roncli.com blog

I've been talking about it for almost six years. I've started and restarted the project numerous times. Finally. Finally, it is here.

Welcome to the new roncli.com!

roncli.com is written in Node using the Rendr framework, backed by Redis for caching and Microsoft SQL Server for data storage, running on Windows Server 2012 R2 through IIS 8 using iisnode, and being hosted on a Microsoft Azure virtual machine.

It is still a little rough around the edges. For instance, I don't have a solid deployment task, and the error handling is not production quality. For a personal website, though, I don't mind this for a 1.0 release.

The content is all here. All of my Blogger and Tumblr posts are in the Blog section. All of my releases from SoundCloud, which include a few new additions, are available in the Music section. A few of the projects I'm working on, including this website, is available in the Coding section. All the games that I play, including videos of some of my streams, can be found in the Gaming section. And a whole lot of extras are found in the Life section.

RSS feeds are available for the Blog, Music, Coding, and Gaming sections, so you can more effectively stalk me, as my wife so succinctly puts it. I even went fancy and got me a short URL: http://ronc.li. Yeah, I'm a geek.

Some things that are no longer available:

My old music directory that had random musical stuff in it, I got rid of that, although the music itself may resurface later.
My Descent 3 levels. Those moved to the DMDB.
The ModPlug Player mirror. You can still get it at OpenMPT, and I am working with modplug.com to get their link updated.

Overall I am quite happy with the outcome, even if it's 9 weeks after my initial goal for production. Come in, check out the site, and let me know what you think.

Labels: Blog, Coding, roncli.com

Monday, March 09, 2015

A Recommitment
Posted: 4:02:00 PM 0 comments

I recently went back in time to the beginning of this blog and revisited the things that interested me back then. I found that I did a heck of a lot more blogging then than I do today, largely because I made a commitment to keep people updated as to what I was doing.

I started this blog when I was working on OSMusic.Net back in the day. I had a lot of free time, largely because I had no idea what kind of focus (and design, for that matter) I needed to get the site to take off. I ended up doing things in my free time that didn't help the site along. Such as blogging.

Blogging became a regular part of my life in mid-2005, and it was fun. I wasn't involved in much back then, as TiS 1 had died and TiS 2 hadn't been thought of yet. I started blogging about on-again-off-again gaming, then about the struggle I had with maintaining all of my side projects, then focus shifted to stresses at work, until finally things got so hectic I pretty much just fell off the face of the Internet, only blogging on major events such as hurricanes or job changes. I've tried to kickstart things over the years, but nothing has stuck.

But with the revamped roncli.com website on the horizon (I'm looking to finish coding and content by the end of the month), I strongly feel that a recommitment of sorts is required to keep content on the site fresh, and to enable easier Nightstalker-stalking, so to speak.

So, here's the deal. I do a lot of things during the week that I've taken for granted. The Six Gaming Podcast, World of Warcraft raids, League of Legends streaming (specifically Ron's Bronze Plays on Sundays), and other random streaming events.

I also still code a hell of a lot. Previously, I'd blog frequently about my findings with certain things, which would result in code snippets that show you how to read an NWS weather feed, or double buffer a list view. I still want to do stuff like this, especially since I'm playing with cutting-edge libraries such as rendr.

I just haven't given myself enough time to do any of this. But with me no longer running raids for Six Minutes To Release, that time now exists.

Therefore, here's my commitment. On days when I do something noteworthy, I will blog about it. You won't see me talk about every WoW raid, or every line of code I write, but it'll be frequent enough to give everyone an idea as to what's going on in my world.

Labels: Blog, Gaming, League of Legends, Life, Rendr, Ron's Bronze Plays, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft

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

Monday, September 21, 2009

Gate
Posted: 1:39:00 AM 0 comments

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: Blog, Coding, Gate, Projects, roncli.com, Solar

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Fastest. Project. Evar.
Posted: 12:56:00 AM 0 comments

I've decided that I'm going to write a website that combines my three main personal sites: Projects, roncli.com, and this blog.

One of the biggest features of this site is the ability to easily add an RSS feed to a webpage without having to write separate pages or nasty ASP.Net http handlers. Basically what I wanted was to have URL's that look like "...page.aspx" load the usual aspx, but "...page.aspx?feed=rss" load the RSS feed instead of the normal page.

This idea led me to the ASP.Net RSS Toolkit, a very easy to use toolkit with some nice features. Including the ability to quickly make RSS feeds. That, combined with a 34-line class (counting 6 blank lines) that inherits from System.Web.Ui.Page, overrides OnPreInit, and forces inheriting classes to override a GetFeed function, and I'm ready to create feeds not only in RSS, but also Atom, OPML, and RDF as well.

Wow. The demo app was more challenging to write than this gem.

I want to give it a test run, probably on some Six Minutes To Release pages, and see if it's stable. However, shortly thereafter I will probably release this to CodePlex so that other people can get their hands on it. I am rapidly becoming addicted to RSS feeds since my iPhone reads em pretty good using Byline. I have feeds from all over the Internet, and it's nice to be able to have one central place to find out what's going on in my own little corner of the world.

Labels: ASP.Net RSS Toolkit, Blog, Byline, Coding, Gaming, Projects, roncli.com, Six Minutes To Release

Friday, September 12, 2008

Blog moved
Posted: 2:34:00 PM 0 comments

Thanks to the fine folks at StudioKraft, I've moved my blog off of roncli.com for the duration of the storm, and onto blogger.com, with StudioKraft doing the image hosting. Thanks Kim for setting this up on short notice!

Labels: Blog, Hurricane Ike, Life, roncli.com

Monday, February 25, 2008

Three Years
Posted: 2:09:00 PM 0 comments

Hard to believe it's been three years since I started this blog, and certainly a whole lot has transpired in that time. I've been quite busy with a lot of new things over the past couple weeks, and there's a couple of things I've got cooking on the horizon, so stay tuned for more new stuff.

Labels: Blog, Life, roncli.com

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Two Year Special
Posted: 3:25:00 PM 0 comments

Well, it's now been 2 years since I posted this blog. In that time, it's gotten 221 posts full of informative information. That's, informative in the "TMI" sense, most likely.

Anyway, when I went to post #222 on Tuesday, I noticed that Google updated blogger.com a bit, and added support for something called labels. It's something I've been wanting, a way to categorize my postings. You'll find that label in the bottom right of each post.

To celebrate 2 years and this new addition, I've decided to write one post for each category today! This will not only make up for the gaping two month hole (I could've sworn I posted something in January, I'll have to check Successor when it's back up), it will hopefully motivate me to actually start writing stuff - maybe even DOING stuff - so that this blog remains relatively up to date.

Here's to the next two years!

Labels: Blog, Life, roncli.com

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Oops
Posted: 7:03:00 PM 0 comments

Now playing: slammy - Reflections Part V 2006 remix (6:30)

I just now noticed that I haven't been showing the song I'm playing... somehow my plugin got uninstalled. Oh well, it's back. Enjoy what I'm listening to again!

Labels: Blog, Life, roncli.com

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Projects!
Posted: 1:59:00 AM 0 comments

I decided to jump into Microsoft Project to organize my list of projects. My god, do I have a lot of projects. Not counting weekly tasks, I have 27 projects. Twenty-seven. When am I going to find time to do them all?

I suppose that's what Project is for, finding the time to do them all. It's not very encouraging at first glance, but when I glaze over the details, things do move along, if slowly. I doubt I'll ever complete all 27 projects, though, as certain projects, such as the D3TL 2003 upgrade (yes, I know it's 2006), D3DSN, and MediaSmarts probably isn't going to happen. They are the absolute lowest on my priority list right now, although I will at the very least review where these projects stand before June is out.

My goal is to get PwnedCars done before my vacation in June - by the way, I'm leaving for Melbourne, Australia on June 17th - and get some significant progress done on the new roncli Productions website. After that, I've got some long-term projects, including Cent, which I've mentioned here before. Since I've actually had to use C++ at work, I'm a bit more comfortable with the language, and hope that can help me get more done on Cent.

Here's a large (but incomplete, I must have some secrets!) selection of the 27 projects I have, for your interest:

modplug.roncli.com - Where ModPlug used to be hosted before the first crash, this box now holds some websites for MisterX (Kim), and its future is unknown at the moment. It probably will turn into a hosting box for the next modplug.com, but that's up to Kim & LPChip. (By the way, modplug.roncli.com technically isn't an address, it's just my designation for the computer itself.)

reborn.roncli.com - Reborn is my router, running FreeBSD 6.1 just like the ModPlug box. It's also my network's backup server with 300 GB of storage space. It backs up everything, including my MAME collection, OSMusic.Net, and all of the photo's Kathy's got stored on her computer.

successor.roncli.com - This is my main computer, and the reason it's a project is because I want to reinstall Windows. Yeah. That's going to be a fun day or three.

www.roncli.com - This is the Windows server where all my ASP websites live. The only thing I need to do is figure out how to backup the databases so that Backup can pick them up and put them onto Reborn.

Outpost Music - My music group that I haven't really done much with in a year and a half. Well, it's high time I got the forums working. I'll likely work on that after vacation.

The Nightstalker - Not to be confused with http://www.roncli.com, http://tns.roncli.com is solely devoted to my music. However, there's only 2 songs listed there right now. Considering I've released over 50, that's got to change.

Chess - Not sure what to call this yet, but I'm really interested in making a site with Java that will allow people to solve chess puzzles, play games, chat, and more. Definitely a long termer.

Cent - I really haven't come out and said what this is, but it's my dabbling into CrystalSpace to see if I can write a legitimate 3D first person shooter. It uses Crystal Space as its rendering engine, so once I understand it - and I understand a lot of it right now - writing the necessary code should just be a matter of time. How far I go with it depends on how well it runs.

Solar - Solar is a TCP/IP Text Processing Engine. I can hear it now. Huh? Basically, it is a telnet server that allows multiple connections, allowing them to interact. It would be great groundwork for a MUD-type application, but I really haven't had any plans to do anything with it. Putting it in as a project at least gives me an opportunity to improve it.

ChessCli - This is definitely being called ChessCli, and is my attempt at creating a WinBoard chess engine.

Outpost IRC Bot - Not sure if I even want to continue this project, but it was designed to be a cutthroat one hour compo manager. I had a lot of ideas for this about 4 years ago. Whether I can recall them, well, who knows.

roncli.com Logs - I'd really like to expand http://logs.roncli.com, as I'm recording a lot more information than I'm displaying. I'd also like to work on the performance and get this thing smoking along.

Torrent Keeper - Frustrated with the lack of true multithreading BitTorrent applications, I started Torrent Keeper about a year ago. It hasn't gone anywhere, but I figure this will likely follow Backup and Due Process as one of the first few roncli Productions offerings.

Word Field - A silly idea of mine that I'd like to follow through on eventually. Combine word scramble, mine sweeper, and some aspects of Press Your Luck, and you've got a good idea what this game will be like.

D3TL 2003 - As mentioned above, I started to do an upgrade of D3TL in 2003. The database was really badly designed, even though it was much better than just updating a Flash file every now and again. Problem is, I don't play Descent anymore, and given that there hasn't been a real game played in months, I might be better off saving an idea like this for Cent if I ever finish it.

D3DSN - This is the Descent 3 Dedicated Server Network. Yes, it's still up. No one uses it though, because the software's buggy. When I went from Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET, I really messed up with some timing issues. What I really need to do is add true threading to that application, but the last time I tried to test it with Esa, I ended up giving up because he wasn't seeing the new web services for some reason or another. Again, if I ever pick this up, it will probably be for Cent instead.

IsItUp - Recall September of last year when I high-tailed up to Lubbock, TX, to escape Hurrican Rita. While I was up there, I was interested in whether or not my servers were up. So, I wrote IsItUp, an insanely simple app. I might expand it a bit, but probably will end up being released as freeware.

Numbers - Some people write "Hello World". I write Numbers. I've written this game in many languages, including TI99-4 Basic, Macintosh QuickBasic (OS 7.0 days!), C128 Basic (dual screen!), and finally Visual Basic 6.0. It's a rather addicting game, and over the years I've added some features to it that make it even more challenging. I want to do something with it, I just don't know what yet.

roncli.com Blog - Yes, the very same one you are reading! I'd like to add some things to the blog, maybe my BOINC stats, maybe my Google Calendar agenda, perhaps some other widgets that will make the site more interactive.

Labels: Blog, Cent, Chess, ChessCli, Coding, D3DSN, D3TL, Descent 3, IRC, IsItUp, Logs, ModPlug, Numbers, Outpost Music, Projects, roncli.com, Solar, The Nightstalker, Torrent Keeper, Word Field

Monday, May 15, 2006

This blog
Posted: 1:32:00 AM 0 comments

So I've been terrible updating this blog so far this year.

I do hope to change that, however. I've decided to get organized and work on at least two projects a day, reporting on what I've done here so that at least I can show myself some progress, if not the people who follow this blog. Things will start tomorrow, so expect to see regular stuff up here soon!

Labels: Blog, Life, Projects, roncli.com

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Happy Anniversary
Posted: 2:37:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: Korn - Twisted Transistor (2:58)

It was one year ago this past Saturday I set up this blog. In that time, I managed to post 160 times, a little under 1 every other day. It is interesting to walk through it and see where my interests wane and wax over time.

Here's to more years of pointless posts such as these!

Labels: Blog, Life, roncli.com

Friday, February 18, 2005

roncli.com blog
Posted: 11:56:00 PM 0 comments

Now playing: David Filskov - Boulder Trash (Dash) rearr. (1:27)

Look! It's a new blog!

Not terribly exciting, I know, but I figure this is the best way to both get information on my various projects out there, and to let people know that I'm not dead.

In any case, I'm not going to be giving this much of a start, I'm just going to pick it up and post as I go. Enjoy!

Labels: Blog, Life, roncli.com