www.sandmines.org

I decided rather than having to log into my server to check my hardware raid status and other things, to make a simple little client / server app that serves the status of the raid array and other things. I've dedicated a whole monitor for this app (just a little 17" lcd) and plan to add support for windows-based systems as well.
The server is plugin-based, which means if you want to monitor some other sort of stuff, you make a very basic .so which will be loaded by the server on startup.
Currently the server reports ibm serveraid status, memory info, and uptime and load.

I came across some 1u xeon racks which had ibm serveraid ultra320 scsi controller cards, dual xeon 3.0ghz hyperthreaded cpu's, and 2 72gb u320 scsi drives as well as 3gb of ram, so I've decided to upgrade my old server with parts from this new one (mainly because it has 8 drive bays to the 1u's 2 drive bays, plus it has redundant hot-swap power supplies). I was previously using software raid, so I'm hoping to get better performance from the new hardware raid cards. The old processors were 2.4ghz xeons, so I'm getting better performance from the new ones as well.

Well it seems like a good learning experience, plus expansion of my gui, to port it to os x. Since most os x cocoa apps are created using objective-c, I've had to learn the basics of that. As well, it seems most mac apps are created using an interface builder, which, to me, seems like a rapid app dev tool. After much fumbling around, I've managed to get something together that opens a window, using a dynamic library to access the objective-c cocoa stuffs, and provided an interface in C to (right now) open a window.

I've added quite a bit of functionality to my rpg since my last blog entry. line of sight, lighting areas, lightsource ranges, and many other things.
Rather than plugging up my blog, I've decided to post my changes / additions / etc to my forum.
http://forums.sandmines.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3 is the url to the thread.

http://images.sandmines.org/game_img.jpg is the latest image which happens to be inside of a dungeon.

Well, its my third day in, and my rpg is maturing slowly.

I've added a character creation dialog http://images.sandmines.org/game_gen.jpg. race / class descriptions are read in and parsed from a simple text file. dice values such as '3d4' can be specified.

I've also added a simple game dev menu dialog. http://images.sandmines.org/game_dev.jpg. It just lets me hide and show the small version of the map http://images.sandmines.org/game_smallmap.jpg. It also has a few test features such as not taking any damage and killing monsters fast.

Well I started my basic rpg yesterday, and am happy to say it is coming along!!

http://images.sandmines.org/game.jpg

is a screenshot.

Its a simple tile-based, turn-based game (getting ideas from zangband).

it generates content dynamically (or at least it will, for now, it just draws random blocks of images :) )

it allows targetting by pressing tab and it will cycle through the near monsters.

it has an action bar for your attacks, etc.

it draws a little 'hit' image (that stays for 400ms for now) on a monster when you hit it.

My gui is coming along, and I'd thought I'd snap some screenshots of things I've made so far.

The url http://images.sandmines.org is a directory containing some images of my current apps.

gridit is basically a simple icon editing tool I made. This is the first thing I wrote to allow myself to make simple images for things like the fileselect dialog.

ircit is my irc client. Its really basic right now, but it does function. I've been using this as my client for a couple months now, and the main reason I use it is to test the stability of SMG (since its running all the time).