Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

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:

A close up of the front flap, including the Peep in fatigues (green food coloring I painted on).

Side View (note the napalm ‘bomb’ incoming just left of center):

Title:

Top view. This provides the best view of the action so I’ll elaborate here. On the right is Captain ‘Peepard’ storming up the beach with Lance and Chef. In the muddy (Peanut Butter) river, you see a surfer cruising by. On the left is Colonel Kurtz’s base, which has been hit (in the center) by one napalm bomb already. A second is incoming, and yes I was singing the Flight of the Valkyries as I made this. Of course, if you’ve seen Apocalypse Now, you know that they didn’t storm the base like this, instead they were captured, and the surfing was a completely different part of the movie. But hey, they also weren’t peeps!

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.

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 [...]

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 splurg 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.

Two nights ago I posted a picture, and a challenge to guess what the heck happened. Didn’t get that many responses, though the best was: “While undercover you smoked up and your backup came to arrest you by accident…” from my loving brother. Thanks for the support. Harkins was right close with his: “I’d bet you got in an awful lot of trouble for making your car look like police car.” Whoops, I meant: “Oh, it’s the other one? Got me then. Skidded through some ice and onto someone’s lawn?”

Leave a comment with what you think happened. Best/finniest story will be featured here. And yes, that is my car.