back again

What better to do on a rainy October day, then catch up on some over due blogging. Much of my blogging "vacation" was due to short-lived infatuation with world of warcraft which seems to be at end. Now things are in high gear preparing for our wedding in November. I've also stopped working on SOT (my mud in planning) to work on a new multimedia project (potentially lucrative mind you).

I have very few if any legitimate complaints about World of Warcraft. Contrary to my initial concerns, the game was not all graphic hype with poor gameplay. It was evident Blizzard paid a lot of attention to Game Balance and the leveling which while many believe was accomplished too easily, I found to fit my busy schedule just right. Two aspects of the game that really won me over were the mindblowing universe and interaction with other players. WoW is huge. So large that you can't fairly compare to other non MMORPG's. Just running between two of the large human cities Ironforge and Storwind could take you well over an hour. Its hard not to fall in love with home cities of main races. Although I experienced heavy lag in the main cities until I upgraded to 1GB ram, the architecture and and immense size of these areas are indescribable unless you play the game. WoW uses the idea of instances to allow multiple players to group together to enter a dungeon and do battle with more difficult NPC's. These instances derive their name due to the fact they are created uniquely for each group that enters them allowing multiple copies of the instance to be entered at the same time without one party having to wait until another party is through. Here is where player interaction really shines. The large expansive world suddenly shrinks allowing for more of group based intimate experience. I get a similar feeling like I got when we I used to play multiplayer Gauntlet for Gamecube. Even better is when you can get the rest of your party to use application such as Teamspeak which allow everyone to use their pc microphone to talk over the internet.

Pizzam

Wow nearly a month without a post, this summer is surely keeping me busy. For all you pizza lovers out out there... (come on admit it.. It's OK to be over 15 and still love finger food) I've found THE site for making the very best pizzas at home. http://www.pizzamaking.com In their forums you'll find discussion about quality ingredients and methods used to make Neapolitan, NY Style, Chicago and anything else you crave. I've been playing around myself with some new sauces and cheeses and have immediately noticed a difference. Unfortunatley the whole dough spinning thing still has me befuddled. Last night I spent nearly a half hour just trying to form something that resembled a circle. Ah well, like everything else I suppose the learning is the fun part.

Are sweatshops that BAD?

I"ll admit I'm really naive when it comes to this topic, but I can't understand why we are so supposed to pity all these workers in third world countries who make our clothes. Are they bound by some type of contract that forbids them from leaving their jobs? If so, that sounds like a government problem. I'm assuming there country offers no better opportunities in terms of employment. I would think most people would be grateful for having a large corporation move work overseas into their country. Obviously the low wages are must be not be so insignificant to them if they are working 12 hour or more days. I'm in no way trying to justify this labor, I just wish when the facts are presented in all the left wing documentaries that they would at least compare there lifestyles to those of other people in their country not ours. Sure by our standards their bathrooms are horrible and they have no breaks, but everyone knows we live in a stuck up country and that our view is no where near a good representation other citizens of this world. Anyone reading this, I'd more than appreciate you clearing this up for me and adding any other information.

thou shalt not covet thy neighbors wireless

I like most poor apartment dwellers have been know to leech off a neighbors unprotected wifi network. The case usually being that I'm waiting for my own service to set up. It's amazing how many open networks you find just crusing slowly through the apartment complex with your laptop. A course should be taught on basic wifi security. My first network I set up two years back I was very strict and locked everything down tight, mac restriction, wep, non-broadcasted ssid and had no problems. It wasn't until this year, when I had to remove some of my settings to get my xbox live working that I actually had unsolicited visitors. Well admittedly pissed off at first, after I relaxed I thought it might be fun to play around with the neighbors. I mean they are using MY network doesn't that give me the right to all the data they are sending across? So I decided to explore options of trapping or redirecting their output requests. Unfortunately I found my router had no real capabilites (outside rewriting the firmware) of giving me access to outbound requests. A little more investigation and I found that hubs unlike the switches built into most modern routers will actually transmit signals to all hosts. Sounds like a possibly? Now that I'm in NJ and just got my cable internet set up, I'm looking for some guinea pigs. As soon as I get my old school hub and set up my ad hoc stalker network I"ll be sure to write more.

apple alarm

In an ongoing effort to automate my lifestyle and further geekify my existence, I am designing a custom alarm clock using Applescript and my iBook. I was very surprised to learn how easy it was to invoke other applications via Applescript. Currently my alarm is set to begin playing an iTunes playlist 10 minutes before I have to wake up. The volume starts very soft and builds until my wake up time. At wake up time, new music follows along with a voice automated greeting informing me of the current time and the current weather (this part is still in the works).The next stage is even louder music coupled with loud time announcements every five minutes. The getweather bit is basically a screen scrape of weather.com using curl...

curl -s http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/businesstraveler/local/$1 | grep '&temp' |
sed s/.*36hr\&temp=/'The current temperature is '/g |
sed s/\&uv.*\&cond/' degrees. The current condition is '/g |
sed s/\&templ1.*/' '/g |
sed s/=clear_mostly/'mostly clear.'/g |
sed s/=cloud_partly/'partly cloudy.'/g |
sed s/=cloud_mostly/'mostly cloudy.'/g

This should work at least until they changed their page structure. As far as I know weather.com does not have free web services. BUUT if they did, I could use Applescript's built in Soap request functionality! Anyway this will be fine for now. I'm also looking into creating scripts to log into web mail and retrieve my messages, and eventually tie that to some voice response system so I could call in on my cell and get my email. Thats a little far off for now, but will keep me busy. Besides I can't automate too much, I spend most of my day sitting around being lazy anyway.

the basket grows...

Over the past few years, I've noticed that the free time actually available to work on independent personal projects wasn't going to happen any time soon. With so much that I wanted to accomplish, but with so little time I started adding my ideas to the "rainy day basket". This more or less "boredom insurance" gives me some temporary satisfaction that ONE DAY i may have the resources available to complete such projects, but until then I can only add it and get the minimal satisfaction that one day I may be able to empty it all out.

zipping along...

The first day at the new job was pretty slow, but since then we've go the opportunity to work on some fairly interesting programs while learning some of the basics of servlets and server pages. Most of our main web application pages are gzipped on return to the client. Rather than zipping these HTTP responses on a per page basis, java web containers support filters to potentially alter any incoming request or responses to the web server. I found the concept fairly similar to Aspect Oriented Programming. Its a very quick and catch-all approach effective for logging, blocking content and other uses. We have playing with using the filters as an easy method for turning on and off compression. Much to my surprise, the exercise has turned out to be far more difficult than I had imagined. The problem centers on rerouting the response to a stand-in stream (to allow any other filters to complete their task) than routing that stream to a compressed GZIP stream. So far we've been able to successfuly compress html documents however as soon as we compress the documents the handle is lost to the response object and we can't make calls to the addHeader methods to adjust the content-encoding header to gzip.

oops!

dvdnull
Originally uploaded by quest313.

Does 1 of null mean I don't have to return this? Blockbuster would certainly have a hard time trying to prove I havn't returned a dvd that wasn't in existence.

modular mindset

’m afraid development ideas are now starting to flood into my outside life. On a grocery store excursion I recently had the choice of buying a small jar of “Chicken Fajita Seasoning” or purchasing each spice individually.  Let’s see I needed Cumin, Chili powder and Oregano at least. All three of those would be near ten dollars total, but the Fajita seasoning was less than five. As I reached for the mix, I began thinking about the other foods I might need to make in the future. Suddenly light the went on, I was saving money on buying the mix, but at the same time I’d still need all the raw spices for future dishes.  How nearsighted of me!  My determination for good design and “loosely coupled” ingredients won over my frugality.   “Chicken Fajita Seasoning” was suddenly a great analogy to hurried Software Development.  The time crunched developer purchases or creates the “Seasoning mix” because it is either cheaper or quicker to develop than the individual components.  Things are going well until he is forced to write a Chili program, now regretfully not having chili powder, he decides to buy a chili mix with all the spices.  Soon thereafter his boss tells him that customers are complaining the Chicken Fajitas have way too much Chili powder and this has to be fixed immediately.  The rushed developer now sees his poor judgement. There’s no way to modify his current Fajitas because his spices are all mixed together, he now has to buy the Cumin, Chili powder and Oregano separately anyway.  But that’s ok to he’ll go back and modify the whole program now as he is a consultant and gets paid per hour.

unplug me

While we spent the last decade, trying to get “plugged-in” and online, the future seems to be unplugged and wireless. In the United States we consider ourselves free people so why do we burden ourselves with wires? I’m definitely on the bandwagon as soon as I learned that wireless internet would cause very little loss in speed, I certainly pulled the plug. Now I want everything wireless!!!! It’s like pre 2000, I just accepted wires as part of my life, I even received pleasure in reconnecting all my PC cables as I moved dorm rooms. In the past year I’ve considering forking over the extra dollar for a wireless print server, wireless headphones, even a wireless midi controller. The fact that I’m always tripping over my xbox controller card angers me, and as soon as I can afford it I’ll buy wireless satellite speakers for my home entertainment system. Is there any room for wires in our future? How thin can we currently slice our EM Spectrum to make room for all these technologies? The next decade will certainly be interesting as many questions await.

Design Patterrns

Woohoo! My Design Patterns book finally got here, now I really can cringe as I read page after page of why my designs the past year have been so poor. Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates from Javaranch put togehter an "Everything You Need to Know" guide to the most common software design patterns. So far I am overly impressed with Kathy and Bert's approaches of explaining potentially dry material in a new and interesting way. I stil consider myself very new to the field of software development, and for architecture I am a mere infant, but I am easily excited when discovering general theories that can be applied to development. Thanks to Kathy and Bert I am building my "Shared Vocabulary" that I can use to communicate effectively in the field. Like a lot of other beginning programmer's I admit I believed an OO view of the world would solve all problems, but I didn't see the dangers and design traps until I began on larger more involved projects. These Design patterns really help to identify areas where a strictly OO solution is not necessarily the best decision and the less intuitive albeit better designs have been passed down and proven successful by many senior developer across a wide array of projects.

XML Madness

After 10 frustrating hours I'm still struggling to Convert base64 type response data to a binary image file for display. Everything has to work both in ASP and .NET Solutions, so we're trying to wrap our check image dll in a Web Service. We've opted to transport the data via a binary stream so there's no messy clean up of image files after an image is served. The real blocker is how to convert the base64 data to binary and write the binary content to a page. We've found base64 decoding functions in vb, however when we read in the textual data from the xml element, I believe newline and linefeed are being reformatted. oXMLHTTP.responseText appears to "preformat" the text which leads to problems while decoding with our function. oXMLHTTP.responseBody returns only the raw text, however the vb string functions don't seem compatible with the return type. Once again its a run around, and I spend more time guess and checking for solutions than making any real progress. Hopefully oXMLHTTP offers other methods that will return workable data. I plan to explore more tomorrow.

Genesis

VNV was every bit as satisfying as I hoped for. Nation however left a lot to be desired. We got to the club very early almost an hour before the opening duo Coder23. The main area was closed off until about a half hour before 9. As soon as the curtain opened we made our way towards the stage. They played normal club music as the bands finished setting up, and we didn't even notice we were right beside the main speaker until Coder opened. Coder23 is described as tech-house duo from Europe. Although I'm completely new to their music I found their show enjoyable and very remiscent of tracks on the Trance Station on DI. Both DJ's kept the beats steady on their powermac notebooks, while a large screen in front looped eerie computer animations which added to the feel of their sound.

It had to be 11 or after before VNV came on. Ronan, who I alway visualized as a very solemn and dark vocalist could not have been more the opposite. With energy he circled about the stage easily gaining control of the eager crowd. The mainly goth dressed audience responded echoing lyrics of the popular songs. Dancing was suprisingly to a minimum, most likely due to the lack of room near the stage. Mark played the "electro-drums" like a tribesman playing whack a mole. His long limbs stretched out to empasize beats as he stood towering in the center of the stage.

My biggest complaint was that the huge speaker we stood in front ( of course totally our fault, and I wouldn't do this again ) seemed to drown out the the melody on most tracks. The beats even over-powered Ronan's singing and songs that I usually knew all the words I got lost and could barely recognize. It sucks we missed Limelight the night before in New York. If I had known VNV was playing Limelight I would have definitely tried to make it. Dark Trance in a Gothic Cathedral would be a truely divine experience.

Over all I was glad we went. Somehow I manged to guide the car back to Harrisburg and get to sleep by 4am. I even convinced Carol to go to another concert in 2005 after release of the Matter and Form album.