The Daily Bits

There’s that famous 4-letter word that can mean a variety of things. I was was once told that there’s a difference between “Done” and “Finished”. The difference being that with “Done” you have stopped and given up. Whereas “Finished” means there’s nothing more you can do to the subject. For example when one puts a turkey in the oven it can be done or finished. Most of the time it’s finished, which is good. The other 10% of the time it will be “Done.” The point being that is that this blog is “Done.” I havn’t updated it since early July and there’s really no content I can put on here that wouldn’t jeopardize the secrecy the project I’m working on at the specific time.

In the past it has been used for ramblings about various things including, Runescape updates, RSBandB updates, and various other site related things. These have all been replaced in one way or another by different sites.

Current Sites:

• Runescape Updates and Pics => RuneWire
• Interesting videos and links (star trek) => Delicious
• Tech related topics => RSBANDBInformer!
• Digg
• My YouTube Channel (defunct) however, be sure to watch RSBandB’s YouTube Channel
• Let’s not forget RSBANDBUpdate!

That’s pretty much where I can be found online along with the RSBandB Forums. Finally, I think it’s fair that I give one more link out to Brad who is also retiring his blog.

I will be setting this up in a dormant mode with caching to reduce database hits and I will also redirect it to a landing page explaining the purpose of the site. As for redirects I will probably later on set one up so shane.rsbandb.com goes to my RuneWire page after people are aware of the transition. You will still be able to access this in a cached static version, so no worries, the archives will remain.

With that said it’s been a rather interesting 4 years here at TDB.

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Quite frankly I am over impressed. I can not wait to get into the crystal city. Come on! Lets see ME Pt III in the July BTS!

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Tomorrow we will embark on the journey to wrap up Project Green. I am within 600k of getting 99 Hebrlore, so I will have it tomorrow. I’m going to use this topic to show case some of the pictures up to this point.

You can see the rest on RuneWire.

Tommorow (June 28) after the Clan Wars event I will be getting 99 Herblore. You can expect it to happen at around 3-3:30PM RSBANDB Time/MDT [2-2:30 PDT, 4-4:30 CDT, 5-5:30 EDT, 10-10:30 BST/England]. So this is all the more reason for you to come to clan wars!

You are all welcome to attend the plan goes a little something like this:
1. Me and my associates will hand out Falador teleport tablets to anyone who needs them. We will then hop to world 132.
2. We will then make our way to the lake that is West of Falador where I will get 99.
3. We will then proceed to the Druids’ Circle for the cape ceremony.

After this I’m not sure. I’ll take a poll at the actual place to see what people want to do. My house isn’t exactly spectacular, so if someone wants to let us use your house shoot me a pm on the forums here. I will be moving mine to Taverley for the day just in case we don’t get the use of one.

Reply in this forum topic.
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Grassy. To help stimulate the grass outside to turn green.

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It’s been almost a whole two months since I’ve last posted here. You could say it’s been due to a lack of things to post, but that’s not entirely the case. I’ve had a few ideas but never really got around to posting them. Don’t expect me to start being like Brad and posting about things I see on TV or on the way home. I am tempted to either revive this blog or give it a proper funeral. The latter I don’t think people would appreciate and it’s something that would have to be dealt with by creating an archive of all the content here. Over the past few years this has sorta ended up as a place where if I find something online it’d go here. A very small percentage of the posts are opinion based.

Over the past few months I’ve been tempted to just create a Tumblelog. Something simpler and that doesn’t expect full length posts such as the one you are reading now. The way I see it is that it would be a perfect solution. I create a static archive of this incarnation of The Daily Bits and then move to a Tumblelog. The only thing that’s preventing me from using Tumblr is the fact that it would not be hosted on the RSBandB server. This ultimately means a lack of control and the inability to fine tune things. The logical choice is to set one up here which shouldn’t be too hard… The beauty of that is I’d be able to do full posts as well if I decide to.

Anyways so thats what’s happening here.

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I came across this today:

European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year-phase-in plan that would become known as ‘Euro-English’.

In the first year, ’s’ will replace the soft ‘c’. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy.

The hard ‘c’ will be dropped in favour of ‘k’. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome ‘ph’ will be replaced with ‘f’. This will make words like fotograh 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent ‘e’ in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing ‘th’ with ‘z’ and ‘w’ with ‘v’.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary ‘o’ kan be dropd from vords kontaining ‘ou’ and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl rit n styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fiz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

Zats al for today.

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The other day I decided it was time to take another look at Firefox Beta 3. It’s improved somewhat since Beta 1. The most notable change is the new Mac OS Theme.

There are still a few rough edges such as the speed of the javascript and flash integration but I hope this will be smoothed over in the release candidates and final version. The address bar and bookmarks system is greatly improved so that’s a nice plus. If it were to ship in it’s current state I would not be able to use it. For a more complete review head over to Ars Technica (the Windows look is horrid).On a side note I’m waiting for version 3.1 of Safari which will have the new faster version of WebKit.

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Some of you may remember a long time ago I posted a Flashy Friday made from exclusive Windows 2K sounds. This is something similar but done much better.

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Edit:

Mac version posted here: http://forums.rsbandb.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=63919

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PS: New theme is in the works.

As some of you may have noticed I ran a little experiment yesterday. Basically what I did was disabled the blog and set up a hit counter for 24 hours to see how many people come to shane.rsbandb.com directly. About 490 people came to the page in 24 hours. Now my reasoning…

Over the past month or so (since late November-ish) I have been having problems finding new content, flashy fridays, and the like. I could write at nauseum about programming ideas such as just why exactly if you think your data distribution might be close to sorted it is better to use merge sort rather than quick sort. I come across lots of links, videos, and pictures. A tumblelog would be more suited to this, however for some reason using Tumblr or this blog for it doesn’t seem right. The only reason I wouldn’t use Tumblr is because it doesn’t allow me to have my content on this server which is important to me.

Another aspect is RuneWire. Before I used this blog for Runescape postings. A good chunk of those are on RuneWire now. I havn’t made any decisions yet but finding something to post about in full length (like this post) is getting harder. Thus pardon the language but it’s becoming a pain in the ass to update.

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This one is about 24 hours late but it’s a rather interesting game. It reminds me of playing marbles when I was younger. Basically you start out with a set of balls and you have to use your balls to knock the other players off the board. It’s quite addicting and easy to get the hang of. you can play it here.

I also have half the mind to take this blog, archive the posts, and start fresh with a nice tumblelog. I really can’t think of anything to post about, if I do I end up being too lazy ot post it -.-… Anyways enjoy!

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Here are some predictions for 2008. It’s not exactly a huge list but it’s enough to get started. They are tech based for the most part so here we go:

1. DRM will die. With 3 of 4 major music labels selling music without DRM on Amazon it’s only a matter of time.
2. In concert with Amazon selling DRM free music, iTunes will lose some marketshare. They won’t slip to second but they will lose some.
3. Microsoft somehow, someway, will be slapped with another anti-trust lawsuit.
4. We will start to see smallish web 2.0 companies being acquired by large companies in order to compete with one another. Similar to what happened when Google bought DoubleClick (Microsoft bought some unknown advertising company)
5. Firefox’s marketshare will continue to increase.

There are some quick predictions for 2008. We’ll revisit this post next year

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PS: Also take a look at the 2007 Google Zeitgeist.

Here’s a little bit of a list of some posts from this year. I’ve selected a post from each month and 5 videos in total so here they are:

Posts

• The Wow Starts Now! – Horrible marketing campaign by Microsoft for Windows Vista. This was the only TV campaign to my knowledge this year and from the looks of it, it didn’t work.
• MacBreak Weekly Ukulele OutTake – Enough said. Listen to the clip.
• I got a mac.
• The Pains of Vista – The comic illustrates the point quite effectively. Vista is painful. 12 months after release and it is still very painful to the point that I have not installed it yet.
• My Collection of Videos – These feature a few videos that I have made. I still havn’t had time to handle the Farming footage but it’s up, just nothing special to it. I’ll probably wait until the next set of 99’s is done
• The RSBandB Goal Signature and Signature Engine Overhaul – This was a major upgrade on RSBandB this year. It allowed for easier creation of goal signatures. The goal sigs are great, thanks to the design work of Mushroom Queen.
• The Formalization of Project Green – Project Green was the goal for raising my Farming to 99. It was a long extensive project but it was never a matter of if… but more so when.
• First Release of RuneWire. – RuneWire will be having another feature release soon. More to come i the new year.
• 99 Farming Achieved – After 2 years, 2 months, and 12 days I finally reached 99 Farming.
• Telescopes Find Signs of an Earth-like planet 20 light years away
• Apple Constantly Came Out With New Mac vs. PC ads.
• And finally… Jagex kills RWIT and The Wilderness

Now some videos in no particular order…

• Ice Wreaks Havoc In Oregon
• The Japanese Car The Germans Wish They Made
• Internet People
• Student’s iPod Touch ad That Is Used By Apple
• Finally… some good old fashion mud slinging towards the Canadian Liberal party EDIT: It appears the Liberal ad was removed. You can see it here at the Conservative Party of Canada website.

That’s all for 2007, I’ll be back tomorrow with some predictions.

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This is the final Flashy Friday of 2007. I’ve had quite a few interesting ones this year. I’m not going to make a list of them because that would serve no one’s use. I just invite you to take a look at the Flashy Friday tag. This is a Jib Jab review of 2007 so enjoy.
Read the rest of this entry »

I was in a video last night on Runescape. The guy said he was filming so I just jumped in. The guy was nice enough to credit me.

Quality is a bit low… but oh well.

Well today is Christmas as I’m sure you all know. Merry Christmas at that, might as well seeing as there’s only 3 minutes left until December 26th. Anyways today I got a Xbox 360 along with Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. The games are great, the xbox is great but there’s one tiny thing… I am horrible at both. I’m not sure whether it’s the fact that I’ve always played PC games and am having a hard time getting used to the console and the controller or they are just plain different than good ole’ Counter Strike Source. Anyways that’s all for today.

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This is the annual Christmas eve post that we’ve all come to expect! Basically I’ve got a few gifts for you all today:

First off is a new desktop that I have recently set. It’s a nice wintery theme, should do me until February.

Second of all is a Chirstmas comic that’s pretty much how most people I know are:

This is a comic from xkcd. I got a good laugh out of it.

Finally a video I came across a couple weeks ago of a made up Apple commercial with the Old Navy style. Most people I showed it to did not see why it was funny but for some reason when I watched it I got a good laugh out of it. You can view the movie here and a bit more of an explanation at gizmodo.

Anyways there’s your Christmas Daily Bits Everyone have a nice Christmas Eve and wonderful Christmas day! I’m off to a family gathering in little over an hour

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PS: Don’t forget to look up at the sky tonight to get a great view of Mars. It won’t be this close again until 2016.

I’ve finally taken the time to move this blog over to version 2.3. I can say that a new theme might be in the works over the next week or so. Realistically I want something that I can change around so that certain content will be only available in certain areas. For instances if I wanted to have RuneWire post my daily uppdates I’d want those going in another section to limit spam. I think I may have found it but I’m not sure. The other option is to stick with this theme and adjust it so only certain categories show up and make an entry point to another page.

But anyways… enjoy the taggedness.

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I’ve been saving this one since September. It didn’t seem right to post it then since it had an obvious winter theme. Basically launch the bunny rabbit type of thingy mabob and try to make it hit as many snowflakes as possible. Take a look at it here.

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I found myself laughing at 4AM after the mention of Hungry Hungry… yea… I’ll let you guys see

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Mars will be at its closest point to earth tonight, and will not be this close again until 2016. Forecasts for viewing mars in the sky for much of the midwest and eastern North America tonight indicate clear skies. Check it out tonight … look to the east!

I will certainly be going out to take a look. Tonight and other nights until it gets smaller!

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read more | digg story

This weekend as some of you may know we upgraded the forums to phpBB3. The new version is a significant improvement over the old clunky forum system. The old system was way out of date and needed to be fixed for a long time. Some features that I am happy about are integrated warning logs, integrated subforums, easy to add bbcode tags, and much more. The mod CP will take some time to get used to but overall it is an improvement. The forums are a lot faster than the old version and the conversion went fairly smoothly. There are a few tiny things that will get smoothed out in the coming days but overall great. Mike also did a speedy job of converting our old theme to work with the new software.

Along with the forum upgrade came PHP5. PHP5 is actually more exciting for me. It will enable us the ability in the future to develop more object oriented php code if we want. It also adds lots of new functions and built in capabilities. So overall the weekend was well spent… along with studying for my remaining 3 finals.

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Well here’s Flashy Friday. Early for once

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I figured I’d post my thoughts here rather than trying to get them in on the official forums. The official forums are so crowded now. I was not able to find any decent rants to take our minds off this update for this weeks show. I won’t be going into a detailed analysis but I’ll go through them and post my thoughts. I invite you to read the development diary article first.

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It has been decided that Brad and I will broadcast episodes 130 and 131 We’ll be doing this via RSBANDB’s team speak server. I invite you to join it by clicking here. The show will take place at 10PM GMT(3PM MST, 2PM PST, 5PM EST) on Thursday December 13.

It will be a listen only opportunity. We may however if possible open the mic later in the post-show if time permits. You can post your questions for this episode here.

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Clicky to make it larger.

Also on digg… Originally from http://www.ammahls.com/random/24food.gif

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This topic serves as a hub for information on our Christmas schedule including our usual selection of two special episodes. This year we have:
The Clip Show (my favourite annual event)
RSBANDBUpdate! Uncorked

The Schedule:
RSBANDBUpdate! 130 : December 14th (standard show)
RSBANDBUpdate! 131 : December 21st (standard show)
RSBANDBUpdate! 132 : December 24th (Uncorked)
RSBANDBUpdate! 133 : December 31st (Clip show)

Now here is where you come in…

Uncorked

This is a special edition of RSBANDBUpdate! with the RSBANDB admins (Mike, Jeff, Brad, and Myself). This will be an all questions episode. The questions will have good discussional value. Some examples of possible topics could include thoughts on homosexual marriage, the war in Iraq, aid and assistance to developing nations. A question that would be a bad example is “What is your favourite colour?” I think you get the idea…

Please post your questions in this topic.

Clip Show

This is the smattering of fun moments and bloopers from the past 365 days. I have some idea of what will show up, however, we would like your input. If you have clips that you liked please post them using the following format:

Episode Number:
Approximate Time Index:
Description of the Clip:

Please post your clip show ideas in this topic as well.

This topic will remain as a sticky and become globalized one week prior to the first recording.

Right now I am writing this entry from Windows Live Writer on a Windows XP virtual machine running under VMware fusion on OS X.  I can say so far that Windows Live Mail and Windows Live photo gallery will be deployed through my household on the next reformat cycle.  Windows Live Photo Gallery appears to be almost an exact copy of the software that ships with Windows Vista.   

Anyways that’s all for the test of Windows Live Writer

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