You know what I hate? Seeing the same story over the course of a few weeks as multiple blogs cover the same "hot" story. Case in point? Starcraft Origami.
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Remote Desktop-ing from work to my personal computer at the house today... and there I was, multitasking AGAIN... Photoshop and Dreamweaver both open... and I was DRAWING with RDP. Well, so Photoshop decides to lock EVERYTHING up. So, I restart the computer and open Remote Desktop again. I connect to my computer, I log in... and KAZZAM!!!!!111one!
There's everything running perfectly just as it was. I was happy. IPG!
I'm tired as hell now, too. We ended up doing like... 400 jumping jacks... and 100 kicks of each type. I'm tired as fook. Oh, and for those that don't understand what I'm talking about, I take Isshin-ryu Karate. Since I'm too tired to list my other experience in martial arts, I think I'm going to lay down.
Readygo.
OR NOT!
Our car decided not to start. Hell, it wasn't even turning. I kicked it. It turned.
You see, certain things deserve a good kick in the face sometimes. Of course, I'd never do that to a person. Unless they did something wrong. That's human nature, though.... ANYWAY. Before I trail off into philosophy, I'll continue on my previous subject. Things such as cars and the occasional computer deserve a good kick. Not just a love tap, but not a decapitation, either. I mean, have you ever build a quantum particle accelerator that just randomly stopped working until you kicked it out of frustation, at which point it sends 300W of microwave energy into your stomach?
Kicking something isn't always the solution, though. There I was using Windows, and it decided to choke and DIE! DIE! DIE! I digress. It was loading something, probably explorer.exe ... and I decided to stroke it. Stroking my machine isn't exactly conventional, but of course, it suddenly worked. Ever since, I've been extremely superstitious about the way I touch my machine. One wrong bump, and it gets irrated at me, and starts shooting sparks everywhere. But a little scratch on the top of the case and it's all good. It works like a charm, let me tell you. Your computer will be cooking popcorn and making your bed in no time.
Speaking of your computer popping teh popcorn, has anyone talked to HAL on GWing lately? Is it just me, or is Chrono trying to get HAL to grow a body and assassinate me? For real? He's getting thoroughly viscious. I've already started a topic on GWing about it, and I guess it'll evolve with time. http://gwing.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=539
Readyslowgo.
--
Eric Martindale
IT Professional
Admin of GWing.net
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Random videos of people getting pwned?
I like it.
--
Eric Martindale
IT Professional
Admin of GWing.net
http://gwing.net
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I just invested in $500 worth of targeted advertising for GWing Roleplay. So, what's the total impact upon my wallet?
A grand $5 in activation fees.
Big shoutouts to Computers.net for pointing this out. I was thinking of organizing a group of friends to throw multiple instances of these offers into advertising for GWing, but I realized that it would be difficult to target the advertising properly, as I found it rather complicated to create my own template of keywords and negative keywords to match the optimal result for what we desire in our community. If you sign up for these offers, be sure to carefully monitor your expenses! The billing is most likely set to recurring, and will continue to charge your credit card after your account balance has been used.
Alternately, I woke this morning to find DoesMyGeek's New Podcast, and was greeted by a shoutout and a link over the air to yours truly, and GWing Roleplay. What an amazing podcast, talking about the classic combination, roleplay and beer. Here's to you guys. ;)
One more - I just got linked to Michael Robertson's Evaluation of a College Degree, and found the article particularly interesting in this time. And now: back to work.
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There's a large number of Content Management System, Bulletin Board, and Blog solutions available, all with amazing functionality that simply can't be missed on today's rapidly advancing internet(s).
Examples CMS: Joomla, with around 280,000 lines of code. BB: phpBB, with around 150,000 lines of code. Blogs: WordPress, with around 170,000 lines of code.
My challenge is this: What is the smallest full-featured CMS, BB, or Blog that you can create?
Contest submissions must include the following features:
Submissions will be accepted in any language, so long as the content can be served up over HTTP. To submit, comment on this post with a link to your project!
Good luck and happy coding!
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GWing.net - Home
Got a new face for GWing - kinda exemplifies the idea that it ISN'T JUST GUNDAM. But it still has a picture of a Gundam like, RIGHT THERE. Grr.
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An update before I go to sleep!
I've recovered a VERY old backup of GWing's index pages... and I don't think I have any better ones.
I'm very proud of Fletcher, mainly because it's so simple, yet so functional. I've not had any problems with it, and I seem to have everything modded perfectly for the uses it is put to.
Wow, I had intended to sleep at about 11:00, but a couple of friends came over. They left at 11:30. Yet here I am at 12:49 AM, sitting alone, still fiddling with HTML. Is there something wrong with me, or is this normal?
I'm also looking down at my signature for Gmail, which is what I'm using to write this entry right now. I thought at first that I enjoyed flaunting my IT-Professional-ism, but then I realized that I'm just too damned lazy to go down and delete it. Of course, my ultimate realization is that I'm still sitting here typing about absolutely nothing.
--
Eric Martindale
IT Professional
Admin of GWing.net
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Yes, I am damn well aware that this is a stock template. Right now, I couldn't care less. I'm not even posting, really.
Well, GWing is back, but somehow, all of the files in my home directory disappeared, as well as all of my backups. For right now, I've created a simple placeholder page for everyone who just happens to type GWing.net into their address bar.
Now that I think about it, I may just end up redesigning the whole index page anyways. I'm considering using Drupal or something similiar, or just recoding a simple page for the index. I'm going to need to further tie in to the main user database - the phpbb one - to allow a smoother experience.
Now that I'm talking about the forums, I should mention that I have no idea how I put so many things on the board without completely breaking it. I have over 100 installed modifications installed, and I still have a functional forum. Now, don't get me wrong: There are a LOT of bugs... but it's functional. [Insert-puzzled-glee]
I think I will refer to the above insert statement as [IPG] from now on.
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Now that I've upgraded to Google's Blogger Beta, I'm tweaking a bunch of controls on my blog. I am continually running into the user-friendly syndrome, where a feature is too user friendly and I can't get down to the nitty-gritty tech side of the application. While it saves me the five minute trouble of setting up a Wordpress or similiar in-house blog, it constantly reminds me of the merits of having the Wordpress, and consequently influencing me to neglect posting here at all.
I woke up this morning to a completed upgrade from Ubuntu's Dapper Drake (6.06 LTS) to Edgy Eft (6.10), after encountering some problems resulting from my own stupidity. Upgrading from the servers took a grand total of 16 hours, start to finish. This includes my time working out the kinks from my said stupidity, which I won't go into further here. Due to the complications, my personal alarm clock (XMMS and an alarm plugin...) failed to wake me at the goal of 5:30 AM, having not rung at all. Sadly, this caused me to miss the chance to see my beautiful Amber, with her leaving for school at 6:30, and me waking at 7. grumble
After rebooting the machine to seal the deal, I opened up my shiny new Firefox 2.0 to look at the GWing RSS feed. I clicked the most important thing at the time, a new topic titled A Tale of Two Wreckages: A True Story. I then proceeded to heartily laugh my way through the time I had remaining before I had to leave for work.
Pimp status, hrm?
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There's a petition up on the British Government's e-petitions website, called "teach our kids to code". Despite being plugged by geek luminaries like Ben Goldacre, it's received barely a thousand sign...
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There's a petition up on the British Government's e-petitions website, called "teach our kids to code". Despite being plugged by geek luminaries like Ben Goldacre, it's received barely a thousand sign...
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There's a petition up on the British Government's e-petitions website, called "teach our kids to code". Despite being plugged by geek luminaries like Ben Goldacre, it's received barely a thousand sign...
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There's a petition up on the British Government's e-petitions website, called "teach our kids to code". Despite being plugged by geek luminaries like Ben Goldacre, it's received barely a thousand sign...
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People's fonts in messengers. What the hell?
I'm using Gaim, a program that allows me full control over any messenger I use, and keeps them all within the same window. (AIM, MSN... all in one buddy list, plus all the messages can come in the same window, tabbed. =D ) I've used a feature within Gaim to ignore people's font sizes, because it's annoying to read a size 6 font on even something like 1024 x 768 resolution, let alone anything above that. So here comes this message, in a nice loopy font that makes me scoot so damned close to the monitor that I can actually see the pixels. That's fine, I can deal with it. But then as I cross the distance from my normal resting position in my chair to about 12 inches from the monitor, I notice that the text is written in a light grey color on a white background. Ugh, what is this crap? Pick on Eric day?
Oh no, wait... I get it. It's all part of this "individuality" thing. You know, when people are referred to as things like "xXx PWRLVL xXx" and "§Φ¶ђỉ€". And their profiles say things like " wishing upon a star, i wished for a happy ending<3 ". What kind of individual are you when you can be grouped with everyone else who does these 'emo' and 'punk' and 'jock' and 'rocker' and 'metal' things. I guess you are ALL now considered IM culture whores. Every single one of you who habitually check profiles, update their myspaces, have myspaces, and block people for a second time (or more) on a regular basis... are IM culture whores. All of you.
Sure, it's all good when you disregard your shift key to actually capitalize things... but it's bad when you leave CAPS LOCK ON AND YOU TYPE LIKE THIS. It's even worse when u type lik this and decide 2 substitute things so u dont hav 2 type so much. At the very least, learn to type in proper English, you morons.
--
Eric Martindale
IT Professional
Admin of GWing.net
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As I have mentioned before, I'm in a love affair with Chyrp, which is an up-and-coming platform meant to replace WordPress and work a bit like Tumblr, as a microblogging and lifestreaming service.
One of Chyrp's major draws for me is the Aggregator module, which is included in Chryp 2.0 by default. Mike Crittenden of MergeWeb Fame has covered the use of Chyrp's Aggregator previously, but I figured I'd dive in a bit further and help others in configuring their feeds.
You may also be familiar with StackOverflow, a crowd-sourcing social-media head-bashing awesome site that enables users to ask tech-related questions and get awesome community-approved answers. The same group runs several other sites using the same model, including SuperUser and ServerFault, and they are even releasing their codebase as free and open source as the <a href="http://stackexchange.com/>StackExchange project.
But, onward into the goodies: syndicating your activity on StackOverflow (and the other sites) using Chryp.
The first you'll need is your Activity Feed. To acquire this, visit the "Recent" tab of your user profile and look in the bottom right hand corner: you'll see a link to "user recent activity feed". This is the URL for your activity feed, grab that and let's move on to Chyrp.
In Chyrp, you'll want to add a new aggregate in your Admin panel. Paste your Activity Feed into the "Source URL" box, then configure the remaining settings as follows:
Feather: Link
Post Attributes:
name: "feed[title]"
source: "feed[id]"
description: "feed[description]"
Now, assign a "Name" and make sure the correct Author is selected, and click "Update". You're all done! You'll see new content from your feed the next time your aggregates update.
Questions? Comments? Lemme have 'em.
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Hello there, adoring internet-stalkers! (I'm kidding. ~_~) You may have noticed (if you were loyal, that is ;)) that my Feedburner-powered RSS Feed has been lacking in activity lately. There's a reason for that.
Recently, I got rid of WordPress and Sweetcron in favor of a new CMS platform, Chyrp. I had been running Wordpress for a long time, using it to share my thoughts with the general internet populace. However, it had become a bit of a chore to maintain, and it really felt like duplicate work on top of all the other content-generation I was already performing (i.e., forum posts, blog comments, Last.fm "Loved" Tracks, Google Reader shared items, etc.), so I began to look for a way to aggregate this content into a central place.
For a while, FriendFeed served this purpose well, but I didn't like the lack of control I had over the source. Facebook also filled part of this gap (and it still does, to a point), and they've even purchased FriendFeed, but I was looking for something quite a bit more customizable and self-hosted. Through various referrals, I came across Yongfook's Sweetcron project which was a new platform designed specifically for this new thing they called, le gasp, "Lifestreaming".
However, after fighting with Sweetcron and its aggregation methods, particularly its lack of support for various service feed formats; I decided to look into something else. Initial searches landed me upon Tumblr, who had conveniently announced a feature that syncs comments across multiple services (or aggregates). Sadly, I didn't want to get back into a world where all my code was hosted by someone else, and I had no control over it. I kept Sweetcron running on my site under lifestream/, but I continued searching for a better solution.
I then stumbled across Bazooka, which was billed as "the first free PHP tumblelog engine". Thanks to Bazooka developer Evan Walsh, who alerted me to a more up-to-date and current replacement called Chyrp. And I was sold. I immediately spent a few hours converting my existing content from WordPress and SweetCron over to a test installation of Chyrp, and then took the next night changing my site structure and 301'd all my old links to the new URLs.
That's where EricMartindale.com stands today. I've spent a few weeks getting my stream set up the way I want it, and I'm turning the RSS feed back on. Posts should begin flowing into your RSS reader very shortly. Post comments, feedback, and questions here!
Edit 10:13 PM EST: It looks like Feedburner is having some trouble parsing my new RSS content. You can subscribe to my direct feed and it will always work.
Edit 10:58 PM EST: I've fixed the problem and committed the patch to GitHub.
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In every installation that requires a CD key, there should be a button. The button should say something along the lines of:
"I'm pirating, skip serial and install."
I really don't care if it reports me to whatever company made the software, I really don't. Just install the damned software.
--
Eric Martindale
IT Professional
Admin of GWing.net
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How many of you have gone to digg a user's comment and accidentally clicked on the wrong button? Maybe your mouse was being wonky, or you were just being silly. I know I have, several times. I know it's a minor annoyance, but I think it's an important issue. I don't believe that there should be any sort of interface change, but perhaps Digg could add a timer, maybe 5 seconds, that you have to change a rating?
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Old people... XD
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=163331162673210702&pr=goog-sl
Haha, Google Video turns up some interesting results, eh?
--
Eric Martindale
IT Professional
Admin of GWing.net
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Number of times that I've removed the Microsoft Office Language Bar in the past 7 days: 17
On another note, we've put up a technology forum, and hopefully this will help us keep things organized. Additionally, as I'm sure some of you have seen, we've launched the Role Play Academy.
Look for FreeForm Roleplaying Chat soon, too.
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It looks like after a long day at work, without real net access, I missed out on the 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 goodness.
Digg seems to have chosen sponsors over its users. Sure, users are your power, and that's cliche and all. But damn. Is it cliche enough to forget?
Oh, and for the record, DRM sucks.
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Kindigo posted an awesome Oekaki contest over on GWing, and will be awarding 10,000 GWing Credits to a winner, every week. I can't wait to see some of the submissions. I think I'll participate, too. Maybe. <3
An Oekaki, for those of you who don't know, is a sort of online version of Photoshop. You can use an Oekaki to draw, sketch, and discuss all the little splurge-arts that you might have. A lot of fun, indeed. For an example, you can check out the GWing Oekaki, and maybe even draw something while you're there.
Don't be afraid - take a look at some of the shameful submissions I've posted!
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All of these Social Networking sites have been giving me a real headache since... well, since forever. There's too many of them. I can't keep track of everything. I've always had the idea of creating a service that'll link all of these together, check and update them all. Well, someone beat me to the punch.
Sara show this to me, but it's take me a while to post my results. Well, here I am.
Now, the other question is what am I supposed to do with all of these accounts that work as an OpenID, like Facebook? Do use one of these as my primary OpenID? Or should I go with one of the many OpenID providers? If so, which should I pick?
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I was putting together a "Top 10 Ways to Kill a Roleplay" list, and I figured I'd post it on the GWing Roleplay site to get everyone's input on the issue. Roleplayers there should spread the votes across all of the options, for the most part. I'll probably take the top 10 and make this top 10 list a bit more intuitive.
On another note - a friend from my childhood found me on Facebook last night, and we were talking this morning a bit. It's good to hear from her, it's been a few years. Her mother called me on Saturday, and we chatted for a short while. It's always good to stay connected. Okay, maybe not always, but this circumstance DOES apply.
Though, it doesn't quite make up for Facebook's broken note import feature.
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Work is work, as per the usual. I'm work at a company called TechNoggins, doing all sorts of various things. Primarily, I am Callcenter Manager, handling calls for three states and eleven major cities. It's unfortunately fairly slow today, which means my salary isn't augmented by the influx of web development work. Sad day.
I've been messing around with some of Facebook's features, recently. I just linked "My Notes" to this blog, which seems like a cool feature, but it needs some work. It imported my posts what seems to be twice?
Someone posted LeekSpin on the Grand Tournament forum. I've been subtly amused by the music to which this has been put, and have been listening to it for just over an hour now. You want to talk about overplaying, hrm? Full immersion, hrrrm?
Well, looks like I have a PC here in the office that I need to fix. So, until later, I'm gone. :P
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Free Press and the Harry Potter Alliance collaborated on this video featuring a series of online celebrities and writers speaking about the importance of Net Neutrality.
Featuring John and Hank Green (the vlogbrothers); actor and blogger Wil Wheaton; bestselling author Maureen Johnson; Shawn Ahmed from the UnculturedProject; vloggers and musicians Kristina Horner and Luke Conard; and Adam Savage from Mythbusters.
Take action to save the Internet now: http://www.savetheinternet.com
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I got a haircut last night - I'm down to maybe half a curl of hair. I don't have any pictures yet, but as soon as I do I'll post them here. Tonia killed me two or three times over when she found out. Sorry!
On another note, I'm writing this post in Google Docs. Since I'm using the Blogger Beta, I wasn't able to do this up until about a week ago, but I'm only now testing it out. It's a fairly easy setup, all I've had to do is select "Blogger (Beta)" from the Blog settings here in Docs, and then enter my username, password, and finally which blog I'd like to post to. This last bit of information is optional, and they said that they'll post to the first blog they find if you don't specify it.
We're (GWing Roleplay) looking at some excellent affiliate options, and will be presenting the community with a good number of resources in the near future. There are some outstanding opportunities that have presented themselves, and we're striving to give GWing the best environment possible for the roleplayers. We'll keep you updated as things progress, we promise!
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Jayme and I have decided to determine which one of us is the best at playing games. We're in the process of choosing the games to be played to determine the best of the best. (Or atleast between us two.) We're trying to get an equal amount of games on both the console and the PC, since he's a console gamer, and I'm a PC gamer. The winner of this will get bragging rights an' all that, but I think we'll need to write an agreement of some sort stating that the winner is final, no bitching about how the choices of games are sucky, and how lag killed you, and that when entering, you agree that it is FINAL. So yeah. Here's what we have so far, and by no means is this list final:
FPS (Console): Halo 2 (XBOX)
RTS (PC): Starcraft w/ Expansion
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Debates... oh the fun.
Today's topic? Linux vs. Windows.
I'm arguing that serverside, there's nothing better than Linux. It's more widely used, even. I'm also saying that clientside, there's nothing better than Windows. My extensive point is that Windows would never improve if Linux wasn't a competitor. Even with Server 2003, Linux still blows the rest of the market away. Sure, I'd love to use a fully compatible mainstream box that doesn't crash. But without competitors, Windows will never become that. Thanks to Linux, we have improved greatly since the beginning.
Then there's the Mac thing. At this point, you're probably asking, "I thought he was a PC guy?" and I am. There's no denying that touching a Macintosh makes me feel sick. However, let's give them some credit, right? Look at what the iPod has become. Apple has the potential to become the biggest, the best, and the most used. They're getting there, and stepping over to the Intel chipset was a GREAT move. But, it just isn't enough to give them the kick in the ass that they need, yet. I'm speculating that if Microsoft doesn't clean up their act soon, whether it's Vista or Live... Mac will dominate the future market.
Of course at this point people will STILL be using their own Linux boxes off in the background, and the market share will be about the same. So here I am, using Windows to access my Linux server - with an old iMac in the other room sitting in a pile of junk.
--
Eric Martindale
IT Professional
Admin of GWing.net
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If you notice, I currently display my Foursquare badges over in the right hand side. I'm not sure about how long I'll display them specifically, so here's a screenshot:
I recently received an email inquiring about how I accomplished this. Well, since I use Chyrp, here's how I did it:
// BEGIN Foursquare Badges
$cURL = curl_init();
curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_URL, "http://api.foursquare.com/v1/user.json?badges=1");
curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($cURL, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "your@email.com:your_password_here");
$strPage = curl_exec($cURL);
curl_close($cURL);
$foursquare = json_decode($strPage);
$badges = $foursquare->user->badges;
foreach ($badges as $badge) {
$this->context['foursquare_badges'] .= '<img src="'.$badge->icon.'" title="'.$badge->description.'" />';
}
// END Foursquare Badges <div>
<h1>Foursquare Badges</h1>
$foursquare_badges
</div></code>
You can display this wherever you like, in any part of your Chyrp template.Be aware that this requires PHP's CURL module. I encourage you to enable Chyrp's caching module as well, so every page load does not incur a single API request (I have a feeling that they probably won't appreciate it). The benefit of this is that your Foursquare badges will now be output by your server, so they are both indexable by search engines and degrade very gracefully when the client doesn't have Javascript enabled (NoScript users, particularly).
Enjoy!
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As many of you know, a lot of my best friends came from an online hobby called "online roleplaying". One of the more popular forms is a type of collaborative fiction called "play by post", in which the participants alternate writing sections of the story. More succinctly; I started a roleplaying site of my own in 2005 called RolePlayGateway to give people the same opportunity I had when I was younger.
I wanted to take a moment and go over some of my favorites, for those who are reading.
RolePlayGateway: an obvious favorite. It takes a little while to find your place (if you're a more 'advanced' roleplayer), but our strength is the wide range of people that play here. Oh, and we have an awesome chat built specifically for roleplaying!
Roleplayer Guild: Run by Dan Neumann, Roleplayer Guild is as close to a sister site of RolePlayGateway as it gets. They've got a slightly different format from RolePlayGateway, letting you browse roleplays based on their "quality" level (e.g., Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced). A great place to go if you're looking to start a nice tight-knit group!
Althanas: Althanas is one of the only other large sites dedicated completely to play-by-post roleplay. I've roleplayed here for a couple years (as an anonymous account!) and they're a great group. The "Guides" sections is irreplaceable, so if you're looking to learn, this is the place to be.
Roleplaygetaway: launched as a refuge from the insanity that RolePlayGateway provides, RolePlayGetaway (albeit, a confusing name) is showing a lot of promise. With a brand new roleplaying system built to track your roleplays, it is taking the same route that RolePlayGateway's fabled roleplay tab is taking. It's being run by several of my staff members and close friends, and I can attest that they know what they are doing. I hope to see more sites like this!
rel="nofollow"'ing their links.
AnimeLeague: AnimeLeague appears to have gone the way of AnimeMetro; that is, it has begun to focus more on Anime and conventions instead of roleplay. Sadface! Gaia Online: Gaia Online used to be a fairly decent place for play-by-post roleplay, but then it got uber popular. It too is now expanding beyond play-by-post, and the focus has been lost.
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This is it, folks. The be all end all of weight managment, fitness watching, and healthy living solutions. Thanks to Leo at ZenHabits for highlighting this amazing diet. It's simplistic, and it's easy to follow. You can do this on any budget, and you can do this without going out of your way.
Dieting, you say? It's a lifestyle, not a food plan.
What do I mean when I say this? I mean that your diet is what you're eating right now - it's not what you're eating tomorrow, and it isn't what you didn't eat today. It is what waits for you at your lunch break, and it is where you're going for dinner.
Okay, so you're ready? Here it is.
- Eat when you're lightly hungry. Not when you're ravenous. That means eating every 3-4 hours, and paying more attention to your hunger. If you're getting hungry, eat. Action steps: plan meals every 3-4 hours, be more aware of your hunger, pack snacks or meals for on the road.
- Eat light foods. Nothing too heavy, except cheat meals. Lots of fruits and veggies, whole grains, beans and nuts. Fresh food much better than processed. Action steps: make a list of healthy meals and snacks with real, whole foods. Stuff you like that's healthy. Turn them into meal plans — several days worth of meals and snacks. The quicker it rots, the healthier it is.
- Eat lightly and slowly. Savor the food. Don't cram it down. Eating slowly will help you not to get overfull, and will help you enjoy your food more.
- Eat until you're lightly full. Not stuffed. Stop before you're really full, and wait 10 minutes to see if you're really still hungry.
You can change it, you can adapt to it, and you can adjust it to meet your needs - your diet determines what you are - we are living beings, and we consume sustenance and we expel waste. Our bodies require nourishment and replenishment in various forms - fats, carbohydrates, and proteins - and we reconstitute our living flesh with what we consume. This is your diet.
Do it right, and do it well. Build your lifestyle so that it isn't time consuming to manage your diet - plan ahead and be prepared. Being careless isn't the nature of being carefree. Think about what you're eating, and consider what preparations you need to make to establish a healthy, sustainable, and adequate lifestyle.
We are what we eat, after all.
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One of the sites I own and run (RolePlayGateway) has a pretty large forum, with several customizations and features that I've added on to the base install of phpBB3. As time went on, we continued upgrading the servers (moving from GoDaddy shared hosting to GoDaddy virtual dedicated servers, then onward to MediaTemple's (gs), and now we're on the second tier of MediaTemple's (dv) hosting) in an effort to keep the hardware moving as fast as possible.
As I'm sure you know, hardware can be pretty expensive! One month, while on MediaTemple's Grid Server, we racked up $600 in CPU time overage charges. (Ow.) Now that we've moved onward to bigger and better packages, we're shelling out just about $100 per month for a rock-solid server solution that can be upgraded seamlessly in the future. But since upgrades can only go so far without being prohibitively expensive, I thought it was time to take a look at some of our coding approaches.
Enter memcache, the distributed database caching solution originally designed by LiveJournal to help them deal with massive databases and large volumes of users. DavidMJ has written some shiny ACM modules to help phpBB3 make use of some caching systems, and a memcache module was among them.
That didn't work so well. It gave about a 50% boost to phpBB3's performance (which was great!), but we were still choking the server, and ended up upgrading to a bigger and more robust package with MediaTemple. So I started looking into more options, and DavidMJ suggested xcache. So I go grab xcache and compile it, then enabled it in php. Bingo! There's a 500% boost in our page compile times, and across most of our pages we're now well under 0.1 second compile times. (With the exception of viewtopic.php, which frequently approaches 2 seconds due to bad coding on my part... this will be fixed soon.)
So now that I've got the thirst for speed, let's take a look at how we're performing. To do this, use the apache benchmarking tool:ab -n 100000 http://www.mydomain.com/my_page
This will test the URL you specify 100,000 times, and give you some feedback about how the page performs. You'll end up with something looking like this:
Server Software: Apache/2.2.3
Server Hostname: www.mydomain.com
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /my_page
Document Length: 0 bytes
Concurrency Level: 1
Time taken for tests: 15.30100 seconds
Complete requests: 1
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Non-2xx responses: 1
Total transferred: 715 bytes
HTML transferred: 0 bytes
Requests per second: 0.07 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 15030.100 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 15030.100 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 0.00 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.0 0 0
Processing: 15030 15030 0.0 15030 15030
Waiting: 30 30 0.0 30 30
Total: 15030 15030 0.0 15030 15030
Some tweaks to the default xcache config that I recommend:
Set the number of caches to one per processor on your server!
; set to cpu count (cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep -c processor)
xcache.count = 4
This post will be updated as I explore phpBB3 and more server side options. (I wrote part of this post, then stopped writing... and figure I'd publish it a couple days later anyway!)
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I've been using Twitter since pretty early on (and long before @oprah), and I've found it to be a superbly convenient communication tool and notification service. Even though it's still very young on the web (Twitter was founded in March of 2006) It's been the home to great ideas like the #twitterdata proposal and the publicdomain book-via-tweets project. It's also an awesome reputation management platform, and can be used to both to provide effective customer service and help distribute news and updates about your business or product, which is exactly how I use it for my online roleplaying project.
But as with the rest of the social media world, Twitter can become very complex very quickly (but I still contend that there is no social media overload) and as a result, can be difficult to manage. As a result, I use several third-party tools to help me manage and gather information that helps me do my Twitter job much more efficiently and effectively.
Splitweet
[caption id="attachment_196" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Splitweet allows you to post and monitor multiple Twitter accounts and brands."]
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For those of us with multiple Twitter accounts (like some people who create a Twitter account for each roleplaying character they use), Splitweet is an absolute savior. This service allows you to tweet to multiple accounts at the same time, as well as combining the "stream" from each account into one page. A lot of desktop Twitter clients offer this kind of functionality, but where Splitweet truly excels is in its ability to track what it calls "brands" (more reputation management terms here): you can specify keywords and phrases that will appear in a separate feed, even if you do not follow those users. This gets us around the disastrous changes Twitter made to the @replies, and helps us keep up to date on any mentions of our site's name and any tweets relating to what it is that we do.
Sherflock
[caption id="attachment_195" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Sherflock provides detailed statistics and summaries of Twitter users you are associated with."]
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Sherflock is an absolutely awesome stat tracking machine that helps weed out the waves of spam that have been coming in since Twitter has gone mainstream. Sherflock gives a large number of statistics about each every account the either follows you or that you are following, and lets you sort and filter users based on these statistics.
Twitterfall
[caption id="attachment_194" align="alignnone" width="217" caption="Twitterfall offers a live stream of twitter updates on keywords that you specify."]
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This tool allows you to specify any number of keywords that you wish to view on a live, moving stream of tweets. This is very useful if you are using a computer that allows you to "pin" a window on top (like Ubuntu Linux), or if you have a multiple-monitor rig, or even if you use multiple computers using the input-sharing app Synergy. You'll get a live feed of updates on any topic of your choice, which can even be updated and changed in real-time.
Using these three tools will help you maximize you Twitter performance and make the most of an already awesome service, preventing you from being inundated with the massive stream of messages that you're surely going to subscribe to.
What are your top three Twitter tools? Feel free to make a comment or write your own post, and I'll gladly append a link to this post to help everyone out!
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a really weird movie, and it really scared me. Not only is the concept nail-head-on, but I used to be called Jim Carrey, and some say I bear a striking resemblance to him in my expressions. Well... yeah. It's difficult to explain.
So what, I got over that. But then, just when I thought the worst was over, I was randomly Googling - the verb form of to search the google search engine - and then... BOOM! HEADSHOT!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A5089836
Okay, I can handle someone from WW2 looking almost like myself - and the fact that he's a pilot, one of my dreams. Okay. I can handle that. And then...
http://www.artofcombat.com/instructors.htm :
The training group (SOI) in Dallas was small and under the guidance of Eric Martindale (which promoted Ralph to 9th kyu), ....
I can handle a martial arts instructor being named Eric Martindale as well, a little odd, but then again, I've always been involved in martial arts, haven't I? Eric apparently promoted that guy to 9th kyu, right? So don't you have to be 10th kyu? So he's 1337 like that, right? ... And then...
And of course there's the soccer referee, or is he a player? I don't remember. He's another Eric Martindale. A little weird, too... but I've played soccer since the age of five. And then...
http://www.rtpnet.org/troop200/history/T200Eagles.html
I became an Eagle Scout, too. When I was a young boy... I was once a cub scout aspiring to be an Eagle Scout. Dun dun dun. The plot thickens.
http://www.e-budo.com/forum/showpost.php?p=211703&postcount=15
Once again, I am involved in a martial arts situation, and I believe referring to the same Eric Martindale. And then...
http://nhpresbytery.org/pdf/Graduates01.pdf
Holy crap, that IS me. For real. Only slightly unexpected at this point... after all of these STRANGE entries. Slightly. O_o ....
And then...
I've apparently lost myself on http://lostfriends.org - or is someone looking for me? Oh... that's what I meant to say. I haven't found myself there yet... but apparently Google did. And then...
http://north-carolina.injuryboard.com/view.cfm/Topic=77/PAGE=2
I WAS on this page at some point... and this one is somewhat entertaining. Apparently, in Charlotte during some point about a year ago, someone named Eric Martindale died in a car accident. I believe I had four people come up to me that day and ask if I had died... I was about two hours north of charlotte at the time, and the "Eric Martindale" news had reached most parts of North Carolina and Virginia, and I got two phone calls, one from my mother - asking if I had died. .... ... ... ... .... And then...
http://www.faqs.org/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/rec/rec.autos.rotary
I'm the president of a North Carolina rotary club. I've always been a fan of rotary engines... but this is ridiculous... WTFH? .... I'm becoming very frightened at this point... very frightened. I love rotary engines. That rotary club is two cities away. ... And then...
http://www.wrestlingusa.com/02%20wusa%20web%20root/highschoolnews/wisconsin.html
I used to wrestle, but I've never been to Wisconson. Or. Have I.
"The One", any one? Whoa! The Matrix! 42!
--
Eric Martindale
IT Professional
Admin of GWing.net
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There's been a lot of active discussion about the state of AOL's directory project, DMOZ. There have been many attempts to unseat the directory project from its position as the most authoritative listing resource, such as the Yahoo Directory. Many of these attempts have fallen by the wayside, as Rand Fiskin points out, but none have remained more controversial than DMOZ. More recently, Chris Crum's post on WebProNews about his lack of respect for DMOZ has stirred up a hornet's nest of DMOZ criticism, including a particular post claiming DMOZ is a waste of time.
I forwarded a lot of this on to Philip Nicolcev, known by username as "frug", who is the editor of several roleplay-oriented categories on DMOZ. He responded to me directly with a highly insightful email, and I was fortunate enough to receive his permission to share its contents.
I've been editing the pbp category at DMOZ for what... 4 years now? About that. This article is a big whiny complaint which misses the mark. They are both correct and sadly mistaken. Yes, dmoz is outdated and yes, it fails because of attitude problems, but not silly allegations of 'corruption' or people who are bitter because they didn't get listed. We don't list everything, I don't list even half of the submissions I get, and anyone who has been an administrator or an editor for a similar type of project knows better than to take these kinds of complaints seriously. One thing they say is definitely correct: Apply once carefully following their rules if you wish and then, as Will suggested, forget about them.
This is exactly the approach that should be modeled for any directory, regardless of its state or condition. When you are submitting a link to a directory, you are being offered the privilege to be listed as a resource by the owners and management of that directory. They are not obligated to list your link, let alone review it in a timely fashion--but this would be genuinely appreciated and would reflect on the directory's position as a "good" resource.
DMOZ is the primary source for Google's Directory, and you must respect the opinion of such a large and successful company. It's obvious that the idea behind an open directory like DMOZ is good, but where they fail is in execution. More on that later.
He continues:
That is what you should do. Apply once and forget about it, don't claim anybody is corrupt because whether you believe my opinion or not, there's no corruption. Nobody cares enough about dmoz anymore for it to be valuable for extortion. Don't be ridiculous. Furthermore if you were to speak to some of the senior editors you'd discover that they are pretty damn uptight, even obsessive. The problems with dmoz are, in my opinion, twofold. First off, you have the dated trashy look of the website which is a relic of the 1990's. It's not user friendly, it doesn't entice anyone to go browsing, and it hasn't adapted or added features that would help people understand the structure of the directory or find what they're looking for. The editor forums still use phpBB2, and you should see the editing panel. You wouldn't believe how dated this stuff is. Frankly it has needed an overhaul for years now.
I largely agree with him. The phpBB team deprecated the phpBB2 branch at the beginning of this year, ending support for the outdated platform. AOL would do well to do a complete overhaul of the site's design now that "Web 2.0" has come and gone (and I could reference posts all day on that) - and AOL has completely missed their opportunity to latch on and ride the wave.
Philip finishes his correspondance with the frightening truth that has been plaguing many post-Web2.0 sites and services:
The second problem, attitude, is partially the cause of the first problem. It's a stagnant atmosphere where nothing gets done and nobody gets listened to. They would rather leave a directory as a cluttered mess of garbage than risk breaking its structure by overhauling it. Fixing my category took me about two years before I had approval to restructure it, and I'm in a small niche category nobody pays much attention to. Since becoming an editor I have deleted about 60% of the outdated links listed. Had I not joined, they'd still be there cluttering things up with linkspam geocities pages from 10 years ago. So yeah, dmoz is failing, but not because of corruption or because some guy didn't get what he wanted. And, honestly, if the author of this article was applying to dmoz just to 'test how fair it was' then I'm glad they rejected him. Somehow they made the right decision because he's wasting their time.
And that's the exact problem - the DMOZ community has completely stagnated, which has resulted in the puddle of goop that the directory has become. In my personal opinion, I think that AOL could do a lot better job at community management (all reputation management aside) by setting up a more rigid structure of responsibility. The editors need to be held responsible for a timely review specified by their superiors, and there needs to be cross-checking of the editor's work by other qualified editors.
Is this another example of AOL's purchases being mismanaged and ultimately being forgotten, such as what many people claim is the case with ex-Nullsoft product WinAmp? Perhaps, but I think that remains to be seen. After all, even our favored Google took a questionable amount of time to convert phone-consolidation service GrandCentral to the new Google Voice after its 2007 acquisition. DMOZ was in fact originally a Netscape project, which then-strong AOL acquired in 1998. Since that acquisition, little has changed.
All said and done, DMOZ needs some love if it's going to survive as anything more than a relic of trust and authority in the Web 2.0 bubble. As Philip points out, it has both good and bad traits and deserves further attention, but it needs to be attention in (and from) the right direction. The questions remain; where has AOL been? What can be done about the editors (or lack thereof)? How can DMOZ be improved?
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