Felocity

You know it has been a boring week when your high point was bowling a 150, setting your record for your best score. Like when I set my previous record of 143, this came about game 4 or 5, when I could no longer feel my arm, resulting in a nice easy swing that let me concentrate instead on keeping my lead foot straight. My arm is going to be in so much pain tomorrow, but that's okay because I can say now on this Friday that I accomplished something. Incidentally, also related to the bowling, Jen turned a year older, so here's to 22. We managed to make a band at the Italian restaurant play for her, the bowling alley put on "Celebration" for her, and we made her wear a pink headband that had a crown/cap thing that read "Party Princess". By definition of college students, I'd deem the celebration a success.

I've been trying out a bunch of blogging clients, attempting to harness the power of Movable Type without the hassle of using the web interface. I've tried out two clients so far, and both certainly have features that make them appealing. The two clients I have tried so far are Zempt and W.Bloggar. Of the two, I like Zempt better, if only because it uses the EM and STRONG tags as opposed to the traditional I and B tags of HTML-old. However, W.Bloggar supports more than just Movable Type, which means once I get the XML-RPC interface working for Xoops, I can use that as well. The true test for W.Bloggar though will be if it calls an update for the blog and triggers a rebuild. Additionally, it will be interesting to see if the MT xml interface will do trackback pings. I was pleased to find out Zempt did these things. For the later two, only time will tell.…

I've been doing a few site revisions here and there, mostly housekeeping, and have been constantly fighting a never-ending battle against spam. I have been looking through the list of things people have done to get rid of spam, and have seen everything from the simple "hide a form element" method to the much more elaborate MT-Blacklist Plugin. I finally settle on an initial tool that doesn't require excessive editing (yet). I still feel the blacklist tool is by far the best, but I am not quite ready to go back and get SimpleComments and Threaded Comments working with the plugin. The Intermediate solution then (since blacklisting spam URLs isn't an option) is to employ some very fuzzy logic in the analysis of comments and pings. I'm actually a fan of the Bayes method, so I was excited to see an MT plugin for it. While I prefer a blacklist for speed, a Bayes routine can have a 99.98% success rate with 0 false positives. Suck on that spammers. And if you happen to use MT, pick up the plugin from James' web site. It doesn't take anything major to install, and it is rather effective in its filtering methods.

Incidentally, I wonder if LiveJournal has ever given thought to comment spam...…

It was inevitable that a piece of fanfic writing would irritate me, and it was just as likely I would respond to it in a semi-public forum. However, since this post was far too harsh for the FF ANBU, it ended up here instead.

Title: Omoide Culprit Author: Sazuran Summary: So rehashed Original Character plot it makes kittens cry Warnings: Laced with wit, licked with a sharp tongue What got it here: Flat diction, horrible PoV, bad tense issues, and an underdeveloped OC I don't actually run around in many fandoms, probably because I have an awful fear of being consumed by that which I can't stand. However, I was asked to drop my $0.02 into the FF ANBU, and so here it is. This is what I get for being a smartass around C.…

The toga party was good, although the environment strangely reminded me of the scene from Revenge of the Nerds. There was lots of booze, lots of drinking, and I somehow managed to avoid getting into a toga the entire night. I suppose that is an added perk to being bartender. There was only one casualty for the evening, and nobody was seriously hurt, but some are going to have some wicked headaches. Details are irrelevant, amusement was infinite, and crashing at the end of the night always slows the party down. By that point though, most everyone had left, which as a plus made it easier to clean. I'd like to think that having done all the dishes, wiped down the kitchen, cleaned the tables, ran the dishwasher, and organized the trash made for an easier time cleaning up today/ When I left, only one person was serious trashed, and so I was waiting on word all this morning to make sure they were okay.

Oh yeah, and my drinking. You know, I still have yet to get drunk. Although, I must say, I always seem to be constantly reminded of why I never drink enough to get drunk. I had 4 shots and a mixed drink, and I left it at that, and was done by about 10 or so. Also drank a good liter of water or so because I prefer to be sober most of the night. And that was the Toga party. The biggest highlight was H's pizza. At one point, Dev and I used it like a frisbee.…

Some projects are done, others are just beginning, and no matter how you look at it, I have too much idle time as a result of hitting stopping points on all my projects - points where I can't do any more until someone else approves X, Y, and Z. So I have idle time, knowing full well this time could be better spent on other things, but unable to spend the time in such a manner. The one project I finished today was the CSUMB Anime Club Online Store, something that I had been meaning to hook into cafepress for a long while, but hadn't had the chance. Now however, it is done, the store is up, and the two logos I spent over 150 hours on are posted and finished. It is nice to no longer have that project hanging over my head. Other than that, today absolutely fucking sucked. But, that's not why you read this.

A lot of people have winamp playlists for various things. I never really understood the how or why behind it, especially with a large mp3 collection. I mean, take for example, my One Piece collection. I have a lot of music from the series, and every now and again manage to get a bit more. I don't know how I would be able to find them in my collection of mp3s just to add them to the playlist. It seems rather tedious just for a category of music. Not that my solution is much better though, of adding based on folder and have the folders well organized. It probably takes just as long, if not longer. I do however, abuse Winamp 2's "J" key since I usually have most of my music loaded up at any one time.…

If my latest cam image isn't any indication I enjoy cooking, I don't know what is. I feel so domestic at times, and that is rather amusing. This probably does help to explain though why I was always such a bitch to Jake about the kitchen and dishes and things like that. Up north, my brother is cooking crabs fresh-caught from the sea. I told him to name them things like "skippy", "happy", and "junior", since it would make the cooking process not only more fun. At Solderini's suggestion, I also commented he could name them after people in the room, adding a social element to it all. I have yet to find out the results of this escapade. (Edit: Correction, the results are in and named crabs were dipped.) I am hoping since our spring breaks overlap perfectly, as in they don't, we will be able to hang out for a bit this semester. After all, we are only some 9 hours apart...

Much like the guidelines for HTML I wrote earlier, I am not going to claim to be an expert on this issue. In fact, these were written with the help and talent of people with monumental skill compared to myself. You would think though, that even the most innocent of fan-fiction would employ some common sense. Writing is supposed to be enjoyable and fun, I'll give you that. However, writing is much more fun, and much more enjoyable if you know other people are enjoying something you had fun making. Nobody wants to read garbage, and nobody wants to be told their stuff is garbage, no matter how close to the truth it is. So, think of this guide as a set of recommendations, especially if you are new to writing fanfiction. Finally, before we dip into this guide, just a few editor notes. There is not going to be anything about pairings being "better" or anything like that. If you can feasibly create a reason why, then you have a reason why. This guide will also not use any direct link examples, nor will it directly quote. The later of the two requires permission, something I felt would be overboard for a simple guide, the former not providing reference for the reader should the link break. Finally, comments are encouraged, as they help this guide grow. Contribute respectfully, and be aware as lord and tyrant of this blog, I don't mind deleting things. Right, ready? Let's begin. Your Fic Idea Sucks Yes, it sucks, and it sucks bad. In fact, if you are just starting on a fic, you may as well throw away your first idea because some 20-odd people have already done it. Good ideas take a lot of planning to make them work right. If you think you have a solid idea, be sure you have a clear idea why your fiction idea is as good as you believe it to be. If you don't know what makes your Gundam Wing High School AU fic a good idea, then perhaps the GW HS AU fic isn't such a hot notion. Additionally, you shouldn't do a fic just because you think "Hey, I can do this better". In fact, this is how an author builds a cesspool of dirty fics that nobody wants to read. If you genuinely think you can do an idea better, you need to know what about your idea actually makes the fic better. As a general rule, attempts to "do better" than someone else using their idea not only fail miserably, but look like an obvious attempt to borrow someone's idea. To save you some obvious steps in thinking, here are fic ideas that have been hashed over so many times, Domo-kun kills a kitten every time you use them:

• High School Alternate Universe: The characters from _________ (insert series/manga/etc) are in High School (teehee). Not only is this a bad idea, but I promise you, covering four years of high school in your fiction is going to be a boring read. Think about someone you know in High School and tell me with a straight face that you could chronicle all four of those years and made it a stellar entertaining read. If so, please tell me your school, I'd like to send my kids there so they would have stories for generations to come.…

While I type this, an old version of the Semagic client is auto-archiving anything that used to be on LiveJournal. The ability to run mass security processing is something so sorely missed on anything LJ. Locally, if I wanted to switch everything to "draft" I could do it with a quick SQL and not even give it a second thought. Incidentally it would also be faster too. So, if you happen to be a livejournal user (like I was), and use an RSS reader (like I do), then the next step shouldn't be tough: grab yourself a heap of XML and be on your way. If you are new to the whole XML thing, I strongly reccomend SharpReader, which is not only free, but is faster than many you pay for, has systray notification, and OPML importing. (Learning OPML is as simple as copying someone else's with your xml lines instead -Ed) Through all this, there remains only one issue. Livejournal, a password / cookie service, does not have any way to authenticate for RSS feeds. This means I am still looking in LiveJournal for protected entries. Unfortunately this also means that those of you with friends-only journals are now in a special group, which is what I filter and check once per day or blinky icon, whichever comes first. However, it would be nice for their syndication to work like on every other web site out there. In the meantime, I have Semagic watching the friends group. It isn't an idea solution, but I doubt authentication and rss are high on their lists of things to do (whereas things like content filtering for kids makes more sense). Lastly on the vein of weblogs and content ratings, is there an effective way to mark content for the weblog? I have seen a few ways, including a definition in a meta tag, but have yet to find anything extremely effective. Not that my content is normally ofensive, but the best for of regulation is self-regulation.

I've made a few site-wide changes, the biggest being threaded comments, and the second biggest being a fully functional RSS feed and as-close-toxhtml-as-I-care-to-get-it code. I wouldn't object to making the entire site XHTML, except that content management systems always have little quirks that make unconditional compliance a hard thing. That and some habits are just too hard to break. For example, I will never get used to changing all & to & in all my links, and since it never copies that way, you would have a difficult time convincing the average user to do it as well. Anyway, that's that on the site news.…

Today's Drink: Paradise Splash 6oz Sour Apple Puckers 1.5oz Orange Bacardi .5oz Malibu Coconut Rum Serve in Highball over ice. If too strong, thin with clear soda to taste

I am only reminded of how artistic I am not when I have a desire to do something artistic. Tablets for me are about as effective as trying to write cursive with a barbell, and Photoshop scares the living bejeezus out of me. For that reason, I use Adobe Illustrator for cell style shading and coloring. I "get" vectors and the idea of how curves can make shapes and how to manipulate the points to create something. This however, is not enough to cover for my lack of graphical ability, as I prefer to think of shading as something you do to avoid the sun and can't even make a stick figure look decent. As a result, doing graphical things is always a massive time consuming project I have to do. I've sunk almost 60 70 hours into the image now, and am as done with it as I think I can be, short of pushing my mouse squarely through the monitor. It's not that there isn't room for improvement, it's that any more improvement outweighs the investment in time I will have to make. After all, these need to be good to go in a week's time. When all that is up and running I will no doubt be plugging it here.…

It is interesting to see over the years how Blog Software has developed. Back in the days where CMS was a new thing, nuke was a "cool idea", and the word "blog" wasn't even around, the idea of Internet published diaries existed courtesy of news software. Since then, personal news postings have evolved to a new level, where discussions take place in addition to the day to day ramblings. And Blogging software has evolved as well, diving neatly into two little camps: hosted, and provided. For the sake of discussion, we will define hosted as services such as LiveJournal, and OpenDiary, whereas provided software refers to things such as Blogger, MovableType, B2 (and evolution), and Greymatter. The biggest undisputed difference between the two methods is their community. The exposure a blog gets on livejournal is often times much much wider than a personal blog on the Internet would normally get. This is immediately apparent through the rapid spreading of memes and quizzes through a livejournal community. On provided software, you rarely see the posting of memes and snippets from quizzilla, but instead see more technology oriented discussion, most likely a result of a more tech-savvy audience. And so where is this all leading? Well, you can't do something like this for free on the Internet forever, and it was only a matter of time before Blog hosters and providers alike needed to find a way to keep their software and ideas aloft. How they have chosen to do it is perhaps what may eventually make or break the blogging community.

LiveJournal has been around forever, and probably will continue to be around forever more. They have opened their registration up, meaning there is no more invite codes, no more limits to the number of users, and no limit to the number of usernames that are going to be taken by the time you read this. In order to recoup the costs associated with servers, the LJ staff has opted to provide free accounts the option to pay money. With the payment of more money, users get all of 3 things. More pictures, more customization, and the ability to read RSS feeds. For those that have been missing the accelerating demand for RSS, these small files of content make it possible to read things with very little load time. This makes RSS ideal for syndication. The most important thing in LiveJournal though from the average user's perspective is the ability to customize. If you have a web site and you want to include your journal, the easiest (and most accurate) answer is "tough shit, pay up". There is no easy way to work with templates, the style system is impossible for most people to deal with, and in the end, nobody takes advantage of the features they just paid for. Expect LiveJournal to be around for some time, although their source of revenue will never be people who are serious about blogging, but more about people who want the post icons, the easy commenting, and a fast way to check up on all their friends.…

It's nice to be back after having been in Southern CA for the past few days, although if I miss one thing, it is most certainly the warm weather. The trip was awesome (photos here) and a lot of fun. Some of the best moments were the Parade of the Stars, the classic rides, and the usual antics accompanying sticking any group of college students into a theme park. We also did California Adventure, which while an awesome park with a few cool rides would never consume an entire day. We were very happy with the hopper since it let us jump back to Disneyland when we were done. Tessa kicked copious amounts of butt in Who Wants to be a Millionaire (Play It), and almost got into the hotseat, losing only by a few hundredths of a second. It kind of sucked that space mountain and big thunder were closed (as well as Haunted Mansion) so I will have to go back another time, even if just for those few rides.

We got back late last night, and I got back to my room, checked email, and then slept. Now it's time to pick up the Senior Project, make some emails, and otherwise get back to work. Though, that isn't to say I intend to stop having fun on this break. On the drive home, we stopped by Chris' place in San Luis and hung out for a bit, catching dinner at a rice bowl place. I need to get back down there to take him up on cheap Mexican food and video games. This evening a few of us are heading up to San Jose, although I am glad that this time, I'm not driving. That would just be too much behind the wheel for me.…

2 hours. moved functions from index.php into their own files. this should help with testing. Need to email Rosalie Strong tomorrow about paper testing for interface.

index.php (summary) complete, untested myprojects.php complete, untested mymanaged.php not written allprojects.php not written…

4 hours rewrote the SQL for index.php to something much simpiler. I was originally working towards "grab all the info, just in case" but instead rewrote it to grab exactly what was needed. Also, in doing this, it was possible to do it all via SQL instead of using a unique PHP function. I will need to apply this to the other two display functions on index.php I am going to seperate the index.php and view_all routines. I would like for index.php to just be a intro / overview, whereas to view all of a given type of project would be better on its own page. Plus, in doing this, it would be even easier to recycle code.

Additional pages and progress: each display mode is going to need an admin option (or 4) view project page will need to have manager and admin functions important distinction: admin != manager, though an admin could add themselves as a manager can users create projects? needs to be an option. if so, users become managers of their project managers can add managers, and managers can add users managers can remove managers, but not the manager who created the project users can view public projects, but only managers can add…

For those that knew I went to MacWorld, it was a good time, although for being in the heart of San Francisco, it sure was small. There was nothing better than watching Steve Jobs pat himself on the back though; priceless moment indeed. For those that didn't know I went to MacWorld, I got a free pass via my tutoring job, and embarked on a BART trip from Fremont to SF in the name of education. Of course, it didn't have to be education, Kryn put under his job title "dictator for life". Clearly they weren't as serious about this as they could have been. Anyway, I got to play with lots of cool toys I could never afford, lug about 15 pounds of Macintosh magazines around all day, pretend to be someone important when talking with companies, and did I mention playing with the toys I could never afford? My personal favorite was the Dual G5 Server. It was shiny and powerful, and ... shiny! This was a mac convention, so everything is shiny, but the glint of silver off of the custom embossed "G5" logo on the heat-sync was simply too amazing. I had to play with it. To my surprised, they actually let me pull out the drives, play on the server admin, detach the processor (of one that was off), and otherwise look at the guts of the beast. I'd have to say that was pretty damn cool.

Outside of that, I have bee abusing my body in terms of an inverted sleep schedule. I seem to have opted for the nocturnal life, staying up until 5 am and sleeping until 3 pm. Of course, this also results in one square meal, sometimes a square nothing, per day. On the plus side, I have gotten a lot of work done for both Kaizoku-Fansubs, for Dotsumi, and for my capstone. On the down side, I think I haven't left the house in a while.…

I should be sleeping, since it is coming up on 4 am and I am supposed to be moving (and driving) by about 6:30. But I can't sleep. It is too cold to sleep. The last thermometer I looked at reported a rosy 52 in the house, and a nice warm 40 outside. I also left my good warm wolf blanket back in Sacramento. I'm using my computer for warmth, my chair to help me stay curled up, and typing to keep feeling in my fingers.

I have a feeling MacWorld is going to be a long day.…

sidetracked with a module. used for practice, and to get more familiar with xoops module architecture total time spent: 6 hours (including spit shine). Not too bad, but found some rough spots in documentation making effective blocks was very hard, especially since the single best reference was hsalazar's how to hack a block.

Difficulty? Options for the block. They are not handled by config options, but instead part of the BLOCKS array in the $modversion array. Additionally, they are pipe-delimited, and seperated into an array before being passed to the module function. Language settings will use MB and are located in blocks.php, not modinfo.php. If your module consists primarily of blocks, then 99% of your language things will be in the blocks.php file. In conclusion, the blocks subdirectory functions VERY independently of the main module directory.…

The Internet is becoming littered. Not only is there garbage everywhere you turn when it comes to content, but now bad web design is slowly working its way more and more into the mainstream Internet world. Gone seem to be the days of hand coding, further gone are the basics of design, let alone design for the web. These are troubled times, where idiots are being paid money to pull a site out of their ass (or from another "cool site" on the Internet) and implement it, not even knowing what they are doing. I don't speak with mounds of experience, but I do speak with a limited degree of confidence that there are designs out there that look like crap. So, this post is designed with you, the moron who thinks embedded MIDI files are hip, in mind. This was originally going to be a simple Do / Do-Not list, but instead, I thought it best to provide some basic ideas of how to actually create a page for the Internet. If you were referred here by someone, don't take offense, a quick look through some of my oldest mistakes found me making many of the same errors I will be talking about. So, without further delay, let's begin. The idea called CRAP CRAP isn't what a design looks like, but instead refers to what a design contains. Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity all relate to the overall look and feel of a designed object. While important, these basic concepts are often overlooked. Don't put dark blue text on black, even if you like the color dark blue. Don't even do it if you like the color black. If you want people to read your site, there needs to be a strong enough difference in the text and background that it becomes easy to read. If this concept is too difficult, it can be simplified down to pastels and jewel colors on black, darks and rich colors on white. The second of the elements, Repetition, means more than just using the same animated GIF in seven-houjillion different places. If you have a color, a shape, or an object, use it more than once. Be consistent in your design, and it will make all pages in your web site feel like they are part of the same site. Your title belongs in the same place every time, and your formatting shouldn't be changing either. Fonts should be 1-3 in number, and should be repeated where they accent the layout. For a good example of repetition (plus color), visit Post-Nuke's web site. The use of icons and shapes make every page feel like part of the larger layout.

The third element is called Alignment, and it doesn't mean you should center align everything on your page. Instead, it means make sure your edges line up along some plane of existence. To hilight this element, look at a few of the designs on the CSS Zen Garden. While you need not strive for using something as fancy as cascading style sheets in your layout, instead take note of how the elements of the page line up and feel complete. There is a path for the user to follow, and it is very clear where each piece of the page is. If you can't explain why something is center or right aligned, maybe it shouldn't be.…