XuluWarrior

Well apparently, the Warbook mana server has been down for months now and nobody seems to be inclined to do anything about it. There are still some people playing it for reasons of their own but I don’t think it will recover from here.

This would mean that it is rather pointless for me to continue developing Brimstone as things stand. If things change then maybe I will reconsider but for now assume that there will be no more releases of Brimstone.

My previous website was rather basic to say the least. This weekend, I finally got around to creating myself a new Joomla based website. Most of the information that was previously available has been migrated. All I need to do now is some actual design work and stop using the default template.

You can check out my first attempt at www.xuluwarrior.com

Made a minor update to Brimstone today. It now:

• Supports Firefox 3.6
• Supports the current Warbook server

However, at the time of writing, the Warbook server wasn’t allowing people to cast spells. (We’re sorry, but we are fixing our DB server. We’ll be back online soon!.)

Don’t know how long that will last for.

Made some time last night to actually sit down and write my first Jetpack. Its a very simple affair inspired by my annoyance that some websites decide to mark their input boxes as autocomplete=”off”. This has the effect of stopping Firefox’s password manager from attempting to remember login credentials. This may be sensible on some banking sites where personal data security is paramount but otherwise is just an annoyance to the user.

RememberMe is a jetpack that once installed allows you to override the autocomplete attribute by right-clicking and selecting “Remember Me”. The jetpack then remembers your request and from then on the attribute will be forced to “on”. You can reset this by selecting “Forget Me”.

You can find RememberMe here.

I have only tested this on sites that I use and so it is quite possible that there are bugs. Don’t hesitate to let me know.

Thought I would upgrade to Firefox 3.6 this weekend. Mostly a smooth process except that it appears that IE Tab doesn’t support 3.6. I don’t know whether this is going to get updated at some point but as work uses a number of web apps that require IE, I was happy to discover that there is an alternative.

Corel IE Tab is a fork of the IETab project with some enhancements. I haven’t actually tried any of these out, but the main function of embedding an IE tab in Firefox appears to work as expected.

On a related note Firebug 1.4.0 also doesn’t support Firefox 3.6. As I mentioned in my previous post, Firebug 1.4.0 is the most recent version of Firebug that allows me to do any decent debugging in Jetpack. In the end I resorted to using Nightly Tester Tools to override the compatibility check. This seems to work fine so far. Now I am running Firefox 3.6, I did try out the Firebug 1.6 alpha builds but no joy on the Jetpack debugging front there so 1.4.0 it is for now.

One of the nice features of developing in Jetpack is the console.log feature. Assuming you have Firebug installed, not only does it allow you to dump messages to the Firebug console, you can dump objects. Once logged to the console, you get the Firebug object introspection which is a gift for debugging exactly what is going on in your code.

However, currently there is an issue with compatibility between various versions of Firebug and Jetpack. I am using Jetpack 0.7 but if I use any version of Firebug after 1.4.0, console.log does not work as desired. It works fine in the about:jetpack tab but if you switch to another tab to do some ‘real’ debugging, console.log stops doing anything. Even if you switch back to the about:jetpack tab, you need to reload the tab before console.log starts working again.

I spent some time this evening going through the various iterations of Firebug and debugging worked fine up and till 1.4.0. I have tried most version after that and had no luck. So, for now, if you are debugging Jetpack, I recommend that you debug profile has Firebug 1.4.0.

Its been a while since I’ve done any development on Brimstone. To be honest I don’t play Warbook any more and without input from users I haven’t had any impetus to make improvements. However, I have been working on a few half started projects which still aren’t ready for release but (fingers crossed) I will be making them available soon.

One thing that has caught my interest recently, is Mozilla’s new project, Jetpack. I’m not going to go into the details here, but the main aim of the project is to make Firefox development more accessible to a wide range of web developers and at the same time improving the experience for the end user.

I will posting soon with my experience and thoughts.

I was going to write a post here about my new extension for Firefox (see my next post) but then took a look at my last post. Has it really been over a year?! Well I guess it must be.

Now, I will readily admit that I haven’t done much development on the Firefox side for a while but I haven’t been that lazy. I have made some changes to Brimstone which have rather quietly been released. But as I no longer play Warbook I haven’t had any personal need to make any major improvements. It doesn’t help that people haven’t been particularly vocal recently as to what they like and dislike about the latest versions of Brimstone and so in the absence of any input I have let the status quo continue.

If you have any strong desire for any changes to Brimstone. Please let me know. The Brimstone forum is the best place to make feature requests and point out bugs.

OK. I admit it. It’s been a while since my last post and more importantly even longer since my last release. I don’t know where the time has gone.

But I haven’t been totally idle. In fact, allowing for a extended dip in Brimstone activity while I tried to catch up with other parts of my life, I have actually made some significant changes for 0.5. I have taken the opportunity to radically rewrite some areas of my code with a view to making Brimstone better at dealing with lots of data (it should no longer freeze for long periods while loading) and also making it easier for me to add new features.

Some of you may have noticed that I have actually already released 0.5. And the updates were available last night. For those of you who haven’t already discovered all the new changes/features. Here’s the list:

• Brimstone sidebar now has scroll bars and a splitter to change the vertical height of the two sections
• New Buildings calculator that will tell you how many buildings to build/raze in order to meet target percents
• The same form also shows income and maintenance costs
• New list views for player and event lists. This has the following features:
  • Performance shouldn’t deteriorate with large numbers of rows.
  • Can now ‘group by’ fields. E.g Group By alliance will group all the players by their alliance and give you an expand/collapse icon.
  • Colouring of defence - Green for easy target. Red for improbable target. Yellow for in between. The options allow you to set the tolerances for each colour band.
  • New filter by age allowing you to chose whether you want to see entries from the last 24 hours or larger age bands.
  • Columns can now be reordered
  • Can copy selected row/rows to clipboard.
  • CAVEAT: Old data isn’t displayed properly in the new grid. Basically a lot of the fields will not be populated. Sorry about that but I hope the new capabilities will out weigh the need to look back at the old data. The data hasn’t been deleted (it’s still in the database) but it just won’t be displayed properly. Let me know if you desperately need access to this information.
• New fields for max attack and defence. These values are calculated assuming that all spies and surveys are correct and target has put all their stat points into the relevant stat.
• By default the players list only shows players that have been the subject of a spy or survey. However, there is a new option to save search results.

Download it from here.

I haven’t posted anything here in a couple of weeks, so I thought I would give you an idea what I am currently working on.

Basically, as is the way of programmers, I decided that there were a number of bits of Brimstone which were either poorly written, or unnecessarily repetitive or both. So, I’ve made a major rewrite of the database and code to display the data grids.

This should make it a lot easier for me to make some of the cooler changes that I want to add to Brimstone.

It also means that there’s a lot of testing to do before I can be sure that everything still works as people expect. So, patience, true believers!

Watch this space!