GSoC 2014 Friday Report #6

Todo For This Week

  • Open the found interfaces
  • Push the http message over bulk transport
  • Echo to command line any response from bulk transport

Completed This Week

  • Interfaces opened and stored in struct usb_sock_t
  • Client’s http request pushed to printer
  • First USB packet of Printer’s echo’d to command line
  • Refactored the tcp handling out of the http stuff
  • Detaches kernel driver if it has already claimed the printer
  • Option to direct error and warning messages to syslog

Todo Next Week

  • Send multiple usb packets worth of server response to client
  • Refactor everything to be better

More good progress this week. The USB interface stuff went faster than expected so I started on refactoring. Then on Wensday afternoon I decided to relax and play a new game I bought: Factorio,  a fantastic game of factory building.

Back when Command & Conqour 3 was released I thought it would be cool if instead of mining crystals and building tanks, you just mined crystals and built more crystal mining stuff. Factorio is that game times ten and this is a problem for me.

Factorio is so fantastic and fits my interests so well I played almost none stop from Wednesday afternoon, to 5am in the morning on Tuesday, woke up at 13:00 then played all day until 4am in the morning on Friday. In total over 20 hours in two days. I would look at the clock and notice time had jumped 5 hours ahead, and then resume playing.

You can see this in the git log. Progress is good until Wednesday afternoon at which point the addiction hits and nothing gets done for a day and a half.

The part that makes me feel bad is I was taking time off making things (ippusbd) to make imaginary things. Other games I’ve played have never been this bad. Ones like Fallout 3 are fun for 2-3 hours sessions then I have a natural inclination to take a break, thus I never risk letting myself get carried away. Meanwhile in Factorio there was always something to make, design, or tune be it the Oil supply line or the iron plate production line.

Thus to me Factorio is too good and I cannot handle it. This morning I deleted the game and all savefiles and I intend to not play ever again. I’d recommend Factorio to others except it brings up the MMO catch-22: liking it is the worse case scenario.

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