roncli.com blog

I came across this old post by Scott Hanselman via Twitter today that got me thinking. The jist of his post boils down to the fact that no matter what level of success we achieve in our lives, we all feel like phonies because there is something that is out of reach, or something in our lives that is slipping away, or something that we started that ended up being a failure.

I asked myself if I felt like a phony, and realized that for me the answer was "not anymore". So I decided to respond to Scott's Google+ thread on the subject with this:

Some years ago, I felt like a phony. So, I decided that I was going to start cleaning up all of my projects and make a good deal of significant progress on them. All of them. No matter how slow the progress, I thought to myself that if I could make some progress, I wouldn't be a phony.

I actually finished a few of those projects. But as the weeks went by, I realized something... I hated much of what I was doing. I didn't hate coding them, I hated the ideas themselves. It didn't take me long to realize that a lot of these projects that I had started were projects I simply didn't care about anymore.

When I realized this, I also realized that I wasn't really a phony. I had started so many of these projects based on a small bit of interest I had on them at the time, but deep down I didn't really care about them. Things that sounded like a good idea got a good start, but then interest waned and the projects were abandoned.

Today, these projects still exist somewhere, but I don't feel like a phony for starting them anymore. Instead, I decided to narrow my focus into the projects that I care most about. I stopped feeling like those projects that I started but never finished were my children.

It's a matter of pride and learning that too much pride is a bad thing. It's a matter of identifying what's really important to you and cutting out the things in your life that aren't. For me, my real interests lie in making music, staying on the bleeding edge of web technologies, entertaining myself with immersive games, and staying connected with those that I love. Once I realized this, it changed how I perceived everything that I do, and it made me a whole lot happer about the things I choose to do with my life.

The jist of my post is that everything in life changes. What was important to me five years ago may not be important to me anymore. Even my four primary interests today - music, coding, gaming, and life - may eventually change. And when they do, I hope that I'm strong enough and smart enough to recognize this and make the appropriate changes in my life to match them.

Labels: Editorials

Monday, December 19, 2011

LibWowAPI 1.0.2
Posted: 2:45:00 PM 0 comments

So leave it to Blizzard. After months of no updates and me procrastinating in releasing an updated version of the API, it took them only 24 hours to add a new recipe lookup.

Well, I'm not procrastinating this time. Check out LibWowAPI in all of its 1.0.2 glory, with a shiny new RecipeLookup class.

Labels: Coding

Sunday, December 18, 2011

jQuery-Default-Button 1.2
Posted: 1:29:00 AM 0 comments

I have committed version 1.2 of my jQuery Default Button plugin to Github just now. This update addresses two issues.

First, I wasn't returning the object, meaning you couldn't do jQuery style chaining with it. Now you can.

The second issue was more obscure, and I probably spent about 2 hours trying to figure this out on a project I've been working on. I am also using the jQuery Tiny Watermark plugin which displays a watermark in an input field when it doesn't have focus. The problem I was running into was that fields that used this watermark would stop responding to the enter key after a while.

It took me a while to figure out the problem. The watermark works by replacing the input boxes every time focus is gained or lost, and every time you replace the input box, it loses its events.

The solution was to let the event bubble up to the containing DIV, check to see if the element causing the event was an INPUT element, and then firing the click event on the target element. Not only does this resolve my problem, but it has the added benefit of using less memory because there's one event handler per form, not one event handler per INPUT on the form.

Labels: Coding

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

An excuse
Posted: 11:57:00 AM 0 comments

This is the 400th post I've published to this blog since starting it almost 7 years ago. If you told me back in 2005 that I'd make this many posts before the blog became yet another side project I'd stop working on, I'd probably not believe it.

Anyway, the purpose for this post isn't to talk about this being the 400th post, it's about the excuse I'm making to write this. Which is, namely, this:

No, not the Chick-Fil-A sweet tea glass. I'm talking about my new 11" MacBook Air, appropriately named DarkSide.

I've been wanting to get a Mac for a while, but never really knew if I wanted a laptop or a desktop. Well, truth be told, I have no more room for another desktop, so the laptop was a slam dunk.

I got it at the beginning of December, and since then I think I've used this thing more than I've used any of my other iDevices. I moved my PHP/MySQL development off of Ox, my main desktop computer, onto this thing and haven't looked back. PHPStrom works just as well on this thing, and being able to use Macports to install Apache, PHP, and MySQL was a breeze.

Despite being a tiny thing - this is the smallest laptop I've owned - this thing's got all the power I need. RockMelt installed and picked up my settings from my Windows machines seemlessly, Grooveshark still plays all the music I like, and I even moved my Ventrilo client off of my web server and on to this thing.

DarkSide came with GarageBand, which piques my inner musician's interest, and getting an early Christmas present of a KeyStudio 49 certainly helps. I've already rearranged some of the spare room to have a little music space away from the rest of the noisy computers and servers, and at some point I'd love to get Reason with Balance to get into a familiar music editing environment.

On top of that, I can unplug this and use it anywhere with a wireless connection. Now, I've had Windows laptops in the past, and I've not even touched them unless we're going on long trips. This thing is almost a companion, I take it just about everywhere, and I use it when I do take it.

The only down side is that there is no real .NET development environment for the Mac, which means that for most of my personal projects I still have to sit at the desktop. I'd love to remedy that at some point, but that may not even be possible. If I had that, though, I wouldn't need to sit at my desktop ever again. Except to play WoW and Diablo III. The D3 Beta's awesome, by the way.

I've even thought about using DarkSide to expand this blog to include some video blogging every once in a while. We'll see how that works out. In any case, I think DarkSide works out as a pretty good excuse to go with post number 400.

Labels: Miscellaneous

LibWowAPI 1.0.1 - Now on Github!
Posted: 11:25:00 AM 0 comments

Today, I released LibWowAPI on Github as part of my continuing effort to move my open source projects off of the roncli.com SVN and on to Github.

With this move, I upgraded the library to version 1.0.1. There are a ton of changes packed into this little version, so many that I debated upping the minor version number instead of the revision number, but in the end I didn't feel that the library's underlying logic changed significantly enough to warrant it.

The biggest change is the removal of the Json.NET dependency. While I like the simplicity of the Json.NET library and its ability to easily manipulate data using LINQ, the overhead was too much for a public project like LibWowAPI, so I switched to using System.Runtime.Serialization.Json instead. This gives the library the advantage of now being self-contained without having to worry about adding dependencies. I will continue to use Json.NET in some of my personal projects, but there is no need for me to include it with this library.

I've also updated the library with many of the changes to the Blizzard WoW API over the past 4 months, including an equipped item's transmogrified property, pet talents, and Portuguese language support.

Several bugs have been fixed as well, removing some annoying errors that occur when Blizzard throws a 500. The IsModifiedSince stuff works now as well, no longer crashing when something hasn't been modified.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the state of the library. My only wish is that I could have done this in stages, as some of the API data is a couple of months old. Unfortunately, my free time has been limited by a much bigger project, so the fact that I was able to put this out at all is a big win.

Labels: Coding

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

An experiment in GitHub
Posted: 5:08:00 PM 0 comments

Just a small note that I'm beginning porting some of my projects over to GitHub, starting with the smallest ones first. Such as my jQuery Default Button plugin, now on version 1.1.

The goal is to get my open source stuff out in the open, hopefully getting it some more visibility. I know that default button functionality is one that many try to conquer, and having it sit doing nothing on my web server isn't exactly a great way to get my code out there in the open.

Labels: Coding

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

#OccupyGregStreet
Posted: 1:58:00 PM 0 comments

Labels: Games

Thursday, October 06, 2011

roncli's Dumbass Award
Posted: 9:41:00 AM 0 comments

Today, the award goes to Westboro Baptist Church.

Well done on bashing the founder of Apple using an Apple product.

Labels: Silliness

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Cheevos FTW!
Posted: 2:56:00 PM 0 comments

While I was working on converting LibWowAPI to use the new Blizzard WoW API, I came up with an idea that, I think, is pretty good.

Cheevos FTW! is a new website that I've created that allows a World of Warcraft player to figure out what achievements to shoot for next. It works by crawling through the WoW API, reading a character's achievements, guilds, and arena teams. The achievements are stored in a database while guilds and arena teams look for more characters to crawl. Guild achievements are similarly stored. Every so often, the achievements are analyzed and sorted by how many players have accomplished the achievement.

When a player enters their realm and character name into the website, it takes the sorted achievements and removes all of the achievements the character has accomplished, and spits out the top 10 remaining achievements from the sorted list. This effectively gives a list of recommended achievements the character should go for next, based on what achievements other characters have already done. The same happens for the guild's achievements.

The site is a very simple concept, but is very data heavy. Already, before the site even has gone live, I've crawled over 70,000 players who have accomplished over 13,000,000 achievements! Within a couple days, this database will have more records than my logs site.

This was a fun, quick site to put together. I have no idea how big it will get, but it will be fun to see how it gets used by the WoW community.

Labels: Games

Saturday, August 27, 2011

LibWowAPI 1.0
Posted: 6:47:00 PM 0 comments

It's finally all grown up!

LibWowAPI, my .NET library for accessing the Blizzard WoW API, has finally been completed, and version 1.0 has been released. It is feature-complete, meaning that everything that is available from the API is available in my library.

I've also spent the better part of the last week painstakingly documenting every last class, method, and property, so that developers will have an easy time figuring out how to use the library.

If you're a .NET developer and interested in playing around with the Blizzard WoW API, be sure to check out LibWowAPI.

Labels: Coding