roncli.com blog
The blog of roncli
roncli.com blog
roncli.com
blog
Profile
roncli
Houston, Texas, United States
Labels
Coding
CTG Music
Editorials
Games
Miscellaneous
Music
Servers
Silliness
Software
Sports
Trax in Space Beta
Weather
Recent Posts
WTF did Revival Productions just do?
A Tale of Two Communities
The Final Stretch
A Two Tiered, Untiered OTL
Secretly, you wish you could've done what I did
What have I done since roncli.com v2?
It's Done. It's Finally Done.
The Big Picture is Starting to Wear on Me
A Low Bang to Buck Ratio
win-acme
Archives
February 2005
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006
June 2006
July 2006
August 2006
September 2006
October 2006
November 2006
December 2006
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007
May 2007
June 2007
July 2007
August 2007
September 2007
October 2007
November 2007
December 2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008
June 2008
July 2008
September 2008
December 2008
February 2009
July 2009
August 2009
September 2009
October 2009
November 2009
February 2010
March 2010
April 2010
June 2010
July 2010
August 2010
September 2010
October 2010
November 2010
December 2010
March 2011
June 2011
July 2011
August 2011
September 2011
October 2011
December 2011
January 2012
February 2012
April 2012
July 2012
November 2012
July 2013
April 2014
July 2014
August 2014
November 2014
December 2014
March 2015
April 2015
May 2015
June 2015
July 2015
September 2015
January 2016
February 2016
May 2016
July 2016
November 2016
March 2017
January 2018
May 2018
June 2018
January 2019
January 2021
February 2021
March 2021
August 2021
October 2021
December 2021
August 2022
November 2022
October 2023
February 2024
April 2024
Current Posts
Friday, November 26, 2010
RockMelt
Posted: 12:07:00 AM 0 comments
I read an article a while ago, can't remember where, about this new browser that was coming out, called RockMelt. "Oh god", I thought, "not another web browser with its own JavaScript and CSS quirks I will need to consider."

Well, I went in on the beta very shortly after it came out, and I have to say, I'm fairly surprised. RockMelt is based on Chromium, the same guts that powers Google Chrome. This browser, however, provides fast and easy access to the social networks Facebook and Twitter.

This is huge. I'm an avid fan of both sites, as they are really easy avenues of communication between me and my friends & family. As a result, both my Facebook and Twitter usage has gone up recently, having fun responding to people's statuses and replying on Twitter some.

What I love most about it is that the browser's settings are stored on their server. This means all you have to do is log in to Facebook (hey, you gotta do that anyway if you want a Facebook-integrated browser, right?) and the settings that you setup on the computer you were using at home are downloaded to your computer at work, resulting in a consistent look and feel between computers.

All of Chrome's extensions are available, so I don't miss things like One Number or IE Tab. However, the extensions are a bit buggy, as you can't see any icon animations, such as notification counts. Hopefully that will get fixed soon.

It also has an integrated RSS reader, although its implementation seems poor for now. I'll be sticking with Google Reader for reading my news for the time being. They recently added a GMail notifier which is nice.

The features I'd really like to see added to it are closer Google integration so I don't have to have One Number or manually subscribe to RSS feeds through the browser. It would be really nice to take a feed and just say "add to Google Reader".

However, this is Good Softwareâ„¢, and I highly recommend you get it if you're into Facebook and Twitter communication at all. If you're on Facebook with me, hit me up for an invite.

Labels: ,

Thursday, November 25, 2010
jQuery UI Scroll Menu 1.0
Posted: 11:52:00 PM 0 comments
For the past couple of years, I've been getting more and more conscious about how many entries are starting to fill up the left side pane of the site. The months in particular are starting to become huge. What I wanted was a compact menu that you could scroll through, keeping the number of visible items down while allowing for any number of items to exist in the menu. Something like this:



Last night, I started playing with DIVs, ULs, LIs, and jQuery UI to see if I could get to where I wanted to go. Well, after a couple of long coding sessions surrounding a bout with tryptophan, and after wrestling IE and Firefox into submission, I finally got what I wanted.

Introducing jQuery-ui-ScrollMenu-1.0.js.

Documentation can be found at the top of the file in the comments. It should be fairly straightforward, although instead of using CSS like I had wanted, I instead just went with setting CSS styles. I'm not 100% happy with how the code was put together, but the bottom line here is that it works, and it's pretty. Perhaps I'll go back and make it compliant with CSS (or maybe someone will do it for me!), but for now I'm going to release it as is.

Labels: , , ,

Monday, November 22, 2010
roncli.com Update
Posted: 1:35:00 AM 0 comments
Now playing: Rise Against - Savior (4:02)

With the Gate project being all but ditched, I have focused attention on the roncli.com redesign I've been promising for over a year now.

The new roncli.com website will initially combine my main site and my blog. However, it will also eventually be home to the defunct projects website and, of course, The Nightstalker's music.

And I must say. This site is turning out to be bad ass.

The site is heavy into jQuery. In fact, the entire login process is done via jQuery AJAX. The latest blog article is shown on the front page - also loaded via jQuery AJAX - and you can go through posts by clicking the appropriate icons. And my does it load fast.

I really am having a blast updating this thing, and I hope to have something live before year's end. That is, if the Cataclysm doesn't completely sidetrack me first.

Labels: , , , ,

Saturday, November 13, 2010
Rawr ProtPaladin update
Posted: 7:38:00 PM 0 comments
Today I finished most of the threat section of Rawr's ProtPaladin module. Most of the work had to do with modeling the abilities accurately since virtually all of the abilities changed in some significant way.

I spent much of the last week on WoW's Cataclysm beta figuring out exactly what each spell does, and got everything finished today.

The rotation for protection paladins has changed into what's being called the 9-3-9 rotation. That is, abilities with a 3 second cooldown are alternated with abilities with a 9 second or longer cooldown to form the paladin rotation.

What's interesting about the new rotation is that there's wiggle room to try different rotations. What do I mean by this? The rotation kind of looks like this:

A - B - A - C - A - D

Where each letter represents an ability you do.

A represents either Crusader Strike or Hammer of the Righteous. This is to generate Holy Power. You'll use Crusader Strike for single targets and Hammer of the Righteous when you need to AoE a bit. This will be an option in Rawr 4.

B always represents Judgement. Protection Paladins regenerate mana by using Judgements. You can use either Seal of Righteousness or Seal of Truth (this replaces Seal of Vengeance in WoW 4.0.1), which will remain an option in Rawr 4.

D always represents Shield of Righteousness. You spend your 3 points of Holy Power to cause massive damage to your target. I'm debating to include an option that would alternate Inquisition with Shield of Righteousness, but that probably won't make initial launch.

C is the interesting part. There are 4 abilities that a Protection Paladin could mix into their rotation: Avenger's Shield, Holy Wrath, Consecration, and Hammer of Wrath. The idea in Rawr 4 is to allow the user to pick what priority they will be casting these four spells when it comes time to use the "C" ability, and will have a rotation optimizer to determine what the best rotation to use is.

There are two challenges with implementing such a system. First of all, Avenger's Shield can be augmented by the Grand Crusader talent, which gives Crusader Strike and Hammer of the Righteous a chance to refresh the cooldown on Avenger's Shield. Lots of math is involved to figure out the probability of when Avenger's Shield will be cooled down by the time the "C" ability is up. The most problematic parts of this is when the rotation contains "Avenger's Shield > Consecration > Holy Wrath". The reason is because Avenger's Shield and Holy Wrath are available once every 2 rotations (with Avenger's Shield being available more often depending on how often Grand Crusader procs), but Consecration is only available once every 4 rotations. Modeling how often Consecration will be used in such a rotation is a nightmare, and is something I am probably going to have to seek help with.

The other challenge which I think I got covered is with Hammer of Wrath. This ability is available every cooldown, but only when the target is under 20% health. The other 80% of the time you can't even use Hammer of Wrath.

So with the threat portion of ProtPaladin done, tomorrow I will likely begin work on the defensive portions. This should be fairly trivial, but there's a lot of overhaul that needs to be done, especially when it comes to block modeling. But still, progress is pretty good, and I'm pretty confident that ProtPaladin will be ready when Rawr 4 is released.

Healadin is another story, and I'll provide more information on what I'll be doing with that after ProtPaladin is done.

Labels: , , ,