BLAG Ramblings of a crazy old fool

29Dec/070

Has Cat, Can E-Bay?

I'm gonna write a book. I'm gonna call it "Has Cat, Can E-Bay" It's going to be about something awesome.

Also, we're going to write a text-based RPG about Stephen Colbert. THIS WILL BE FUCKING AMAZING. Something about summoning eagles and fighting bears. Also, you should be able to smoke and drink while driving (this was in an ep somewhere).

Great. So. We'll get on that then.

19Dec/070

I’m Collegiate Or Something!

I passed Math114! Third time IS the charm, apparently. Waiting to hear back officially from my prof/grades posted, but the gradebook shows everything complete, with an A. About fucking time.

Overall Score : You have earned 87.9 out of 95 for an overall score of 92.5%
Total Time Spent (all times rounded to the nearest minute): 35h 24m

Just gotta get back in touch with my adviser to find out about testing out of 6 classes, and take 6 more of these things. Then I'll be graduated. Or whatever the past tense adjective of graduate is.

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8Dec/070

Faith

(This was originally an unpublished draft)

So, I don't usually go all uppity on issues of religion and faith, unless I'm pissed, out of smokes, or pissed. You all know me, I'm the kind of person that scoffs at 'leaps of faith' and 'life-changing moments'. However, I think I may have had one. What does that make me? A hypocrite; but I digress...

So, I've never felt more strongly about my faith and my life than I do now. Maybe I'm just a crazy old bastard, but working around kids ALL the time hasn't made me hate them. Just the opposite, I find myself wondering what it would be like to settle down and have a family. All the work I've done with the Knights has really helped me understand what it's like to be a part of something and be able to help out people that need it.

I've actually started praying too. I've never really prayed, except mumbling along at church, in my life. And its not like, oh I'm praying because I should, or because it's what I'm supposed to do, but because I want to. It's weird. And I'm serious about the family thing. Any wimmins out there, you know. Jump on this. ;)


OH YEAH! IM SANTA CLAUS! Pictures will follow.

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7Dec/070

New Webhost

Alright, So I finally broke down and went with decent internet hosting. At least now you can view my rantings at high speed with 99.9% availability! Took me a bit to get it all configured, but almost no one (myself excepted) saw any downtime. Indubitably, I rock.

So, a big thanks to Chris (xtantmatrix) over at Critical Audio and Design CHECK THEM OUT!

1Dec/070

Augh Internet~!

Man, do I need a decent internet connection. This shit at my parents' house is killing me. Took me all night, and some of my morning, to download the Visual Studio Express 2008 DVD. And that doesn't even include the MSDN files (2GB) or XNA/GDevTK (2GB). So. Yeah. Someone get me a 15000/2000 connection for Christmas, or else!

Transferred: VS2008ExpressENUX1397868.iso 894.65 MB in 10 hours 30 minutes 45 seconds (24.2 KB/s)

Oh well, at least we're to this point. Guess I'll go play WoW while this starts.

28Nov/070

Woo, New Hard Drive is here

So my new hard drive came today. 465GB of pure IDE greatness. I would have gotten SATA300, but i only have a SATA150 controller card, and its maxed out. I would upgrade but my plan is to buy a new server at some point and use it as a home network file/web server. So my question is this, should I:

  • Put FreeBSD on there, and know it will never die
  • Put openSUSE on because the website looks pretty and I've heard good things about it
  • Or put my copy of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and put my workstations back into a domain?

Also, I'd like to have redundant power supplies on this machine, since I have zero tolerance for downtime. Does anyone know of a [rackmount] motherboard and case that will allow this? Or do these have to be specifically ordered through an OEM?


After half an hour, we are currently 2% through formatting. :/

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27Nov/070

Well, it's apparently working now. chkdsk must have found and fixed something because the files are back and working fine. Still. I'd like to RMA it because I wouldn't trust its data integrity at all. But if they wont RMA it, I guess i do a low-level format once the new drive comes in. Who knows.

Peace

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27Nov/070

So, we're apparently stuck at 8% complete with chkdsk. And it's been running for about 3 hours now. Wonderful. SeaTools came up with no answers, though the drive did fail both read tests. Course it didn't detect is as a Maxtor drive. Also, I called Maxtor support to see if the drive is still under the manufacturer warrenty, but according to them this drive doesn't exist. I even sent them a picture, but they said they never made it. wtfshit. It's a refurbished Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160GB SATA/150 hard drive. Tigerdirect's policy is they they will replace 2 years after manuf. warrenty ends, but I wasn't able to get ahold of anyone again about this issue.

And the student loan place called to say that they haven't been paying my school. Awesome. On a good note, I did get my car back from the shop so I have reliable transportation now. And it'll be warmer in the winter than my truck, though I lose all the cargo space. Oh well.

I guess I'll let this run overnight/work tomorrow and see what happens. I think the drive may have just gone bad. Too bad it didnt wait until the new PATA drive gets here, I was planning on moving the data to that disk anyway.

26Nov/070

I fucking HATE Maxtor.

It would figure that out of all the harddrives I buy, the one maxtor would fail. And it would be the one that I store all my backups and installation files and ISOs on. I hate Maxtor.

I did just buy a new 500GB PATA drive, and the plan was to back this one up to it and stick this SATA drive in another box. But no. That can't happen. Rediculous. So, my evening will be filled with running Diagnostics and swearing at Maxtor.

If anyone has any suggestions for restoring data from a drive, let me know. Right now, only one folder was affected, the rest are working fine. Who the fuck knows why. Also, it only lost the files and folders that dont start with `A`.

Rrrrggh. Fuck it.

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25Nov/070

Christmas List

Click here for my 2007 Christmas List

So here is my Christmas present to you, intarwebs: The source! This is PHP/MySQL and can be easily included in any PHP page. Get your list started early (late?) this year with new code!

<?php

  //
  // christmaslist.php
  // Chistmas List script for weblog
  //
  // Author: Joshua Worden, IWM Entertainment
  // Released Nov. 2007 under GPL
  //
  // Usage: Designed to be included on a page.

  /*
     --
     -- Table structure for table `christmaslist`
     -- 

      CREATE TABLE `christmaslist` (
       `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
       `image` text NOT NULL,
       `title` text NOT NULL,
       `description` text NOT NULL,
       `price` float NOT NULL default '0',
       `date` datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
    PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
    FULLTEXT KEY `description` (`description`)
    ) TYPE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=5 ;

    --
    -- End table structure
    --
  */

  // Definitions 

  $_site['sql-host']      = ""; // MySQL Host (localhost)
  $_site['sql-user']      = ""; // MySQL Username
  $_site['sql-pass']      = ""; // MySQL Password
  $_site['sql-data']      = ""; // MySQL Database

  // Functions

  function DisplayItems($B_SORTED, $T_SORTMODE) {
    if($B_SORTED) { $Q_SQL1 = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM christmaslist ORDER BY ".$T_SORTMODE." ASC;");}
    else          { $Q_SQL1 = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM christmaslist ORDER BY date ASC;"); }

    echo "<div style=\"width:100%; text-align:center; margin:0 auto;\">\r\n";
    echo "<div style=\"width:100%; clear:both;\">\r\n";
    echo "<div style=\"width:20%;float:left;position:relative;\"><a href=\"?sort=image\"><b>Category</b></a></div>";  // [Image]
    echo "<div style=\"width:20%;float:left;position:relative;\"><a href=\"?sort=title\"><b>Title</b></a></div>";     // Title
    echo "<div style=\"width:20%;float:left;position:relative;\"><b>Description</b></div>";                           // [Description]
    echo "<div style=\"width:20%;float:left;position:relative;\"><a href=\"?sort=price\"><b>Price</b></a></div>";     // Price
    echo "<div style=\"width:20%;float:left;position:relative;\"><a href=\"?sort=date\"><b>Date Added</b></a></div>"; // Date Added
    echo "</div>";
    while($T_SQLRESULT=mysql_fetch_array($Q_SQL1)) {
      echo "<div style=\"width:100%; clear:both;\">\r\n";
      echo "<div style=\"width:20%;height:100px;float:left;position:relative;\"><img src=/images/thumbs/".$T_SQLRESULT['image']." /></div>";
      echo "<div style=\"width:20%;float:left;position:relative;\">".$T_SQLRESULT['title']."</div>";
      echo "<div style=\"width:20%;float:left;position:relative;\">".$T_SQLRESULT['description']."</div>";
      echo "<div style=\"width:20%;float:left;position:relative;\">$".$T_SQLRESULT['price']."</div>";
      echo "<div style=\"width:20%;float:left;position:relative;\">".$T_SQLRESULT['date']."</div>";
      echo "</div>";
      }
    echo "<div style=\"width:100%; clear:both;\"> </div>\r\n";
    echo "</div>\r\n";
    }

  function Error($T_ERROR) {
    // Show error
    echo "<div style=\"width:400px; height:150px; clear:both; background:#FF0000;\">\r\n";
    echo "\t<h4><font color=#FFFFFF>MySQL Error:</font></h4>\r\n" . $T_ERROR . "\r\n";
    echo "</div>\r\n";
    die;
    }

  // Connect to MySQL

  $B_SQLCONN = @mysql_connect($_site['sql-host'],$_site['sql-user'],$_site['sql-pass']);
  $B_SQLDATA = @mysql_select_db($_site['sql-data']);
  if(!$B_SQLCONN || !$B_SQLDATA){Error(mysql_error());}

  // Check for sort mode

  if(isset($_GET['sort'])) { DisplayItems(TRUE, $_GET['sort']); }
  else { DisplayItems(FALSE,"date"); }

?>