jmtd → log → 2005

It was a difficult birth but we got freedoom version 0.4 out, a little over a year after the release of 0.3. Coverage at doomworld, newdoom (no direct link possible), linuxgames. We're not doomy enough to warrant coverage at planetdoom.

This release was primarily motivated by the desire to make sure we didn't have more than a year between releases. As a result, there's not a lot of new stuff: I spent most of my time learning my way around fraggle's rather scary build system.

I can assure you, that the next release will be something to look forward to :)

I've just switched to using static pages for my blog, rather than generating them at view-time. The server's load averages have been crawling up and up, with blosxom.cgi doing well in the CPU high-score. A consequence of this, I believe, is that planetplanet at news.alkali.org will explode. I apologise in advance.

What made the recent XML RPC exploits so serious? The fact that each PHP application implementing XML-RPC has taken a static copy of one library, which needed to be individually patched.

That's why code sharing is so important. Look at the list of vulnerable apps: Drupal; wordpress; Xoops; the PEAR copy; what looks like the original; Serendipity; phpMyFaq...

planetplanet running on newsdot exploded when cph switched to atom 1.0. This is a shame, as atom seems to be a much better-thought-out syndication format than RSS.

I applied one patch I found floating around the web which improves the situation, a bit at least: it still needs to escape the encoded HTML for the output. The problem is actually in Mark Pilgrim's feed parser code, which I understand is unmaintained these days.

Linedef type 242 was added by team TNT in the BOOM source port as part of their (arguably) biggest change: the property-transfer effect. This lets you draw fake floors and ceilings in a sector. It also lets you alter the COLORMAP used in that sector. The COLORMAP for the main area of the effected sector is decided by the main texture of the linedef's first sidedef.

The trouble here is if the linedef loses it's type-value (over-zealous pre-boom editors may delete unknown types, for example), then the main texture value for that linedef's first sidedef is no longer valid and the map won't load in prboom (and I expect, other ports).

Enter Fredrik's python doom library, omgifol. This library lets me quickly* and easily narrow down the troublesome linedefs in the map and reset the texture:

from omg import *
mywad = WAD('e1m1.wad')
maped = MapEditor(mywad.maps['E1M1'])
count = 0

for l in maped.linedefs:
    if maped.sidedefs[l.front].tx_mid == 'MFADEMAP' \
    and l.action != 242:
        maped.sidedefs[l.front].tx_mid = 'STARTAN1'
        count += 1 

print 'changed %d textures from MFADEMAP' % count
mywad.maps['E1M1'] = maped.to_lumps()
mywad.to_file('out.wad')

* (yes, even though I haven't written a line of Python before either, it was still quicker to figure it out and learn the library than hand-check the linedefs)