May Contain Nuts

I hate being sick. Worse though is when I’m mostly over being sick, but I get stuck with a lingering cough that expands into a cough and a headache, which then expands into a cough, headache, and severe eye strain, which makes it really hard to get any work done…

Also, I can definitely tell that Excedrin has caffeine in it; I’m about as jittery as I would be if I’d downed a couple of Mt. Dews right now… I’m not exactly sure what putting caffeine in pain relief medication is actually supposed to get you, but all it seems to be doing to me is making me twitch.

Quickly posting from work before I head home…

I’m looking into getting a media center station set up in our apartment, built around a 32″ LCD HDTV, a Mac Mini, and an Airport Extreme network (plus the requisite gaming console(s) arrayed around the bottom of the thing), and have a question or two for the readership at Myst Blogs:

I know the Mini doesn’t support HDMI or component out, unlike its little brother in media center-related crime, the AppleTV. As such, I’d need to hook the system up to the TV via a DVI-to-HDMI connection (there’s no DVI-in on the TV we’re looking at) in order to make it work. My question is: I know HDMI is designed to carry video and audio signals, so would I be able to properly hook up the Mini through HDMI and still get sound through a secondary input, or am I out of luck? I realize this may be something that’s fairly TV-specific, but having a starting point for interrogating the folks at Costco would be nice ;).

I wish I could set up an AppleTV, because it’s a bit less network-intensive, and would likely integrate well into any sort of rumored movie rental service from iTunes, but it’s just not quite what I need on the hardware side; I don’t want to have to buy a DVD player to put under the AppleTV, and a Mini comes with that plus a virtually identical version of Front Row and an Apple Remote, plus a decent hard drive for media mirroring and easier-to-implement support for extended codec playback utilities like Perian (I know you can install Perian on the AppleTV, it’s just a pain in the ass ;)).

Hopefully MacWorld won’t see the discontinuation of the Mini, or will see an AppleTV with a DVD player built-in (I’ll accept the techie solution to installing Perian if I could just have an optical drive!). If AppleTV gets exclusive access to any mystical rental service (which I doubt), I’ll be in an even deeper quandary, but for now, I just want to know if I can jack in a Mac Mini without losing audio or having to buy external speakers for my unit.

Anyone?

Much to my surprise and amazement, I’ve leapt onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon with considerable zeal this week. I updated my LinkedIn profile for the first time in probably a year or so, I joined Facebook (because the alternative seemed to be MySpace, which I refuse to be a part of in any way, shape, or form on matter of artistic principle :P), I signed up for the private beta of Mixx (aka “digg but with different letters and colors… and fewer assholes”) as a way to keep tabs on the world without having to resort to the far more inane CNN news feeds I was using before, and I bit the bullet and spent a fair amount of time organizing my bookmarks on del.icio.us (no link because none of my bookmarks are presently shared, so what’s the point?).

We’ll see how long this lasts… I’ve already had my Facebook profile for a week and have yet to add a picture of myself to it, and I just got into the Mixx beta today, so the novelty may soon wear off again, and I’ll be back to my old ways.

To go off on a ranty tangent, the only service I’ve started using that I think may end up annoying the crap out of me is del.icio.us (in part because I think the URL is ob.noxio.us [pity that URL is already taken by someone :P). The reason for this being that I am apparently one of the few people who actually likes using Safari on the Mac, and there is next to no delicious (I give up on the periods) integration for Safari, because there’s no really viable plugin architecture for the browser (InputManagers aside, which may be of limited longevity anyway). I’m someone who likes having their bookmarks stored in Safari, and I like the .Mac sync service enough to make use of it for the purpose of having access to my stuff at work and being able to save things for later review at home.

Now, ideally, I would like to be able to tag stuff in my Safari bookmarks the way I would tag things in delicious. Seeing as Safari’s bookmarks are nothing but a .plist file in ~/Library/Safari, one would think there exists somewhere on this series of tubes an application that is able to load this plist and generate a collection of data that tack onto each entry in a separate “database” maintained by the application, thus: Safari-integrated tags. However, such an app seems to be completely beyond the realm of possibility, instead making way for apps like delicious2safari and Socialist, which basically either maintain their own collection of bookmarks based on what you’ve added to delicious (Socialist), or simply append your delicious bookmarks to Safari’s .plist (and in its current state, delicious2safari doesn’t even maintain an active collection autonomously, you have to manually re-sync it every time you want your Safari .plist updated).

Obviously, the “simple” solution would be to just ditch Safari as my browser and use Firefox with the new (and very nice; I’m using it on Firefox at work) delicious add-on, but frankly, I hate Firefox in OS X. It’s bulky, it takes too long to launch, and it totally fails at managing to look like an OS X application. I could of course get all the benefits of the Gecko browser with none of the fat ugly UI elements by using Camino, but then I lose the add-ons, so what’s the benefit of using Camino over Safari then?

If anybody (chucker?) knows of a decent way to integrate Safari’s bookmarks with delicious (or hell, even just a way to tag Safari’s bookmarks, so I don’t have to use delicious), I’m definitely all ears.

The Inspiron arrived today, and with it, our game development studio is now complete.

It took a little bit of leg-work, and I was tempted on numerous occasions to just wipe Vista off of the machine and re-install Windows XP on it, but despite Oscy’s repeated efforts to convince me to do it, I’m still running Vista Home Premium on it. I was worried for a few minutes that I wouldn’t actually be able to accomplish what I was after without paying more money or back-grading to XP Pro, because Microsoft in its infinite wisdom decided to nerf the REmote Desktop client in Vista Home (bet you’d never hear someone complaining about an OS developer “nerf”ing anything, huh? ;)). Out of the box, you can request Remote Assistance sessions, and can start RDC to connect to another Vista or XP machine, but you can’t connect to a box running Home. For that you need Business or Ultimate. Which is stupid.

Apparently (and thankfully), I’m not the only person who thinks this is completely retarded, and within half an hour I had a version of the Remote Desktop dll that allows a machine to host an RDC session set up on the box. So I can now connect to the Vista box using RDC on the Mac. And I can run 3DS MAX 9 (in XP compatibility mode, or it crashes, but whatever) at a level of performance that somehow still manages to exceed the performance of MAX running directly on my aging laptop.

I can now effectively operate as a one-man game studio, though I will openly admit that Osc is better with the audio creation than I am, so I let her handle that while I deal with the modeling, texturing, assembly, and scripting. The duties are a tad lopsided, but whatever. This should make it a lot easier for me to get things built and dragged up to a fully-functional game, since I have an end-to-end solution without leaving my chair. No more dealing with my crash-prone, aging laptop, and no more having to steal Oscy’s computer when I want to actually get something accomplished in MAX. This makes me happy.

Now I just have to finish working on DPWR and get it the hell out the door so I can actually do some game development :P. I have a mountain of things I want to do to Labyrinth to make it better, and I have a few other things that I want to do as tech demos and environment tests for future projects, but it all has to wait until DPWR is done. DPWR has waited through enough other delays, and I’m tired of it hanging over my head as something that needs to be done. So: DPWR first, then the good times may roll.

For the first time in quite a while, I feel like I’m making real progress toward what I actually want to be doing for a living. That makes me very happy.

This is harder than I remember it being… of course, last time I literally just hacked a few queries together and didn’t do much at all in the way of actual database integration. This time around I’m going all out with new post markers and view counts and everything. Thus, it’s slower-going than I expected it to be.

That said, the Library is coming along nicely. The main index page is working, and the story list just needs a modification to only show the number of comments a story has received, excluding the number of story posts made (might include that separately). The trouble with that is that the information isn’t stored in the topic cache this way, so I’d need to query the database an unknown number of times to get all of the post IDs and their parents for each story, then loop through them for each topic and get final counts for story posts and comments. This may end up being more trouble than it’s worth, and I may as a result end up pulling the count altogether. Hopefully I can work something out, though.

The story page itself is also making headway. Creating a nested comment structure is hard, even when you’re only nesting one level deep. However, I finally banged out a rather insanely elegant solution that takes full advantage of the <foreach> construct in IPB’s HTML-logic parser. I’m rather proud of it, I must say. Now I just have to make sure the posts are parsing correctly, tidy up the actual presentation, and integrate the code to mark the story as read when viewing it, and I’ll be pretty much all set on the viewing front.

I plan on getting the view component of the Library wrapped up tomorrow, and getting the view component of the News wrapped up on Saturday. Posting, commenting, replying, editing, and moderating will have to wait until late Saturday and Sunday. That pushes getting the Golden KI automation done back into next week, hopefully no later than Tuesday. If I still have time before next Friday, I’d like to see how feasible it would be to get a search built in to the Library and News segments; we’ll have to see, though… it may not end up happening, just because search is a pain, and managing permissions within the forum the way I’ve got it hacked is a whole ‘nother can of worms.
Anyway, I’ll probably be doing a backup of the live database next Friday or Saturday, uploading it to the test server, and executing an update on it there to see where any kinks might crop up and fix them before deploying this thing live. We’re getting close!

For those who are waiting for the Archive on DPWR to actually become something useful again, here’s a large chunk of good news for you.

As of tonight, the upcoming Archive refresh will feature the following:

• Search - Finally, you don’t have to know the name and category of what you’re looking for before you can find it!
• Tags - Articles can have multiple tags applied to them, similar to WikiMedia’s Categories tool. This will replace the current category architecture in the Archive.
• Revisions - Editing the Archive will no longer be a volatile process. All changes are stored in the database, so if something gets defaced, it can be reverted without issue. (Note: this may not apply to attached images, I’m still looking into that)
• Templates - Like WikiMedia’s {{template}} tags, the Archive will now support (albeit in a slightly flaky manner due to the restrictions I’m dealing with) the ability to insert pre-existing bits of text into another article (i.e. the ability to add a “stub” template to an overly-brief article). It even allows you to define variables to replacement later (this is where it gets slightly flaky, but there’s little I can do to remedy this issue right now).
• Recent Updates - It’s not a completely-functional “view new entries/edits since last visit” feature, but it’ll show you the last 25 things done to the Archive, which is a start. I’ll likely be expanding on this in the future.
• Discussion Topics - Each new Archive entry will generate a topic in the forum for discussion. If you really want to know what was added since your last visit, viewing the new topics in this forum would be a good place to start.
• Tables of Contents - Like WikiMedia, the Archive will, if instructed, generate a table of contents from any [h="value"] tags located in the article.
• Pagination - Incredibly long articles (I’m looking at you, D’ni Timeline) can now be broken up across multiple pages.
• Functional Subscriptions - Subscribe to an article or an entire tag. The Archive will PM/Email you when something happens.
• RSS Feed - The Archive now features an RSS feed with the most recent edits to the Archive. Subscribe and stay up to date!

I’m incredibly thrilled about this upgrade. I’m finally bringing the Archive out of the rigid forum-based structure it has existed under since mid-2001 and applying more modern Wiki principles to it. Now I just have to finish the rest of the site… look for the all-new DPWR by the end of the month, provided IP.Gallery gets released in a timely manner.

As a number of you may know, DPWR is (still) undergoing a long-overdue and much-talked-about-by-me upgrade to the latest version of Invision Power Board and its ancillary components. Among the things being done is a complete overhaul of the Archive and a major upgrade to the Gallery. I’m hoping to automate the Golden KI and make it easier and less tedious to manage and participate. The Library may also see some extra love, but it depends on the time I have after upgrading the Archive – much as I’d love to see the Library flourish, the Archive is what most of the people on the site are there to see.

As you may also know, DPWR integrates the entire site into Invision Power Board’s member database and session tracking classes. I’ve maintained this level of integration between the forum and the site for several years now because I believe it is the best way to provide a consistent experience for the visitor and allows me to create a single site powered by a single database without having to re-invent the wheel too much. Unfortunately, this integration also comes at the price of not just being able to toss up the latest version of the forum whenever a release comes out. The upgrade from 2.0 to 2.1 would have completely destroyed the site integration bridge I had built (okay, “cobbled together” is perhaps a better term), and the delays in completing the new skin as well as the site integration back-end caused 2.1 to become 2.2, and I had to start over again. Finally, I managed to catch up with the release of 2.3, and DPWR is well on its way to being upgraded, hopefully by the end of the month. If not, then by mid-August at the latest. The new Archive component will likely be finished within a week or two, and IP.Gallery is moving toward Release Candidate by the end of this week, and those are the only remaining third-party updates I need to get. Everything else is up to me.

On that note, I decided to undertake the site integration bridge tonight while I waited for final releases of the other components. It’s still something of a hack – essentially I’m copying the forum’s index.php file and removing the parts I don’t need to create a site init file – but I’m being smarter about how I implement it this time. For 2.0, I very crudely hacked on the init file and started throwing code willy-nilly in a fashion that only vaguely resembled OOP standards. This time, I’m being clever about it.

Invision Board, for those who don’t know, includes additional files into its execution through index.php based on the task it needs to perform. With IPB 2.1 and later, these files inherit a base class called ipsclass, which contains all of the skin, session, language, and common control functions to do away with the old method of using global variables. I’ve emulated this behavior by creating each PHP file with a class identical to the name of the file itself (i.e. “index” for index.php, “library” for library.php), including the site init file, and then instantiate that class by stripping the file name out of the PHP_SELF variable. From there I can then pass the ipsclass class into the site’s files without resorting to old-fashioned global variables and messy non-OOP practices.

It’s a fairly simple thing, but I’m rather proud of myself for figuring it out in about 30 minutes.

I would also like to note that I never thought I would see the day when a 23″ widescreen display wasn’t big enough for me, but I’m rapidly approaching that point with the number of text files and browser windows I’m juggling trying to pull this whole mess together.

So Oscy is getting some long-overdue computer upgrades thanks to a fairly substantial surplus in our monthly budget. This is a good thing, because if I’m right, one of these upgrades (to an Athlon XP 2200 from an Athlon Thunderbird 1.4 GHz) will actually let her computer play nicely with PhysX and get us into Uru Live for the first time since December. We’ve also got another 512MB stick of RAM on the way for her, which will put the system up from 512 megs to a gig (name-brand 1GB PC2100 sticks are hard to come by and fairly pricey anywhere but eBay, which I honestly don’t trust for hardware).

We’re going to try and swing her a newer monitor next month… she’s had some bad luck with monitors in the past. Before she moved from Portland she had a somewhat fuzzy 15″ display (if that, it was tiny). When she was living with me in Kentucky she inherited my 19″ monstrosity that would only go as high as 1024×768 without getting blurry. When we moved to Spokane we left the monster behind, so she was jacking my Cinema Display for about a month before we tracked down a $20 hand-me-down from Craigslist. Unsurprisingly, it’s fuzzy as all hell too, even at 800×600 (she runs at 1024×768 anyway because it’s as low as you can go and still be able to do things these days :P).

So we’re looking at a decent little LCD display at Costco for about $180. It’s no Cinema Display, but it’ll last until she gets a laptop, and she can use it afterwards for desktop extension if she so chooses, so it’s still a good investment.

On the subject of money, though, we’re working hard to pay off what is pretty much exclusively my mountain of debt, educational and commercial. We should be able to get most of it paid off by the end of the year, which opens some doors for saving up for the future and also getting a few more pleasantries that we’ve been salivating over for a while now.

All in all, things seem to be going quite well for us at the moment, and I’m really happy about it. It’s nice when you strike out on your own and you manage to stand on your own two feet (well, four counting Oscy’s) rather than falling on your ass :P.

I debated actually posting this, for reasons that will doubtless become clear later, but I needed to get this off my chest, because it’s important.

I am no longer under the employ of American Multi Cinema, Inc.!

After 4 years, 4 months, and 7 days, I am finally free of AMC Theatres. I spent just over 4 years at the theater in Newport, KY, and transferred to the theater in Spokane, WA for the remainder of my employment, but as of Friday, March 16th 2007, I can kiss the dorky red/navy uniform and the depressing 4 year pin good-bye.

Today (or Monday, anyway) is, to use the cheesy over-sentimented saying, the first day of the rest of my life. Endings and beginnings indeed.

Please send congratulations privately; comments will be disabled on this post, despite the happy occasion, for the reasons previously noted as becoming clear later.

Has been installed in our apartment in Spokane.

(for those out of the loop on this joke, Oscelot and I finally have an internet connection… and Comcast has foolishly provided us with a switch on the router to turn the internet on and off (seriously, that’s what the button says, “Internet On/Off”…).

I am so tired… I just spent the last 7+ hours working on getting caught up on everything I’ve missed in almost two months of Library-only internet access, which sucks for things like comic reading, arts-watching, podcast-listening, and Battlestar-watching (I get it from iTunes, and I have withdraw SO BAD it’s not even funny…). It barely functions for things like Archiver management and keeping tabs on forums.

So I have 5 episodes of Battlestar Galactica to watch, plus about 15 hours of podcasts to catch up on between Filmspotting and Mac OS Ken (which is a daily Apple news ‘cast, but I’ve been offline, and so have missed the fun non-iPhone tidbits… plus, Ken Ray is just a blast to listen to most days. Plus I have 3 TCT ‘casts to at least peruse, plus ShortWave updates, plus I haven’t even looked at the Uru Live forums since January… I already spent about 6 hours with Oscelot playing the 2 episodes of Sam & Max that came out while we were offline (hooray GameTap!), plus another 5 hours cleaning up my watchlists on various art-related sites (and that’s still not done). Plus I spent 2 hours watching the MacWorld keynote, because I enjoy these sorts of things.

But now, it’s almost time for Oscy’s alarm clock to go off, so I’m going to head off to bed. More posts tomorrow when I finally drag myself awake again. Specifically, I have something I think Chucker may well be interested in… if only so he can re-write it to be more awesome ;).