24 Oct, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 141st comment:
Votes: 0
I'd never seen the construct "contact <contagious condition>" before, so that's why I was wondering if it was a reference to something or an inside joke. :smile:
24 Oct, 2008, Avaeryn wrote in the 142nd comment:
Votes: 0
It's also along the same lines as yawning. One person yawns a few times. Eventually the entire room is yawning. I remember that happening in some lecture classes. *cough* Not that I was bored or anything. *cough*
24 Oct, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 143rd comment:
Votes: 0
Avaeryn said:
It's also along the same lines as yawning. One person yawns a few times. Eventually the entire room is yawning. I remember that happening in some lecture classes. *cough* Not that I was bored or anything. *cough*

What is this strange phenomenon? :stare: I have never once seen this happen in class! :rolleyes:
24 Oct, 2008, quixadhal wrote in the 144th comment:
Votes: 0
They've actually done studies on that… it's not exclusive to humans either! I don't think it's conclusive, but they have had people yawn at their pets and their pets yawn in response.

I think (one of) the current theories suggest that seeing someone, or something, else yawn makes you aware of tension in the muscles that a yawn exercises, and thus you find yourself yawning to relieve that tension, even if it's only imagined. :)
24 Oct, 2008, Conner wrote in the 145th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
I'd never seen the construct "contact <contagious condition>" before, so that's why I was wondering if it was a reference to something or an inside joke. :smile:

Wow, you've never heard of a contact high? … that's just amazing to me, given how common a common knowledge item that is amongst those I usually associate with. :shrug:
You learn something new everyday, right? :wink:

quixadhal said:
They've actually done studies on that… it's not exclusive to humans either! I don't think it's conclusive, but they have had people yawn at their pets and their pets yawn in response.

I think (one of) the current theories suggest that seeing someone, or something, else yawn makes you aware of tension in the muscles that a yawn exercises, and thus you find yourself yawning to relieve that tension, even if it's only imagined. :)

I've seen articles recently (relatively) about that too, I believe that it works the other way as well, if your pet yawns, you can find yourself doing so as well.

And here I'd thought that a yawn was something pertaining to oxygen levels in the blood within the brain. :shrug:
25 Oct, 2008, Avaeryn wrote in the 146th comment:
Votes: 0
Newborn infants will often mimic the expressions of those they see. Honest, I'm not making it up. Watched an entire video during child development about that. Was really cool to see a baby stick its tongue out at its parent, or just yawn when the parent yawned. Didn't happen just once, but repeatedly. Can't remember what its called either :P Gawd, makes me almost wish I had not sold that textbook after the semester ended.

Anway, I've wandered off topic enough. :cry: I'll go back to some other activity now.
25 Oct, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 147th comment:
Votes: 0
Imitation is one of the strongest forces around for social development. We imitate each other all the time, even as adults, and on very many levels. If we're talking about fishing, and I use the word "boat" whereas you use the word "ship", one of us is very likely to adopt the other's vocabulary. The same applies to gestures, facial expressions, and so on. There's some theory that imitation serves as a learning tool, and has the benefit of making us like each other more if we do similar things or act in similar ways.
02 Nov, 2008, quixadhal wrote in the 148th comment:
Votes: 0
ANNOUNCEMENT!!!!!

gcc 2.95 is NO LONGER SUPPORTED! *grin*

Not a big deal to anyone here, but I thought I'd just shout that out because I found this little gem tonight.

Quote
gcc-2.95 -Werror -Wall -Wformat -Wformat-security -Wmissing-braces -Wparentheses -Wshadow -Wredundant-decls -Wcast-qual -Wcast-align -Wchar-subscripts -Wreturn-type -Wswitch -Wwrite-strings -Wunused -Wuninitialized -Wpointer-arith -Winline -O3 -g -c act_comm.c -o act_comm.o
cc1: warnings being treated as errors
In file included from /usr/include/sys/types.h:270,
from act_comm.c:32:
/usr/include/bits/pthreadtypes.h:99: warning: unnamed struct/union that defines no instances
make: *** [act_comm.o] Error 1


Note that the source of the error is a system header file. I don't want to be in the business of conditionally choosing which system files to include for ANY reason, so that means gcc 3.4 is now the oldest compiler we will expend any effort to support.

As always, just like supporting MacOS 7, Visual Studio, or getting people to compile on a PDP-11…. I'm happy to offer suggestions, but nothing in the distribution will help those poor souls.
02 Nov, 2008, Runter wrote in the 149th comment:
Votes: 0
Now if only gcc would become depreciated and g++ is the only option left. That would solve some more of our problems. ;)
03 Nov, 2008, quixadhal wrote in the 150th comment:
Votes: 0
Continuing my trend of making announcements in the Town Crier voice…. :)

I'm pleased to announce that phase 1 of the SVN repository restructuring is complete. I've moved the existing files into the Ice/ subdirectory, which will now be the official home of the C version of RaM. An empty Fire/ directory now exists as a placeholder for the future C++ enhanced version, and another empty branches/ subdirectory exists which will be for experiments by individual team members who want to try something or do something they haven't yet convinced the team into accepting as an official release yet. :)

There's still a bit of mucking about with permissions and whatnot, so I don't think you can dive in yet… but you can prepare for the layout and read my snazzy WELCOME message.

Once we have permissions figured out, if you DO want to make a branch to work on, you'll want to read up on the svn copy command. It will become your friend, as it lets you create new branches very easily. Let's not get too carried away though, as disk space is cheap but not totally free. *grin*

So, work will continue on Ice until the official bug lists (posted waaaaaay back up there in another thread) have been waded through. We want our leaping off point to be nice and clean.
03 Nov, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 151st comment:
Votes: 0
Creating a branch uses that much disk space? Score one more for DVCS: creating a branch is basically free, disk usage is proportional to the changes made, not the size of the code tree as a whole. :smile:

Are "fire" and "ice" the code names of the C++ and C versions?
03 Nov, 2008, quixadhal wrote in the 152nd comment:
Votes: 0
Creating a branch makes a copy of the code as a new revision.. SVN treats branches as directories, so a new branch is just a copy of an old directory with a new number. I don't know how much internal space it takes, so I would error on the side of caution so Davion doesn't have to start charging us by the length of our postings. *grin*

Yes, Fire will be the C++ version, and Ice is the C version. It seemed to fit nicely.
03 Nov, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 153rd comment:
Votes: 0
Ah, right. In bzr, for example, a branch does not require copying the code. It only requires tracking the changes made to that branch from its ancestor. I never did like how svn requires branches to be such heavy-weight entities.
03 Nov, 2008, Avaeryn wrote in the 154th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
Continuing my trend of making announcements in the Town Crier voice…. :)

I'm pleased to announce that phase 1 of the SVN repository restructuring is complete. I've moved the existing files into the Ice/ subdirectory, which will now be the official home of the C version of RaM. An empty Fire/ directory now exists as a placeholder for the future C++ enhanced version, and another empty branches/ subdirectory exists which will be for experiments by individual team members who want to try something or do something they haven't yet convinced the team into accepting as an official release yet. :)

There's still a bit of mucking about with permissions and whatnot, so I don't think you can dive in yet… but you can prepare for the layout and read my snazzy WELCOME message.

Once we have permissions figured out, if you DO want to make a branch to work on, you'll want to read up on the svn copy command. It will become your friend, as it lets you create new branches very easily. Let's not get too carried away though, as disk space is cheap but not totally free. *grin*

So, work will continue on Ice until the official bug lists (posted waaaaaay back up there in another thread) have been waded through. We want our leaping off point to be nice and clean.


Thanks for all the hard work, Quix. I would say something about the town crier voice and costume, but I'll let it slide this time. :cyclops:
05 Nov, 2008, quixadhal wrote in the 155th comment:
Votes: 0
Ok, we're almost there!

Thanks to Avaeryn, Davion, and Samson's help, I believe I have the SVN permissions nest figured out and working. For now, I'll retain control ovr the main (Ice) branch until we're happy with how things seem to be working… but I will now be happy to let people who want to start doing some work have a directory under branches to play with.

Just remember, merging branches gets more and more fun as they diverge, so if you want your experiment to be mergeable back into the main trunk, you may want to either wait until we declare the bugs and "essential features" done and fork the Fire branch off…. or… make sure you update frequently and hand-merge new trunk changes into your experimental version.

I guess for now, send me a PM with the password you want and I'll see if I can get it setup and working. The main branches are setup with working groups for each team, so once things stabalize, I can add people to those groups as well.

The command to make a branch, BTW, is svn copy. So, if I wanted to make a new branch to try making rooms randomly kill players who speak, I could do
Quote

Hopefully things are working properly, but if you notice something weird, please let me know!

Thanks guys! As the ball gets rolling, I hope everyone starts having some fun with this! :)
05 Nov, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 156th comment:
Votes: 0
May I ask why SVN was chosen? Obviously I think it has its flaws, so I'm curious why it was chosen. If the answer is "it's what we know" that's cool too, I'm just wondering if there was any technical factor in the decision.
05 Nov, 2008, quixadhal wrote in the 157th comment:
Votes: 0
AFAIK, the choices available were that or CVS. Having used CVS for too many years, I'm all too familiar with all the problems IT has. Subversion seems to be mature and easily accessible. I know there are newer distrubuted systems out there that might (or might not) be easier to work with, but I tend to error on the side of caution with production software.

I think it's always a toss-up for any kind of version system. A distributed system may have avoided the apache issues that SVN has, but I'm sure someone on the team would run into issues trying to share their changes because of their own firewall, or their ISP, or some such problems that you avoid using a centralized system.

Partly, it might just have been that I think I suggested SVN over CVS early on, and nobody else really pushed for any other choice. :)
05 Nov, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 158th comment:
Votes: 0
Why was the choice binary? And why is this being considered production software when it's in heavy development phase? :wink:

quixadhal said:
Partly, it might just have been that I think I suggested SVN over CVS early on, and nobody else really pushed for any other choice. :)

Sometimes I wonder if some of my posts slip by you, like the ones about not having to find a shared string library. :rolleyes:
05 Nov, 2008, Runter wrote in the 159th comment:
Votes: 0
Because if we used anything easier than svn it just wouldn't seem like enough work.
05 Nov, 2008, Runter wrote in the 160th comment:
Votes: 0
Quix is old. Sometimes he just forgets things the second he reads them.
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