I'm not going to be posting week-by-week status updates here. (For that, read my "progress" tweets on @zarfeblong.) But you get one special one tonight. The new year has reached its Mondayness, so you're probably wondering if I am officially In Gear.
Answer: yes. I spent the end of December more on slacking than designing. That phase is over. Here's what the beginning of January has looked like:
I made some improvements to the profiling code of my Glulxe interpreter. (Graham Nelson wants to work on optimizing his Inform 7 compiler, and he asked me for some features to aid measurement.)
I fired up XCode and started a new iOS project. This is an audio toy, not an IF interpreter. I need to remind myself how ObjC works before I start anything serious. (After two evenings of work, it displays a button and beeps continuously. No, this is not Boodler... yet.)
I filed to create Zarfhome Software Consulting, LLC. This is exciting! The last time I tried to start a business was 1997, and I never got beyond a name and logo. Now I have a Federal Employee Identification Number!
I tried to set up a business bank account, but failed because I didn't have the LLC form printed out. I'll go back there tomorrow. In the meantime, I bought a printer to print the form, so that's some progress.
I spent a couple of hours futzing around with a programmable LED badge (available in the hardware-shovelware aisle of your local MicroCenter!) (Where I went to get the printer.) I got this Linux driver compiled on my Mac -- jury-rigged to a trial, but it worked. Once. Now the USB library won't recognize the device. Oh well. No, this has nothing to do with Hadean Lands, but I am revelling in my freedom or some such.
I withdrew $28699 from Amazon Payments. (To my personal bank account, yeah, whatever, this is what accountants are for.) $28699 is what $31337 looks like after Kickstarter and Amazon take their cuts.
I wrote down more design notes for Hadean Lands. This is the phase I am in, and will be for a while -- alternately write down ideas and stare at them. I will do this every day. Eventually the ideas will start fitting together. It's not fast but it's the way it has to work. (I'll know it's done when I start wailing "Oh, woe, all the coolness has leaked out of this project and my design is completely lame." Then I can start coding!) (Yes, this really is the way it always goes.)
A little bit of slacking anyway. Of course.
Expect more of the same in the weeks to come.
"I made some improvements to the profiling code of my Glulxe interpreter."
(That wouldn't include printing a call stack trace on runtime error by chance, would it?)
My real reason for posting: I'm hoping your tweet feed (or whatever those things are called) is on the Planet I-F. I am tweet-challenged.
In any event, congratulations on Living The Dream(tm)!
No, not a stack trace. It's not exciting unless you have a test harness set up to profile the performance of hundreds of Z-code and Glulx code examples.
My twitter feed is not on Planet IF. I don't think that would work out, because I don't use hashtags much, and the *whole* feed is not particularly IF-oriented. But you could follow the RSS through some other mechanism than Planet IF, of course.