shiningpolaris.com

June 6, 2007

Facebook Apps: Best of the Lot (so far)

Filed under: The Internet — sherl0k @ 8:58 am

Facebook’s new Developer APIs are a HUGE hit, and I’m loving the amazing apps that are coming out. So many cool widgets can get seamlessly added into your profile, moved wherever, and still manage to cleanly integrate with the rest of the site. Here’s a few apps that I’m loving. If you don’t have them yet, give ‘em a shot.

Last.fm – While not the official app, it actually looks much better than it. It’s not flash-based, and shows only your most recently played tracks. I wish the official one was laid out this way, because the developer working on this hasn’t worked out all the kinks to make it work flawlessly. I have faith though, that everything will be fixed soon.

Free Gifts – I wish Facebook would take a cue from this and not charge for theirs. Now you can send and receive gifts without paying for it, and works nearly exactly the same as the official version. New gifts keep getting added too, which is great.

Graffiti – What better play on the idea of writing on someone’s “wall” then actually drawing on it? A nifty flash-based app lets you draw in a whole palette of colors, changing the thickness of the brush too. It’s thought out really well.

X Me – No longer are you limited to poking someone. Specify your own action! Hug, Kiss, Glomp, Give a Beer To, or whatever your heart desires.

Extended Info – Add in more info about yourself. Create your own categories, pertaining to whatever your interests in life are.

Files – Powered by box.net, you can upload and share files of any type through Facebook. With a gig of space, you have lots of room to play around.

And last but certainly not least…

Digg – Shows your 5 most recently dugg stories on your FB profile. Gotta show the love.

May 31, 2007

Holy crap work is kicking my ass.

Filed under: Life,The Internet,Work — sherl0k @ 9:47 pm

First, apologies for the past entry that was re-posted from an earlier entry, I have no idea how that happened but I really wish that would stop.

So yeah, work. 9-6 all week, and 9-6 all next week. Lots of good old fashioned physical labor. Moving tables, desks, and computers, all over the building from one room to the next. Clearing out rooms to clean and paint, then put stuff back in. Cleaning the equipment, and getting a partial high from the Goof-Off (hey the associate dean suggested that one). Sometimes we switch tables and computers between rooms. Sometimes we just remove stuff and throw it out. And every time we move stuff, all the cabling has to be re-done. So half the time I’m lifting and moving heavy objects around the building, the other half I’m on all fours, crawling under a table and rewiring cables. And it’s not a typical “oh just throw the cables behind the table and leave it” job either… there’s a process we go through to keep everything neat and orderly so it does require a good deal of time and finesse with the cables.

I’m getting free food every day though, and they supply us with Mountain Dew. I really can’t complain much. Plus the time flies when all this is going on; it’s really enjoyable work, I really don’t mind doing any of it. They even let us blast whatever music we want while we’re working. The atmosphere is just amazing there.

The only real downfall is that I come home all sweaty and exhausted. Yes, this sort of work does make one break a sweat, even in an air-conditioned building. Hot air doesn’t seem to rise fast enough when you’re under tables for the majority of the day. So I come home, shower, get something to eat if I even have enough energy to do so, and just crash for the rest of the night. This weekend I’ll have downtime though to just sleep in and relax.

Speaking of weekends, last weekend I escaped with Crystal to the Zoo on Saturday. That was oodles of fun, I love the zoo. I forgot to bring my camera though, I wanted more pictures of the penguins. Ah well, I suppose I’ll just have to go again sometime soon. And then we saw Pirates 3 on Sunday. Amazing movie, loved it, rounded out the trilogy quite well. And it was 3 hours long, damn. Worth every minute though, that’s for sure.

On the internet front, I’ve been spending a lot of what time I actually have to spare working on the BMS Terminal, fixing up the download code and adding stuff. If you’re into IIDX simfiles, seriously check it out if you haven’t yet already. I’m working on getting the full collection there, I’m just limited to when exactly I can get work done on it. I’ve been getting some help with sowsBits too, I really hope to get all the bugs squashed with that in the next couple weeks so I can start doing more fun things with the tracker, like adding new features. I have some pretty kickass ideas rolling around in my head, too.

Well, I suppose I’m going to pop in a movie and pass out. Another 9am shift ahead of me, this one’s going to be a doozy. I can just tell.

April 14, 2007

Well that was overdue.

Filed under: Life,The Internet — sherl0k @ 1:40 pm

I disappeared for a couple days, if anyone noticed. Just needed some time to myself, my car needs a new engine and that’s going to run me $1000 and I’m without it for another week. Not exactly the best news. So between that and just other crap surrounding me, I just up and left for a couple days.

I potentially have a job offer though, with a local IT consulting firm. That would be pretty sweet if I landed a spot there.

I swapped the PCs in my house giving me the 1.6ghz in my room and put the 1ghz in the basement. Kept the cases in the same spot though, which means I had to swap mobo’s and other parts. My tower was so dusty because of the fact the heatsink is HUGE and was propped up right against the power supply, offering no air flow at all. Cleaned it out though, and the box is so much quieter now. Also the heatsink on this mobo is a lot smaller, so there’s more airflow. I fell asleep last night barely hearing the fans, it was refreshing. Also, this mobo has DDR RAM, which makes it go MUCH faster. I installed Xubuntu Feisty and this thing flies. The beta runs pretty well, haven’t come across any problems aside from the usual compositing errors with the NVidia driver, their method of enabling the binary driver is still a bit buggy. I had it working for a bit, I rebooted, and it stopped working causing X to crash. Back to the nv driver I go, at least until a new version of Envy is released or Ubuntu fixes the problem. I think it has to do with the newer kernel revisions not working with the NVidia driver, but I could be mistaken. I’m no kernel developer.

So the basement PC needs a fresh copy of XP installed on it, I’ll get around to that today. I don’t think it’ll take much of a performance hit in the sense of watching movies and playing the few games I have down there, hell it only had 256mb of RAM before, and it was playing x264 and DVD movies without a hitch. That’s all I’m worried about.

Playing around on the new server for sows. Not exactly an easy task, but I’m doing the best I can configuring everything the way it needs to be done. It’d be easier if I was physically there to do this, but with it being in Sweden and me being in New York is a bit of an issue. Ah well. Just another day at the office, I suppose. Reminds me, I need to get that Counter-Strike server up and running for Carlo… ugh. One more thing added to the list.

Oh right, it’s Saturday, and I’m not at work! I switched around my hours at work so now I have weekends off completely. I’m loving this. I haven’t had a weekend off in such a long time… it’s great. now I can get more stuff done. And with that… back to my multiple console sessions I go.

March 19, 2007

300 was amazing.

Filed under: Life,The Internet,Work — sherl0k @ 11:10 pm

Go see it, if you haven’t already.

Last night pissed me off badly. Those who know, know why. It bugged me all day too. But hanging with Jarred and watching 300 made life better. And coming home to my favorite people helped too. Needless to say, my trip to Florida couldn’t be any further away.

I have another webdesign job to take care of, that will probably soak up this week’s free time. I’m pretty confident in my abilities, I hope I can get everything done the way it should be done. If I can’t, it’s always good practice.

Bouncing to happy hardcore. Mmm. This music should be outlawed for being so good.

February 25, 2007

Let’s go to the zoo!

Filed under: Life,The Internet — sherl0k @ 5:05 pm

And that’s exactly what I did today. Rest of the pictures are in the gallery, go check ‘em out.

Been busy fininshing up the quarter at school, finals abound so I’ve been distracted with that. Had to finish up publishing the source code to the tracker, removing any and all bugs I had come across. I’m working on some other small-game sites on the side, too, that’ll keep me occupied.

One more test tomorrow and I’m done for the quarter. I’ll be working my ass off the next couple weeks pulling in some extra cash, I could definitely use the money.

February 2, 2007

XHTML, how I love and loathe thee.

Filed under: The Internet,Work — sherl0k @ 8:25 pm

Firstly, I apologize to those using my LJ feed, it kinda barfed on you all a few days ago. A server move will do that to a feed.

So XHTML, you can be a pain in the ass. Developers, always specify “px” or another method of measurement in length assignments in your CSS otherwise XHTML won’t know how to position your divs. I was frustrated for about 45 minutes last night trying to figure out why my divs weren’t put in the spot I told them to. That was annoying.

And I love how ImageReady hides the polygon image map tool. Click and HOLD down the button? Why can’t I just right-click? Sigh, maybe CS3 will be smarter.

Ah well, my frustrations have made me $50 richer. Gotta love web design jobs…

January 30, 2007

I’m grinning like a fool.

Filed under: Bemani,Life,The Internet — sherl0k @ 2:18 am

Caz was awesome. It was such a relaxing weekend. Granted we didn’t go sledding, and Risa was really sick all weekend (feel better hun!) I still loved being there. Jarred and I drove up on Saturday and we hung around for a while with Shelly, Kristi, Corey, and Ashleigh. Grabbed food at the local pizza shop – which has the most amazing wings, for the record. Kristi and I went back out this way to Carousel Mall, where we wandered around, window shopping. We played a round of DDR where I was stuck on Beginner mode because the Supernova machine is STILL broken and the down arrow wasn’t responding. Ah well, it was fun to freestyle again. I think Kristi beat me on a couple of the songs too, that was amusing to see. We also went to Build-A-Bear, and we built a monkey. Named him George. He’s awesome. I gotta hand it to that place, they know how to make some cuddly stuffed animals. The process is so much fun, too. Stopped at Wegmans afterward to show her where I used to work, grabbed a couple things, and we were on our way back to Caz. We spent the rest of the night together, relaxing in front of the TV.

Sunday we grabbed brunch at the dining hall, making fun of how bad some of the food there was – but then again, when isn’t campus food bad? Afterwards Kristi and I just lounged around watching more movies until Nick showed up from Norwich. By that time though it was almost dark, so we all – being Kristi, myself, Jarred, Shelly, and Nick – just grabbed dinner. We went out to this somewhat fancy restaurant/bar that was downtown, really good food. Quite the adventure packing us all into Nick’s truck, too. Came back to the dorms and just hung around with everyone. I left around midnight, only because I wanted some sleep for class in the morning.

Monday came and went, class was pretty good because Jarred and I kick ass at networking up Windows and Linux boxes together. He hung out here after class for a little while because of the bad weather, but thankfully it cleared up for the most part. I’ve just been busy with working on Edge|Emu and doing laundry, while talking to Kristi, distracting her from anything and everything. It’s what I do best.

Full week ahead of me as usual, with school and work. Life is good.

January 26, 2007

Blogging, how I have missed thee!

Filed under: Life,The Internet — sherl0k @ 7:33 am

I guess not so much blogging, but just having my websites up and running.

I did the host switch that I had been planning on, and it has been a complete nightmare. The FTP wouldn’t work for me at night, when I do most of my work. I was going back and forth with the support tickets online trying to get it sorted out. I’ve been dealing with people like Sergey Rusakov, Dima Ostapchuk, Oleg Korenyuk, Dima Skalenko, Sasha Semes, and Alexander Pachkovsky. Yeah, try to say that five times fast, bet you won’t get through it.

And today, the site wasn’t even UP. I called, and some foreign guy on the phone said that there was a server crash and it would be be back within 20 mins. Well, I took a shower, came back, and got the nice message saying “Thanks for using CPanel! If you’re seeing this message, contact your system administrator.” And it stayed like that for the majority of the day, until I came home, bitched to them over the phone, then went back to the support tickets to get someone to fix it. 2 domains were fixed, one needed to be fixed still. It wasn’t until almost 2am that the last domain was fixed. At least FTP is working properly, being able to upload at full speed is nice. I’ve yet to do a speed test on the server though, to see how fast down I get. Not really concerned about that at this point, I just want everything restored. At least WordPress is working without a flaw, and I’m adding everything back to the image gallery, albeit a bit slowly. The RAM setting in php.ini is only 16megs, which is causing a few hiccups but nothing major. The other domains seem to be working as expected.

I’m on a huge ATB kick right now. He’s probably one of the true great trance artists, not the random junk you hear. He’s quality. I’m loving it. Wee, randomness.

Really looking forward to the weekend. Get to see Kristi (!!), Jarred, Shelly, Risa, and Cori. I don’t know what exactly Saturday’s plans are, but Sunday we’re all going out sledding. It’s going to be awesome. Caz is the place to be, yo

Time to finish this can of Dew and let this last batch of files upload. Work tomorrow, shouldn’t be too bad.

January 19, 2007

Pack your bags, we’re moving.

Filed under: The Internet — sherl0k @ 10:05 pm

Yet another server move. Aplus really limits me with the amount of SQL databases, FTP accounts, and domains (only 2 each). I really need more than that. Also, they limit the number of SQL queries you can execute? What kind of joke is that? Nonetheless, I’m closing up shop with that and moving over to FastNext where I get far more bang for my buck. Not sure when the move will take place, but when the site goes down you can probably guess that would be when. I even got a free domain out of the deal, so now I own teknolust.org and I have no idea what I’m going to be doing with it. When I figure that out I’ll let you all know.

And on a completely unrelated note, the new Fall Out Boy album really sucks. Just as I expected it to.

September 6, 2006

Food for thought.

Filed under: Life,The Internet — sherl0k @ 11:16 pm

I usually save this blog here for the “real” stuff and leave my LiveJournal for the less-meaningful posts. When I post here, it usually serves a certain purpose or it’s something you can take seriously because it’s more than just me posting “on a whim” with whatever is going through my head at the time. Then again, this post is just what’s going through my head right now, but I think I can write it down to a point where it’s not just me randomly blurting stuff out without putting any thought into it.

Meh, the last sentence totally went back on the entire paragraph that preceded it. Go figure.

I don’t know.  Things are just so different now than from when they were a year ago. It’s crazy to think how fast times go by, not even thinking about it. And once when you do, you realize that things have changed a lot more than you think. May be for the better, may be for the worse.

There’s just a lot running through my head right now. I really don’t know how to explain it, and even if I did… I don’t think I’d want to be explaining it on a public blog.

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