The part I helped with is about being able to find a “route” from one point to another.

My first attempt was just for fun, a stored procedure for MySQL which did the lookup with the help of 3 temporary tables. This worked quite well, but had serious troubles resolving really long paths (avg. of 7 seconds for a 24 hops search).

So, I finally decided to create a dedicated database format for Eve Online, which would be optimized for lookups.

With this new database, a 95 hops lookup takes an average of 2.25ms. This is fairly acceptable, I’d say.

For those who are interested, the generated database (it took ~3 hours to build it), and some data files are available for download. You can also download the initial MySQL database dump.

The index file is fairly simple, it contains only solar system ids and locations in the main file (4 bytes for little endian solar system id, and 4 bytes for location in main file).

The main data file is a bit more complex. For each solar system we have:

• Solar System ID (4 bytes)
• Solar System Security (4 bytes int, explained soon)
• Number of known solar system when adding this one
• Solar system name length (1 byte)
• Solar system name (variable length)
• Solar system links to other solar systems (size of 9*number of known solar system when adding this one). This list contains:
  • Next hop to reach this solar system (4 bytes)
  • Number of hops remaining to reach it (1 byte)
  • Security level of this route (4 bytes, explained soon)

The security level in Eve Online is a float between -1 and 1. Storing float or double values is a pain, so I converted them to integer with a simple operation: int_value = (float_value + 1) *1000000000.
This way the int_value will be between 0 and 2000000000, and (almost) efficiently use space available on signed 32bits integers.

Creation of the initial file is also pretty simple.

First, we create the various solar systems, based on data from the database.

Next, we insert what we call “level 1″ links (basically, those are all the direct links).

Finally, we enter a for loop starting a 2 and finishing at 255 which will ask to populate links. There the way this is done is easy.
For each solar systems:

• We collect all links which takes one less hop than the current value of the loop (for example for the third iteration, we take all “2 hops” links)
• We “advertise” them to solar systems directly connected to our solar system, saying the “next hop” is us (for example this would lead a solar system directly connected to the current one adding the current solar system as a “3 hops” target for the advertised solar system).

Explaining all that is not easy, I hope I didn’t get anyone lost here.

Anyway have fun with this piece of (maybe) useful code!

Other changes should include:

• MySQLnd async queries and other stuff like stream scanning
• ext/mhash removed from main tree, and replaced with ext/hash, which seems better (I believe compatibility function names will be used, eg. ext/hash will provide mhash_* functions aliases)
• OpenSSL will now work with buffers (I’ve been waiting for this one)

Anyway this is most likely going to be the last alpha release of PHP 5.3, as this should mark the last new features added to PHP 5.3. Next test releases should be beta, then RC, for finally getting a final PHP 5.3 out in 2009.

By the way, remember that in France, the PHP 2008 Forum will be held on December 8th and 9th 2008 in Paris, and many people will be there…

At first, I tried using QtSoap (part of Qt Solutions), but I was expecting something better for a commercial-only element (the lack of wsdl parsing is the main problem, I guess).

Anyway I finally decided to look at less complex solutions, and found WDDX to be a good idea.
After some tests I wrote a WDDX module for Qt and started doing tests. I was surprised at some point when I saw that the data I was getting from the server appeared to be UTF-8 encoded, and here I found that PHP’s WDDX extension was broken: the documentation stated WDDX functions only accept UTF-8, but the code was clearly showing conversions from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8…

This led me to write a patch to fix that (along other patches for other features in PHP), and post a lot of stuff to the PHP internal mailing list.

I found out that the Wddx extension was maintained by Andrei Zmievski, and I guess he didn’t have enough time to continue looking after it… anyway he approved my patch, and at this point I became a “php developper”.

Next steps are pretty normal: I discovered again CVS, which I had totally forgotten, I discovered branch management and manual merge because PHP branches are too different, and a lot more stuff which made my time working on Wddx pretty fun.
Thanks to the tests I wrote I could spot two other bugs, one in PHP_5_3 (wddx_add_vars() was ignoring the first passed variable) and one in all versions of PHP (serializing a class providing a __sleep() method with wddx caused this class to be stored without its values, even those __sleep() said we need to store).

Anyway the next thing I’d like to implement in Wddx is packet streaming: the ability to send a packet while building it, allowing creation of really large packets without needing the RAM to store it (and coupled with stuff like mysqli::use_result(), it’s a nice way to stream large SQL data).

Anyway WDDX is a really nice way to serialize data, and it seems JS libraries able to parse WDDX exists (I only use it for communications with Qt, so I didn’t look a lot in this direction, still I guess google could tell you more).

This is an important step for an OS that has been only written using emulators like QEmu and VirtualBox.

Starting today, all websites hosted by me are IPv6 enabled. This is probably going to be some troubles if you scan IPs, or do something like that, but if not, you’ll be happy to see that.

If you want to see your IP as seen by the server, you can use my IP service : What is my IP. If it shows an IPv6, it means you are connected via IPv6

Also, in order to make easier for the users, there will be no need to deal with things such as shells, etc… to get the OS installed.

I’ve taken over the USB driver developpement, while BombStrike will work on the process scheduler in order to fix a few glitches that were reported.

While this happens, I’m still working on TuxTelecom althrough the service is now owned by Mutum Sigillum LLC. I get to play with the central while real service will be initiated soon.
The final service will of course include regular phone calls, but it will also include ability to send SMS to the world, and maybe to receive those too (in order to receive SMS you’ll need a special plan. Everyone with credit on their accounts will be able to send messages).

Finally, a new non-open source project I’m working on : libthor (threaded torrent library). This cross-platform library will allow anyone to build applications handling torrents (load a torrent, seed it, etc).

Well, that’s basically everything to this week’s news. See you next week !