The Daily Bits

Well yea… I have this assignment due on Monday and it’s slowly shaping into something…

New Shot…

For anyone wondering, it will be an image viewer made in Java with Swing

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20 years ago today Star Trek The Next Generation appears. I was 6 months old. According to sources I watched it while sitting with my dad on his lap.

So here’s a blast from the past…

Man I wish I was around to see this. One day it will happen again

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Last week Mike showed me a program called Stellarium. Stellarium lets you take a look at the sky for your desired location. All you really need are the latitude and longitude of your position. Once those are inputting it will show you what is in the sky. This is a perfect application for seeing what will be coming up in the next few hours. Especially with it’s ability to speed up time.

The video is small, so why not just go try out the program for yourself

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Today at the ‘99 Madness Party’ I finally got 99 Farming. I videoed pretty much everything that was important. You can expect that to be up later in the week. Today was the best day for me on Runescape ever since I created my account. Here are the two pictures:

For anyone wondering about my method: 4 palm, 5 magic, and 1 calquat every day. In the end I protected the magics. This should come out to about 1.1M per day. So it’s sorta expensive

Anyways that’s that. Movie will be out later this week. Now to find a dragon woodcutting axe.

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“An animated tribute to the internet people of the world, wherever you may be.” Basically it goes through all of the known and famous web 2.0 people and internet people in general. Some of the mentioned people were Weird Al, Numa Numa, Leory Jenkins, and Ask a Ninja.

Definately worth watching.

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With the RSBandB Event where I will get 99 Farming coming up rather quickly I needed to find a good mac screencasting appllication.

There’s one out there called Snapz Pro X but it’s $69 for a full version with video capture. The trial also seemed a little hard to use. Luckily I found iShowU.

iShowU is well worth the small $20 payment. There is a huge list of codecs to select from. It also can record audio from the system or record your own narration. What makes it really great is the support for the H.264 codec. I was able to make two decent looking movies using the ‘High’ option, I can’t even notice that they are compressed.

Demo 1 (Small screen, demoing eclipse and MSN.)
Demo 2 (Full screen scaled to 50% loading up RS in Safari.)

I think with this piece of software I’d be tempted to do all video recording on this machine even if I wanted to record a Windows application. Here’s the equation I see:
VMWare Fusion + CS:S + iShowU = A very good CS:S movie.

You can also talk about it on rsbandb.

Anyways… in the mean time it’ll be used for Sunday and maybe more RSBandB events.

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There was supposed to be another post in the works but I totally forgot what it was going to be about. I thought of it on Sunday night as I was going to bed… Anyways the title on this post “iWork != MS Office.”

Rougthly two weeks ago I installed the iWork ‘08 trial on the mac. It’s a great office suite and gets the job done. It just doesn’t feel right however to be using it seeing as I do most of my work in a Windows/Unix centric environment. The common document standard at my school is DOC. Sure you can export but I just like to be able to save out without doing any special exporting. It would be great if the new xml based document standard was widely adopted everywhere but it’s not. I’ve also come to learn my way around Office and iWork has significantly less features. Not to mention that I like the new and improved features and ease of use of office 2007. We were supposed to get a beta of Mac Office 2008 this summer but it has been pushed back to later this year/early next year.

So yea… back to my old PPC MS Office 2003

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Last night I sent Jeff a copy of my theme. He was nice enough to tweak the sidebar code so it’d work as intended. Now the only thing to manage is the link sizes seeing as things are floated around. So whenever I add a new link to the “blogroll” i’ll have to make sure it doesn’t screw up the floats. But ya… thanks Jeff.

Also if all else fails here’s a theme I was looking at. It’s sorta white… but there are no good black themes out there. If I was to move to this one I’d remove the header image and calendar.

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Thule Trail is a modern version of the classic Oregon Trail game. It may be from before your time but I spent extensive hours playing it during my computer classes. This game is modern with the exception that you can still hunt for food. I needed a quick setup so I set it up with Me, Mike, Brad, Jeff, and Creepeh. Sorry to anyone else on the mod staff… the car only holds 5.

Play it here. I spent about a good half hour playing!

Oh and this happened…

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Edit: Please post funny screenshots in the comments.

Ok… This blog is white once again. I seriously got tired of fucking around with that black theme trying to make it a fluid two column design. I’m really not sure about it anymore. So I’ve decided to go back to the classic

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I have been looking and searching. I can’t seem to find a way to make my side column content work with horizontal lists.

Example:
Categories
September 2007 August 2007 July 2007
June 2007 May 2007 April 2007

etc…

Anyways I want them to line up vertically. I’m really not sure what to do here…

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I’m on a wee bit of a break right now so I’ll try and be as concise as possible. As I’m sure some of you know you are able to retrieve stats of players from Runescape by use of the “lite hiscores.” When the lite hiscores were first released I considered it as one of the best things that Jagex ever did. Now I’m not so sure…

First off on the weekend we noticed a problem in which they changed the format of the output. It used to output -1,1,0 for rank, level, and xp respectively. Now today I find out that they are no longer giving us the level and xp of stats that are above 30 and not ranked. It would have been very nice to be informed about both of these changes via news update.

Anyways the moral of the story is… inform your users of critical changes to formatting of date.

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Here’s this weeks Flashy Friday… It’s a rather interesting game with a ball on a string.

Play.

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Well as some of you may know it’s that time of year… back to school. Yes unfortunately that comes for me tomorrow. So I figured I’d do a bit of a summary of what was accomplished in that time on Runescape and RSBandB.

I started off in May with 88 Farming, it is now level 97. I moved from 88 to 90 in May. I am roughly two weeks away from getting to 99. I also achieved 81 Herblore. Some other accomplishments of May were 80 cooking, 70 firemaking, getting my lederhosen back, and obtaining that oh so coveted lumberjack costume.

June was a quiet month on Runescape. In June I got 91 Farming. Not much else happened besides my 90 Hitpoints and Trekkie’s 99 attack. However in June we released the updated goal signatures and stat signatures on RSBandB. That was a major step for RSBandB as it made signature creation and management a whole lot easier.

July was opened up with 82 Herblore. Shortly after was 75 Firemaking. July brought 92 and 93 Farming. I also received my first Dragon drop which was Dragon platelegs from the metal dragons.

August was a very very busy month. I am very proud with my progress on Farming in August. I went from level 92 to level 97. I also tied up a loose end that was annoying me, I got 70 Thieving. I also got 91 Hitpoints and 92 Attack which brought me to 112 combat. I was also fortunate to receive an excellent clue scroll reward which helped to fund the last part of Project Green. August was a great month on RSBandB. RuneWire was released on August 25 into a private beta. Personally I’d expect the beta to expand sometime next week

I invite you to see all of my Runescape achievements since June 14th on the RSBandB highscores.

I will have details in the coming weeks on a new Runescape project that should be maintainable over the next few months.

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PS: I still have to fix this silly theme… Works fine in Firefox but messes up in IE.

You have have noticed that the design of this blog has changed. I was feeling cramped with the old layout. I converted it from a fixed width to a fluid design. With this also goes the digg news and del.icio.us stories. I have also made the entrys on the right hand side display horizontally to conserve page space. With this extra space I plan to put some widgets/badges. I’ll also be putting a RuneWire widget once that is up and running.

Please also note that all RS pictures will be uploaded to my RuneWire profile. You can also subscribe to the rss feed. I’m also looking into making a gallery page with all of the 400 odd shots I’ve taken in the last 3 years. That should be fun

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Edit: Turns out the sidebar is broken in ie -.- Reverted to original until I can fix this P.O.S.