Category: geek

36 Cube

So I’ve been geeking out over a puzzle that I got for Christmas this year. The puzzle is called 36 Cube. If you have this puzzle, and haven’t solved this cube, or would like to in the future, or have any other reservations about reading spoilers,

PLEASE STOP READING.

This is not a hints post, and I do not ease you into a solution slowly. This is a post about how I solved the puzzle and some interesting facts about the puzzle I found out afterwards when I began to dive deeper into the solution set. As well as the programming that went with it.

If you would like some proper hand-holding, please see How to solve the 36 Cube puzzle – hints & solution for hints (and samples of the program that got me started down my path).

AGAIN, IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS, PLEASE STOP READING!
Continue reading “36 Cube”

hacking iTunes paths

so unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that we’ve moved to Slovakia. during the move, I was unable and unwilling to pack my computer up to bring with us. it was just too large to be feasible. the next best thing was to backup my digital life onto an external hard drive–which chelsea so conveniently gave me for christmas–and bring that with us instead. one problem with this is that, as with every other time that I had to wipe my hard drive, I would be forced to re-import my entire iTunes library into iTunes, and if you’ve ever tried to import an iTunes library, it’s better than starting from scratch, but it sucks. playlists don’t sync properly, especially if they are based on other playlists. and the add date for all your songs becomes the same date, which I use in many of my playlists (recently added, etc.) but I think I found a solution to my problems…

Continue reading “hacking iTunes paths”

leap second added at end of 2008

for everybody who will be celebrating the coming new year, make sure you don’t start (or end) your new year’s countdown early.

the international earth rotation and reference systems service (IERS) has announced that a leap second will be added at the end of 2008, making 2008 one second longer than it should be.

so either start your countdown at 11, or end your countdown at -1, either way…

enjoy the extra long year!  (it has both a leap day, and a leap second)

thoughts on proprietary file formats

so we got a new camcorder for christmas (mrs. claus was nice enough to bring one by for us), and I broke it out, started using it, got it home, and tried to hook it up to the computer…  well, that failed with a cryptic error message, but no big deal, the memory card is easily removed, and the camcorder conveniently came with a USB card reader. so i plugged that in, attached it to the comp, and tried to open the files with my favorite in-a-hurry audio/video player, VLC…

nope. try again.

Continue reading “thoughts on proprietary file formats”

“i told you so” just doesn’t sound strong enough…

Microsoft Internet Explorer is about to ruin your day. Read the story for more info:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7784908.stm

Done reading?

Now, do yourself a favor and grab one of these:

Linking to specific moments in a YouTube video

A co-worker of mine pointed me towards this entry in a blog.

It talks about linking to a specific time in a YouTube video. I’ll repeat here in case you don’t want to link offsite.

Have you ever recieved links to videos that say something like “It gets really good around 1:47”, or something similar?

Now you can link to a specific moment in that video by putting the time as follows in your link: #t=1m47s

What this does, is when somebody goes to that link, it not only starts at the given time, but it doesn’t buffer all the stuff that comes before it, so you don’t have to wait for the part you’re interested in.

For instance, try the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP1-5uxZffE#t=5m45s (SFW)

That’s just awesome.

new browser

being a web developer, i try to keep up with what’s going on in the browser realm of the interwebs. today saw the release of the new Google browser: Chrome.  a new browser release is nothing new, but the fact that Google has, for quite some time, been the main ‘internet’ company, providing everything from search engine and page cache, to email, web documents, and calendar, all online, makes this browser release something to look at.

Continue reading “new browser”

site backups

Since my wife and I started using a blog again, I was thinking it would be cool to go back in my archives and grab the old posts I had on here years ago, and try to find a way to import them back into the blog.

So I started looking in my backups folder for a database dump that would have the blog posts in it, and I searched and searched, but could not find the most recent version of it. I have a coupe older ones, and some really old ones, but not any that were from right before I deleted the blogs.

I don’t know why I didn’t make a backup of them, or if I did, I don’t know why I didn’t keep it in a safe place, but I didn’t.

So I jumped on the wayback machine, and found one more post that I didn’t have in my backup. I imported the backup into my database at home, installed the version of WordPress I had when the posts were made (also via the wayback machine), and posted that last one that was missing. Then I installed the latest version of WordPress, made an export file, and imported them into this incarnation.

So now I have posts that go back about 5 years (albeit very sporadically), with the possibility of a few missing that are probably gone for good, unless I happen to find an old dump somewhere that I didn’t know about, but I doubt it…   oh well.

I’m off to make a backup of my site right now, and I’ll label it ‘Keep’, because obviously, the method I have now doesn’t work.

Maybe I should start putting my site backups in Subversion…

Anywho… enjoy the old posts.

webhost issues

my site went down about a week and a bit ago, so i tried to contact my hosting company and find out what was going on.
I went to the website, no notices there, went to the forum which has been removed, tried to submit a service ticket which i couldn’t do due to lack of a password for the system, and finally tried to call the 800 number which was blocked from my area code. all this took about 2-3 days, all of which saw no return of my website.

i finally found a regular number that i called and got in touch with an actual person and found out that 16 of the servers that this company owned got hacked and had all the data erased. no backups, no data, no nothing.

they finally got in touch with us (4 days later) and let us know what had happened.

i finally got a password for the support ticket system and submitted a support ticket for my website to be reinstated.
i must admit it was a very prompt reply, but the information they had given me was completely wrong, it was for another user and another site. I let them know they had messed up and they never replied. i told them again…   nothing. i finally wrote them a nasty little note and they promptly responded in kind.

i finally got my corrected information and got my site uploaded, but whenever i tried ta access it it would redirect to another website totally unrelated to my own.

it is still having issues, but my site is back up (thanks to backups i had made a week before the attack), my mail is finally working, but there are still some small issues with the site.

so…  long story short…   don’t host your site through webhostplus. their service sucks.

damn my a.d.d.

so i’m trying to make a php game (commanders) from scratch and it’s not going quite as fast or as easy as i’d hoped. there are a lot of little things that you have to plan for when coding an application from scratch, no matter what it is, that will bite you in the ass.

when i first got the idea for this game, i thought “i’ll get the game part of the script working and the rest will be easy”.  nope. first off, i have to get the game part working…  it’s not. not quite. secondly, i get distracted by other things WAY too easily. and thirdly, i really have no idea where i’m trying to take this.

i started off with an overly simplistic plan. not on purpose, but because i have no experience coding anything from scratch, after writing a preliminary few hundred lines of code, and trying to test that code, i began to realize that my storage methods (both within the database, and during code execution) were grossly underestimated. it took an almost complete rewrite of the existing methods and all the code that goes with it to get to a point where the game will actually progress the way that i want it to.

but now that i’ve got the game almost working, there are other issues that are creeping in that i wasn’t ready for. for instance, the game that i am creating is actually a port from a real life board game (Power).  the trouble with this is that issues that are trivially easy for a person to deal with are intricately difficult for a computer to deal with. i’ll spare you the details, sufice to say that my code is becoming much longer than i had planned. porting form a real board game also has the added benefit of having the rules already written, or at least most of them, but the ones that aren’t written are the ones giving me the troubles. what should i do if this situation happens?  what about this other situation?

another issue i have to deal with is myself. when i get in one of those moods, as i’m sure most of you have, where the juices just aren’t flowing, we’ll call it “coders block”, i turn to other items that may not be necessary to the project. i’ve also started another (albeit much smaller, simpler) game (battleship) from scratch which is progressing much faster and therefore holds my interest better. this is bad. even though the new project is nearing completion, i know that i am the type of person who will never think of anything as “completed”.

and on top of all this i am still working on webchess 2.0 (which finally had a beta release not too long ago).

so i now have three projects i’m actively working on, my job, and a freaking network+ test to take on monday.

and i have to spend more time with my wife, who is probably feeling pretty left out at the moment.

so here’s my time division:

  • my job (30%)
  • my projects (30%)
  • eating and sleeping (30%)
  • studying (10%)
  • my wife (110%)

if it weren’t for my a.d.d., i’d think i have a real problem.

(note: i’m not officially diagnosed with a.d.d., but most everybody i know would love some ritalin)