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Coding (52)
Written by nickchanger the 4th of August 2010 at 19:30
- Viewed 4 times
- Coding, Friends, Gaming, Me!
A lot is going on in these days. To much for my taste actually.
Since I am done at the university I pretty much have to get a job somewhere. That has meant making my CV and different job applications. It also meant joining what is known as an A-kasse. Not sure what it is called in English but it is something that will pay me as long as I do not have a job, pretty sweet deal. Of course they demand that I am actually searching for a job, but who would want to sit at home everyday doing nothing anyway.... wait a minute.
I am currently also in the process of moving out of my apartment in Aalborg (in just a couple of weeks). But since I do not know where in the world I will get a job yet I have no apartment to move into. So to begin with I will be moving back home to my parents. Hopefully I will have a job soon so I can move out again :P .
I have been in the process of creating a framework for websites, and have for months now been working on using that framework for this site. At the moment I only need some administration stuff and I should be ready to release it. I did, however, feel like it needed a new design as well so that might come too. Of course it has already taken longer than I expected but I just have not had the time :( .
Riot Games (the creators of League of Legends) released the "Season 1" ladder stuff, which meant the log file changed. The log file we parse to get all the data for LoLBase.net. Since my partner were visiting his family in Vietnam and rarely had any time, and the fact that it was me who originally created the parser, I was forced to fix it so we could continue the parsing of the thousands of log files we receive every day. Of course season 1 was released right in the middle of a holiday trip I was on, where me and 8 other young people (I was actually the oldest :P ) went to a summer house on the west coast (of Denmark) to get drunk for seven days straight. Yes I was drunk most of the time there and it was actually quite fun. Well, except for the fact that one of the two girls who were there got a concussion the 2nd night at could not participate in most of what we were doing the rest of the week. Pictures on Facebook :P . Anyway, I finished the parser a few days ago and the parser is currently crunching through the more than 120000 log files that was in the queue (would take around 85 hours), and it is still going :P .
Riot have, however, done something really awesome. With the release of season 1 they also released a new website both in North America and in Europe. At the bottom of the front page is a small box with the title "Community Spotlight". On both sites there is only one thing inside this box: the banner for LoLBase.net! Fork yeah! I have made something that is used and known intonationally by thousands of people! Not sure, but I do not think Sands of War reached the same amount of users?
I have also finally started to actually play some LoL again. Sucks and owns randomly atm :P . I have also bought Arcanum on gog.com. My brother bought that game years ago but I never finished it - now I will! Then there are several tv-series that are about to start or have started and finally some anime. I told you, lots of stuff to do :P .
Shit this was long... I end it with Lilim...
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Since I am done at the university I pretty much have to get a job somewhere. That has meant making my CV and different job applications. It also meant joining what is known as an A-kasse. Not sure what it is called in English but it is something that will pay me as long as I do not have a job, pretty sweet deal. Of course they demand that I am actually searching for a job, but who would want to sit at home everyday doing nothing anyway.... wait a minute.
I am currently also in the process of moving out of my apartment in Aalborg (in just a couple of weeks). But since I do not know where in the world I will get a job yet I have no apartment to move into. So to begin with I will be moving back home to my parents. Hopefully I will have a job soon so I can move out again :P .
I have been in the process of creating a framework for websites, and have for months now been working on using that framework for this site. At the moment I only need some administration stuff and I should be ready to release it. I did, however, feel like it needed a new design as well so that might come too. Of course it has already taken longer than I expected but I just have not had the time :( .
Riot Games (the creators of League of Legends) released the "Season 1" ladder stuff, which meant the log file changed. The log file we parse to get all the data for LoLBase.net. Since my partner were visiting his family in Vietnam and rarely had any time, and the fact that it was me who originally created the parser, I was forced to fix it so we could continue the parsing of the thousands of log files we receive every day. Of course season 1 was released right in the middle of a holiday trip I was on, where me and 8 other young people (I was actually the oldest :P ) went to a summer house on the west coast (of Denmark) to get drunk for seven days straight. Yes I was drunk most of the time there and it was actually quite fun. Well, except for the fact that one of the two girls who were there got a concussion the 2nd night at could not participate in most of what we were doing the rest of the week. Pictures on Facebook :P . Anyway, I finished the parser a few days ago and the parser is currently crunching through the more than 120000 log files that was in the queue (would take around 85 hours), and it is still going :P .
Riot have, however, done something really awesome. With the release of season 1 they also released a new website both in North America and in Europe. At the bottom of the front page is a small box with the title "Community Spotlight". On both sites there is only one thing inside this box: the banner for LoLBase.net! Fork yeah! I have made something that is used and known intonationally by thousands of people! Not sure, but I do not think Sands of War reached the same amount of users?
I have also finally started to actually play some LoL again. Sucks and owns randomly atm :P . I have also bought Arcanum on gog.com. My brother bought that game years ago but I never finished it - now I will! Then there are several tv-series that are about to start or have started and finally some anime. I told you, lots of stuff to do :P .
Shit this was long... I end it with Lilim...
1 comment
A quick update to let you know about the upcoming exams period. I have been way to busy to write anything clever here for a while.
We, me and my group m8 Tuan, hand in our project (report and product) on the 14th of June. Then we have our project exam (the only exam this time) on the 28th, and finally a ceremony where we are handed our diploma, or whatever, on the 30th. And then I have a candidate degree in Software (cand.polyt.)!
LoLBase.net have received surprisingly many (to me at least) donations and we have already bought a new server and put up a brand new design! Everything is awesome until yesterday where the main database suddenly disappeared ... wtf?! So we are currently reconstructing the data from backups and archives. With the move, the new design and the lost database we have been quite busy with that too.
Back to work...
1 comment
We, me and my group m8 Tuan, hand in our project (report and product) on the 14th of June. Then we have our project exam (the only exam this time) on the 28th, and finally a ceremony where we are handed our diploma, or whatever, on the 30th. And then I have a candidate degree in Software (cand.polyt.)!
LoLBase.net have received surprisingly many (to me at least) donations and we have already bought a new server and put up a brand new design! Everything is awesome until yesterday where the main database suddenly disappeared ... wtf?! So we are currently reconstructing the data from backups and archives. With the move, the new design and the lost database we have been quite busy with that too.
Back to work...
1 comment
I am busy with my school project, and will probably be for the next month until we hand it in the 14th of June. That leaves even less time to come up with an obscure blog about something weird. So instead this will just be a small update about things going on ... and showing of my latest drawings.
For a few months I have been creating yet another PHP framework from scratch. It is heavily inspired by the framework behind this site, created by me, and the one we use for LoLBase.net, created by my school project partner, Tuan. About a week ago I started to transform this site into the new framework and it is going great. Everything looks so much prettier ... in the code that is. The process is not done yet, and it is very likely that it will not be in the coming month either. I have a couple of other sites in progress that also uses the framework, and maybe I will tell you about that some day :P .
LoLBase.net is going tremendously great. We have run into one performance problem after another because of the huge interest we are getting. We have solved most of them but have now decided that we need our own full-time server to handle the pressure. To accomplish this we have started a donation campaign in hope that some of the users would help us, and some have already done so :o ! It is quite annoying that school requires so much time so we have trouble finding the time to actually do some work on lolbase, and the list of feature request is loooong.
Small update? Yeah, whatever - now for some drawings. Again inspired heavily by anime and mange :P . My scanner really suck so there is random shadows and missing shadows on all images :( .
Click on the thumbs to see a larger version (preparations for a gallery I am also making for the new site :P).
Louise from Zero no Tsukaima and her whip.
Fan service! Really do not understand Japan's fascination with bloody noses?
Random girl with a gun. Her left hand were annoying so I made her cry to move it up there :P .
Tsukimiya Ayu from Kanon. As always I did not capture her face in a good way so she is not really recognizable :P .
Satsuki Kitaoji from Ichigo 100% (a classic ecchi harem high school romance comedy manga).
3 comments
For a few months I have been creating yet another PHP framework from scratch. It is heavily inspired by the framework behind this site, created by me, and the one we use for LoLBase.net, created by my school project partner, Tuan. About a week ago I started to transform this site into the new framework and it is going great. Everything looks so much prettier ... in the code that is. The process is not done yet, and it is very likely that it will not be in the coming month either. I have a couple of other sites in progress that also uses the framework, and maybe I will tell you about that some day :P .
LoLBase.net is going tremendously great. We have run into one performance problem after another because of the huge interest we are getting. We have solved most of them but have now decided that we need our own full-time server to handle the pressure. To accomplish this we have started a donation campaign in hope that some of the users would help us, and some have already done so :o ! It is quite annoying that school requires so much time so we have trouble finding the time to actually do some work on lolbase, and the list of feature request is loooong.
Small update? Yeah, whatever - now for some drawings. Again inspired heavily by anime and mange :P . My scanner really suck so there is random shadows and missing shadows on all images :( .
Click on the thumbs to see a larger version (preparations for a gallery I am also making for the new site :P).
Louise from Zero no Tsukaima and her whip.
Fan service! Really do not understand Japan's fascination with bloody noses?
Random girl with a gun. Her left hand were annoying so I made her cry to move it up there :P .
Tsukimiya Ayu from Kanon. As always I did not capture her face in a good way so she is not really recognizable :P .
Satsuki Kitaoji from Ichigo 100% (a classic ecchi harem high school romance comedy manga).
3 comments
A couple of weeks ago we had big problems with the LoLBase.net database. We had to basically start it over which required us to "recreate" all of the data in a new database. There were over 400 MB of data in the old database that needed to be restructured and reduced. It takes a shitload of time to do so and we had to do it in small steps to make sure everything were done correctly (and to make sure the server would not get overloaded). This meant we (or more precisely me) needed to manually change some starting values and run a script once or twice a minute. With two half-hour dinner breaks and a two-hour major fixing, the whole process took around 18 hours straight - from early morning to late night.
I had Opera opened throughout the whole 18 hours, including during the major fixing where it where used heavily to dump and upload data. At the end it used almost half a gigabyte of memory and started to make some weird black graphic errors on the script starting page. So a good advice to anyone, is to close your browser completely once in a while ;) . Would be scary if I had used Internet Explorer or one of the earlier versions of Firefox which had memory leaks o.0 !
To avoid just sitting and waiting for the script to finish so I could start the next iteration I had to find something else to do. That is not easy, since I would get interrupted at least once a minute. That ruled out pretty much every game I have, except for Peggle! So I played a lot of Peggle that day... but 18 hours of Peggle would just be insane, so I needed to think of something else from time to time.
Usually I would start programming something, but that is damn hard when you cannot keep focus on the task at hand for more than a minute at the time.
A few days earlier I had finished seeing the second season of School Rumble for the second time, damn funny stuff! I were about to start on the third season when I remembered that they totally forked it up by only creating the last two episodes (25 and 26th). What were they thinking :( ! I then read some forum threads and they reminded me that School Rumble were originally made as a manga and apparently the anime followed it pretty closely. So I decided I wanted to find the manga and read that instead.
I quickly found a website that had plenty of mangas, including School Rumble. But I also found that there were no clear separation between the manga chapters that would tell me where season two of the anime would end and season three would start. So instead I started to read some other mangas, basically just picked some random ones. Got through more than two (with ~30 chapters each) on this day!
The site I found were called One Manga. I highly doubted it would be the only site out there and a simple Google image search on a popular manga revealed several others: mangareader.net, mangafox.com, manga.watchanimeon.com, manga.animea.net, mangavolume.com, mangachapters.info and ourmanga.com ... just to name a few. I have not analysed all of them so I have not uncovered all the differences and figured out which might be the best. They all have ads when you are reading the manga, and some are quite annoying - but of course these can be blocked by Opera. Most of them are updated at the same time with the exact same scanlation (as the scanning and translation of a manga is called) so none have better quality than others, and they use basically the same way to navigate through the manga pages. I think I will stick with One Manga though, as I like its simple design and navigation when reading.
When browsing the mangas I quickly found three mangas that were everywhere and usually also marked in some special way (one site even have them in the main menu!). These are Naruto, Bleach and One Piece. All of them I knew about from anime, but have, however, never seen any of it. Both as manga and as anime they are of the "never-ending" kind. Naruto have 490+ chapters, Bleach 390+, and One Piece have 580+! That is just way to much to follow at this point so I doubt I will ever read these three, despite their popularity. If you have any recommendations for a manga I should look at please let me know, as I am currently shooting randomly here :) .
Reading all of this manga have done two things to me: First, since Japanese manga is read from right to left, it have forked up my reading direction - I even tried reading an xkcd comic from right to left which is not as funny :P . Second, I have been greatly inspired to start drawing again - so hopefully I will release some drawings in the near future, and you cannot stop me!
3 comments
Written by nickchanger the 21st of March 2010 at 15:59 - Last updated the 22nd of March 2010 at 16:53
- Viewed 46 times
- Coding, Hmmm
March 2010 were the month where Microsoft released their Browser Choice Screen or whatever. This little weird thing were the result of the European Union. For some reason they did not like the fact that Microsoft creates applications that can be used in their own operating system. It has been like this for several years now and it started with Windows Media Player which were not allowed to be an integrated part of Windows any more. Now Internet Explorer is the big problem as to many people uses it because they are unaware of alternatives. What is next? My beloved Paint? Nah, they ruined it themself in Windows 7 so who cares any more.
EU calls what Microsoft is doing as anti-competitive, or something like that. There is however just one big problem with that - there is a reason why people are unaware of alternatives: They have no clue what the fork Internet Explorer really is!
Google send a guy (called Scott) to Times Square, New York, to ask passers questions like "What is a browser?". The result can be seen on youtube. It is quite funny hearing the answers when you are a computer geek like me, but also kind of disturbing. So many people have absolutely no clue what they are doing when they use a computer at all ... and I am going to get a carrier where I create software for these :/ . It will be a pain.
In response to the decision by EU, Microsoft them self said that most people do not even known what a browser is, obviously implying that this was a ridicules act by EU - and I can only agree. Do not get me wrong, Internet Explorer is, and has been for a long time, the absolutely worst browser among the major contenders. Even Apple Safari beats it by miles!
It is basically like this: Opera > Mozilla Firefox > Google Chrome > Apple Safari > no internet > Internet Explorer.
But even though I hate Internet Explorer so much I still find this whole case lame. If I created an operating system and gave other people the possibility to create their own applications, why should I then be punished and not be allowed to have my own applications as the default choices? It just does not make any sense. Makes you wonder why Apple have not been a target of something similar - well at least not to my knowledge.
One good thing have come of this, however. Apparently downloads of Opera in Europe have doubled since this Choice Screen were added, so hopefully more people are actually getting the best internet experience :P .
*UPDATE*
An Opera blog made me aware of a browser benchmarking site created by Futuremark (the people behind the famous 3Dmark tests) called Peacekeeper. On my system I got the following result:
I still do not understand why anyone would ever use Internet Explorer on purpose, and it is almost scary how bad Firefox performs (without any plugins at all).
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