Bush Mackel

I’m trying ease back into the work week after Memorial Day. So far it’s going alright and I have softball practice to look forward to this afternoon which always proves to be a little pick me up. But hey, I was checking out on my blog today and through the little MyBlogLog sidebar widget/gagedeteroo I found starthannig’s page and consequently, this cool little Geek Quiz. Sure every couple of months there’s another one, but it’s always fun for a little diversion.

54% Geek

As memorial day approaches, I’m suddenly presented with the problem of what to do this weekend. Well, it wouldn’t really be a problem if it were up to me since I would just hang around the house, buy a 360 and play video games all weekend long. Unfortunately though, the fact remains that I’m married and the wife is with child. Furthermore, she’s going stir crzay because she can barely walk now so now she expects that we’ll go to every freakin BBQ presented to us. Now normally I’d be about that, but if you haven’t figured it out, I’m currently in a particularly lethargic mood.

So yeah, don’t expect too many posts from me this weekend because on top of being lazy, I’ve recently become addicted to Desktop Tower Defense from a post on Shoemoney. I’m slowly learning the way of the game, here’s a screenshot of my top score on Easy.

CNN reported yesterday that Apple is looking to charge higher prices for songs on iTunes, with the caveat that these songs be w/o the DRM technology and that they also be of higher quality than regularly priced songs. Personally, I’m kind of divided on this.

On one hand, one of my biggest gripes with iTunes is that they really try to hinder the user in that they don’t let them easy port songs from iTunes to other media players. With this newly proposed deal, it would obviously be easier to play your songs on other devices. Now, this still doesn’t alleviate the pain of still having to use iTunes, but I guess when you buy an iPod, those are the breaks.

On the other hand, I’m really not sure that iPod’s user base will pony up the extra money to get these tracks. I could be WAY off on this, but I think most of the people who get music onto their iPod aren’t going to be able to tell the difference between what they’re listening to now and these higher quality versions. I DO however think that they’ll see the difference in price and just stay with the cheaper version. Furthermore, I think the people who DO understand the difference in quality and can also tell that difference are probably savvy enough to get their music TO their iPod and OTHER music devices in high quality and cheaply anyway.

Check out CNN’s article here.

So yesterday at the ol-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l J.O.B., I was trying to get a little Flash app I made to read data from XML output on a particular server. That server is one that the company I work for owns, so I just knew that it would work fine. After I completed the apps, I tested them on my local and they worked like clockwork…They read the data, displayed the results, just like I planned on. Then I uploaded everything to one of my personal servers just to check that they would work online. And of course, NADA.

And I’m not talking about “nada pequito” or however it’s spelled. I’m talking about “NADA TODOS”. (If that isn’t the best butchering of the Spanish language, I just don’t know what is).

So I of course rechecked everything, uploaded the Flash files again, republished the Flash files in different versions, and tried again to no avail. I rewrote the HTML page that was using the Flash files, changing and editing all the different parameters used to pass values to the Flash. I just did everything I could think of.

I then proceeded to bang my head on my cubicle desk for the next 3 or 4 hours.

After my head went numb, I did what every good programmer would do…I went to Wendy’s for an hour. And while at Wendy’s I had an epiphany. I had faintly remembered seeing something called “crossdomain.xml” in another FLA file sometime before. I don’t why that thought suddenly popped up, but I felt pretty confident that my answers lied within this mysterious file.

So when I got back, the first thing I did was read up on this file, and sure enough that’s what the problem was. Check out this excerpt from the adobe website…

” For example, a Flash movie loaded from http://www.yourserver.com/flashmovie.swf can access data residing at http://www.yourserver.com/data.txt. The text file is located within the same domain as the SWF.

However, an attempt to load data from http://www.NotMyServer.com/data.txt will fail and no error messages are displayed. The load action will cause a warning dialog to appear.”

D’oheth. This is exactly what I was trying to do. I had put the Flash file on my personal server, but was trying to read data off the company server! So after I made a crossdomain.xml file and got it on the company server, everything worked out. It’s so funny that as a programmer, everything can seem so simple until suddenly nothing works, and then as quickly as the problem surfaced, it can be resolved in about the same time frame despite all the hours in the middle of seemingly unending attempts at any and all possible fixes. Ha ha. (Needless to say, after I got this working, I got the hell outta work).

I happened onto this article yesterday on cnn.com talking about a company called NeuroSky that is trying to make toys and video games more…interactive. Basically, by wearing a special mask that’s connected to a bunch of sensors, they are able to make items respond to your thoughts. In the demonstration cnn wrote about, a NeuroSky worker wears a Darth Vader outfit while holding a special lightsaber. The more the person concentrates, (a.k.a. using the force), the more the lightsaber lights up. Kinda cool right?

Well the leap then to video games is this same kind of “concentrated effort” where someone with deep focus and attention could make a player on screen say have better aim (think GTA3) and someone who can’t concentrate that well having horrible aim. They go on to say that other games like Tiger Woods could benefit from this kind of connection too.

This is definitely an interesting article, if for no other reason than thinking about the possibilities down the line. I think if this technology ever goes consumer, (and by that I mean in my lifetime), it has to be picked up by Nintendo! They have always been pushing the envelope as far as getting their players to interact with the games in different ways and they’re always eager to try new technologies, despite it possibly not being the most lucrative scenario. So yeah, it’s certainly an interesting concept but a scary one too. I mean, think about all those people who play WoW and their only way of burning calories is typing on the keyboard and clicking the mouse. Now those people won’t have to do anything to play! Can’t wait to see what the nerds look like in the year 20xx.

Read the article here.

So as you probably know, I’m just getting my feet wet with all this blog stuff. Again, I’m definitely glad I made the switch to this format for my website because my site was really turning into a blog anyway. Plus, I’m always having fun learning about different computer technologies, and up to now, I haven’t had any experience with blogs, so that’s also a good thing. But on that note, it seems the “blog culture” is definitely taking me a minute to get a handle on.

I found a really cool article titled…


21 Surefire Tips for a Successful Blog Launch

(BTW, I LOVE THAT PICTURE). I think above everything else, it has helped me out the most in regards to getting my blog “up to snuff”, not only mechanically but also getting me in the right mindset. I think I’m beginning to understand that if your blog is to be a success, you really need a community to support it. So unlike so many other models on the web, you really have to make….friends! And that’s definitely a cool thing. I mean, before this, I never paid attention to other blogs or tried to find ones that I found interesting. Now, I’m always on the lookout for a cool one!

Were blogs the first Internet medium to really push social networking? HMMMMMM.

In an extreme fit of boredom today at work I said to myself, “Say, when was the last time you went on GameFaqs?” And frankly, I didn’t have an answer. Logic says that it was sometime while I was playing FFXII (which I still haven’t finished). So yeah, I go onto GameFaqs, and they have a link to an article on GameSpot titled, “How to Optimize Your Frame Rates”. To my surprise, it was actually a pretty cool article!

They talk about options commonly found in the graphics settings of video games including antialiasing, anisotropic filtering, resolution, draw distance, shadows, and textures and how to change these to get the most out of your games. Now if the article just stopped there, it may not even be worth the read because you’d probably get bored to sleep inside of a minute. The cool thing about this piece is that for every option, it presents a picture that shows what the game looks like with one setting, and when you mouseover it, what it looks like cranked up or down! You can get a really good idea of what you can skimp on to get the most out of your game w/o sacrificing too much in the way of visual appeal. Check it out.

Finally, after several weeks of nailing down a redesign I liked, I have made the necessary changes to all the pages in LSO and have put them online. At this point, I don’t think anyone would really notice the difference, but K-Weight of the pages have been reduced dramatically and I think in general, the site looks a lot more professional. Also, because of the more “color heavy” look of the site now (as opposed to “image heavy”), I think it will be easier to get different color schemes for the sections up and running in little time which will hopefully give sections a lot more personality. Now I actually have to get some links back to the site and maybe some sponsors.

Even though I had a self made tuna fish sandwich for lunch today at work, I still needed to get out and take a break from the computer. So after going to Best Buy I went to the Borders to try and find a decent book to maybe give me some ideas on how to promote my blog. I of course didn’t find anything, but I did overhear this older woman talking to a salesperson trying to find a book to teach her about computers.

After the salesperson left, I introduced myself to the older woman and told her I was curious as to what she wanted to learn. Thankfully, she was really nice and said that she had a grandson across the country in California and it would be easier for her to communicate with him if she knew something about computers and especially the Internet. We talked for maybe a minute more and I thanked her for her time, and then I felt really sad in that there wasn’t anyway I could really help her.

If you know me, you know I love teaching people about technology, especially the computer. I of course have this website which is supposed to teach people about computers, http://computers.learnstuffonline.com. I’m in the process of redesigning it right now, but it still has some decent information up there that could be a big help to someone like her. At that moment though, I had no way of giving her anything about the website. I didn’t have a pen, I didn’t have a card, and I knew that the website’s URL was probably too long for her to remember…

But at least now I have an idea of what people are looking for, and I know now that caring cards on me may not be a bad idea.*shrugs*

This is a story from a little while ago, but I kept forgetting to put up word about it. You can read all about it here, http://blogs.business2.com/apple/2007/04/dell_switches_b.html. Now this usually wouldn’t be news to me, but recently I got a Dell laptop because I found a great deal on a dual core one with a 256MB vid card…so I couldn’t pass it up! Plus, lately I’ve found myself needing a laptop when I’m on vacation and stuff….But otherwise, I don’t personally care for Dell because I can usually make better computers cheaper myself. Anysvay..

Apparently, Dell has bowed down to customer complaints and have decided to ship their computers with XP rather than Vista. Which right now is a good thing because let’s face it, nothing works with Vista! It’s had a rather sluggish start as far as support for hardware and software, and obviously it’s been causing a lot of people, (including my wife), more than a few headaches. My wife’s problems stem from trying to get her Anatomy CD programs to work, which um…Won’t. But as long as Vista has access to the net, I’m generally ok. I’m sure in another year or two, Vista will be the dominant PC OS with DX10 and just a prettier look.