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| Ronald M. Clifford |
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| Recent Posts |
| SVN turns 1000 |
| Cleaning Up Code |
| MSDN |
| Leaving CTG, Closing OSMusic.Net |
| Riding the Wave |
| XAML again? |
| LibWowHeroes 3.2.2 |
| An Experiment |
| Gate |
| LibWowArmory 0.2.1 beta |
| Friday, March 05, 2010 |
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SVN turns 1000 Posted: 5:22:00 PM 0 comments |
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Today, I made my 1,000th commit to my SVN server. It wasn't much of a change, reversing a commit that turned debugging on for one of my websites, but it's a milestone nonetheless. Building up to this, I did a lot of work with the applications and libraries that currently exist on the SVN. Here's a brief summary of what I've done recently:
For now, I will continue to focus on the Six Minutes website, as there are a lot of guild issues that require me to do a lot of coding. After that, however, Gate will be the focus, as I want to get a copy of that up and running before Google shuts down Blogger FTP on May 1st. Granted, I have a backup plan if I don't succeed in that goal, but I'm hoping I can get something quick done by then. Labels: Coding |
| Thursday, February 18, 2010 |
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Cleaning Up Code Posted: 5:54:00 PM 0 comments |
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I took some time today to update some libraries in my source code, which is affecting a bunch of my projects. Cent, which runs off of CrystalSpace, is getting a makeover of sorts, as I am switching it over from the traditional CrystalSpace build process of linked libs and using DLLs instead. The process is quite nontrivial, as I am finding that I have to modify the Visual Studio solutions a bit to get things working as I need them to. The biggest issue I'm coming across is trying to get the plugins into the same directory as Cent.exe so that I don't have to carry around a CSPath environment variable. I thought just adding it as a reference would copy it over, but it's not. I'm sure I can resolve this, but I just ran out of time today. The other fun makeover I'll need to do involves Constellation, my Planarity clone. It runs off SDL, which, along with a slew of other libraries, are in a bunch of directories outside of my SVN directory. I'm going to try to get those all together and get a functional build of both Cent and Constellation before I continue working on any of the code in there. Once I'm done, it's back to Six Minutes. I have a LOT of cool stuff planned over there, and a lot of coding to do to get it done. With some extra spare time the last week or so, I'm trying to knock out things that I've been wanting to do for a while but just haven't had the chance. We'll see how far this goes. Labels: Coding |
| Monday, February 01, 2010 |
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MSDN Posted: 1:53:00 PM 0 comments |
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Last week, I finally got a hold of my own MSDN Subscription (no, you can't have any software). So far I've setup Successor on Windows 2008 as the new domain controller and my primary computer, Ox, is running Windows 7. There were a few install woes with my Windows 7 that were resolved after disconnecting all other drives, but once I got past that it was pretty easy. Soon Understudy will be on Windows 2008 as well, but there is going to have to be a lot of planning going into that. Understudy is my web server, SQL server, SVN server and mail forwarder, among other things. I plan on moving SQL to Successor, replacing 602 Lan Suite with something to forward my mail to GMail, and redoing the web server as IIS 7. Then I start playing with the development tools. Expression Studio 3 is something I want to dive into and see what I can do with, and of course Visual Studio 2010 is around the corner, with the beta already out. There's a lot of fun stuff for me to play with, should keep me fairly occupied for a while. Labels: Servers |
| Monday, November 30, 2009 |
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Leaving CTG, Closing OSMusic.Net Posted: 4:19:00 PM 0 comments |
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Just a quick note that I've tendered my resignation at CTG and am going to be closing OSMusic.Net soon. I just can't dedicate myself to music websites anymore due to lack of time and motivation. Some would say it's for the best. As for OSMusic.Net, I'm mulling over offering refunds to those who did try to keep the site going with credits and stuff. I will keep an archive of the songs on OSMusic.Net similar to the archive I keep of TiS1. I currently do not plan on creating an archive of TiS2. The Nightstalker is not going away. I am still a musician at heart and that will never change. I just hope that I someday will get the motivation to get back into creating music, but unfortunately I do not see that day coming any time soon. Labels: Music |
| Wednesday, November 11, 2009 |
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Riding the Wave Posted: 2:42:00 PM 1 comments |
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Last night I had a surprise waiting for me in my inbox: a Google Wave invitation! I spent the majority of last night playing in various multiplayer Sudoku waves and checking out many of the other public waves available. The implementation is very nice. I haven't done a whole lot so far, but this post here is my first attempt at using Bloggy, the robot that publishes stuff to your blog. [ed: It failed. Bloggy's not working yet.] There's also Tweety for Twitter, and about half a gazillion more that I haven't even discovered yet. Having very few contacts makes it difficult for me to do anything productive here, but it's really neat to be able to check out the latest Google technology. And before you ask, all my invitations are spoken for. Sorry! Labels: Software |
| Saturday, October 24, 2009 |
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XAML again? Posted: 4:46:00 PM 0 comments |
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Back in January of last year, I started work on the Six Minutes To Release website using Silverlight. It... didn't go so well. People couldn't use it on Macs, and there were other fugly things about it I didn't like. I ended up abandoning the project and coding it in straight ASP.Net. Turns out that the XAML experience I got from working on it the first time through the SMTR website came in handy. The Rawr project is using Silverlight for its next major release, Rawr 3. Having taken on the protection paladin module, I was able to write a needed piece for that module to work in Rawr 3 in about 3 days on and off. Of course, the stumbling of not having touched it in nearly 2 years took me some time to get past, but once I did it was smooth sailing. There's a few things I don't like about it, though. Rawr is going to release a Silverlight web release and a WPF application release. The problem with the two releases is that the XAML used in each is not necessarily compatible with each other in all cases. This results in being unable to use certain features, such as StringFormatting. We also have to use a cheap preprocessing approach to be able to compile the same XAML file in both places. Is it me, or could Microsoft have done a better job of streamlining the two versions? Why even have two versions of XAML? It seems like a lot of extra work for similar functionality that could be done all in one place. In any case, I've put a lot on my plate, and I've devoted this weekend to getting it out. Up next, SMTR's new raid performance reporting, which is almost done. Should be fun. Labels: Coding |
| Sunday, October 11, 2009 |
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LibWowHeroes 3.2.2 Posted: 4:25:00 AM 0 comments |
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It appears I'm amassing a nice amount of .Net libraries for World of Warcraft. My latest offering is for WoW Heroes, and is a .Net library for accessing their XML files. It's called, predictably, LibWowHeroes. Yeah, sorry for not being original, but at least you know what to expect! Unlike my other libraries, this is a full release. With it you can query WoW Heroes for a guild and return lots of WoW Heroes-specific data from it. Unfortunately, I don't have manual character updates working yet, but that will be something I will work on soon. And WoW Heroes data will be coming to Six Minutes To Release very soon. Labels: Coding |
| Friday, October 02, 2009 |
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An Experiment Posted: 5:53:00 PM 0 comments |
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Six Minutes To Release seems to be my favorite testing grounds for experimental code lately. Fortunately, the RSS experiment was a success. This one involves moving the ViewState off of the HTML page and on to the database. Some of the ViewStates were getting huge, even when I'd try to manage the size of the ViewState. So I decided to take that out of the HTML to slim some pages down. So far it seems to be working, but it hasn't been up for too long. This caused me to rethink my ASP.Net model, and I ended up putting data that I usually store in a separate class, such as login information, into the class that inherits System.Web.UI.Page. Makes it much cleaner in my opinion, as I don't have to store references to Response, Request, and Server. So we'll see how this goes. This is all based on an idea I got for Gate, and if it goes well I'll end up using it in Gate as well. Should be fun. Labels: Coding |
| Monday, September 21, 2009 |
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Gate Posted: 1:39:00 AM 0 comments |
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In a recent post, I mentioned that I was combining roncli.com, my projects site, and this blog into one website. Well, work on it has begun, and it's called Gate. The name Gate is actually short for Aggregate, which I will somehow work into the main theme. Gate itself aims to be an open source, modular project. The first three modules will be a wiki, a Blogger-supported blog, and a project management module. I've been working on the SQL Server database setup the last week and a half or so and have it just about completed. Now I gotta write the repair script, which is what happens when installation goes wrong. It's been pretty fun, as I've been using jQuery and jQuery UI for the interface, allowing for the installation to be robust and user friendly. The challenge is going to be figuring out how I want to do the modules. There are two problems to solve here. First, I need to figure out how to handle database usage between the modules and the core application. I'm using LINQ to SQL to build the data structures and synchronizing them with SMO, so theoretically the modules could use a separate LINQ to SQL file for the same database, but that might not be very optimal. Second, I need to figure out if I am going to be able to just drag and drop modules into the /bin directory or if I'm going to have to compile it into the main website. The design strategy is to keep things simple for the user to install, so it would be nice if I didn't have to recompile things for every module. I know how to do plugins for desktop applications, as I have in Solar, a TCP/IP text processing engine that I've written that allows users to write their own plugins to process the text however they want to. Would it work for websites, or even make sense for them? That is the challenge ahead of me. The nice part of it, like I said, is that it's open source. I'm doing this mostly for myself, and if others can get good use out of it, that's great. And if I can get others to help out with the code, that's even better. But until I have a functional version, I'm pretty much just going to write the core module plus the wiki, blog, and projects modules myself. Once the new roncli.com is online, then I'll look into releasing Gate as its own project. Labels: Coding |
| Tuesday, September 08, 2009 |
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LibWowArmory 0.2.1 beta Posted: 4:35:00 PM 0 comments |
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Blizzard decided in the latest World of Warcraft patch to add items that are only usable by one of the factions while providing an item with exact stats but different looks to the other faction. LibWowArmory, my VB.Net Armory parser, has picked up on this, and thus version 0.2.1 is released. Labels: Coding |