Back from a Long Hiatus

The Humm and Strumm Project has a face-lift!

Hi all! I want you to know that I haven't abandoned this blog. I have been very busy this summer, between personal things, Humm and Strumm, troubleshooting two new distros, and so on. I want to start back up posting here, as often as I can. Seeing as a broke the last promise, I will not make another this time regarding posting frequency. I will say, though, that I do like the schedule in that post, and I will try to make Wednesdays updates on my development in Humm and Strumm (or angry rants about some aspect about it that would not be suitable as official news).

First and foremost, I am now running three operating systems. In addition to my beloved Debian Sid and the necessary Windows, I now have a Fedora system to aid in the testing of Humm and Strumm. Having this will make packaging for Red Hat systems quite easy. I don't use it often, but one thing I have noticed is that the GNOME Shell in the Fedora repos seems a bit more up-to-date than the GNOME Shell in Debian Sid. I'm too lazy to compile GNOME myself, though, so I can live with an older version of GNOME Shell on my main system.

If any of you are keeping up with the development of my project, Humm and Strumm, you will have noticed that we've a new web design, one which I believe to be final. The color scheme seems fine, the design is usable, and over all, the website looks quite nice. I hope this new image will help give off a more professional image, while still maintaining the image that we are a lighthearted game.

Code-wise, Humm and Strumm has been coming along, too. I hope to get a release out very soon, and with two people waiting on me, there is definitely pressure to do so! I have just finished implementing a UTF-8 implementation for strings and characters; this gives the engine the ability to support any script in Unicode (I suppose some of the characters, like code point U+262D or code point U+1F03D, will not be of much use to us...), allowing easy translation into almost every one of the world's languages! Check back soon at our i18n wiki page for more information.

I've also finally completed the switch from my Twitter to a new, Free Software based Identi.ca account. I will continue to syndicate to this Twitter, but i will no longer actively check it. If you wish to contact me, please use Identi.ca. I will actively check my Identi.ca. The service is amazing; I encourage you to check it out.

Speaking of Free Software social networks, how many of you have heard of the upcoming Diaspora Project, created in response to the lack of privacy options and the centralization of Facebook. It looks like an amazing project, and best yet, it will go completely open source on September 15. Do you plan on joining Diaspora when it comes out?