Our minds cannot repel logic of that magnitude!
Archive for January, 2009
Possibly Moving to a new Dedicated Server
Jan 26th
So I rarely like to ask people for money, let alone putting up a fundraiser on my website, but this time I’ve broken down. To make a long story short, I believe that I have expanded beyond the capabilities of my Virtual Private Server – let alone the fact that I’m not entirely satisfied with the performance of it. As a result, I’m pushing to move this website, the entire RicePaddy Network, as well as Vault Head Games’ (my company) many websites to a new entirely dedicated server – Gentoo-powered, of course! By doing this, I will be able to do significantly more with my hosting and I’ll be able to offer all the accomidations that I wanted the RicePaddy Network to give the public. Also, I am starting some development on a web browser-based, persistend, turn-based space strategy and conquest game. If we end up getting the funds required for a full quarter, I will switch to a dedicated server and the game, from Vault Head Games, will go public. So, without further delay – here are the details! For a full quarter of the dedicated server, the cost is approximately $149. The setup fees and fees for the additional IP addresses that I require are not included in this figure, and I plan on covering them. Here’s the deal – if I can get at least half of this figure donated, so approximately $75, I will cover the rest and we will go live with our first game! So, use the Chip-In module below, and help make the network better and bring forth a new browser-based strategy game! Also, as an added bonus, for everybody who donates – you will receive some classified perks in the game, one of which includes it being able to play the game with no advertisements (since it will be ad-sponsored)!
My Newest Obsessions – iMob Online and Mafia Live!
Jan 26th
Okay, so recently I have found two apps for my iPhone, one free and one paid (but I got it on sale for only 99 cents) that have completely stolen my time – iMob and Mafia Live! They are, as you would assume, persistent, online games all about, you guessed it: making a mafia (or mob if you’re not up with the lingo). If you haven’t checked these apps out, do so. If you’re able to get Mafia Live! on sale still, do so – even if you have to pay full price for it, it’s worth it. They’re both good games, very intriguing, and both very fun to play. While iMob is much more graphical and has much more eye-candy, it crashes a lot and is slow (and at times painfully slow). On the other hand, Mafia Live! is not as graphical and rather plain looking, but it has never crashed for me and although right out of the box it was a little slow, it is never slow enough to make me want to throw -my iPhone to the other end of the room.
So, if you heed my advice and check these two apps out – be sure to add me to your mob. On iMob my friend code is 126-318-276 and on Mafia Live! my family code is 308-700-565. See you in the game!
Newest Project – The Code Beautification Utility
Jan 24th
Okay, so most of you are going to laugh at me for how this story goes, but I have to tell it because it speaks worlds about what kind of person I am. So the other day I’m at work and I’m trying to debug some problems with a ColdFusion Flex component. The only problem is that this component is over 600 lines of code long and, due to the immense amount of changes, there was absolutely no formatting of the code at all. It was probably my worst excuse for code to date; tabs were non-existent, code wasn’t indented properly – if any at all. Needless to say, I was very irritated at this and needed to do something about it. So what do I do? I start fixing the code myself, line by line, properly indenting code.
That trek did not last very long. I got to around line 80, realized that it was a futile attempt, scratched it, and went to get my lunch. Now I’m the kind of person who likes to eat at my desk, and continue doing some sort of work. So here’s where I got the idea – I’ll write a utility during my lunch break to format code. Voila! The Code Beautification Utility, or CBU for short, was born.
In a mere 43 minutes (what I consider to be record-breaking time or damn close to) I wrote a simple, yet somewhat effective, code formatter using my weapon of choice – C# of course!. At the current point, it only understands ColdFusion files (cfc and cfm) and HTML files. However, it understands the languages based off of embedded XML files – so it’s language knowledge can be easily expanded. Now for all of you GUI fans out there, I have some bad news for you – it’s a command line program, sorry. However, a GUI can be easily written for it, and I will probably do so. The output from the program also is very simple – if you decide to let it recursively fix all files in a directory, it doesn’t give you any indication as to it’s progress. Not yet, at least. You can pass just a single file to it as well, if you’re only looking to fix one file as I was.
And so, in a nutshell, there is my newest project and utility which I will be slowly expanding upon in the upcoming weeks. Hopefully relatively soon it will be a fully functional and stable utility. Check the project out in my project repository here.
Lack of Updates brings forth Updates
Jan 13th
So it has been well over a month since my last post. Hard to believe time has gone by that quickly, but who’s counting? Anyways, I figured I’d make a new post to bring my readers up to speed as to what is going on. First off, I have a lot of programming posts to toss up as I have been accumulating a lot – the only thing is that I don’t have the time to post them. For those of you not already aware, we are closing on a house back in Lockport, and as a result I will be a bit predisposed until we close – which is scheduled for the end of February. After that, however, I should be freed up more and have more time to post since my drive to and from work will not be a 3-hour round-trip commute…it’ll be more like just over an hour round-trip. Big improvement.
