Useless Blogging

A lot of little things are going on, coding-wise. (That was the cue for the general audience of this blog to disengage your brain.)

Julz asked me to solve a problem for her. Well, more specifically, she asked if I knew of a way to keep her from doing tedious manual labor, and since I didn’t have an answer, I created one. Bonus: I now know a little about IMAP mailboxes.

Tactical Gamer got an update of its BF2 Reserved Slot system, which allows the folks who help pay the bills to get onto an otherwise full Battlefield2 server. Those revisions will be submitted to the folks in charge tomorrow.

For a disaster recovery test at work today, I tinkered up a PHP page based on my Excellence Award-nominated archive system (since I couldn’t get the normal, everyday use database bindings to work). It ran the results of both tests (production and recovery) side by side, so the comparison of the results was a snap.

In future news, the Counter-Strike game officer has an idea on how to populate one of the private servers, and page_admin (my utility to call an admin to a game server if a problem player is ruining a game) will likely be adapted to the task. More to come on that, maybe.

Took off the chat and the IM. Underused (particularly by my wife, who was the target audience). Whine enough, and they may return.

OK. The time has come to do some PHP coding again. It’s been a while, but there’s some stuff for work, and some stuff for a business website, and sone stuff for uselesspython, that I want to get at least minorly cranking on.

I get to see if I remember how to do all of this. Wish me luck.

From Julz:
Some stuff I done did…
(more…)

So I noticed that my host offers a number of “value-added services”, which translates into “Open-Source stuff we can automate, making it free and no work for us.” I’ve popped one of those things in, phpOpenChat, and called it “Steegness Chat”. The theory is that it should operate like a normal chat room, just over the web. I have no clue how much of a resource drain this might be, but it’s worth letting it fly for a day or two.

Users have to register, and click a link in a confirmation email. Nothing major.

I plan on trying it out tomorrow while everyone (including me) is at work. I’m going to see if I can find some way to rip the status so you can see how many people are in chat from the front page, but don’t hold your breath.

The art of the tease – baltimoresun.com
Why I’m blogging this:

Believe it or not, publicly removing your bra and swinging it, lasso-like, above your head can be considered a feminist activity. So can crawling around on all fours, sewing your own rhumba shorts and learning how to apply Caribbean-blue eye shadow and Pepto-Bismol-pink blush, just so.

And J is afraid.

[16:38] j: I’m afraid you know too much…

Often, I fear my knowledge too. If I took what I knew, and applied to for the purposes of Evil, things might be very different in this world. MY world, that is.

MWAHAHAHA!

Juniata: Student Alumni Career Connection

I presume this is where my friends are headed this weekend. Looking at it, I find the whole thing sort of funny, especially were I to go.

“What do you do, and how is it that you came to do it?”
“Nepotism got me in the door. After that, I parlayed my hobby of computers into something resembling a career by impressing the right people at the right time. And my degree is in philosophy.”

ELL. OH. ELL.

So, my little Sourceforge effort has picked up a new developer who whizbanged it up to 2.0.

Changelog includes:
* Queries updated to use new request formats, and challenge numbers.
* SRCDS._any_response(QUERY) now supports multi-packet responses.
* SRCDS.__init__() now supports hostnames as well as ip.
* SRCDS.__init__() also supports timeout=secs argument, to specify upd/tcp socket timeouts.
* SRCDS now fully supports HL1 servers (with automatic discovery of hl
version), with HLDS subclassed from SRCDS for backwards compatibility
HLDS.
* No longer attempts tcp connection unless required for HL2 RCON
* RCON support almost completely rewritten:
* More accurate RCON password checking for Source
* Fixed multi-packet TCP recv bug from 1.01
* HL1 RCON support added (with automatic discovery of hl version)
* SRCDS.status() method rewritten without StringIO module
* Better Exception raising
* Some other minor bugfixes

Girlscoutcookie did a hell of a job bringing the library back up to speed with the changes that Valve made to the server processes. This also drove me to learn a little about CVS, as the files are now version-controlled via SourceForge.

Collaboration is the wave of the future. Or plastics. I forget which.

Tomorrow marks not just the fortieth Superbowl, but also the start of my parents’ 35th year together as husband and wife.

True love isn’t often found, and less seldom is it held as long as you guys have managed it. With all my heart, I wish you two a happy 34th anniversary, and many many more to come.