Back From Georgia

I came back home from Thanksgiving break in Georgia yesterday. Surprisingly, I really enjoyed the time with the family. I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving as well!

I brought two things home with me from Georgia. One is a little 6-week-old kitten we named Gracie (I might talk about her more later, or even post some pics), and the other is an old computer my aunt was planning on scrapping. It has some interesting family tree info on it she wanted me to pull off of it first, but after that, it is all mine. The reason I decided to take it home is because it has a PCI Ethernet adapter, which if you recall I have been looking for to connect my server to the network/internet. I will be doing some more work with the server and seeing if I can get the adapter working with it over the next couple days.

Me? A Teacher?

Earlier in the year, I suggested the idea of teaching GML (Game Maker) to the Programming II class. The teacher, Mr. Allen, decided that the first semester, he would teach the class Java, and the second semester, I could teach the class GML. Today, he gave me a 17-day timeframe to come up with a basic lesson plan to use after Christmas break. Im so excited to finally be able to share my infinite wisdom of computers with a class. :p

If I come up with a lesson plan that I feel like sticking to, Ill be sure to put it up on BlakeNet, along with select projects created by the students of the class.

BlakeNet

Saturday, November 3rd, I got bored and decided to completely clear off one of my old computers, install Linux, and get a server going. The next day, I installed and configured Apache, PHP4, and MySQL. What took me two weeks to post this? Well, Ive been busy working with the hardware of the machine.

The computer did not have an Ethernet adapter, so I got one from one of my dad's old work machines. The problem is the adapter is ISA, which Linux doesnt exactly like, and the ISA port seems to have issues with the adapter plugging into it fully. Either of these could be the cause of the problem. So, after two weeks of fighting it physically and digitally (with the immensely appreciated help of the LaunchPad help group), I have finally reached boiling point and trashed the card. Now, Im looking for a PCI Ethernet adapter.

In the meantime, I will be working offline with LeetBoard and a couple of my site concepts. When I find the adapter, you can check out the progress first-hand. The server, and inheritantly the website from which all of this material will be available, will be refered to as BlakeNet. Yes, its a pretty lame name. Ill come up with a better one when I have time to stop and think about it.

Playing The Oldies

Well, I decided to head into my room today and untangle the mass of cords all huddled up in the corner. After sorting them all out, I got to touch my old SNES and NES from way back in the day. I dusted them off and hooked them up, and sat down, ready to play.

Unfortunately, I couldnt get the SNES to play on my TV correctly. Ill have to work on that more later. But, I DID get the NES fired up, and after a few savage beatings, I actually got to play some of my old favorites. Super Mario (one and three), Mission: Impossible, Star Tropics, and even Solstice! It really took me back to the good ole days. I plan to take a break from the Wii for a while to just take in all of the glory of the old, crappy games we used to play and love to remember.

If any of you have an old system that may still have a chance of functioning, I suggest you wrestle it out and play it for a while too. Halo 3 wont miss you that long. ;)

MyishiCorp.com Down

Today, MyishiCorp.com reached the end of its lifespan. This includes the LeetBoard beta testing. Myishi vets can still use the old forum, although it may not be very active. We encourage all vets, newer members, and old allies to get MSN Messenger and keep in touch with us through it. If you have it, but dont have any of our addy's, e-mail me.

The shutdown of the LeetBoard beta will drastically affect the development of the software. I will be setting up a new site for testing soon enough, but for now development of the project is suspended.

It's been fun!

Recent LeetBoard Updates

Lately, I have been working quite diligently on LeetBoard. As a result, four new features and fixes have been implemented today.

The first is the moderator macro feature. This allows administrators to set up shortcut operations, or macros, for board moderators. The macros can pin, lock, move, and reply to topics. Macros can be limited to a specific forum or forums, usergroup, or a combination of the two. In the future, the power of the mod macros will be expanded to allow actions to be taken on the posters themselves.

Second, we have polls ready for use in topics. Polls can be appended to regular topics where they are allowed. You can read more about this feature in the previous post title LeetBoard Tech: Polls.

Next up is the post title/description issue. It turns out there was an error with how the title and description of new topics were being processed, causing them to display strangely if certain reserved characters were used. This also lead to both fields being cleared automatically upon previewing the new topic before posting.

Finally, another fix for the smiley system. This issue involved the "Show All Smilies" link missing from the Editing Topic form.

I will continue to work on the LeetBoard software. Each day it gets closer to completion. A special thanks to the Myishi Corp community for their continued help in beta testing the software and feedback. For additional feature updates, check the todo list.

LeetBoard Tech: Polls

Many message board softwares allow their users to create polls that allow other members of the board to read a question and decide amoung several choices provided. LeetBoard now supports this same feature. A user can provide a poll question, along with a minimum of 2 or maximum of 6 options, to be appended to the top of a topic. The options may contain BBC and smilies. After voting, the users can then view a pie chart rendered on-the-spot that shows the current poll standings including the total votes, and number and percentage of votes per choice.

MC Closing Again

Well, it seems Myishi Corp is going down for the count yet again. This time it will probably stay down. Even though I sort of expected MC to run out of steam so early in its revival, it's still pretty sad to see poor ole Myishi going out for the, what I guess to be, third time in it's on-off life.

As there is no point in having a website for a corporation that no longer exists, MyishiCorp.com will be dissolved after the latest payment on the hosting and registration expires (which should be sometime near the end of October 2007). This means the forum will also be pulling a vanishing act, which will effectively end this round of LeetBoard development. I will be starting a new website somewhere down the line where I will continue development of the project. But, until then, the only place you will be able to see anything LeetBoard-related will be here. For anyone who is reading this and was a former member of MC, the old forum will still be up, although I will not be actively administrating it and very very few others will be using it. We prefer you get MSN/WLM and chat with us using it instead.

Retargetting Images

I just had to blog about this. This technology is awesome. Basically, its like resizing an image, except instead of just subtracting rows and columns of pixels, the program seeks the best pixels to remove, that way the image doesnt appear lop-sided or otherwise deformed. It also works for enlarging an image. Check it out.

Image Resizing

LeetBoard Tech: Custom BBC

LeetBoard aims to provide you with the ability to create your own BBC tags to use on your board. Unfortunately, this means the mechanism responsible for creating the buttons users click to add the BBC to their posts requires some advanced programming in order to allow you the freedom to create BBC tags without any restrictions on how much they can do.

BBC tags are traditionally just short-hand codes which are replaced by their HTML counterparts. But some more advanced tags may allow you to use syntax highlighting, or even generate dynamic content. No forum software before LeetBoard has given you this level of power when creating custom BBC tags.