Spannerous
As well as doing very little on the game, I’ve been not doing a lot of work modifying the Enchantrix add-on for WoW. I started hacking it about a few weeks ago, and then decided to ask if I could get my changes added to the official code. Long story short, I’m now on the team. Earlier this evening I decided that I’d start working my changes into the latest code, and so as a first step I copied the code to my actual WoW install. Then I realised that I’d just written over the only copy of the code that I had changed. Fortunately, I had at least put most of my code into a separate file, so that survived, but I feel like a complete tool, both for copying over the code and for not having a backup anyway.
WoW add-ons are written in Lua, which has a fair amount in common with Python, although it doesn’t feel as purposeful as Python to me, at least withwhat I’ve seen so far. The structure of the WoW UI framework is interesting to me though, as it uses XML to define widget positioning, parameterisation and binding of events to code. This is something I considered for my day job a while back and I was very curious to see how the idea panned out in practice. As I suspected, it makes for some boring XML editing tasks, but it also allows for flexible definitions and a nice clear separation of UI from underlying logic without adding any great overhead. It’s a pity I’ve gone and lost the XML I had written, but seeing as the Enchantrix lead dev told me that they use Khaos for generating configuation UI, I was going to have to dump it anyway.
Apart from trashing some work, I have done some brief tinkering with the Django pages and deleted some old files lying around. The accidental overwrite has made me aware of some of the messiness I was allowing to build up, so some spring-cleaning of directories is in order. I may even get around to reducing the total number of Python installs on my Linux box to one. I think I’m down to two already.
