roncli.com blog

So yesterday was the 10th anniversary of my 21st birthday, and I got quite an unusual birthday present.

Mind you, it wasn't intentionally a present, but Backup sold its first copy on roncli Productions. It was quite a mess. The PayPal return was hitting the wrong page, the website is full of bugs, and nothing seemed to work right. I spent an hour last night fixing everything, and there's probably a lot more work that needs to be done. I can only hope that the software actually works, and this guy isn't trying to use it on Vista.

Labels: Backup, Birthday, Life, roncli Productions

Monday, June 26, 2006

roncli Productions is live
Posted: 9:51:00 PM 0 comments

It's finally done! roncli Productions is complete and live. Backup and Due Process, two pieces of software I've been talking about for many months, are now available for download. I'm quite excited about it, and look forward to see how people use the software and what kind of suggestions they will come up with.

I've yet to submit the software to various download sites, but hopefully I'll be able to wrap that up tonight, so I can concentrate on other things, like providing a blow-by-blow account of Melbourne and Surfers, quote, "Paradise", unquote.

Enjoy the site.

Labels: Backup, Coding, Due Process, roncli Productions

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

More work!
Posted: 11:40:00 PM 0 comments

Does the catching up ever end? More questions than answers today, it seems.

Despite doing extra work, I slacked again on the weekend and have forced myself into catchup mode. Right now, I'm an estimated 14 hours of work behind, with STILL most of it being in the Pwned Print category. There's no way in hell I'm getting that done by Australia like I had hoped. The good news is that the 14 hours are spread across 3 tasks, one of them being a 2 hour progress review, so I'm really hoping my time estimations are on the high side.

What I am going to get done for sure is the roncli Productions website, with the official launch planned for Monday, June 26th. Backup and Due Process will be the site's first two offerings, with a new project, Sitemap Generator on the way.

Yes, I decided to write my own, simply because I can't be bothered with adapting other people's ASP code into something that doesn't time out and kill my web server on my larger sites. In fact, that's going to be a primary feature of Sitemap Generator: you can run it on your own webserver and specify a delay between page reads so that it won't completely destroy your server. There are also plans to be able to include or exclude specific pages or directories, and I'm hoping I can manage to write a nice scheduler for it, complete with a little taskbar icon in the corner to be able to control the application. It should be a fairly complete application, and I plan for the free trial version to be able to index up to 100 pages, which is perfect for bloggers and smaller personal sites. I'm wondering how I'm going to be able to deal with ASP.Net pages, though, something I may challenge myself to accomplish should it come down to that. It should be a fun app to create.

I've left both Saturday the 17th open (I leave around 7 PM) and Sunday the 25th open (We return Saturday). Hopefully I'll be able to dedicate some of that free time to projects.

But for now, sleep.

Labels: Coding, Due Process, Projects, Pwned Print, roncli Productions, Sitemap Generator

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Catching up is hard work
Posted: 12:05:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: roncli, The Nightstalker - Awakening (5:01)

I made the fatal mistake of not doing any projects this weekend - that's 12 blocks of 2 hours each that I had not completed. My reward for this was spending this entire week playing catch up.

As of this writing, I am still behind an estimated 16 hours, most of it residing in the PwnedCars category, although I did catch up a good 6 hours on one task today, designing a form I thought was going to be hell to design in a relatively short amount of time. I also ran into a stumbling block when working on the roncli Productions forums, not being able to use the DataGrid at a rate of speed I'm accustomed to with classic ASP. But fortunately most of that is out of the way, the only things I am behind on is making a search page for the support section (I'm having an issue with Google AdSense for Search on that one) and forum subscriptions, which I'm not terribly looking forward to.

The good news is that I went ahead and scheduled the rest of the week, leaving nothing but simple-to-accomplish tasks to do through Saturday. Hopefully this will string enough time together to get some of the major tasks I have out of the way. roncli Productions is almost done, although I am having trouble with the Backup software not deleting things again, so I may have to work on that before I officially open roncli Productions for business. Oh, and there's that PayPal thing I keep avoiding...

OSMusic.Net has actually had some excellent progress on the minor changes I've been wanting to make, and hopefully completing the next big thing won't be too far behind. Finally, I am hoping to give Outpost Music the forums that have been largely absent for a couple of months now sometime early next week.

Things are beginning to look up as various projects come to completion, and even though I am behind further than I'd like to be, progress is always a good thing, no matter how slow it may feel.

Labels: Backup, Coding, OSMusic.Net, Outpost Music, Projects, Pwned Cars, roncli Productions

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

The Long Weekend
Posted: 2:13:00 AM 0 comments

Well, the long Memorial Day weekend has come to a close, and to be honest, I have amazed myself with how much I got done. I found the bug with Backup that causes it to run at 100% CPU until you kill it and squished it. That allowed me to repackage and finalize the MSI that will be distributed once roncli Productions comes online. I've also found the bug in Due Process that causes it to tell Windows it didn't startup properly when, in fact, it did. I still have one more feature I want to add to Due Process before I finalize its MSI, which is the ability to never allow a process to run (&%*#% ctfmon.exe!). That shouldn't take terribly long.

On the website front, the forums are slowly moving along, I anticipate 12 hours worth of work remaining before they are online. However, once that's done, I have at least two sites I can port them to, including Outpost Music, something I plan on doing before I leave for vacation.

The problem is that Pwned Print is slipping further than I had wanted it to. I've been quite ignoring this big 8 hour task for the simple fact that it's... well, 8 hours. And overdue. I want to sit down and at least start it at some point, maybe I'll do it tomorrow after work or something.

Overall, I've managed to not slip further behind in my projects than I was a week ago this time, and I'm more optimistic than ever that I can follow these projects for some time to come.

Labels: Backup, Coding, Due Process, Outpost Music, Projects, Pwned Print, roncli Productions

Monday, May 29, 2006

So Much To Do
Posted: 3:15:00 AM 0 comments

I did some research as to where I stand for four other projects today... holy crap, do I have a lot to do on so many things. I'm trying to take it one project at a time. I see the light on Backup and Due Process, as all that needs to be done for them is to fix bugs and make the final package. But the roncli Productions website is just going to take forever.

I got some good work done on the forums today, but I got a late start and didn't get as far as I had hoped. Most of that stems from the complexities that exist in my classic ASP forums code. Translating it over to ASP.Net 2.0 is going to be interesting.

I also decided to add the bug fixes necessary for OSMusic.Net into the projects, and hopefully I'll slowly get to those. I'm surprised, after 5 months of nothingness, 8 songs have been added to the site within the past two weeks. I don't know if it's going to become a more active site as a result, but the activity is quite welcome.

I took a good look at Outpost Music, and decided that, when the time comes, I'll simply copy the forum system from roncli Productions into Outpost. In the meantime, there's some additions I want to make to the site to make it more functional for me and the other members of the group.

Finally, I looked at The Nightstalker page, where my music is supposed to go. I decided that I'm going to add all of my current releases there, and eventually I'll go back and add my old tracked releases as well. Maybe some day I'll convert them to Reason, but each song is a project in and of itself - I can see that taking years.

There is no shortage of work for me to do, I have stuff planned out to July 1st, and some of that work is set aside to plan out future work. There's so much to do, and I wish I had more hours in the day to do it with.

Labels: Backup, Coding, Due Process, OSMusic.Net, Outpost Music, Projects, roncli Productions, The Nightstalker

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

A Day Off... Kind of
Posted: 10:33:00 PM 0 comments

I decided to take a bit of a day off in my catch up, doing only what was needed to complete today's tasks. Both of them involved working on the upcoming roncli Productions website, and both were completed sooner than expected.

My body aches from tennis, although after only 3 times out I'm feeling a bit more athletic. Imagine. Me. Athletic. Heh.

It almost turned out to be a day off at work. A power problem caused there to be no power at work when I arrived, so our computers and everything were off. We were contemplating what time to leave when the power came back on for good at about 10:30. Oh well.

Labels: Coding, Projects, roncli Productions

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Still Catching Up
Posted: 11:58:00 PM 0 comments

After falling behind badly in the first week of my committment to do 2 projects a night, I feel I'm making a lot of progress. That's good, I didn't want to have to scrap the idea entirely and end up with nothing ever getting done.

The progress for Pwned Print is finally coming along nicely with all but one of the 5 tasks I had scheduled for last week being finished. Yesterday, I cleaned up my desktop and my god does it look empty. But it looks really nice and gives me a lot of space to work with. I was able to review my progress on roncli Productions and scope out another week or two's worth of work in it. I've also been able to figure out what I need to do with Backup, and after this I'll probably do the same for Due Process.

Tonight, after doing a little bit of Pwned Print, I finally sat down and figured out how to backup files in SQL Server 2005, and went a step further by scheduling monthly maintenance on the indexes and database size. Then I dove into Linux, compiled and installed BOINC, SETI@Home, and Einstein@Home (not in the plans, but remarkably easy to do), and wrestled with getting that to run. After a bit of a scare (yes, you CAN accidentally type in rm /*/*), everything was running smoothly.

The three things from last week I still haven't done is correcting the NATd and IPFW configuration for Reborn, a single form for Pwned Print, and review what's left to do for Due Process, which I should get to before I head to bed. All in all, a pretty full Monday and Tuesday, and I'm finally making some real progress on these projects.

Labels: BOINC, Coding, Due Process, Einstein@Home, Projects, Pwned Print, roncli Productions, SETI@Home

Catching Up
Posted: 12:07:00 AM 0 comments

Well, on Sunday I managed to finish up the stuff I was working on for the upcoming roncli Productions website. I had a few frustrations with ASP.Net again (as usual), but got by them after a while. I look forward to designing the rest of the sight.

However, I got nothing else done on Sunday, as most of the day was dedicated to fixing my damn NAT. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, the ipfw.rules and natd.config look right, and most things work. However, I can't figure out how to open up ports like I was able to before I last formatted the machine. It will be an open issue for a while.

In the meantime, today I got quite a bit done, including specing out the rest of what will be needed for roncli Productions. I will be, for the second time, writing forums in ASP.Net. This time I won't be building the HTML as I go, I'll actually be using the contrals as they were meant to be used.

I also got two completed forms for Pwned Cars, speced out the rest of what's needed for Backup 2.0, and even got some time to play with BONIC on Linux, as I'm wanting to get SETI@Home running over there. What I had speced out to be 10 hours took me 4 at best.

All this while spending an hour playing tennis after work... and man am I sore. Good thing it's time to sleep, I need it.

Labels: Backup, Coding, Projects, Pwned Cars, roncli Productions, SETI@Home

Sunday, May 21, 2006

Not going well
Posted: 1:35:00 PM 0 comments

Seems the projects aren't going as well as planned.

The messaging system in roncli Productions is nearly complete, though. I did finally get some time to work on that last night, despite wanting it done on Wednesday. However, it's not 100% complete. Further, I never got a chance to fix the NATd and IPFW support on Reborn, and absolutely no progress has been made on Pwned Cars. I also wanted to clean up my desktop and compile and install SETI@Home for both the Reborn and ModPlug servers so that could be running in its idle CPU time. I doubt I'll get to backing up the SQL Server on roncli.com any time soon.

Fortunately, Sunday is a long day, and I've got a lot of time to do a lot of things, and I'm in a good working mood. Let's see what can get done!

Labels: Coding, Projects, roncli Productions, SETI@Home

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Another Long Night
Posted: 1:15:00 AM 0 comments

I knew the night was going to get off to a bad start when I didn't even get sat down in front of the computer until 7 o'clock. It wasn't for a bad reason, though. Saurin called, discussing some possible projects (as if I don't have enough, see last night's post for details on that) that might be on the horizon if I'm interested.

But despite chatting for about a half an hour after work, I decided to open up Pwned Print to play around with the interface. I open Visual Studio.Net, and it opens up a few code screens. Then it tries to open a designer and dies.

Uh oh.

I spent the next half hour trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my computer. I did a chkdsk on the hard drive that contains the source code, as that drive was known to be bad at one point (don't worry, all the code is in Source Safe and backed up twice onto Reborn), and it returned fine. I had serious thoughts of starting on that reinstallation I've been toying with before I had an idea. I opened up BOINC and suspended it. As soon as I did that, everything worked perfectly. What the heck is going on between Visual Studio and a BOINC application that causes Visual Studio to lock up? I hate it when applications don't play nice with others.

No problem, 7:30 rolls around and Kathy's up and about. I get started playing around in the code and my personal BlackBerry goes off. There's email that I have to attend to, and by the time I finish up with that, it's 11. I work another half hour, then Kathy messages me because she has no money to get any food, so I had to feed her.

12:30, I sit down for the last time, and after another half hour of work and I've at least got half of my daily goal done. Seems to be my standard since starting these projects, I can't get more done than half of what I expected to.

I was supposed to work on the roncli Productions site launch, but never got close to touching it. Here it is almost quarter after one, and quite frankly, after being up for 18 hours, I'm more than ready for bed.

Labels: Coding, Projects, Pwned Print, roncli Productions

Sunday, November 20, 2005

Where have the days gone?
Posted: 3:56:00 AM 0 comments

Since downloading Visual Studio .NET 2005, I've been doing absolutely nothing but ASP.Net. I mean, nothing to the point where I haven't eaten food, I haven't slept much, and just about every thought (outside of the area of my brain permanently reserved for music) has been how to get something to work in ASP.Net.

And for once, I'm actually excited about AJAX.

I'm working on the roncli Productions website. In order to properly launch Due Process, I will need to develop the website full on. I plan on having a simple page that has a product listing, trial downloads, purchasing, and forums.

Of course this means I need a registration process. The whole "are you 13 years of age" thing to collect email addresses set in, and I thought, wouldn't it be nice if there was a control that could limit the date range in which one could enter within it?

This quest led me to Michael Schwerz's amazing and free AJAX.Net library. It's not open source, but there is enough support for the library, and it's just so damn easy to use, that I decided to give it a shot. My jaw literally dropped when I saw how easy it was to do.

My problem, though, is I'm far from a JavaScript guru. In fact, my JavaScript is about as bad as my C++. Considering they are related languages that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. The simplest tasks become complex when I typo here, case wrong there, forget to var something elsewhere.

So now I have a nice date picker control in ASP.Net 2.0 that I can use anywhere I can use AJAX.Net. So I figured, why not do the entire registration process like this?

I'm about halfway done, having tackled my first AJAX routines, and I actually WANT to finish it. Never mind I'm half asleep and it's 4 AM in the morning.

Ah, the coder's life.

Labels: AJAX, ASP.Net, Coding, Due Process, roncli Productions