roncli.com blog: November 2010

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 Software™, 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: RockMelt, Software

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: Coding, JavaScript, jQuery UI Scroll Menu, Screenshot

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: Blog, Coding, Gate, roncli.com, The Nightstalker

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: Coding, Gaming, Rawr, World of Warcraft