Digitally Hazardous' Blog - Carl Going

Steady progress and updates

our Artemsia server has been performing wonderfully since she went into operation. There were are few expliots recently discovered, they have been closed off since. Firstly, Anonymous FTP was being used to store illegal files for retrieval later and something discovered an exploit for our old NuralStorm email system. So if you have received any spam from us recently, we are sorry.

Universe Versus is underway and progress is good. The basic game logic is being worked on, but slow mainly due to the fact that I need assets (e.g. Models / Textures) to work with. So I'm back to modelling some really basic stuff until I find someone who can model/texture better than me!

We are also proud to support to the the Open Source Scene, mainly, Squirrel Mail. It has been a valuable asset to us and will continue to do so. We gave £50 to the Squirrel Mail Project.

More Spam and updates

Spammers seem to do anything these days to send crap into someone's inbox. The new fad currently is self-sent spam. It is a clever method, allowing emails to be sent without needing to authenticate or worrying about greylisting. Thankfully, this exploit, has now been closed off.

I've managed to get some time to fix the site for Firefox users. My rant still stands, IE6/7 and 8 understands padding correctly and yet Firefox still insists on making padding as a margin.

2009 should be a busy year for us, we have Universe Versus on the table and are ready to provide the support it needs. The new network code and NSG Framework is working wonderfully, but as we are concerned about it when it goes public, we are optimizing as much as possible.

New site introduced, and bugs already?

Yup, thats right! Thanks to firefox and its incompetence in rendering mosts sites, a bug where Firefox ignores the padding and aligns the text to the previous element has shown up. This causes the menu to shift up and aligns the text to the logo image. This also causes the menu graphics to overlap the logo image (grr). A another small bug is Firefox's width, logically 100% of 760 pixel is 760 pixels right? not in firefox! It 100% means the client's browser width and so caused page contents to flow out of screen. I have worked around this problem by forcing sizes. Opera also fails to render correctly the menu, ignoring the `display` style sheet.

Apart from those annoyances, this site renders perfectly in both Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and surprisingly in Lynx! I can imagine safari failing to render the site to, but not bothered about Mac users, they are the minority.

Development has been a bit quiet since our lives have been to busy working or trying not to work. We still plan to finish Universe Versus (and a new name for it) and release it. We just hope things start picking up once everyone settles down from their daily lifes.

Bought 2 new pairs of glasses, both from SpecSavers. One is an Ultraclear lens and the other is a darkened Reaction lenses. How much? 373 quid!...ouch, but as someone said, they are kinda important.