Lewies Blog

I’ve listened to Daft Punk hits for a while now on my XM Radio (Channel 81: Beats Per Minute). I’ve liked everything that I heard from them that I decided to go out and purchase an old album. I bought it used on Amazon for just under $10.

I received it in the mail yesterday and started listening. I instantly loved all the hits that I heard on the radio:

• One More Time
• Digital Love
• Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Now, I don’t know if it is that the CD has different versions, or maybe the quality of digital radio is better then CD’s. A lot of the other music just didn’t do anything for me at first. After listening to this album over and over again, some of the music has grown on me and is much more to my liking.

• Aerodynamic - Cool solo’s of what sounds to be an electric guitar. Just too weird to zone out with.
• Crescendolls - I don’t remember hearing this one on BPM, but I think it is good enough to be mainstream.
• Nightvision - wake me up when the next song comes on. It is nice, but I’m falling asleep.
• Superheroes - Don’t like it much. The beginning snare drum reminds me of an old song done by the Smashing Pumpkins. I just keep waiting for the guitar to kick in each time I hear it.
• High Life - almost good. Again, it might be my equalizers or something. I’m sure if this was remixed, it would make it to mainstream.
• Something About Us - The beginning of this song reminds me of Men in Black.
• Verdis Quo - Easy going and relaxing. I can coast into deep thought.
• Short Circuit - Can’t get into this one just yet. A portion sounds like special effects that Aphex Twin is pretty popular for doing. (It’s the melody at the end)
• Face to Face - Just don’t like it.
• Too Long - Horrible. So horrible.

If I had an iPod, then I would probably have been better off buying all the songs that I’m used to listening to for 99 cents each. Hopefully I can get one more person signed up for the free iPod offer so that I can get mine.

I’ve started making my program log into HaloScan and request individual comments. The reason - I think a lot of people have free HaloScan accounts.


Shabooty suggested that it would be a great feature. I try my best to please.

My program can finally do this - but at a price. After each page request, I set the client to pause for a few seconds. If it is any less, then I start hitting the server too hard and risk making a DOS (Denial of Service) attack.

Doing this causes a lot of unnecessary traffic between haloscan and the client application. It takes a lot of resources on both ends to transfer the data. Each comment has to be downloaded individually.

If you have a lot of comments, you could be spending a long time downloading them. I need to build in a caching mechanism for subsequent downloads. Still - the initial query is going to eat up time.

I’m debating just removing support for free haloscan accounts. The reason being is that HaloScan only requires $12 per year to begin with. It is very cheap for the service that they provide. Please go ahead and register - it is worth it.

Maybe I’ll set it up to only download the first 20 comments listed on the first page so that you can at least try it out. I have over 925 comments spanned over 47 pages on haloscan, so it takes a long time to go through and parse 972 pages. It’s doable, but not efficient.

As a few of you may know, I have completed the ground work on my Gravatar program. I was able to get it running from my windows task manager. This means that when I am not logged into my computer, it will run behind the scenes at predetermined intervals.

I came home from work today and found that I had a few errors. The errors didn’t tell me anything useful. It was just a big hex number.

Application popup: JIT Debugging : JIT Debugging failed with the following error: 0×800405a6

Please check the documentation topic ‘Just-in-time debugging errors’ for more information.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I could go ahead and research how to log errors to the event log, but I figured it was a waste of time for now. I wanted something quick and dirty. I created a method to save detailed information about the error into a file in the same directory as the program.

I’ve tested it and everything seems to work fine. Hopefully the same thing that happened today will happen tomorrow. I really want to get to the bottom of any bugs in my code.

I have also started speeding things up. Before validating gravatars, I was checking to see if the domain is registered. Doing a DNS query takes time. There are also a few problem domains that seem to throw exceptions. I put my caching techniques to work on this problem and now I can check for valid domains really quick for each successive query.

If anyone wants to start testing this program on there own machines, let me know. At the moment, you need to have a haloscan premium account, or you need to save your comments in a CAIF formatted Xml file to be parsed.

I think I have stumbled upon an underground development of a 3D animated movie being built on a cheap budget. Ok, Rustboy is actually a short film. From what I see, the camera scenes are setup very nice and have good detail and lighting.

The director is documenting his progress from storyboards to final movie clips. You get to check out some of the tests that have been done. A link is provided to buy the book, but at a price of $58 US, I think I would rather buy a few video games first.

Well, I have been digging into this gravatar program ever since I got home tonight. I was able to implement the REST API for gravatars without too many problems. One thing that I did notice is that one of my commenters has a rating that is nil. Usually, people have a rating of G, PG, R or X. If they don’t exist in the system, then the rating element doesn’t show up at all in the XML and I get a status code of 404.

This person had a status code of 200 (meaning ok). My only guess is that this person has a pending gravatar. That is, they are probably registered in the system, but waiting for the great folks over at Gravatar.com too rate them.

In addition to this, I also threw some email validation with regular expressions before asking Gravatar.com if this person is registered. I figure it may help cut down on wasting resources. In addition to that, I also check to see if the domain name is registered through DNS.

I found a few addresses where people had added extra text such as “remove-this” to there emails’ domain name to avoid spam. Since only valid email addresses can be registered through gravatar.com, I can safely assume that these addresses don’t exist.

The last part on this program is to finish moving some code from the front-end to the back-end. There doesn’t seem to be much left. I have been moving sections over a little at a time. It has helped me identify some problem areas during the process.

If anyone is desperate to try this out, I can send the program to you to evaluate. The problem is, you must have a Haloscan “paid” account, or a CAIF file on your hard drive. I’ll be working on being compatible free haloscan accounts after the code has been moved to the back end.

Update


The preliminary work is done. I am now able to set this up in my windows task manager to run without having to start this up myself. This means that I no longer have to manually run this program. Yeah!

I still have some tests to do and some tweaks, but this program is just about ready for beta. I may also be working with Paul Scott to determine how we can grab the comments out of his software as well for this tool.

It may turn out to simply let him create a CAIF file. If that’s the case, I have a CAIF class in .Net that may come in handy as well as a simple object serializer that he could use to turn it into Xml.

In case anyone has been wondering about my Gravatar program - I haven’t been slacking. I’ve got it setup to automatically update every X minutes. Every day when I come home, I see a small error that I didn’t handle here and there.

I just recently went over to the Gravatar Blogs. I saw a new post oriented specifically towards me called XML Info via REST API. Here is some quoted text:

Since a lot of gravatar plugins are being written these days, I’ve decided to implement a little REST based function that returns some XML giving all the essential information about a gravatar. To get the xml info about my gravatar, you would simply request it like so:

http://www.gravatar.com/info/md5/b8cce166175577913dc19b2bf3f91581

This is great! It is also more reliable then the method that I was using. I was requesting a uri 4 times before giving up. I would do it to figure out the rating of the email as well (G, PG, R, X). I felt like it was such a waste of time and cached my missing addresses for 4 hours before checking for them again.

If anyone is clueless about what my program does, here is a screen shot showing the most recent commenters on my blog who have a gravatar, and have also submitted a valid Url.

Winter is over and yet again, I missed out on expressing myself. 50% of the human race has an ability handed down to them through chromosomes. That talent is the ability to pee in the snow with accuracy. Where many think that the act is indecent, I think otherwise. I just don’t have the time.

Finally, I have found the answer. Rather then keep it all to myself, I am going to share it with you. Even the goddesses that visit my site can also take part in this artistic desecration. Go ahead my readers, go forth and pee in the snow.

When I’m a little depressed, I often go on a shopping spree. It’s not one of those kind of sprees where I go from store to store and buying lots of stuff. It is more like something where I just browse most of the time and then leave with a big ticket item that I always wished I had but was just a little out of reach.

Tonight, I went over to a popular computer store and spent an hour just walking around. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything that I really wanted. No games, no software or utilities. I couldn’t find any accessories or hardware for my computer that I wanted. Graphical software and DVD copying was just not my thing.

What is wrong with me? Am I really that depressed that I find nothing of interest at all? I don’t feel overwhelmingly depressed. Maybe I already have everything I need. There were a few items that I would have liked to have, but they were still expensive for the moment.

• A powerful shiny new laptop
• A Mac mini
• A flat screen HDTV
• Mac OS X (10.3 or above)

On second thought, there are a few things that I do need that I forgot about. One being some printer ink and the other being a USB hub. After a little bit of thought, I just realized that I saved $80.00 tonight because I didn’t buy these things. That cheers me up a little bit. But I am sure that sooner or later I’ll have to give into the ink (or just buy another printer).

I’m a really nice guy. I practically let everyone walk all over me. I am not all that great when it comes to standing up for myself. That is why I needed some tools to form an evil plan of my own.

Objective: World Domination
Motive: To show them all

Stage One
To begin your plan, you must first seduce the chosen one. This will cause the world to sign up for life insurance policies, overwhelmed by your arrival. Who is this evil genius? Where did they come from? And why do they look so good in battle armor?

Stage Two

Next, you must steal the Pyramids of Giza. This will all be done from a haunted woods, a mysterious place of unrivaled dark glory. Upon seeing this, the world will die in a way you just don’t want to think about, as countless hordes of winged monkeys hasten to do your every bidding.

Stage Three

Finally, you must send forth your opening of the seven seals, bringing about pain, suffering, the usual. Your name shall become synonymous with “Dear God, No!”, and no man, woman, child nor senior will ever again dare interrupt your sentences. Everyone will bow before your cunning intelligence, and the world will have no choice but to lavish endless praise on your misdeeds.

I didn’t say it was a good plan.

If you get a kick out of those battle of the sexes jokes, then I got one for you. I found tons of jokes explaining why beer is better then a man/woman. Here are a few examples:

Why beer is better then a man:

• A beer lasts longer than seven seconds.
• A beer does as many chores as a man, with a lot less complaining.
• If the beer is finished before you are, you can have another beer.
• A beer helps with the housework.
• A big, fat beer is nice to have.
• A beer won’t even mind if you have another six pack.

Why beer is better then a woman:

• You can enjoy a beer all month long
• A beer is always wet.
• Beer never says no
• Beer doesn’t mind getting dirty
• Beer is never late.
• Beer tastes good.