What's News?

8/16/2007 7:40:00 PM
Hello! For those of you wondering where I’ve disappeared to... I’m still here, still paying the annual fees to keep the site up. Given that SO MUCH has been happening to the Inform language since my last post, I’m a bit ashamed that I have so little to update. I make no excuses. Life has simply gotten the better of and me and taken a toll on my free time. Here’s my feeble attempt to breathe a little life into this site and give a general update that encompasses answers to many of the questions posed to me in emails:

Yes, I’m still answering emails, although at a modest rate, and I’m still taking bug reports on the ORLibrary modules. The most recent of these is Howard Sherman’s fix to ORNPCVerb, although I confess that I have a few sitting in my email that I’ve yet to fix. Hopefully I can get to these soon.

Yes, I’ve put a little effort into ORLib or I7. Much of this was from early pre-release cycles of I7, of which Graham was kind enough to include me in a few, but I don’t really have anything worth releasing at the moment.

Yes, I still have plans to continue writing the Mage Wars trilogy; time, as I have indicated, is a commodity I have very little of at the moment.

Yes, I do still lurk around on the R*IF groups from time to time. I seldom feel the need to respond to general posts, but I try to stay on top of the changes.

No, I’m not using David Fisher as a pseudo name. Yes, I see he’s written a tense changing module for I7 similar to OREnglish, but we are not the same person. Great minds think alike, though.

No, I don’t see myself continuing with CodingMonk in quite the same way as I had originally anticipated. It is likely that I’ll reverse many of the site redirections that are currently pushing from OnyxRing to CodingMonk and translate that site into something else.

Thanks to everyone who has been sending me emails; I really do appreciate them and its great to hear that people are still using the ORLibrary. I hope to do updates with a bit more frequency, so feel free to share your thoughts, especially on potential extensions that you might like to see.

11/6/2005 4:25:11 PM
OMG! It’s been over a year since my last post! Huh. Time flies. Well, there’s been a couple of points worth mentioning, so here goes...

First, there’s been a patch to the ORKnowledgeTopic module of the ORLibrary made in response to a bug report from Clinton Arbaugh. Thanks Clinton!

Next, many of you may have noticed that some of the links to articles on this site redirect you to the same article at the Inform zone at CodingMonk.com. This isn’t an accident. I’ve mentioned before my thoughts on a site, similar in spirit to OnyxRing’s article pages, but not limited to Inform the language, or even IF as a general topic. CodingMonk is that site, and future work on articles will be housed there. It’s still at it’s beginning stages, but I expect it to mature with time.

But let me be clear, OnyxRing is NOT going away. It will continue to be the home for the ORLibrary and its documentation. I have additional plans for the site, but it may take a while to achieve them.

That’s all for now. I’ll try to do more updates in the next year.

10/22/2004 4:15:14 PM
Still here, still alive.

The move to a new hosting company was not without a few hiccups, it seems. First, the navigation menu has been broken, so navigating to common pages could only be accomplished by direct URL. Those managing to get past this issue and return to the ORLibrary page for updates were greeted with an old, pre-release version (.9A) dated September 2002. Those trying to let me know of these problems were rewarded with a bounced e-mail since OnyxRing's webmaster email address was disabled.

Whew. Hopefully, we're problem free again (crossing my fingers).

8/18/2004 12:25:04 AM
If you're reading this, then the DNS repopulation has successfully found its way to your ISPs server and updated OnyxRing's IP address. This means, of course, that we've changed hosting companies. There's been a lot of work put into moving the site and translating the articles and content from an Access file to a SQLServer DBMS.

For those interested, additional work is being put into another site focusing on a wider spectrum of programming. It will not be IF specific, but will superset OnyxRing's content. OnyxRing isn't going away, though and you can continue to access its content from the standard link:

www.OnyxRing.com

as well as a new sub domain of the new parent site:

OnyxRing.CodingMonk.com

Other than that, there's been a couple of minor bug-fixes to the ORLibrary which you might download.

6/8/2004 12:00:00 AM
There's been update to the ORLibrary which now bears the label 1.3C. This is just a service release containing a few bug fixes. (Sorry, life's getting a little busy right now.)

The complete "What's News" history can be found here.