Some site updates..
You might find a minute or two here and there that this site is down for a couple of days. Don’t fear! I’m just working on a couple updates! I updated my blog software today and went through making some little tweaks here and there. I’ve created a separate tab for my iPhone apps. I’ll hopefully have a nice forum up and running pretty soon as well. It will be mostly for the iPhone apps, but anyone can jump in and have some fun if you want. Just thought I’d stop in and let you know I’ve got some updates coming to the site.
News and stuff..
After finding out that my free Joyent Facebook accelerator was going to expire in a week, i started acting fast.. I had to move Halo 3 Players from Joyent to my SliceHost slice (that also hosts this blog). Being a man strapped for cash, I really couldn’t afford the ‘upgrade’ offer that Joyent was offering. For a 512MB server, they wanted me to pay a $75 setup fee (to setup a server I’ve been using for a year now?) and then $75 a month on top of that. They had annual deals and even a ‘buy 1 year and get a 2nd for free’ deal for christmas, but again.. I’m broke. So I’m sticking with SliceHost and I think I’ll stick with them for all of my ‘cheap’ hosting needs. I’ve had a 512MB Slice on SliceHost for almost 2 years (?) now and it works fantastically.. And it’s about half as much as Joyent’s! Anyone who needs affordable hosting that’s awesome, check out SliceHost!
So the server move went well. Better than I thought it would. I actually rebuilt my Slice from scratch just so I could make sure it was clean and ready to serve up Halo 3 Players. It only took me most of a night to get all my web stuff back up and running and now I can just spend some spare time tweaking things.
What else is new? I’ve diving in, head first, into iPhone development. I’ve never really done anything with C, C++, Objective-C, Cocoa.. or anything really besides Ruby. So I’ve been cramming my brain with lots of new information and I think I’m doing quite well. I’d love to start developing games but I’m having a hard time finding a good ‘getting started’ book. I really need something that teaches the basic concepts behind efficient game programming, so if anyone knows of a good place for me to start, leave a comment or something. That would be great!
That’s all I got for now. I’m thinking of doing a nice blog post when I have some very general understanding of game programming to help anyone else who’s just starting out. Until then.. Have a great holiday and I’ll write more whenever I have something to write about! x=)
FinallyFast.com is laaame
Has anyone seen these really stupid commercials from FinallyFast.com? Anyone else find it a little strange that 2 out of the 3 “PC”’s used by the ‘annoyed’ “PC” users are an iMac and a MacBook? I just found that pretty hilarious. The acting is horendous as usual, but it just irks me to see the MacBook running Windows XP and the person using it having trouble ‘checking her email’.
Some personal stuff..
So.. since I don’t have a lot of exciting things to talk about as far as Ruby or web development goes at this moment in time, instead of leaving this place totally bare, I’ll update with some personal life things. This is going to mainly just be some rambling from me because I’m a little bit bored.Work is going well. The people I work with are really great and the job is fantastic. Anyone who lives in the chicago-land area really should do themselves a favor and head over to The Improv in Schaumburg and see a good comedy show. It’s fun times. Leave me a good tip, while your at it. x=)It’s been raining a lot for the last week. I like the rain, so I’m OK with it. Bring it on!I was told by a co-worker to watch the movie called The Secret, so I did. I have to say that I did believe in the power of attraction and stuff to an extent before ever hearing about The Secret (I guess there are books, and CD’s and the movie and whole shit load of other stuff and it’s getting to be pretty huge now a days) but watching the movie is really motivational. I’m testing it out on a few things and can currently say, for the little things I’m trying, it seems to work. I’ll update in a few months when I have more time to test x=)The Cubs are in first place all by their lonesome!! Go cubbies! The game was postponed due to rain today, which sucks. The game will probably be postponed again tomorrow because the rain isn’t out of the weather forcast for at least another 36 hours. So I’m going to be bored. Hopefully I can get some web work done. Maybe we’ll get lucky and have a nice 3 hour window starting around one in the afternoon where the rain either stops or is light enough to let them play. GO CUBS!I’ve been playing a bit more Guitar Hero 2 on the 360 lately. I’m finally to a stage where I feel like i can at least PASS most of the hard songs. I’m not getting much more than 3 stars on them, but I’m passing them. Once I get through them all, I’ll go back and 5 star them all just like I did with Medium. Practice makes perfect! x=)The macbook is great. I’m loving not having a loud (and slower) computer in my room that I can’t take with me. I packed that up the day after I got my macbook pro and haven’t looked back since. Now I don’t have to worry about turning this room into a permanent sauna because of the heat expelled from my old noisy contraption. I even installed windows with Boot Camp just in case I needed it, but haven’t really used it at all. I might try and add Ubuntu to the mix, but I haven’t done any research on how well that works. If your reading this, Liz, and you find out.. Clue me in. I’d love to know how it goes for you.I think that’s enough nonsense for one night. I’m going to listen to the rain and try to sleep. Good night, folks.
New macbook pro!
I’ve officially joined the ranks of the 97% of rails developers who develop on a mac. x=) It’s kind of an exciting time for me because this is my first mac and all. I got the low end macbook pro. Maybe in a year or 2, I’ll upgrade to a higher end model but for me, this works great! Anyone with tips or tricks or any advise for new comers to a mac, feel free to leave me a comment! More updates soon.
Busy busy…
So, for those who might not know. This new job I got is the first ‘real’ job I think I’ve had in a while. At least the first real job I actually make a little bit of money doing. Because of this abundance of money and the fact that I haven’t bought myself anything really nice in at least 3 years, I went all out and bought myself a new 32” LCD HDTV (a Samsung.. it’s nice..) and an xbox 360. I’m quite pleased with my new purchases and when I have a few minutes to spare, I’ve been ‘shredding’ out some guitar hero tracks. It’s a blast. On the Ruby circuit, a whole lot hasn’t changed. I’m going to slowly start to allocate a little bit more time to Ruby and Rails over the new few weeks. I just feel like there’s not enough hours in the day! Oh well. Just thought I’d stop by to update again with some nonsense.
An update.
Not much new going on. The new job is taking up a lot of time away from me but I’m finally getting settled to a point where I can get started on ruby work and other stuff. Um. I don’t really know what to say here. I just figured I haven’t updated in a little while, so why the hell not. I’ll waste your time with this nonsensical babble for a while.
A couple fixes.. Some news..
I finally went ahead and whipped up a quick hack for mephisto to allow me to keep my twitter status and last.fm status updated without killing mephisto’s great caching features. Previously, I was using Dan Webb’s lastfm plugin for mephisto, and my recent modification to the same plugin to make it fetch twitter information instead of lastfm information. This works, to a degree, but the problem comes from the fact that this plugin uses a liquid tag that embeds the xml information on the page. What this means, is that mephisto will cache the page with the current status or lastfm list and recent updates won’t appear until the cache gets flushed. I know there’s a ‘setting’ in dan webb’s plugin that allows you to change the time in which mephisto will auto flush the cache and try to update the page, but it never worked for me.
What I did was create an Ajax request at the bottom of the page that updates the twitter and lastfm information on the fly. This means that the page that mephisto caches will always stay the same. The updates to twitter and lastfm will happen behind the scenes and update the page w/ javascript. Sucks for those of you who don’t have javascript enabled, but works for me. x=)
I want to whip up a versatile plugin for mephisto with this functionality, but that might take a little bit of time for me to pull off correctly and all. I just started a new job serving at a comedy club in the area, so that’s going to take some of my time in the near future, but I promise that as soon as I get some time and figure out how I want to do it, I’ll get this out in a plugin form. It won’t be a plugin just for twitter and mephisto. I want to make it so you can parse any xml file and update any element on your page with that information on the fly so you can keep dynamic content on your site without killing the caches. Stay tuned for more info on this.
New look
Ya, I’ve only been using mephisto and the skittlish theme for 2 weeks or so, but I got bored with it already and found micro to be much more clean and simple. I took the evening to edit it to suit me and am pretty happy with the way things turned out. This one might stick for a little bit longer than 2 weeks. We’ll see, folks. x=)
Settled In..
I can finally say that I’m settled in here. I’ve gotten to a point where there’s not a whole lot I need to set up on the new server any more and I’ll be doing a lot more work w/ ruby on rails and linux in general. So post count will increase here in the very near future. Out of boredom, I wrote a new Ruby script that burns an audio CD from a directory of mp3 files. I’ll go ahead and post that here when I get home just for shits and giggles. Anyone who might be looking for a Rails developer for a project, get in touch. I wouldn’t mind some real work.
