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.

Hisashiburi Desu
May 20, 2008

Man, its been a long time since I've posted. Apologies - this happens almost every Summer. I've passed all my classes and have entered into hardcore packing mode for the moment to hit our June 6th closing date. I've also been working on a C# implementation of my old System Status script in order to get a cleaner implementation. Working on my nice fast home machine is so much nicer than the one at work which grants me a coffee break everytime I hit "ctrl-shift-b".

Oh, and of course there's been too much GTAIV for this blog's health.

Using MVC with ASP.NET
February 05, 2008

Some of you may have noticed that I didn't make any updates to listforge over the weekend. Alas, I was busy with bigger things. As part of a recent opportunity, I've begun honing my skills with ASP.NET and am in the process or rewriting my Caturday page using its new MVC framework (Really, it took them this long to get one out there). All of us cool kids who use Ruby on Rails have been using MVC so long that we've tired of it and are moving on to REST, but MS as usual is lumbering along behind us. I must say that I'm thankful, though. The concept of MVC is a much needed design pattern for web applications and an incredible difference over Code Behind.

The process itself is actually going quite well and I'm learning a lot on the way. For instance, if you pass variables in to the controller statement it seems to eat the Request.Files children. You have to actually use the MvcToolkit (totally different from the MVC extension) and use .UpdateForm (not .UpdateFrom like the MSDN blogs say) to populate entry data.

One other item of note is that unit testing out of the box doesn't work if you're using a local database file. There doesn't appear to be a way to set "development", "testing" or "production" databases within the projects and unfortunately the testing project that gets created fails to recognize the database specified by the main application. I pulled my hair for quite some time, thinking that I destroyed some crucial application bit, before realizing that the testing just plain didn't work. After firing up the web server, I realized that everything was just fine.

I'm using ASP.NET 3.5 so I also get the beauty that is LINQ. Really, it is .NET's redeeming feature. The ability to query any (of the widely supported) enumerable type(s) using a SQL-like language is phenomenal. It even brings with it ORM style object addition and data-store commission allowing things like "LinqContext.Items.Add()" for anything ranging from XML files to SQL Databases to you're usual arrays. Delicious.

Interested in trying some MVC development in ASP.NET? You can download the extension itself from Microsoft's Official ASP Site and the Toolkit Extras or MvcToolkit from Microsoft's Official ASP Site. If you're looking for help, Scott Gu's blog has an excellent series of articles on the matter (though in typical MS fashion, no decent way to find them). Obviously you'll need a copy of Visual Studio Web Developer (or VS2008 Pro in my case) in order to get going with this.

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?

Holy Busy Batman!
October 09, 2007

These last few days have been incredibly impossibly busy for me. In between the new 360, school and this last weekend's D&D session which got me home around 01:30A on a Sunday - I'm totally beat. Hopefully I'll make some new postings this evening, but even that's suspect since I've disassembled my office and am using my poor neglected laptop to type this up. Oi.

Oh, I did get the 360 to talk to Windows Media Player too. 'Tis quite nice to finally have decent music access in the living room.

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.

Life Time Consumption
October 01, 2006

So, working a 40hr work week while going to school fulltime is a pain in the ass. If I'm not at work or school I'm at home studying. There are so many unvisited sites in my ~/uri file that I can't count them anymore. It saddens me to watch internets pass without viewing. *sigh* Hopefully things will let up a little bit after my first Business Statistics test passes on Tuesday. Lord, I hope it does.