Weekend LAN Party
June 25, 2008

So, I totally have an excuse for not updating anytime recently - this past weekend I was host to an awesome LAN party! Unlike most of our usual ones, which are usually limited to around 4 people, this one had 9 total participants which finally made team games like Counter-Strike a viable option.

Much fun was had playing Counter-Strike, as Mike A. from work definitely helped our team pwn everyone else. ;p We tried playing some UT, but it truly has not aged well. I had to drop to software mode, and lag was a continuous issue. Also, it didn't help that the speed had gotten reduced down to Halo'tastic on a game meant to be a twitch shooter. We got in a few good rounds of Quake 3 which was awesome, because it happens to be amongst my favorite games. We finished the night off with some Co-Op Serious Sam and I beat out the little pyramid area for the fifty ninth time.

I was surprised at how well everything went off having 9 people on the LAN. There weren't *too* many technical issues, Draz' box hadn't been configured to play games (no video drivers, lol) and Tom's box managed to corrupt its version of DX. I also had to buy a Cat-5 coupler, because Micro Center lacked bulk cable necessary to run from my main switch to the other room where people were. Alas.

So, all in all - it ended up being a great party and an awesome way to kick-off my new house. Thanks to all who attended, and may Tiegs' version later in July be made of equal parts win and win.

Twitter Status Updates!
March 10, 2008

I finally got off my ass and implemented a Twitter status updater here on my page to the right over there. Notice that I didn't take the lazy way out, and it's actually included here on my blog. I wrote up a quick Ruby script that interfaces with the Twitter API in order to get my latest request. It uses SSL, so everything's encrypted and I don't have to worry too much. Additionally, I decided to actually implement it using Ajax instead of directly embedding it in my page. Why? I'm not sure that I want Google knowing about *everything* that I'm doing on the Intarwebs.

Anyway, you can download my script right here if you're interested. Just run it as a cron job outputting to a text file, then you can use Ajax to embed it or some sort of server-side processing to include it. You can look at this page's code if you're interested in how to do it with Prototype.

Ya, I did rip off the Twitterriffic icon. Twitter itself doesn't provide any decent graphics. :(

The MiniView Micro KVM
March 06, 2008

I finally broke down yesterday and purchased a KVM switch. For the longest time I've been sliding in between my shiny new Macbook and my Game'rific PC that I was finally fed up with it. Enter the IOGear GCS632U MiniView Micro USB Plus KVM Switch. Quite a mouthful, but an acceptable product which after much searching and cajoling has done what I needed.

Why so much cajoling? Well, it's because I'm using a shiny new aluminum Apple keyboard (There would be a link here, but Apple fails at having a linkable storefront). This keyboard, seems to draw too much juice from the USB lines and is thus incompatible with the KVM. Thanks to some helpful chaps on the Apple forums, however, I found out a way to make it work.

Apparently, to get the GSC632U to work with the new Apple keyboards you must:

1. Plug the Apple Keyboard into the Mouse Port on the KVM
2. Plug your Mouse into the Apple Keyboard
3. Plug a PC Compatible USB keyboard into the real Keyboard Port on the KVM
4. Use the command keys on the PC Keyboard to operate the KVM

It's hardly the most optimum situation, but it works I suppose. Now I have my Macbook finally outputting to my delicious large BenQ monitor. It is truly awesome.

Ohoho! Yet Another New Design!
February 06, 2008

Well, overall the reaction to my last design was less than stellar. David thought there was low alignment, James thought it was too white and Andy... he thinks everything sucks. In honor of my new position of Webmaster at W3i I've decided to take some time to rework my existing design and make it a little more interesting. You'll notice the return of my fancy diagonal bars from an old design, and a whole lot of green. I like green (and I want to remind David of his lifelong goal of reworking his blog to appear as a console application).

I'm planning on tweaking some of the colors and to revisit how to make the "content" area of the page appear a little more in sync with everything else. For now though, this is what it is. James should be happy with the darkness and David should be happy with the alignment. :)

Keep an eye out for more Caturday announcements too. Since I've been accepted at W3i as an ASP.NET developer I'm going to be stepping up my personal exploration of the technology. Alas, my MacBook is ill equipped (what with running OSX and all) for .NET development so my time on campus must be devoted to other things. Mayhaps some Parallels investment may be in order. Who knows?

My current plans are to get my new reworking of the Caturday page up and running on a Virtualized computer on my machine at home. I'm hoping that performance will be acceptable, because I'd hate to have to invest in another machine *just* to run Windows Server and IIS.

While all of that is going on at home, I'm intended to keep up with Listforge development during my time at school - just to keep my deliciously useful Ruby on Rails skills up. I'm also very excited that there doesn't appear to be too much limitation at W3i, so I might actually get to use Microsoft's new MVC Development Toolkit to get my MVC groove on.

Now Web 2.0 Compliant!
January 05, 2008

I've been weary of my old design for quite some time now. Sure, throughout the last year I've made a lot of tweaks and changes. I updated the color schemes, and I've even added new features - but deep down at the core of it has been the same old "header up top, sidebar with lots of crap" design.

Since I was home sick today, with the help of my now trusty Macbook I decided to embark on a quest that I haven't gone on for awhile. Totally redesigning my blog. As a web developer and a designer I need to do these sorts of things from time to time. Sure, I design for clients and such all the time but it's never the same as the experimentation that I get to do on this blog.

So, without further ado I give to you my new blog design. A truly new design and it's something that I haven't gotten to do with clients - explore the new(ish) Web 2.0 design patterns. It's easy to read, very clean and extremely focused.

Look! There's even a new mission statement for my blog; Our mission is to continue to authoritatively disseminate excellent resources so that we may synergistically initiate parallel intellectual capital to exceed customer expectations. Thanks Scott Adams!

Joyent Is Sloooow...
November 29, 2007

Sorry guys, Joyent's moving slow as molasses today. I've noticed that the server I'm on has never performed great - but today is just... slooooow. Anyway. In the meantime, enjoy DHH talking about REST.

What's In Your Queue?
November 12, 2007

Sorry guys, I'm just finding it incredibly hard to find time to write lately. This morning my unread count in Google Reader is up around 4,000. That's a lot of stuff. Even before that there's the group projects for class, all the papers, exams, the new Genshiken series and oh the new monitor that's set to arrive today. So much to do... so little time. I haven't even been able to upload the pictures from our last Dungeons and Dragons session including the giant Draz head. Oi.

Originally this was an excuse post, but my browsing of Dtoid got me thinking about how many damned video games I have queued up to play over the coming month or so. With so many great games coming out (and that have come out) in recent times I thought a list would be in order!

This week I ask, what's in your game queue? For me the rather long list includes...

• Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
• Halo 3
• Half-Life 2: Episode 2
• Persona 3
• Beautiful Katamari
• Assassin's Creed
• Zach and Wiki
• Mass Effect
• Super Mario Galaxy
• Hellgate London
• Conan
• Eternal Sonata
• Contra 4

So, what are you jonesing to play over the coming months of delicious almost obese portions of gaming delight?

Moving Sites to Joyent
September 27, 2007

The recent outage has prompted me to go ahead and bite the bullet. My sites are now being migrated to Joyent's Servers. I figure that any host whose blog contains more succulent tech info than you can shake a stick at is definitely worth a check.

Please bare with me while this is happening. My main site has been migrated, and I should be working on Caturday tonight and tomorrow-nights. Hopefully I'll get in gear and start making some more changes to the Caturday page since I'll be able to host more user additions.

Btw, migrating psql databases is a PITA. pg_dump -Fc is your friend, and be mindful of your encoding. UTF-8 or die trying to use iconv.

Switching to Feedburner
August 29, 2007

With the latest re-organization of my domains, I'm going ahead and switching my RSS feeds over to feedburner. Why? For one, it's easier to manage. I don't have to worry about making sure that all of my old feeds stay in sync with new changes, I just update in one central location. For two, it gives me easier tracking. Right now I really have no idea how many of you view my blog using RSS.

So, if you're currently subscribed to any of my old feeds - please do yourself a favor and subscribe to my feedburner feed. Hopefully everything should stay in place and remain pretty stable for now.

Onyxraven pointed out that I needed to do some work on my RSS feeds, and rightly so. I've added image support and cleaned up the formatting a lot. I hope that these changes are working out nicely for you guys! Pop on over to the comments section for this post and let me know!

Nothing New, Really...
June 19, 2007

The farm soon cometh. Emily and I are counting down the days until July 1st when we move, so my entire life is basically consumed by packing. When I'm not packing, I'm busy trying to figure out which box Babbles got packed in... the office is totally packed except for the networking core and of course my main rig. I've also got the living room and hallway areas packed up from all the nick-nacks. Next up are the non-essentials from the kitchen and bathroom. Joy for packing!

What's new? Well, David's wife should have popped out her baby by now. Hopefully Mr. All of Her Berlin will enjoy rousing rounds of Counter-Strike and Warioware with his daddy. I am estimating roughly six weeks before he has a Wii-mote strapped to his back and David's trying to get it to connect to the sensor bar.

I've been playing Halo 2 a lot, especially now that I found the graphics detail setting. I'm happy with my $50 purchase. Happy like a fox. Multiplayer's pretty fun, if you can find a game. I counted seven populated servers last night - two of which were password protected. Oi. Also, did you see? Geometry Wars has been released over Steam. Damn, I gotta get me some of that.

I also found a nifty way to make home-made salad dressing even easier... use a cocktail shaker! I like to use half olive oil, balsamic vinegar, 1/2 teaspoon each of salt, pepper, dill, garlic powder and lemon juice. White wine goes good too!

Until next time... KITTIES! Yes Draz, I will soon have something ready for you to assist me in tagging these super-mega-kawaii creatures.

The Silence Before the Storm
March 07, 2007

So I've been quiet for awhile. I know. My nights have been spent working on a very sekrit project. Citescape's coming by today to see if I can get service at my location so that I'll finally be able to have real internet - as opposed to the watered down view of it that Charter has. With that in mind, I will simply say that the attached picture is very related. Salivate*.

*Yes, I know that Jesse won't salivate. He's the only human alive to not adore cats.

Blog Maintenance
December 27, 2006

So, Jesse pointed out that he had been unable to post comments for awhile. Apologies. When I restored my backups, I discovered that the version I had was a bit older and thought I had updated everything. Nope! There was a bug in the comment system whereby if you had a mis-formatted URI field, your comment was never posted. I've fixed that and added a little bit of magic to highlight "close" URIs. Have fun posting again Jesse!

I'm Back!
December 15, 2006

So, the hard disk in my server died last weekend. T'was a dismaying thing to be crouched down playing with Babbles when I hear it start to whine. No matter, for I dug up my old backups and I'm back! I also took this opportunity to make a little site redesign, so I'm hoping that everything is well. As always, the site probably doesn't work in IE. But really, what does?

Lack of Posts and Car Troubles
November 15, 2006

Well, I have to apologize for the lack of posting this week. Emily's car died and I've been fighting with getting that taken care of. Couple that with school and work and you've got a most joyous time on your hands. Anyway, hope you all understand!

Improved RSS
October 30, 2006

So, I finally got around to improving the RSS Feed. I realized that I've been yammering on and on about it - and wasn't even subscribed to my own feed. Oi!

On a slightly related note; I've noticed a few hits coming from Blackberry.com. Could it be that someone I know is subscribed to my site with their Blackberry? Is that person subscribed with the RSS feed - or does Blackberry offer some sort of "update notification" thing? ;p

Where Have All the Posts Gone?
September 20, 2006

I know that I haven't posted anything this week yet, and I feel terrible. I've been terribly busy with school, work and other life chores. I swear that I've got a couple topics up my sleeve for updates later! Keep checking back!

Site Tweaks
September 13, 2006

Some of you may have noticed some minor site tweaks here and there. I've made some visual chagnes as well as a few feature changes. My favorite is the "like" / "hate" feature, which I'm hoping to get feedback through since it doesn't require any sort of "input" from the user. I also brought back my delicious feed, since I personally browse it a lot - and I like to give props to other sites I like without having to post about them.

Let me know what you guys think!

Something a bit Simpler
September 04, 2006

I redesigned again. I chose to go with something a bit more stark and simple this time around, since I haven't tried that in awhile. I always used to love the minimalist themes from all the UI sites, so I'm going to try this for a bit. I'm still not quite sure how to work the sidebar back in, so that will have to come later. I'm thinking about perhaps having it run through at the bottom, but I'm not certain.

Most Popular Posts
August 04, 2006

Well, Google will have no choice but to list me as a sushi oriented blog now! I've crafted a lovely piece of SQL that will list out the most commented on posts (that I'm dubbing as the most popular) on the right hand side.

Anyway, I love INNER JOINs and the COUNT(*) aggregate function. I've actually used the two of them in conjunction quite a bit this week. Here's the SQL that's sporting up the new Most Popular Posts listing.

SELECT a.id,a.name,b.count FROM posts AS a
                          INNER JOIN (
                            SELECT post_id,count(*) FROM comments
                            GROUP BY post_id                            
                          ) as b
                          ON ( a.id = b.post_id )
                          ORDER BY b.count DESC LIMIT 5;

I'm debating rewriting portions of the viewing code to include some sort of auto-incrementing "viewed" field - but I really don't want to be hitting up the database that much. I mean, granted that Wintermute's avg. load is around 0.35 I shouldn't be that concerned... I still can't bring myself to labor those kinds of inefficiencies.

(The image is from the Wikipedia Sushi entry. I also want to write some citation code into my picture listings.)

Update: Onyx writes in to suggest that the following is more efficient:

select p.id, p.name, count(*) as count
  from posts as p
  join comments as c on p.id = c.post_id
  group by p.id
  order by count desc
  limit 5;

Why Does Google Think My Blog is About Sushi?
July 27, 2006

So, I made a single post about Sakura's tasty sushi awhile back and now Google thinks that my blog is entirely about sushi - as can be seen by the sushi advertising on my sidebar. I am slightly baffled, because I don't even show up on the first three pages of searching for "St. Cloud Sakura".

On the flip side I have been making some tasty sushi lately and will have to post pictures soon. It's so amazingly simple, tasty and fun. Also, the Sushi Video on google video is a must see.

Now google will have no choice but brand my blog as a sushiblog!

New Design!
July 03, 2006

Well, I thought that I wasn't going to update anymore... and then I had the idea for this latest design! It's much more lightweight than the old one, so loading should go a lot faster. Additionally it's Internet Explorer compatible. Exciting!

Tags Tags Glorious Tags!
June 29, 2006

I undertook the unthinkable, and refactored my CMS. Yes, I refactored. Usually I just redo my CMS in whatever new language/framework is fighting for my attention at the moment - but Ruby on Rails is just so good that I don't want to let go.

Well, Phantomdata.com now sports tags - and some little modifications. Most of it you guys won't notice. It's backend stuff so that I can make some better changes, where I noticed my initial design was flawed.

Well, if anyone notices anything wrong - be sure to leave a comment.