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| Ronald M. Clifford |
| Houston, Texas, United States |
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| Friday, August 13, 2010 |
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Social Listening Posted: 3:08:00 PM 0 comments |
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I've finally jumped on board the social networking of music. Yeah, yeah, I'm late to the game, but until now, I've never had a really convenient way to listen to stuff I want to listen to, wherever and whenever I want to. That is, until now. Grooveshark has some nifty features and is really easy to use, so I setup an account on there. I also have set it up to scrobble to my new Last.fm account as well. You can find me on Last at http://www.last.fm/user/roncli, and on Grooveshark at http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/user/roncli/3550034. |
| Friday, July 09, 2010 |
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Revisiting LibWowArmory Posted: 4:03:00 PM 0 comments |
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The biggest thing I dislike about the World of Warcraft Armory is the fact that it throttles requests to 120 a minute. Of course, I understand why it does this, as it must prevent getting hit with so many requests so fast that it essentially gets DOS'd. This means, instead of bitching about the limit, instead I need to find an elegant solution to avoid hitting the Armory more than 120 times per minute with LibWowArmory. There are several problems that I must tackle in order to implement this. Firstly, LibWowArmory is a library, which means I can have multiple calls to the Armory coming from multiple places. For instance, my web server calls the Armory from both the website and a nightly maintenance application. I need to find a way to centralize management of the number of calls the application is taking per minute. Second, I can't block a webpage when a call to the Armory is queued, but I can block the maintenance program. I need to develop a queuing mechanism for both scenarios. Something elegant and AJAXish for webpages, and something else for client apps. The need for this has come up because I'm on the verge of adding GearScores to the Six Minutes To Release website, and the average character GearScore creates over 15 calls to the Armory, one for the character and one for each item. Requests absolutely have to be throttled, or I'm going to run over the 120 requests per minute fast. I'm hoping to get this done this weekend so that I can release it along with some bug fixes that were introduced with the Visual Studio 2010 conversion. Eventually, the library will go to .NET 4.0 as well, but I'm not going to do that until all of my libraries, websites, and applications are on the same page. Labels: Coding |
| Friday, June 18, 2010 |
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Late night coding, how I miss thee Posted: 3:06:00 AM 0 comments |
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Now playing: Muse - Uprising (Album Version) (5:06) (Wow, haven't used that line in a while.) "Get some sleep," said Kathy as she left for work earlier this evening. Yeah, right. When I get on a roll, it takes a lot more than a recommendation of sleep get me to hop off. Tonight I was determined to get back into the Six Minutes To Release project and fix it up so that it works with my changes to the LibWowArmory project. Well, that I did, and then some. The website doesn't compile just yet, but all of the associated libraries do. Also, everything is updated for Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net Framework 3.5 except for one project, which I will tackle tomorrow. The reason the website doesn't compile is because I decided tonight to get rid of the Ajax Control Toolkit in favor of JQuery UI controls. The reason for this is because the Ajax Control Toolkit has some kind of minification MSBuildTask. That's great for people who don't already use minification, but I've gone so far as to code my own minification (plus combination, compression, and caching) library. It annoys me that I have to install something extra just to get code to run. So, Ajax Control Toolkit is out. The only controls I was using was a calendar and dialog popup, both of which is provided in the stock jQuery UI release. I've been wanting to get away from Microsoft's Ajax for the jQuery (even Microsoft uses jQuery) because of the ease of use of jQuery and simplistic and low bandwidth Ajax calls compared to Microsoft's chunky code. This is certainly a good first step towards that. Yup, I'm in full code monkey mode, and far be it for sleep to interrupt me for any longer than it has to. Labels: Coding |
| Monday, June 14, 2010 |
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"Eye" Yi Yi Posted: 6:28:00 PM 0 comments |
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So it was two nights before my 33rd birthday. I was up late, tinkering with some things in Caesary, when I noticed something odd. As my eyes wandered around the web page, there were various letters coming in and out of my right eye's vision. Little tiny spots obscured my vision. It was late, but I figured I was just a bit too tired, so I went to bed, thinking it would be gone the next day. Nope. I got to work and noticed them again immediately. It scared me enough to see an eye doctor the following week. What they found was a little unnerving. Vitreous detachment is a rare event for people under the age of 40, and in extreme cases can lead to retinal detachment, which can only be repaired with surgery. Fortunately, that is very low chance, and the fact that I still have 20/20 vision in my right eye gives me a measure of relief. The process can take anywhere from 6 to 12 weeks to complete, so apparently there's a good chance that I'm going to be in for a visual show before all is said and done. For now, there's nothing good that can come of worrying about what might happen, so it's still business as usual. But I must say, becoming a one-eyed pirate does have some appeal to it. Yarrrrrr. Labels: Miscellaneous |
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LibWowArmory 0.3 beta Posted: 6:17:00 PM 0 comments |
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Well, it took me a lot longer than planned, but Visual Studio 2010 came with so many neat features, I had to convert LibWowArmory over and use them all. And when I'm on a roll, I can't stop. Not only did I convert the project to VS2010, I also took the time to add three brand new classes to the mix. AchievementStrings is a class that returns strings of achievements and achievement categories, and is required by the new CharacterFeed class. The CharacterFeed class returns a list of events such as achievements and achievement criteria completed, bosses killed, and loot won. But the grand opening of ItemTooltip is the one I'm most excited about. Thanks to Lukan Schwigtenberg, I was able to integrate all of the data that makes a WoW tooltip a WoW tooltip. There is a lot of data that you can get about an item now, and it will be interesting to see if it can be put to good use. This release completes all of the character and item data you can get from the Armory. I also plan on working on guild, arena, and auction house data in the future, although I don't know when I'll get to it. Besides, I have a ton of other projects to upgrade. Fun times! Labels: Coding |
| Monday, April 19, 2010 |
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Visual Studio 2010 Posted: 4:40:00 PM 0 comments |
I've got Visual Studio 2010 up and running both at work and at home, and so far it's been pretty smooth. A few things that I ran across that I don't particularly care for, but have made a workaround for:
I've begun working on getting all of my code into Visual Studio 2010, although the C++ projects are going to prove a little more painful, possibly more so than they are worth. Cent and Constellation may have to remain on 2008 until I can figure out a way to get them working again. But so far, 2010 kicks ass. Code Analysis is fun to play with, and reducing all my VB.Net properties to one line is just delicious. I'm not going to go to the .Net 4.0 Framework just yet, although that is indeed the next logical step, and with luck it will come possibly next week. Labels: Coding |
| 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 |