Okay so it’s been just under three months since I last posted and that has been for a variety of reasons, which I will now outline.
I was briefly sucked back into the world of MMOs, first by playing EVE Online and then World of Warcraft soon after. I managed to get a Hyperion in EVE (a battleship roughly 1.7 kilometres in length) and a level 80 Death Knight in World of Warcraft. Having achieved these goals and essentially selling two months of my life to CCP and Blizzard, I decided I was done with these games for now.
I’ve also had some web hosting and development work for various people that I’ve been dealing with and I’ve been writing a DirectAdmin skin for the guys over at Honest Networks.
On that note, I’d like to say that writing skins for DirectAdmin is a bitch. The fact that there appears to be a relatively high demand for DirectAdmin skins with very few people making them seems to reflect this. The skinning system works, but it’s unnecessarily complicated. You can read more about it over at http://www.directadmin.com/skins.html.
I’ve also been spending a lot of time on IRC as I’ve been writing an IRC bot in C#. I may or may not cover some of that in the coming weeks but who knows.
I also received a whole a bunch of messages and emails in regards to the SketchUp video I made, there seems to be a substantial amount of people who can’t find the plug-ins that are ostensibly now included with the regular SDK. Not to worry, you can still download them right here by clicking this link:
http://files.nacimota.com/sketchup_plugins.zip
Speaking of Hammer, I’ve got an article I’m planning to write covering the use of the carve tool, probably the most controversial tool in Hammer. It won’t be particularly long so that should pop up on this page soon.
In other news, the iiNet vs. AFACT trial officially started last week with both sides giving opening statements and explaining the BitTorrent protocol. For those of you who are overseas or just living under a rock, AFACT is the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft; iiNet is an internet service provider that AFACT is suing on behalf of several major film studios and the Seven Network. Their complaint is essentially that iiNet is infringing copyright by not preventing pirated material from being downloaded by their customers.
AFACT sends thousands of emails to various ISPs across the country each week that accuse their customers of pirating copyright material. Many ISPs including iiNet have chosen to ignore these emails on the premise that they can’t cut off a customer’s internet connection based exclusively on an unproven accusation made by a third party. The essence of this argument is essentially that their customers are “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law”, a concept that so enrages AFACT that they chose to go after the ISPs instead.
The concept that an ISP is responsible for what their customers do with their internet connection strikes me as completely absurd. It’s not unlike suing a telephone company for allowing a customer to make threatening phone calls.
The case continues on Monday.