Soo, a year since I last posted anything, so I guess it’s about time I did something a little more constructive with this space than leaving it sitting here gathering comment spam.
Everything’s happily upgraded to the latest Wordpress version, complete with reCAPTCHA spam protection.
I’ll begin updating things more frequently now, starting with some continuing development of my most recent project, Out of Eve.
Sup.
Since there are certain people about how hosting a website on unreliable home ADSL is a generally bad idea, I’ve decided to move it to a more stable, permanent home on my little Linode.
Also, since my last post, a number of things have happened in my life in general. Firstly, I bought a really leet car. A brand spanking new Honda Civic hatch. It’s probably the single most awesome thing I’ve ever owned, and I love it to death :D.
Shortly after that, mother and I decided to club in together and buy a town house. We’ve only ever rented places before, so the whole buying thing was a bit new, but it pretty much sorts itself out after 3459094 different companies and institutions shove 459345 different documents in front of you to sign.
The place is in a nice small complex in a quiet corner of Ruimsig, on the very western edges of Roodepoort. Very nice little house, nice big garden (sometimes it’s very relaxing to feel real grass under bare feet :)).
Anyway, work’s been keeping me pretty busy, so I haven’t had a lot of quality time with either of the above new things… Really need to take some leave I think…
I’m only posting now, since I finally managed to drag myself away for long enough to actually do some useful stuff for a change.
I could probably rave on for hours about how awesome the thing is, but then, you’ve probably read a million other reviews already.
Launch day I was up with the sparrows, off to my local Look & Listen to pick up my pre-order, only to realize they open an hour later than I had arrived :D. An eternity later (AKA one hour), I was in as the door opened, at the counter collecting my stuff (and the casheer labled “Trainee” ended up instructing the manager on how to do the sale, since the pre-order deposit had to be taken into account). I was rather disapointed with their limited game selection, they had no Tomb Raider: Legend, Dead or Alive 4, or Project Gotham Racing 3 - despite DOA and PGR being the main selling points aparrently, with huge posters everywhere.
Went over to Incredible Connection who have a branch in the same centre, to be greeted with lovely PGR stands and banners everywhere, yet no actual PGR or DOA stock, and the usual assortment of lame staff who looked shocked to discover that there was in fact this gigantic X’360 stand/area in the middle of the shop.
Anyway, off to Makro next, who luckily had loads of stock of DOA and PGR, and were a bit cheaper than the prices on Look & Listen’s website.
Oh, I forgot to mention just how heavy the darn thing is. Lugging it around the shopping centre was no walk in the park, and my weakling arms were actually quite painful afterward.
Anyway, between then, usual working hours, and now, I’ve been playing, learning, discovering, etc. It was a bit of a schlepp to get hooked up to Live, as it’s not actually supported in SA yet, and since they seemingly don’t allow you to change your country after sign-up, it’s a bit of a mission to set up a profile that is usable. I ended up creating a UK-based Passport and Live account.
On the subject of Live, Sony is going to have to pull off something really amazing to beat Microsoft’s setup, it’s really quite alltogether cool (except that, because of Telkom I’m willing to bet, every now and then when communicating with Live, adding friends, unlocking acheivements, etc., the machine hangs completely and needs to be reset - probably why Live is not officially supported here yet).
And I [b]seriously[/b] need a better spam filtering setup. SpamBayes catches only around 50% of my spam, regardless of how much more I train it, if anything it’s getting less effective over time. Currently looking at Bogofilter.
Anyway, I’m off to see how DOA4 multiplayer works 
Indeed. I discovered the only thing I didn’t like about this site’s design was the page header image.
So it’s gone, and a leet one is in it’s place. Yay.
Hmmmmm, long time no update. That’s not to say I haven’t been busy recently.
Last month, we released “UnWheel R5“, which seems to have become the (hopefully) final release. I’m pretty happy with it at the moment, all the major bugs are gone, multiplayer is working wonderfully and the online record system is churning records around at a mean rate (and those records still need a monthly rotation system applied, so still some work to be done there). I still haven’t decided if I want to do this all again in Unreal Torunament 2007 or not :).
Elsewhere, I’ve been playing around with DynaBar, and it’s grown a lot. The plugin system has been tweaked to allow better customisation options from the developer side, as well as having options added to improve the user interaction side of things. There are a whole crapload of other options available as well, multiple layers (supporting PNG graphics with alpha transparency), different scanline styles, text prefixes and suffixes, better caching options, etc. In addition, you can choose to have the bakcground be a gradient blending between any two colours, horizontal or vertical, and you can create “groups”, which is a bunch of userbars animated (with fading/blending between bars), and they all remain fully dynamic. Speaking of dynamic, I’ve also added a whole load of plugins, from XFire, to more Last.FM options, to Battlefield 2 and TrackMania, and even RSS headlines and live game server status via Qstat.
I’ve put up a test system here as a sort of sandbox, so feel free to try out all the options and plugins, and if you have any suggestions or ideas for plugins, please let me know. In addition to the designer, there’s a browser available, which lets you easily build the animated groups mentioned above. Also, it all works with Internet Explorer now, which I didn’t bother fixing with the previous version (wasn’t meant to be such a “big” project :)). Source code package will be available as soon as some more testing is done.
In addition, I’ve been re-writing my online Dosage-powered comic viewer - Injector - again, this time it’s going fully “Web 2.0″ (ZOMG!), so everything’s quite nice and quick. This project still needs a bit of work on the administration and installation side of things before it can see a release.
Aside from all that, I’ve also been slowly building a new UnrealZA site, using the Python-powered Django framework. It really is a wonderful thing. Please excuse me for a minute while I run away from a horde of crazy, twisted, Nevow fans (among others). Anyway, I’ll happily recomment Django any day of the week to anyone looking for a Python web framework.
I’ve also decided I don’t like the look of this site anymore, so I guess that’s another thing to go on my to-do list for the near future.
Technorati Tags: UnWheel, userbars, dynabar, python, dosage, django
Seems just about everything on my server machine has been running perfectly since I upgraded to PHP5, except this site :(.
So for the time being, the attachments plugin is disabled (the cause of the problem), so no downloads are available until I fixxor it.
Edit:
Well, that took all of 5 minutes to fix 
Well, only one for now.
Sadly, I no longer need my laptop for work, as I have been provided with a proper desktop machine (this may be a good thing, since I can now boot Debian permanently, as I’ll no longer need to use Delphi on it). Anyway, I kind of liked having my work stuff and private stuff portable with me. So, I got something a little more portable, which I can both work (well, do basic documents, do all my emailing, track to-do’s, contacts, etc), and personal (fill it with random fun stuff) stuff on.
Enter, the iPAQ hx2750 :D. Complete with wireless LAN, so I can connect to networks at home, work, and the occasional Mug and Bean, Bluetooth for sending files between the handheld and laptop, and sending photos to to from the phone (I can even dial contacts on the iPAQ via bluetooth on the phone :P, and of course use it as a dial-up modem when a network is not available), SD slot for extra storage, and another way to transfer files between laptop and handheld, and a bunch of other leet stuff it can do.
I’ve also got PocketPuTTY up and running, so when I feel the urge I can pop onto whatever boxen I need, Python CE has already been helpful, as it enabled me to write a small .tar file extraction script for some other files I wanted. Even though I’m still first and foremost an Unreal fanboy, I couldn’t resist installing Pocket Quake. Pocket RAR and Adobe Reader have also come in rather handy.
Pocket Word is quite reasonable, and maintains document’s original formatting quite nicely. Pocket Outlook works very well for receiving, reading, and sending emails, and if ever offered the option of Outlook or Pocket Outlook, I’d have to choose the pocket version :P. It handels POP and IMAP mail eaqually well, and even does IMAPS without complication.
All-in-all, I’m rather impressed, and I find myself using it rather regularly throughout the day, especially for keeping track of projects and things at work, which was partly the main idea anyway.
Update: DynaBar 2 is available, the download link below is out of date.
Finally got around to making a proper release of something :).
Presenting DynaBar, a PHP script which can create dynamic images through the use of plugins, inspired by the Userbars.com website.
I thought it would be cool to be able to have userbars with dynamic data in them, stuff like game server status, stats, etc., etc. to make them a little more exciting. I also wanted to learn a bit more about PHP’s image manipulation, so this proved a good oppertunity for that.
Basically, the whole thing works off a plugin system, which lets you drop in a PHP script (the plugin), set up a config file (the userbar), and link to an image. DynaBar then goes about loading the plugin, requesting it’s data (so it goes off and collects stats, or whatever), and building the final image (putting on the [optional] scanline effect, glossy shine, and layering the text data from the plugin on all of that).
I’ve also created a small designer script, which allows you or any users to create new userbars using plugins or whatever, with their own images and content, in a simple wizard-like interface. The end result is ready-to-use forum or HTML code. :).
Here are some examples, using plugins included in the package:
Simple, plain text (nothing dynamic about it).
This one queries LastFM for which song I’ve played most recently in my media player.
Finally, here we have Battlefield 2 stats, coming from BF2Tracker’s clan XML feed.
Grab the download from the bottom of this post. Please read the README in the doc/ directory.
Technorati Tags: Userbars, PHP, Images, Signatures, GD2
dynabar.zip 72K
w00t
Finally, got my internet connection back. Turns most of the houses in the townhouse complex we moved into don’t actually have phone lines installed. It’s taken more than 2 weeks of begging and whining at the complex managers to get something done. They finally arrived yesterday (Thursday) with a Telkom tech guy and installed it in around 10 minutes.
Today a not-too-bright Telkom dude pitched up and installed the ADSL. Aparrently we should be glad it works at all, since we’re far from the exchange. I guess all that matters is that it actually works in the end :).
The drive up was pretty uneventful, even though it did take 12 hours, around 3-4 more than it should have. I blame retarded truck drivers for that. I must say the scenery around the Eastern Cape is a lot nicer than the barren wastelands between there and Johannesburg. I’ll miss it. The weather here is so dry and hot :(, I’ll miss the humidity too.
Aside from the lack of a phone line (although fixed now), the new place is pretty nice, secure and stuff, 2Kms from work, nice views (guess I’ll post some nice pics I took the other day soon). You’re not allowed to hammer anything into the walls or anything here, or drill any holes, etc, etc, so I’m looking into getting as many PCs on 108mbps wireless LAN. Dodging masses of network cables around the passages between rooms isn’t too hot :).
Work’s just work, but it’s nice not having to fix people’s emails and printers every five minutes, I’m just left alone to write code and stuff. I’m strangely looking forward to work every day much more than I used to in East London, although I’m basically doing the same job (except the lame fixing stuff). Maybe it’s the free and easy access to the coffee machine. Unfortunately the interweb has been owned by a rather nasty proxy/firewall setup that seems to block completely random stuff, even development resources like parts of SourceForge (like most search results) and large parts of the online PHP manual. UnrealZA also works fine, until you try to view a thread… Pretty strange :/.
Guess I should stop babbling and go catch up on some Battlefield 2 :D.
Technorati Tags: Johannesburg, Moving, Telkom
So Korpse pointed out a rather interesting website the other night - Pandora.
Basically, it’s a rather nice little service which allows you to discover new music, artists, etc, by telling it which music you like already. Based on a song, or artist name you provide, it goes off and finds music matching an assortment of criteria matching the provided song/artist. It then proceeds to play a endless playlist. It’s all streaming, but it’s extremely good quality for streamed content, and practically never stutters, even when downloading or uploading other stuff (0n 512k ADSL anyway).
During your listening, if it plays something you don’t particularly like, you can tell it so, and it’ll further fine tune the playlist, the same applies to something you do like.
I do have a few things I’d like to see added or changed though. The ability to play your well refined playlist in the player of your choice - could play pretty much like a normal streaming playlist. Show a timer/track progress bar thing, it’s just nice to know :). Ability to go back and play previously listened to tracks. Perhaps two additional rating categories - it’d be nice to rate vocals and music seperately.
Anyway, my 10 free trial hours are up, and I can’t seem to cheat by deleting cookies or something. My MasterCard should be arriving this week some time, and I’m seriously considering that $36 for an annual subscription…
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