Shaving my Yak

Hactoberfest A Hactoberfest takes place in October where coders are encourages to churn out a set amount of Pull Requests in the month. And a Pull Request is essentially a contribution made to the community. It is an interesting opportunity set to help motivate coders to take an active part in the open source communities in general. I certainly enjoyed the chance. This blog is dedicated to the Hactoberfest and acts as my index to my contributions and associated blogs. That Index I was talking about... A failed attempt that will be revisited and its blog Rocketfuel and Zinc and its blog Protein Powder Realism and its blog A lesson on .308 and its blog A tribute to Hannibal and its blog Awl-pike with a weight issue and its blog The Good I have made five pull requests, contributing to open source programs for the first time. In many ways, this is my dream come true; just 3 years ago, I never even thought this to be something within my power to do. I was always a cons...

Last time... In my previous commit, I had the pleasure of studying the guns and their ammo and how they are reflected in the world of Cataclysm-DDA. This time, the some members of the community were buzzing about a 3-meter-long pointy stick called awl pike. Awl Pike The awl pike is basically an extra-long spear designed specifically for use in a formation attack. A formation of 3+ ranks hold the longest possible stick at their disposal and poke the enemy that stands in front of them or charging at them. It is very powerful weapon against things that stands in front of them, but due to the need for formation and the shear unwieldiness of the weapon, it is not very versatile and adaptable to changing circumstances. In a one-on-one combat, the weapon would be very difficult to stay effective. How do I know all this? Well, there was the entire discussion about it in the issue page. Like I said, this kind of games brings out the geeks from their closets and provide the floor to sp...

The Gun Nuts Some of the most beautiful thing about open-source, rouge-like games are that it brings out the geeks in all of us. In one game , it brought out the geography geek to express themselves into the game that turns a simple management game into something that teaches you a bit about geographical compounds and where they are formed. In the case of Cataclysm-DDA, and in this particular issue, we tapped into the gun nuts. Based on some comprehensive review , someone provided a case to convince the community to fix a simple typo mistake. I mean, it's a typo mistake on a simple ammo object, and this person went and dug up information only the hard-core gun enthusiast would care to pen down! I certainly enjoyed reading and learning more about the world of guns, ammo, politics, military, and a piece of history just so that I can understand the need to add the negative sign in front of a number. It was fantastic. The fix This was a simple case. The issuer even spelt out e...

The thing about Cataclysm-DDA is... This is a zombie-survival game. This part is going to be more gruesome than usual, so I suggest you spare yourselves and turn away right this moment. . . . . . . Proceed at your own discretion. . . . . . . You have been warned. . . . . . The survival is meant to be tough and difficult. A bunch of city-folks are thrown into the deep-end of the nature with added quirks of friendly next-door neighbors giving you a helping hand in becoming one with their stomach. No grocery stores, no farms, no livestock, no help, not at the beginning, anyways. Therefore, the game explored the possibility, and the horror, of survivors doing everything they must do to survive. That, to some, meant eating the flesh of other humans given the chance. The game features many meat-based food items, and almost all of them has a counterpart that uses human flesh in place. This includs the protein powder. I told you to look away. Caveat This particular...

Continuing on Cataclysm-DDA I have decided to work more with JSON of the game and resolve more conflicts and introduce more complexity to the game. This time, the issue was on creating protein powder. It is created from meat of some kind, and currently uses just fire to produce it. That doesn't seem right, now does it? Fire might be good for creating a steak, but how would the meat suddenly crumble into powder from that form? To resolve the issue, the issue creator called for adding mortal and pestle as additional necessity to create protein powder. Alright, so where are these powder git grep was my bread-and-butter of this particular activity. First, I wanted to know the object name of the protein powder. To that end, I searched for powder and landed on quite a number of results. Turns out, the name is simply protein_powder. Okay, so how about the mortar and pestle Again, git grep was very helpful. I also wanted to know how it was used as a part of the recipe, too. B...

Hectoberfest part 2: Pwning my favorite game While I have used various open source programs in daily bases, I have never imagined to be the one contributing to it. It has been the reason why I got interested in computer, so that was always my holy grail, but it was not until recently I could see myself as someone standing with the giants. Turns out, I can stand on their shoulders. What a view! Anyways, for my second PR, I decided to work on one of my favorite game: Cataclysm-DDA . It is about time my survivor got himself some rocket fuels! Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead This is a rouge-like survival game. Your character is spawned in the middle of an unfriendly, zombie-infested world. Depending on the difficulty, you may spawn anywhere from a relatively safe bunker to neck-to-neck with the next-door, undead-and-hungry neighbors. The goal is to utilize every object and knowledge to gain an upper hand and survive. The player has the world at the disposal to craft and use. Speci...

The Overview I use vim every day. In the course of my use, I ran across neovim, a folk of vim with aim to introduce new features, such as asynchronous disk operation. I wanted to submit my first patch in hacktoberfest to this project. What is neovim This is a folk of vim. It has multiple aims, such as decreasing bloat, implement asynchronous disk operation, and to be a drop-in replacement of vim. It also aims to adopt different development culture than that of vim where the course of development is more open to the community. While all of them are interesting goals catering to specific needs, I am most interested in the asynchronous disk operation using libuv. What is libuv libuv is a set of libraries designed to perform asynchronous disk operations. It is widely used in projects such as node.js, and of course, neovim. What is the issue libuv has introduced uv_fs_copyfile() method. I intend on implementing this function in neovim. So far, I found two locations where neovim co...