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                   JOURNAL FOR TUESDAY 13TH FEBRUARY, 2018
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SUBJECT: More progress than sleep
   DATE: Tue 13 Feb 04:45:11 GMT 2018

It has been pointed out to me that I am not writing as much as I was and seem
to be coding even less. I’ll hold my hands up now and admit to being guilty as
charged. Even a couple of the entries I did write were not really about
WolfMUD but about backups and cryptography instead :(

The good news is I have managed to do some more coding on WolfMUD recently,
although nowhere near as much as I would like. The reason being “context
switching”. No, not performance issues due to kernel page table isolation
(KPTI) as mitigation for Meltdown and Spectre issues. I’m talking about the
huge mental burden of context switching from ‘work’ programming to ‘WolfMUD’
programming. Usually it’s not a problem. However, I’m currently working on a
large project for an important client. For a minimum of 8 hours a day my head
is saturated with this project. I can see its structure, the files, the
modules, the interactions, the logic — all in my head as I’m working out
solutions to problems and playing ‘what if’ games all the time. Packing that
away at the end of the day and silencing my thoughts isn’t easy. I’ve never
been able to just switch off, trying to get to sleep at night has always been
a nightmare.

If you’re thoughts are currently of Johnny Mnemonic and squeezing huge amounts
of data into your head then you’ve got the idea :)

This was supposed to be about WolfMUD. The trouble is when I switch from work
to WolfMUD I’m still thinking about work. At the moment I can’t just purge
work and replace it with WolfMUD. So working on WolfMUD has been painstakingly
difficult.

For the last few weeks I’ve been writing the Marshalers for all of the current
attributes. I still have a few left to write. Some I need to revisit. For
example the player attribute is not holding enough of the account information
for it to be written out by the Marshaler. Containers are not processed
recursively resulting in their content not being written out.

I keep thinking that the Marshalers should implement the TextMarshaler and
TextUnarshaler interfaces from the encoding package in the standard library.
At this point I just want something working. Working code is good and can be
refactored later on.

I’ve been adding some more functions to the recordjar encode package. This
brings it more inline with the decoder package. Ideally the two packages
should mirror each other with their functions.

Let’s hope this Wednesday is more productive than usual.

It’s now 4:45am and I guess I should at least try and get some sleep.

--
Diddymus


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