Web-log improvements (Day: 53)
09/10/02 at 22:39 EST

I don't know what possessed me to do this, but I implemented the tag-line randomizer at the top of the page. The Banner as of yet is not randomizable; I need to make/acquire banners for other sites so there is something to intelligibly cycle through. Since that only took me a few minutes to do, I decided to implement COOKIES so that users can customize certain features of the site. Currently, you can enable/disable the banner, and you can set the size of the posts to thin (for mobiles, PSPs, etc) medium (the classic default) and Wide (which isn't really that wide. I may change that in the future,) for whatever suits your fancy.

Take note that if you set the post width to thin, all IMG tags in my posts will be disabled. Again, it's for your viewing pleasure ♥
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Time to celebrate, I guess
09/10/02 at 18:12 EST

As I mentioned before, it is being considered a miracle as of late whenever anything goes remotely according to plan. While it wasn't the most desired outcome, I will eventually have a place to live. My car's also ready to go so I'll be getting my plates and the car itself on Monday where I will happily drive it home and leave it parked in the driveway for a couple weeks. Between the second week of October and the first week of November things are going to be all over the place for me, so it's high time I spent all of my free time on the recently-released-in-English Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days for my dated DS.

I'm still not sure how to pronounce that title, so if anyone asks, I'll have to dub it "Kingdom Hearts DS", but it's been a couple years now since the release of Final Mix+, and it's nice to finally have another new Kingdom Hearts game to play. I won't even bother attempting to explain the infatuation I have with this series; suffice to say it is undeniably present and I do not wish to disturb the peace. Don't fix what isn't broken, as they say.

Though as was the case with The World Ends With You, (in my opinion the last great thing to come out of Square Enix,) when all is said and done with KH:DS I'll have to get a ROM dump of it and play around with the game's guts to see if I can't have some fun with it. The ROM, I mean. The game itself has been magnificent so far, making no compromises to its Playstation 2 counterparts, something Chain of Memories for the GBA had to do extensively. But I will leave it be, for now. I think Saix wants me to take Meatbag out for another stroll around town.
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Oh, sunnuvabitch
09/10/01 at 14:51 EST

I just realized that all of my months are one behind. This is 09/10/01 not 09/09/01.

I guess I can go fix it up. I'm not changing the comments, though. They're a reminder.
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What are your two cents?
09/10/01 at 00:22 EST

After providing some remote support on an e-friend's blog, I decided to start developing my own comments system so that users can make replies to these here posts. I came to a quick realization that without a database things will become bloated rather quickly. I'll eventually re-write it to use one anyway, but this is just something fun to do. Got the submissions working, need to add display support for comments (a matter of recycling code, more or less), a means of reaching the comments page, and general data sanitizing to prevent smart people from being stupid.

Hopefully I can get around to it within the next couple days, though things will be pretty hectic.
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I'm just making sure I squished that parse error"bug"
09/09/30 at 21:03 EST

And I'm killing 3 birds with one stone. Kind of.
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I don't encourage this, though
09/09/30 at 20:57 EST

Though it really wasn't necessary in my opinion, I've added a safeguard against brute-force password hacking. It's kind of a cheap hack, but it seems to do the job. Granted, if anyone does attempt to brute-force the site, I will be slightly inconvenienced, but at the same time this slight inconvenience is also a mild pat on the back for a job well done.

I could have sworn there was another reason I was writing this post...but I can't remember.

-awp

EDIT: Oh nifty, I found a cute little parse bug. Time to fix it.

Also, I should add an exception for NULL passwords. I do that a lot.
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Bear with me
09/09/30 at 18:52 EST

while I make a horrible pun in this post's subject title. Suffice to say I wasn't eaten by bears.

Far from it.

As I expected, I didn't even see any bears, so I was on the road for 1200km, moved some heavy (if you count 20 pounds as "heavy") boxes, cleaned up construction refuse, and trudged into a dump for essentially no reward (though I reached disc 2 in The Legend of Dragoon without needing any plugins or gamehacks to make the cross over, which was nice). It may be another year before I head back up in that direction, to boot. But it may be much, much less.

As luck would have it, news of the apartment rental I was pursuing and rather optimistic of came in as a harbinger and my application was denied. I imagine it was denied under false pretenses that cross a line of discrimination, but a lack of regulation does well to hinder my ability to throw the book around. So, it's back to square one for finding a place to live, however, that square one is moving closer and closer to the edge of the table and pretty soon, if nothing positive happens, I may actually be homeless for a spell. At least things are getting exciting around here, even if only for the worst.

So once more I've had to build another roster of apartment rental candidates. It would be nice to have something actually work out for a change, and it is a sad state of affairs when celebration is in order because something went according to plan, as if it were some great stroke of luck, some miracle of fortune bestowed upon me by a magical, merciful deity who happened to be in a good mood that day. Things are supposed to go according to plan. I don't know why things are so insistent on falling short of expectations lately, but I digress.

On the lighter side, it's nice to finally see some real recognition for To Each A Tempo! Turnabout Is Fair Play!, an osu! beatmap which I am proud to say I played a role in the creation of. This is the first time I've mentioned osu!, so I'll give a quick run-down of it: EBA/Ouendan for the PC. In more general terms, it's a community-driven freeware PC rhythm game with a commendable community. Back to the topic: it seems gonintendo, GameSetWatch, Kotaku, The Escapist and Court Records have all caught wind of this beautiful EBA / Phoenix Wright crossover tale. So while this news does absolutely nothing to fix my two pertinent issues of homelessness and unemployment, it at least makes an effort to warm my heart.

Speaking of heart, I've had a change of heart: I think next on my web-log engine to-do list would be to facilitate post editing in a more elegant manner than going directly into the server files and tinkering with them there. I don't expect it to take any longer than an hour, either.

Hmm. Actually, I feel like doing that now.

Testing the editor without backing up this file is done to demonstrate my confidence.

I buggered something up. Double-editing. I hope I don't make it even worse.

All right! Apart from the addition of a \n at the top of any post I try to edit (which I can swiftly remove) it works exactly as intended. Now, I wonder if I can remove that unwanted \n...

-awp
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After-hours Musings
09/09/28 at 12:26 EST

After writing last night's post I decided to finish off the night by watching some good ol' fashioned Zero Punctuation (humorous video-game critic reviews for the unfamiliar) when I came across a link to a gaming web show called "Game Damage". While the show itself is currently nothing more than a full-length pilot episode which, if I may say so, was reasonably entertaining, that got me reflecting on the nature of it all.

Gamer television.

Why is there a market for this? From my point of view (which is not the most absolute point of view, it is just the most logical one as far as we're concerned) while gamers essentially fall into the group of people who enjoy spending hours at a time in a static state, akin to those who watch television, the difference here is that while TV viewers are content remaining idle as the images and sounds pass before them, gamers are people who wish to interact with their images and sounds. Gamer television, as I see it, is targeting the demo-graph that was unsatisfied with a single, linear progression of images and sounds and sought to control things themselves. It seems foolish to me, however, the fact that this is a concept strong enough to develop a career around suggests that even gamers need "down-time" from all the gaming that they do (myself included, naturally, as this was the exact means in which I encountered the subject of this post in the first place). That leaves me with one question: what do TV enthusiasts consider down-time?

There was something else I was going to address today, but I can't recall what it was.

At any rate, I'll be on the road for another 1200km tomorrow, helping my old man move some more of his possessions from Old House to New House. Rather than simply slapping a PSX game onto my PSP the night before and hoping for the best, (curse you, Persona 2 Innocent Sin) I've outfitted my PSP with two tried-and-true functional PSX games: a childhood favourite, Legend of Dragoon and the RPG Resident Evil knockoff, Parasite Eve 2. So not only should the 12 hours on the road be entertaining enough, I have been promised some bear sightings this time around. As always, I'll have my camera, and if I see any of the grizzly beasts, you will too.

If you don't hear back from me by the end of this week, assume I got too close to the bears during a photo-op.

-awp

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The time has passed...
09/09/28 at 01:03 EST

There are only so many things I can do to keep my brain from growing stagnant during my temporary unemployment. I can use the term 'temporary' without commonplace arrogance; though the duration of the aforementioned unemployment escapes even the most clairvoyant, it's safe to suggest an upper bound on this time-frame which adds up to approximately however long it takes me to run out of money and starve to death. So it won't last forever, that much is for sure.

After a couple hours of some shady, underhanded PSXP gaming (I imagine I'll elaborate on this at some other point in time) I hit that now-routine stage of restlessness where I can feel my creativity, and with it, self-worth, slipping away, in need of some constructive, engaging activity. I opted to tackle the next couple milestones of this web-log engine (if you can call them that - their splendor is not that grandiose) and come up with a preliminary visual theme, trim the excess fat, and set everything up on the new subdomain. I'm also met with some disdain regarding Firefox's spell-checker. It seems "blog" is accepted terminology while its root, weblog, has yet to be coined in the catalog. Aw well, there's only so much worth complaining about.

Whether this serves as a general "to-do" reminder to myself or a list of things for an absent audience to look forward to: next up I'll be developing a randomized north banner advertisement consisting of random websites I enjoy perusing. Beyond that, I'll eventually need to tackle the seemingly-herculean task of assigning log posts categories of interest (a simple task) such that they may be cataloged and filtered through a simple search engine (this is what has me concerned).

I've already trodden through new territory in the last two days with astounding success, but I'm not one to push my luck too far. It may be on the back-burner for eternity, akin to more or less every other large-scale project I've undergone.

Oh! Before I forget. Testing out image tags in the post below reminded me to add another to that to-do list: automatically resizing linked images to fit within post borders. Though, on the other hand, that's something that can be handled entirely in the html tag itself, so it might not be necessary.

Well, it's high time I sneaked off to discard some excess baggage and call it a night.
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And then it was perfect...until more bugs were found
09/09/27 at 17:20 EST

So I think all the immediately apparent bugs have been worked out of the post submission engine to the point that it is now usable (I would never be so brash as to assume it was bug free; I for one happen to know that as of the year 2100 my tm_year formatting will become ugly) and all that remains is porting the rest of the code over to a new subdomain, which will require a bit of reformatting on my part. Nothing too serious. Also redesigning the background and look of the post image backgrounds.



After that, I will probably at some point rearrange the overall look and feel of it to be acceptable for smaller resolutions, given the rising popularity of Netbooks (or "Baby's First Laptop" as myself and some colleagues refer to them) and it would be selfish of me not to consider those of us browsing the web on the back of any deity that doesn't fit the description of an immolating vulpine.



All in good time. Oh, before I forget







test test



-awp
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