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24 June 2007
Again, I've been a little slack with my hopefully weekly updates. I decided to check out what's new in the scene only to find out that once again, and this time for good, Qbasicnews.com has been shutdown. All forums have been locked, and nobody can post anything there anymore. It's a dead zone. A ghost town. A memory. A graveyard.

Anyway. The good news is that Marcade once again snapped up the defunct domain qb45.com and has listed a little forum to discuss the future of the site. There is no sign of jofers, the admin for the last two or three years, or the old Bigfoot theme, which personally I didn't think fitted the community based site very well at all. But anyhow.

I submitted an article for review and publication in QBExpress #23. Read about it over at Pete's QBasic Site. Enough said.

It seems that once again with the death of a major site, many new ones replace it in the hopes to revive the community with a fresh idea or look. cha0s has taken the liberty to open a new forum with the same principle categories that Qbasicnews.com had. You can find it here: c0de. I hope this does just as well as some other long lived sites out there, unlike mine. Although I have faith in this one.

Enough from me.

>anarky

14 June 2007
I forgot to publish the last update, so here it is...

>anarky

9 June 2007
Ok, I've had a dodgy internet connection since the country went offline. It is now stable again, and after a system restore and reconfiguring of the NB5 modem, I am back online...

...to find out that QBExpress is BACK!

I only mentioned this a few days ago, too. Read about it here. You can get to the magazine itself from that page. Of notice are the comments posted by the infamous Z!re. Eric Cowles' (aka 1000101) article about flame wars is of particular importance. I have never been one to agree even half-heartedly with Z!re, but in this letter, he/she makes some very valid points.

I'll leave you to read it.

>anarky

6 June 2007
I finished work some ten hours after I started. At around 4pm I tried something: I switched to my old modem, which had default ISP settings and should work if all went well.

It did. As it turns out, the whole country lost connection for about an hour from 10 - 11pm EST last night. So, right now, I have to reset and reprogram my NB5 to work with the settings I had before. I have also decided to reformat the server box, which is the one I use primarily, since it is out of space, and better organise data storage. The IRC server will be down for about 2 to 3 more days. A bigger hard drive and more memory would be nice too, any takers? :D

On the real life side of things our dairy switched back to two milkings a day from the three we have been doing since August 9 2005. We had a drought breaker rainfall which ended the summer, and as a result, half our grass was trampled into mud. Production went down and cost is up. The cows are tired and need rest. This may be a good time for some R&R for our 1400 head of cattle. Not before time, too - they deserve it. In my opinion they work harder than anyone else there, including myself.

Enough said. I'm tired and have to sleep again before work. Yes, my life revolves around the job at the moment. Joys of being management. :-\

>anarky

5 June 2007 : Entry 2
Telstra had a problem with no data flow. What this entails even my ISP was unable to say. What he did say however, was they were working to "patch" up the network by rerouting traffic through other ISP's. At this time my ISP had no official word that the problem was resolved aside from a message like "it should be working now".

Not here. Even power cycling the modem did nothing. Well, I will have to post this tomorrow after work IF I have a connection back. Right now, I need to sleep. I have 5 hours before work.

>anarky

5 June 2007 : Entry 1
Damnit! spaz's move from Ohio to Florida meant some changes in the IRC network structure. For some reason, nb was chosen as the new hub. Probably because of his server's extremely high uptimes and Linux platform. For some other bizarre reason, not long after getting the spaznet.net domain, we switched back to the spaznet.info domain. Another change the server configuration to handle this left my server anarky.spaznet.net with a list of connection failures. I got wind today we had again reverted back to the .net domain structure. At the same time somebody had fiddled with everything on the computer. Boy was I pissed. Fixing that problem, I returned my attention to the server.

Then the internet went down. I called my ISP and I immediately got a recorded message saying "We are experiencing a network outage."

What a day. At the time of writing this article, I still had no connection. It had been out for about two hours now, despite assurances they would have it on within the hour. I am now waiting on hold for a techie to tell me what was happening, so I can better understand the whole system and also explain this outage to you, the reader, better.

I'll get back to you.

>anarky

31 May 2007
I discovered something with the socket library I am using for all versions of RedBall: it was designed for the Freenode IRC network. This alone explains why I have problems with the development, since it is based on SpazNet. spaz, President of the network and co-author of the bot's core code is creating a new IRC library. I will be working on the Windows port of this library. With some luck it should be network independent, as is a requirement of the bot at distribution time. More details of RedBall's development from now on will be found on the RedBall site. Click above.

I was wondering about of the other guys in the community lately. Pete Berg, editor of the eMag, QBExpress. In July 2006 we saw the last instalment of what was up to this point a very predictably on-time monthly magazine. Jam packed with features and a great read at that. Nearly twelve months later and not a word from Pete and no more magazine.

PCOPY appeared to fill the void at '07's start. Although it's not as big as the long gone and much missed QBExpress, it's still packed with a lot of cool articles. Two unique features of the mag include a very different way of numbering issues: Issue 1 is labelled as issue 10. Issue 2 is 20, so on. This may have something to do with the original PCOPY command. I don't know. I never was the best coder. The other thing I've never seen in any magazine is a comic strip with multiple "episodes" scattered at random throughout the issue.

Headed by the guys at ASCII-World, PCOPY looks like it may be here to stay. Go read some today. You'll find the link for PCOPY in the menu on that site, or read issue 40 here.

>anarky

25 May 2007 : Entry 2
I should mention a bit more about this joint. Aside from everything being so straight forward, I should explain what the strip links above are.

The site is actually for both FreeBasic news for the world and it's my new home. The link menu on the left is for FB-World, and the strip above is links to other sections of the site for my stuff which is entirely unrelated to FreeBasic or FB-World.

"You always have a forum. Where is it?" Bah. Why bother? Just email me. If I get a lot of requests for an FB-World forum, I'll make one.

"This isn't at FB-World.com. Why?" I haven't bought it yet! Give me a break! It may be another month or two yet.

Enough.

>anarky

25 May 2007 : Entry 1
It's been a while since I was last at the forums I normally regular. Of course being an ex-QBasic programmer, these forums are www.QB45.com and www.QBasicNews.com. Today I actually decided to check them out. The site admin for www.QBasicNews.com run into problems with spam and sale issues over his other site, FileAnchor. It has since been shut down.

So has QB45.com. I was stunned. One month gone from the "scene" and the scene is practically gone when I get back. I was hoping for something on the other end of the scale.

I guess I was wrong... again.

In other news, FreeBasic 0.17 final is out. It's been a CVS for a little under a year now since the 0.16b release. There are a multitude of new features packed into the compiler. You can get a detailed list of these at the source: www.freebasic.net.

I've migrated from forums to IRC of late, even to a point of becoming a founding member of a new IRC network, SpazNet. Originally founded as Uncyclonet by spaz and Starnestommy. I joined in committing a server, and another appeared. So it now has four servers and about as many operators as bots, with maybe 10 ordinary users. Not big yet, but I'd personally like to see it climb to a user level of around 10,000 by year's end.

Yeah, right!

The major projects of focus for me these days has been two websites and an IRC bot for the masses. I have tried to focus on other projects also, but have no enthusiasm for them as yet.

The first website in question is this one. I started it in mid-April and after a few days lost track of time and forgot about it. Then something twigged in my memory. Production then began again. I focused on bringing content and news articles in a format which was more user friendly. By this I mean simply typing anything that came to mind. You are looking at FB-World.com right now. This is the result of what could have been done in less than a week but took over a month. Yeah, I'm a slacker.

But...

Project RedBall is already at core 3! "What's RedBall?" I keep getting asked. It's an IRC bot. I won't elaborate too much here since it will have it's own website hosted here very soon indeed. Within the next few weeks when I have a release candidate for core 2. More information can be found on THAT site.

...and the other site I have mentioned above.

At one point you would have seen a message at the index of www.qbasicnetwork.com stating I had had enough of people's crap in the community, or "qmunity" as it's called by locals. Well, old habits die hard. It was this same timeframe that RedBall came alive. This inspired me to take up the old habit again, not more than 36 hours later!

It did take a while to remove that message, and it wasn't until I had to upload something that I actually returned the site back to it's original state - a six month outdated waste of time on a domain I really have no time for anymore. With QB far behind us all, I see no point in creating the all-happening network hub for QB sites alike.

In fact, screw being anyone's network hub. Passports are for the lame... Yeah, go Microsoft...

So needless to say, the QBasicNetwork is dead. Blobworld will continue, but will move to it's own dotcom in time.

Getting back to shit that matters, perhaps I should give everyone an update on the long-anticipated Brainfreeze. You know what? No.

Ok, you win. It's on the shelf at the moment until I hone my socket programming skills. Then the online section of the game can be started. Hell, to be honest, it might not even be worked on at all this year. Even though I had originally intended it's beta release by Christmas 2006. I failed.

Well, that's me in a nutshell lately. I'll keep you all posted.

>anarky