nickchanger's blog - Category: "Coding"

For two years and two months ago I released the previous version of this site. Only about four months later I started on a completely new site from scratch. I mentioned this over a year ago, but now it is finally here!

It uses a totally new framework, called 109framework, created by my self. It has several cool features which you probably will not notice as you are only seeing the HTML output :) . But soon I will release 109framework to the public so you can use it yourself.

For the frontend I have done a lot to improve its speed, "correctness" and coolness, including the use of HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery. There is one thing, however, I can do to improve it even more, and that is minifying the code (both HTML, JavaScript and CSS). But, I have decided not to do this so it will be easier for anyone interested to look at and steal it - as that is what the internet is all about! :)

I have spend the last three hours doing the actual release of the site. It should have been really easy but of course there were all kinds of weird bugs showing up - mostly UTF-8 problems :/ . Those should be fixed (or hacked for now), but there might be more. So I would be grateful if you would tell me about any problems you might find. You can use the comment system for this article - or send an email of the comment system does not work :P .

All of my previous blog entries will contain broken links to images etc. and I will go through those and fix them... some day. I have fixed the first page at least just so the page does not look broken on the first visit ;) .

The content of the site have changed a lot... well not that much actually but most have been rewritten. Some sections have been removed, others have been added and finally some have been moved.

When I designed the site I wanted some cool background images with a kind-of transparent content area and I succeeded. But, these background images uses 150-200 KB which is quite a lot. Therefore if you are visiting from a mobile device it will turn of the background images. It will also mean that every time you will see a new background image it takes just a bit longer before the browser have finished rendering the page. As soon as you have them all it will go pretty fast. You can use the icons at the top-left corner of the content to cycle through the background images. There are currently 18 background images of a total of 3 MB! ... and I will add more later.

It has been four months since my last entry. There were so much to tell that I could not find the time to actually write a post, and suddenly this release got really close so I decided to wait until after. So expect some "informative" blog entries in the future. :P

Now, enjoy! :P ... I better get back to the TV.

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...

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...

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).

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!