Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

First time in, oh, 4(?) years I've put up a new theme! Hacked on Sporty from Themespack.com to get something that looked good. I'll be tweaking more, but wanted something more bike oriented up. Let me know what you think!

(And those finding this on LiveJournal, come view it)

For a little while now I've been pondering changing this blog from its current focus of (theoretically) computers and some Arabic grammar over to something else. At one point I was pondering 2nd Amendment law discourse, but I think then it would take any fun I had from updating this away as I just get riled up. More recently I'd been thinking about changing it to be about motorcycles but figured 'eh, why?'

This past weekend has been a brutal reminder of the preciousness of life, from a memorial ride for a fallen police officer on Saturday (and finding out just how many memorial rides I could be going on) to putting my childhood kitty, and friend, to sleep last night. I'm resolved to start living life even more than I am, and to help others (naturally by throwing them on a bike and forcing them to enjoy themselves).

So where I typically would go out on the bike, enjoy a great evening, and have the events live in my head, I hope to start posting ride reports here. I'll flesh the rest out later when I can think more.

This is for you, girl

I heard about a peep diorama contest and figured I'd enter thinking that I haven't had an outlet for my creativity besides code since graduating. I spent all weekend pondering what to do, and finally hit upon a scene from Apocalypse Now, since the name would work oh so well. My submission was entitled "A-Peep-Calypse Now - I love the smell of mallow in the morning!" and was made entirely of edible materials (save, of course, the shoe box and guns the peeps have). I ended up taking third out of 16, and was the highest placed submission that didn't use work time/resources/a team to complete it.

Without further ado:

Read More »

I took the past week off work for a final Spring Break, since I graduated early. When the friends visiting me left a day early I decided to use Friday to catch up on my programming. My goal was to finally create a library for people wishing to create character sheets for Dungeon Runners (that popular MMO I've been playing about once a month). The result is DRCSL, the Dungeon Runners Character Sheet Library, which gives web site owners an easy way to create character sheets or just pull random character data quickly. I used the DRCSL this morning to create a quick MediaWiki extension that spits out a pre-formatted character sheet. Lets discuss:

DRCSL
DRCSL is a php library written using PHP 5 and PHP objects. At its core it is currently just one file, Character.php, that upon its creation fetches the character XML from NCSoft's servers, and stores all the data. Once the data is stored, the Character can spit out its information with just a few commands. What's required to use this library is a web server with PHP 5 on it, along with wget to fetch the XML. A default Linux PHP install works just fine, though if your host blocks exec() callouts you're out of luck. I'm on my first release, so the paths are hard coded for Linux delimiters which will be fixed in the future (of course, the Windows host will still need wget installed).

An example:


<?php
//Include this file to have it include everything ya need.
include "drcsl.php";
//Create a new Character
$billy = new Character("Segfault");
//Store the character's name
$name = $billy->get_char_info("Name");
//Store the character's title
$title = $billy->get_char_info("Title");
//Display some info
echo "$name is a $title\\n";
?>


This would print something to the effect of:
"Segfault is a Coordinated Practiced Poison Ranger"

MediaWiki Extension
The MWE became real easy after I created the DRCSL. Rather than include a ton of the code from my Character Viewer into the Extension, now all I had to do was include drcsl.php and come up with a default view. It looks something like this, by the way. In all it took about an hour from the time I woke up this morning and decided to finally create one to having a test version out for TheTownstons to test.

To use the MWE one just creates a page and includes the drcsl function.

{{ #drcsl: Segfault }}


Further Reading
More details on both of these projects can be found at the DRCSL website. I was going to write more but there's something bugging in my Code Highlighter plugin (hence why the code looks like non-highlighted junk) and I'm fighting the urge to go fix it.

I've got a Livejournal that I started about a year before this blog, roughly the month leading up to college. Jeez, and reading back on that stuff makes me think I've come pretty far, in a good way. Anyways I started that blog to encourage my friends to get through school, the idea behind it was "If I can make it through college, you can to." Here to say I've done it. My last finals are over, all I'm waiting for is to get my degree in the mail (eh, and a transcript might be nice). BA in Arabic as well as Computer Science. Graduate work done in Informatics, specifically security related fields, and random coding done for 3 professors who will use it in the future of course will not show up on the transcript, but that 'party time' I 'wasted' has prepared me for the world to come, I think.

In not so boastful news, I'm currently working (read: started coding tonight) on a game site that I think will be really fun. Its a little 'Snarky' twist on a great game dating back to the 17th century and after bouncing the idea off the good simud folks, I think more people than just myself will love it. Hoping to get it done (read: a presentable beta version) by Christmas.

Along the same lines, Three Planets Software is finally getting a site. I don't like the style yet, and am tweaking stuff still, but my professional side can be viewed over there.

Look out world, here I come!

I've been badly addicted to I Can Has Cheezburger for a while now. Like me, those pictures are cute and funny. Unlike those pictures, I know how to grab them all! I finally got fed up with having to click next, and decided "What the hey", I can get all the URLs for the direct images! So I cooked up a quick Perl script that spits out a text file, one line for each image. Of course, once you have the aforementioned file, wget becomes your best friend. I needed a quick script success, and this little tidbit has both provided that, and given me something to do for the rest of the wee--- erm, night.

Today be "Talk like a Pirate" day! I had hoped to be splittin some funny booty with me mates, but all my wit seems to have been boonswaggled (not a pirate word, but very very fun). Instead I'll say that I hope to post something up later this week (I don't want to wait a year! I'm impatient) and tell you about Puzzle Pirates.

First off, byt the time you read this, my WoW account is closed down. Seggers is no more amid tearful goodbyes and the giving out of thousands of gold worth of gems. To compensate until Tabula Rasa comes out, I picked up a month of Puzzle Pirates. I didn't expect that much out of the game, but its quite addicting and fun. I really like the concept of everything being a puzzle. For instance: Sword fights are a falling blocks type game (Think Tetris or, more accurately, Dr. Robotnik's Mean bean Machine), Rumbles (fist fights) are a Bust a Move type game, ship building is matching... the list goes on. What I like is that I don't really have to worry about gear or any of that crappy MMO stress. I can just log on, play some puzzles, and go plundering with 50 people on a ship. Its a good time.

Now I've lapsed out of Pirate Speak so, Yar I'm off to the bar! I'll scrounge up some mead, and plunder indeed!

Here's a quick (low-quality) video of the room I'm now living in. Please notice the large (80"x80") cubicle that takes up most of one corner.

It starts coming in my door, the breakfast nook is straight across. Next to that is my nightstand/bed, and finally the behemoth cube. Both Blade and MountainDon't are set up in full gear (dual monitors on each) along with a printer, switch and really nicely routed cables through the behemoth's cable trays. Beneath it you see a rolling cabinet that houses all my spare parts/cables (ok, it houses a lot of it, but no where near all) which is nicely tucked away. It stops just before it gets to my TV/bookshelf...

I apologize for the cruddy quality but a nice digital camera is so far down on my expense list I'd rather get a motorcycle before a nice camera (aka my phone is now my camera).

Anyways... here ya go!

So, I've spent the last 24 hours begging everyone I know to get into weewar and play me now, since I got that pro account. The new units, I've gotta say, are amazing. I finally got a game where I got enough credits coming in to splurge on the new units just to check them out and man was I impressed. They're strong, real strong. The Assault Artillery is fun. Drives fast to set up, and hits decently. The Berserker is slow but packs a HUGE punch. And the D.F.A... well... the D.F.A. made me laugh when I got a chance to use it. Here's a screenshot I just had to take. Talk about a target rich environment! And yes, not only does it have the range, but it'll get a 10 strength tank down to 5 in one shot. Cue evil laughter.

I'm sitting here on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, with sunlight streaming in my window, working on a few programs. For the past two hours I've been helping a buddy I met playing World of Warcraft set up a portfolio website for himself. Its been ages since I saw him online, but I helped him build a guild website way back in the day, so he came to me for help this time. I've got hims set up with a few nice Open Source packages, and within a few hours he's got the knowledge to build his own site.

So what? I just ended up marvelling at how quickly he and I formed a relationship, me helping him on a site, that led to me learning more stuff. He's an architect, and was passing me sites of "famous" guys in his field, and I just found it really cool that by taking two hours out of my day to help him I've now opened up a whole new world of information.

The same thing happened when I set up a site for a photographer friend from church. He and I really bonded on many levels making it, and he wasn't the type of person I really identify with. Honestly, with both of them it'd have been easier to not pursue that relationship, but I'm glad I have for the information its opened up.

Moral: Take the extra 30 minutes, help someone, and get to know 'em.