roncli.com blog: January 2008

I have just finished up what was a relative breeze of coding, the Six Minutes To Release forums. My major stopping point was the fact that I didn't really want to have two instances of the paging control - the control that shows you the pages available in a list of, say, threads or posts - and I spent a real long time trying to figure out how to template it.

I fell quite short and decided that it was just going to be easier to put the control on the page twice. Not a big deal, but it would have been nice to be able to do things easier. I did learn a lot about control templates and such along the way, so it wasn't a total loss.

But everything else was smooth. There were annoying, bite-sized bugs that I had to squish, but that's normal with most code. I still contend that XAML is one of the easiest languages I've ever had to work with, and I've only been working with it for two months or so at the most.

Anyway, if you're a World of Warcraft nut, hop on over to the Six Minutes website and check us out. The site's starting to fill out!

Labels: Coding, Gaming, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft

Trax in Space playlists
Posted: 10:35:00 AM 0 comments

I figured out how to take TiS's playlist control and use it on your own webpages.

First of all, you need to know the playlist ID of the playlist you wish to use. Just open the playlist and look at the URL:

http://www.traxinspace.com/playlist/?t=view&i=321

See that number in bold? That's going to be your playlist ID.

Next, get out notepad, and plug the following into it:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="450" height="150" data="http://www.traxinspace.com/player/xspf_player.swf?repeat_playlist=true&playlist_url=http://www.traxinspace.com/pl/321">
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#e6e6e6" />
<param name="movie" value="http://www.traxinspace.com/player/xspf_player.swf?repeat_playlist=true&playlist_url=http://www.traxinspace.com/pl/321" />
<embed src="http://www.traxinspace.com/player/xspf_player.swf?repeat_playlist=true&playlist_url=http://www.traxinspace.com/pl/321" quality="high" bgcolor="#e6e6e6" width="450" height="150" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>
</object>

Of course, you should replace the number 321 with your playlist ID in the three places it appears above.

That's it. Put that script into any HTML and you got a TiS playlist. You can now post your playlist anywhere you can put HTML.

Labels: Trax in Space

Monday, January 07, 2008

Sigh of Excitement at the Novus Compo
Posted: 3:07:00 PM 0 comments

Sigh of Excitement has landed a spot in this month's Novus Compo. Now, I've had some songs entered in this compo before, but Sigh of Excitement is a song that I'm quite more proud of, and would love to see this thing win something.

If you like it too, go vote for it!

Labels: Music, Novus Compo, Sigh of Excitement

Vacation Roundup
Posted: 2:47:00 PM 0 comments

Well, I've been back from vacation for a few days now, and figured I'd update everything that went on.

First of all, this was actually one of my better Christmas vacations. I tell Kathy every year to remind me to take short vacations, because spending extended amounts of time with my family tend to irritate me. So this year, I went for a 9-day vacation, one of my longest.

Truth be told, it wasn't half bad this time around. Aside from one of my mom's many, many dogs using my chest as a spring board the first day there, and plenty of moments of boredom having to sit through watching television when there wasn't anything good on like a Sabres game, I actually enjoyed my stay overall this year.

Speaking of the Sabres, my brother Ryan got me tickets to the NHL Winter Classic on New Year's Day. So we went to Ralph Wilson Stadium after I picked him up from the airport. Took us over an hour and a half for what normally should be a fifteen minute drive thanks to ridiculous amounts of traffic. It was snowing lightly that day with temperatures in the lower 30's. We get to the stadium, pay $25 for parking, and get to the gate. They scan the tickets, and it tells us "Reprinted". They send us to the ticket booth. Uh oh.

Turns out that the tickets were reported stolen, and were from a block of tickets set aside for Penguins fans. After lots of arguing, Ryan finally got a new pair of tickets for face value - $39 each - and we got to see the game despite missing the first half of the first period.

Overall, the game was kind of slow, but the atmosphere was just spectacular. The Sabres really should have won the game, but their 4th straight loss was the same as any of the others, they couldn't score goals. They didn't even allow a shot in the 2nd period until there was less than 3 minutes left, but only came up with one goal. In the end, Sidney Crosby wrecked an otherwise wonderful day of hockey with a shootout victory.

They talk about playing that kind of game every year, but I hope they don't do it. That was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and repeating it annually would make it lose the luster and specticle that it was. Really enjoyable.

By the way, Chicago is frickin' freezing. When I got to O'Hare on the 2nd on my way home, it was -6 degrees. Fahrenheit. Brr.

Labels: Buffalo, Buffalo Sabres, Life, Pittsburgh Penguins, Winter Classic