Dpchoung.com

In general never buy a game at release retail price, usually they go down in a few months. The price typically drops faster for PC games than console games. (This rule goes out the window if you're gunning for a Special Edition though, because clearly nothing's going to stop you from getting that horse armor).

If you're on multiplayer with a headset on, try not to breathe too hard, everyone can hear you. 'Ya srsly'.

Console gaming accessories rarely ever go down in price. So if you find a good deal go for it.

If you're thinking about getting a gamer a game, for a gift, make absolutely sure it's something he/she is interested in. Otherwise that copy of Hello Kitty Bubblegum Friends will do nothing but entertain specs of dust.

I've refactored my site. ~Yay!~

You can't tell because it was all backend stuff. ~Boo~

I've OOP'd it all. Basically.

On impulse, I decided to buy this book: Practical Electronics for Inventors by Paul Scherz. I look forward to reading it, and hopefully getting a better understanding of electronics in general.

In reality it will probably sit on my desk, not to be read, for roughly about a year or two. At which point I will finally take a look at it and go, "Oh, I didn't know I could do that." over and over again... and then I will put it down for 2-3 more years...

I'm slowly finding out that putting together a shopping cart is a bit more complicated than I thought. I originally intended to slap one together to see if I could sell off random junk lying about the house. Being that this junk is random though, it ends up widening the range of considerations in putting together the database. At one point I had to resolve, in my head, whether or not a publisher could be considered a manufacturer or not, I mean, they do 'manufacture' the book, don't they?

Still going at it, but it's slow. and tedious. But I'm still too lazy to glance at the documentation for OS Commerce.

I'm comforted by the fact that it could be even slower.

Somehow.

I've noticed that the LCD dimming sensor has a pretty good range. Every time I raise my arm to scratch my head the screen darkens.

This is in a room that's already pretty dark.

I've also noticed that I've been making good use of the backlit keyboard a lot more than I had imagined. I didn't even think it was going to be that useful.

Pleasant surprise I guess.

This is something simple that I don't see explained in too many texts. I guess it's just so simple that people should get it right away. This is for the ones that don't...

Basically, use '$this' to get the method (function) working if you want to use it inside another method, but within the same class.

Congratulations UCLA on another wonderfully predictable loss. Every year that passes makes Dorrell's victory in 2006 look more and more like a divine miracle. Thank you so much for allowing me to hold my head high and proudly declare, "I love UCLA football". Why did we let him go again???

Something tells me this won't be as addicting as Morrowind or Oblivion were.

Some thoughts...

After 3 hours in though, it is pretty fun.

I like the way they deal with gunplay, the v.a.t.s. system, it works really well. My guy is a terrible shot though.

I like the graphics, they look great, just as good as Oblivion, actually probably better.

I'm not that fond of the wasteland look, that's just the nature of the series though.

I'm slowly beginning to get the impression that there is no real set standard for MVC implementation. In some cases the database is included in the Controller, in others it is excluded from the MVC altogether.

I'm still messing with CakePHP, although some aspects end up stamping a big question mark above my head. Such as how the View layer files are .ctp instead of .thtml now.

I'm sure it's not as big a deal as it seems to me.

Maybe I'm better off not going with a framework...

Well, it looks like it's finally happened. My prayers have finally been answered, for behold, a 13" Aluminum Macbook!

This is the proper successor to the 12" Powerbook that I've been waiting for. I've noted my disappointment at the Macbook lineup, up to this point, in this past posting.

Just got Unix in a Nutshell and found a nifty little piece of fun to torture coworkers with...

In the terminal you can have the Mac's Speech app activate and say whatever you want, such as if you type in:
say "i feel pretty, oh so pretty"
and then hit ENTER, it will of course say those exact words.

Take it up a notch though and type in:
say -o example.aiff "i feel pretty, oh so pretty"
and then hit ENTER.

It will then save the speech to that sound file, you won't hear anything, but if you replay in a sound app like iTunes then you'll hear it perfectly.

Wow, that Treo Pro sure looks great.
It's got WiFi and GPS, and microSDHC, and 256mb of memory, and Micro USB, and Bluetooth. Wow.

Too bad it's running Windows Mobile.

I was carrying around my usual iPod Nano/ WD Passport combo the other day when it dawned on me that I could put both in one, by acquiring an iPod Classic.

Thinking about it some more, it also occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to use my Mac-formatted iPod as storage on the PC. So I snooped around the web and found the solution. Just format the iPod through iTunes on Windows, because it uses the Fat32 format, rather than Apple's, which I think is HFS.

The only downside, I believe, is that I can't auto-update my iPod's firmware any more, but that doesn't happen that often anyway.

Oh Yay!

Found a great article by Jason Gilmore over at developer.com called, Performing HTTP Geocoding with the Google Maps API. It helped me get past a roadblock on the way to getting some API work done on one of my sites.

I spent all of today playing around with the Google Maps API, it's pretty interesting stuff. I actually opted for Google over Yahoo's because I felt Google had the better satellite images.

I later came upon a site that distinctly pointed out the differences between the two. It turns out Yahoo Maps has their own Geocoding solution in their API. Google seems to let you figure that part out yourself, somewhat. I kind of wished I had known that before, but then thinking about it some more I realized that it wouldn't have made their satellite images any better. Unfortunately.

I just had one heck of an ordeal trying to install the iPhone Final SDK on my Powerbook. I had actually done it with the first beta, thanks to a nice workaround pointed out by Mike Rundle.

Basically, all you needed to do was manually install the iPhone-related extra packages, which all had the prefix "Aspen". This time around they've done away with the "Aspen" prefix and just replaced it with "iPhone", which isn't really too big a problem.

The new problem was in how the SDK reconfigured XCode to throw up a compilation error because it only wanted to run on intel Macs.

While perusing the comments of Mike Rundle's blog posting I ran across this post by Tom Bradford. It looked like Tom had already figured the workaround by locating the file that XCode read, to see the list of which processors it was allowed to compile the iPhone SDK on.

So, with that settled I went forward and followed all the directions. Unfortunately, and probably due to some past XCode meddling, I kept on running into some gcc-4.0.1 error. I relented, uninstalled, and then reinstalled XCode and the iPhone SDK, followed the workaround directions, and now everything seems to be in order because I just ran the "Hello World" sample app that you can download from the iPhone Dev Center, and it WORKS!

All I can say is thank Goodness for these two individuals.

Got a new RSS feed up and running. For all 2 of you. Me included.

Back from Greece. It is a great place. Everyone should visit it some day.

That is all.

I grabbed a flashing led kit from Fry's and soldered it together today.

Halfway through I realized that the solder I've been using is too thick.

That might be part of the reason why I've been soldering globs.

I then picked up an old broken USB 1.1 hub, and pulled it apart for its LEDs and the usb ports. Maybe they'll come in useful later.

My iPod Nano is roughly 2 years old and has been a great little device up to this point. About a week ago I noticed that the battery drained at an excessive rate. At first I pondered whether it might be due to the 320kbps songs I was listening to at the time, my brother disagreed with me on that hypothesis, but I still feel they're responsible to a small degree.

Regardless, after checking battery fix prices with apple I said to myself, "why not?" and just resolved to try and replace the battery myself.

First step, of course, was youtube, to see how the 'pros' did it. Some videos seemed more useful than others. Here's the small list of videos I found helpful:

• ConsoleZombie.com
• Tutorial by Doyy1

The consolezombie one was great, I thought it was kind of odd that he had to alter his voice like he's running from the mob (and if his voice is really like that, sorry I didn't realize!). It did have a few empty spots though, and that was why I dug the Doyy1 tutorial.

Second step, order the battery replacement kit off of ifixit.com. The kit itself is nice because they package in 2 case openers (the hardest part for me, we'll get to that later though). What else was great with ordering from these guys is that they're based near San Luis Obispo, so I literally received the kit the next day!

3rd step, opening her up! This was definitely the hardest part for me, I didn't understand how much pressure to place, or the approach, or anything. All the videos made it seem kind of easy, believe me, it's not that easy for a first-timer.

After dulling the somewhat pointed edges of my kit's 2 opening tools, and some extra help from my pocket knife, I was finally able to pry it open.

From this point on, I would say things got easier. It just becomes a simple process of remove and replace. Although I did run into a bit of a snag when I became afraid that I was running out of solder on the board itself. I thought that I might need to put some of my own solder on it, after refreshing my memory of how much solder my tip can seep on, I realized that it would have been overkill. Luckily the contacts and the existing solder held firm.

The solder points looked a bit small for my iron:

The size of my iron's soldering job:

Closing it up was a literal snap. I'm charging it right now and after a few rough tests I'll have an update.

I recently redesigned my haunted places website, socalspooks.com. I thought the process was interesting enough that someone may find it worth a gander, so here it is.

Prior to the redesign, my site existed on a somewhat ad hoc look I threw together. It was basically a big rounded rectangle with blood spatters in the background. While I wasn't completely satisfied, it seemed sufficient at the time.

Fast forward to the last few months. My motivation and free time wavelengths were in tune, so I decide to jump in.

When starting off on any design/redesign venture it's always good to present yourself with a few different options. I usually go for at least three.

The first design idea was to have the site look like a big headstone, the title would have an inset look, as if it were carved in, and the sub-headings would be red, body text would be white.

The second design idea was to make it look like a bulletin board with postcards and college ruled paper strewn about.

The third idea was to go for an absolute minimalist look, all white background, red sub-headings and body text.

In my next posting I'll go into why none of them worked for me 100%, and why I went with what I went with...