Dispatches from the Uzkmro Quadrant

My Imperial Galaxy career is advancing so rapidly, it's become necessary to increase the rate of updates. When we left off, a helpful prince (let's call him Ellazh) had shuffled me around in the fleet, temporarily rendering me fleetless, but sending personal COMMs often, and got me back as a Captain soon enough. I was excited, seeing as I was networking and might see the benefits of that soon enough, though trepidacious about the reshuffling.

I realize later that, although excited, I was a little apprehensive about the frequent communications, that Ellazh was micro-commanding, worried too much about the structure of his fleet and controlling his fleet too closely. Indeed, when I got a PRSNL from him asking me to let me know as soon as I'm online, my suspicions were confirmed.

You see, up to this point, I've made sure to stock my module updates before a large all-fleet attack (like the one planned for this weekend)... but otherwise I've acted alone. I still contribute for the fleet and am happy to be in Nemesis, but I like to do it on my own terms: I want to go into battle when it works for me. In the end, it works best for BGN as I will sometimes spend a good deal of time hammering the enemy with attacks.

My fleet commander needs to give me the freedom to keep this routine. Point of fact, this is how my career is now structured and -- I believe my employers would agree -- I'm at optimal production levels in a laissez faire environment.

Enter Providence, aka Emmtuv Okmuth. During one of Ellazh's piddling shuffles, I become a free agent, and Prince(ss) Okmuth scoops me up. Best of all, Okmuth is a Admiral, thus sending me from Captain straight to acting Vice-Admiral. A short time later, I get a PERSNL from Ellazh:

"Well I lost you, Sir. I can't re-add you because you out rank me"

I'm sorry, Adm. Ellazh. You were indeed a loyal prince for Nemesis, but since my Vice-Admiral appointment, I haven't been shuffled once and have been allowed to do mettle-free battling (which in fact consumed a good deal of my night).

Through all this meshugass, I somehow kept one volunteer captain in my sub-fleet. Now that I have higher status and a more comfortable fleet environment, I wanted to start building up my fleet. I sent out invitations to my fleet, targeting 05's, hoping that the advancement to 06 would entice them to move. As of now, I've received two courteous denials. Gotta hand it to loyalty.

Hopefully I'll get a few takers so I can start attacking 4s. So far, I've been attacking 1s and 2s without fear, and an occassional yellow 3. Even though (or possibly because) I only have one prince in my sub-fleet, I want to make sure I don't damage his ship too severely solely out of hubris.

In other Imperial Galaxy news, I've started looking into coding web crawlers, a development avenue I've surprisingly never trod before. My ultimate goal will be to enter in a URL for a Quadrant and return a report of sub Systems and their Threat levels. Of course, I got carried away and now want to make sure the crawler takes robots.txt into account, even though I know that Imperial Galaxy is not on the Disallow list for facebook.

I downloaded the Searcharoo project and got some excellent guidance from it. My ultimate goal is to write a abstract base class with a generics definition so that it can be easily inherited, and a specific parsing task can be implemented on top of it.

public abstract class BaseCrawler<ResultType>
{
   public abstract ResultType[] GetPageResults(string html);
}

public class IGSectorCrawler : BaseCrawler<IGSectorResult>
{
   public override IGSectorResult[] GetPageResults(string html);
}

.... something like that.

Further updates to follow.