Uncharted Spaces, Unseen Phenomenae

Spent more time playing with scanners and finally ventured into a wormhole located in Nafomeh system. Some would just dive into fighting those unknown inhabitants of the uncharted space, I was instead surprised with the spatial effect which immediately affected my ship. Luckily, no vital changes, ship systems kept working properly — shield, propulsion, life support.

The source of the effect was found immediately — local sun wasn't the only source of radiation in the system. A large rift looking similar to Eve Gate was shining bright on the sky. But even more interesting was some blueish thingie in the same quadrant. Don't have a single idea of what it might be.

I have reported my data to other capsuleers when I left the system (wormhole was quite stable, I went through it 4 times in my Hurricane total and it wasn't seemingly disrupted by it). While the true answer is yet to come, there were some speculations that the stellar object I saw is the source of the spatial effect that hit me, and that it probably affected my shields subsytem in some way.

One more thing: On-board scanner revealed a starbase installed in the system. Not the local technology, but our gallentean starbase complete with ship maintenance array and ammo assembly array. So we might either expect some data on the phenomena assuming this lab is there for research, or expect nothing if the owner is secretive enough.

Lost in Uncharted Space

Yesterday I hopped into my Cheetah and went looking for wormholes. This was quite an adventure especially when the the wormhole collapsed after Kuno's megathron and I had to find a new way out. Finding a deadspace signature isn't hard. Finding a wormhole among two dozens of signatures is. I was lucky to find me a way out in just a couple of hours. And the exit led back to high-sec amarrian space.

Mr Smith haven't contacted me again and I might know a reason for this – on-board computer automatically identifies unique locus signature for each system and does it in deterministic way so every W-space traveller sees the same locus signature for a given system. No need to identify a system by star spectral class or planet mass.

2 + 2

Those chicks I booted yesterday came back with some gorilla-like guys. Those basically blocked my door and I couldn't leave my apartments for a full day. Eventually they got bored and left but I had to sit here unable to go to space.

So I turned back to mr Smith's program and finaly made something for him. Then I turned on news channel and all I had to do is to add 2 and 2. Of course he doesn't need that database to identify known space, he wants to build a database of uncharted systems!

Knowing star spectral class, it's temperature and number of planets in the system allows us to almost certainly identify a system. Maybe some addtitional info like star luminosity, age and mass will help here.

My shipment of Deep Space Probes is on the way. Uncharted space, here I come!

Apocrypha

Just turned off Scope channel. Incredible. Whatever those wormholes reported by SoE are I should definitely look at it.

Back to Programming

Last night I was relaxing after a hard week when my NeoCom started beeping like crazy – someone wanted to chat with me. Not that some beeping can distract me from relaxing but this guy was too persistent and my ears can't take 2 minutes of constant beeping. So I asked girls to rest a bit, took on my gown and went to the communicator. Of course, it wasn't hot girl but some old geezer in a gray suit. Who immediately demanded me to turn on secure transmission and to ask everyone to leave. This sounded a bit too serious so I asked girls to get out (pushed them out with all their raggery – who said I'm a gentleman?) and turned back to the screen.

The guy was there waiting for me with the same facial expression. First he said that he knows that I was using DED databases to aquire some data on stellar maps. Next he said that I'm building some software. And then he proposed me to make him a database of some sort. Since I was just grasping my senses, I didn't have much to object to this and asked him to give me details and since it was all recorded, went to get a cup of coffee while he was mumbling. When I returned, communication was closed.

I looked at recording and it seems the guy just sent me it in text. Blah. He wants me to write a solar system database allowing to identify a solar system by it's star (star type, spectral class, temperature etc.) and planets (number of planets, size, mass) and if that's not enough, moons. Not too hard.

I looked at recording several times trying to get some additional things I need to know. First: The guy's name is mr. Smith. Surprize! Second: He's going to contact me later about the result and payment. What? Where did my mind go? I didn't ask about payment in advance?

So I'm sitting, looking at the screen and several thoughts bother me. Why would someone need a program liek this if every ship's on-board computer can easily tell you system name using global coordinates?

One more thing. Some say you can't send scent through FTL comms. This guy smells SoE.

Pod Pilots Shoot, Economy Grows

6.3.111 Lai Dai, Others Announce Black Rise Plans

Following the recent move by Kaalakiota Corporation, other major players in the Caldari State have stated their plans for the expansion into the Black Rise region.
Yesterday Lai Dai Corporation announced that its board of directors will consider moving a number of facilities to Black Rise.<...>
Other Caldari corporations have also declared similar plans.

They mention FW successes that make Black Rise a safe place for expansion. But what happens on the other side of the war? And that other side is the low-sec Essence. And the Heydieles system among others.

There were tons of battle reports coming from either Heydieles or nearby systems. Not gonna search through archives now. And every time I saw the system name I felt pain. Because Duvolle labs in Heydieles is where I have started my scientific career. My first work after I left the University.

So what does it mean? Caldari corporations are going to expand at the cost of Gallente suffering? That's not the way I'd love it to see.

Current null-sec space is occuppied with pod pilot alliances and pirate factions. I bet empires can fight any of those if they want. Which one first?

My vote: Get some ships and beat those Sansha and Blood Raiders.

Moon Mining and Moon Materials

4.3.111 Kaalakiota Unveils Black Rise Survey Program

<...> the program will be conducted by both the corporation's intelligence division and the Home Guard, the goal being the development of a comprehensive resource database of the Black Rise region. The program will survey the planets and moons across 49 systems in 6 constellations.

I highlighted the word "moons". I remember seeing something like this before. Digging through news archive I found this:
8.10.110 Minmatar Mining Industry Expands to New Frontiers

HEXAG has confirmed that a moon will be the target for the new venture, with bulk extraction of minerals not readily accessible through orbital mining techniques the primary goal.

So... On-site moon mining? Imperial moon mining, not handled by pod pilots? Are we going to ever see moon materials in abundance and not controlled by pod pilot alliances? These changes might strongly affect the current T2 market.

We've been trying to start Golem manufacturing. The total price of ferrogel used in its production is around 400 millions. Nearly half of the market price of the ship.

Rare moon materials are controlled by pod pilots and Empire leaders know this. And while they cannot overthrow alliance monopoly on Dysprosium-based materials, they can mine lower-end minerals in abundance and using the so-called Alchemy reactions they still can produce ferrogel and other stuff. And they have much more processing power then your usual pod pilot alliance.

So we're going to witness a major change in T2 market. Assuming this is not just a political move.

Too bad I don't have any contacts within Kaa. Lab in Ishukone, research in Lai Dai. Kaa – nothing. Still gotta visit Kokanogi. At least he resides in Nonni and could have heard some local news. Unlikely though – he's scientist after all.

Distributed Repositories, Automated Assembling

Having a single working box is good. Having several working box having access to GalNet is better. As long as you don't have to share your work between those. Otherwise it's a pain to keep all your versions synchronized. Added a fix while sitting in a station working with my stationary PC, forgot to transfer it onto on-board computer in my prowler, made a workaround there, had to re-implement it here... Even worse than T2 manufacturing.

Ok, here comes distributed version control system. I have a working copy (or several) on different machines and can push all the changes to a single public repository. Good. Now split all the code into subprojects... Not so good anymore. Finally made a super-project for managing all the submodules. Spent a few days writing scripts for syncing, deployment and managing. The work is still far from completion and that's not exactly what I was doing in the beginning. Scripting instead of coding. Meh.

And it still doesn't save me from forgetting to add a new file to the repository. Good that it was just 3 or 4 lines of code.

Something That Works

Not "Hello, world" though.

I'm not just manufacturer, I'm a trader also. So I'm hanging sometimes with other traders. One of them asked if someone could make him a program allowing to see all the market buy orders in a given region for a given item. Most importantly he needed a way to see the highest buy order in for each system. And some kind of map. So I thought that it might be a good exerсise for me. Not asset management but I want my Uber-Program to help me with market trading too. So I agreed to try to make that one.

So what did I need? A way to access market data and some kind of regional map. For the latter one I downloaded DED database dump (nothing illegal there, it's distributed openly), extracted the data related to region maps from it and that's all.

Market data is a bit harder. Customer asked me to use market data exports instead of Eve-Central data. These exports are just chunks of raw text - NeoCom should really be fixed here - so I needed a way to parse them.

Finally I need a way to draw a map. About a year ago I tried to do one using GraphViz. Then I found Ombey's maps and forgot about my attempt. This time I though "Hey, I can just extract region map data, form it into dot-file and then feed to GraphViz". That worked. But that's a bit too ugly to use. I contacted Ombey about his maps.. He didn't give me his raw data and it's quite understandable. Thus it will be my ugly auto-generated maps. At least for now.

Some coding... Some hacking... Some coding again.. Lots of reading. And when I was satisfied with results I sent it to customer. And even got some payment already. This is not yet a final result but still a good start.

And I also should spend some more time syncing data between my workspaces.

First Steps

Versatility is good. But versatile skills lead to having to make decisions. And the decision I have to make now is bugging me for some time already: Which technology will I use for my Uber-Asset-Management-Software?

• it will be tightly coupled with GalNet;
• it has to work properly on all systems (not "Amarr box only" or "Anything but Matari");
• it has to be easily expandable.

While declarative programming is cool and fills me with pride (when I succeed in writing something complex, that is), my poor skills in it mean it won't be the best choice for the project. The second requirement means that the project is either made in some interpreted language, or I have to also implement some build platform suitable for all boards

The Inner Voice suggests using XPCOM. And I have several reasons to agree with it. First, there are tons of manuals; second, I do have some experience with it; third, it's my Inner Voice after all.

And with all these manuals and features of XPCOM I might have some results really soon. I guess, "Hello, world" will be enough for starters.

Managing My Assets

This manufacturing and research becomes really complex. I have to keep the track of all my bluerptints and datacores and materials and minerals and tons of other things. Either I give up and stop building and selling the stuff or ...

Years of learning Computer Science back in University of Caille gave me a lot of useful skills. Hacking through R&D databases is what I'm using daily. But there are more creative uses to those skills than just hacking. So I've got some manuals on asset management software, NeoCom API and other stuff and maybe one day I'll create something to aid in my daily job.

And maybe that piece of software will also be useful for Calm River who is struggling to keep the lab online.