tbradshaw.net

Things have been going pretty darned well around The Bunker since the school year has started. Now everyone is back and just about everyone has been enthusiastically tackling projects to get The Bunker whipped into shape for the new year.

Cleaning has been going pretty well, with some quick cleaning for our first party of the year last Friday. Lindsay and I went on the task of hanging up some posters that I picked up for the study and in the process of agreeing on a place for them on the wall we reorganized the entire study.

Which in turn lead to the purchase of some curtains for the study, which look great… but were surprisingly expensive. It seems like if a guy wants relatively masculine curtains that don’t look like they belong in a thirteen year old girl’s bedroom or an antique kitchen one has to drop a little bit of money. After picking up four panels, curtain rods, matching pull-back/stay thingies… it was way more money than I planned on spending. But I am pleased with the outcome, so I’ll just have to deal with it for now, heh heh.

Today Alex even offered a hand putting the media box back together. He’s going to take a backup of any files that were stored locally on the media box and then start a gentoo installation. I’m kind of tired of Windows screwing itself up over and over again, so I’m hoping to give MythTV a try. Alex has a little bit of linux experience and was very optimistic about taking a crack at it. Excellent.

I’ve also been making some great project on the Bunker Management Software, just today completing the development environment to get things started. I hope to start using it on a very basic level for running day to day house expendatures within the next couple weeks. Very exciting.

All in all, things have been going very well lately and I’ve almost been too busy to blog. I’ll try and keep up a little better now that I’m aware I’ve been slacking.

As I try to integrate more content into my website, I find more and more that I’m outgrowing WordPress a little bit.

For instance, there’s quite a bit more that I want to do with my Projects section, and I’m either going to have to code a plugin for WordPress to provide the extra functionality, or (more likely) I’m going to have to bite the bullet, create a new theme, and then use that theme for WordPress and whatever applications/pages I feel like creating so that they look integrated.

While Subversion isn’t a “supported application” for DreamHost, the support team has been looking into the problem anyway. I just received this great support email about an hour ago:

Hello Curtis,

I believe we’ve found the cause. It turns out that subversion was using fcntl to do locking, and that method isn’t he least bit nfs-compatible. Fortunately, it appears that debian’s subversion package works just fine, so we’re nstalling it on all of our shared servers right now. I’d appreciate it if you could test it and let us know if anything isn’t working with it.

Thanks!
Jeremy

Awesome! Only to my surprise, it seems to be working with my custom built installation anyway. As crazy as that is, here is my reply.

Jeremy,

Thanks for looking into this. So, funny story. Subversion has started working again… without any changes on my part.

I’m currently using subversion 1.2.1 that I compiled from the source at malt.dreamhost.com:/home/bradshaw/src/subversion-1.2.1, currently living in mail.dreamhost.com:/home/bradshaw/local/

I checked to make sure I was using that version, and not the installed package:


[bradshaw@malt bradshaw] $ which svn
/home/bradshaw/bin/svn


Sure enough, it’s just working now. http://www.tbradshaw.net/websvn began working again and my updates/commits on existing projects are also running great.

I am excited at the idea of no longer having to maintain my own installation of subversion and will certainly still check out the installed debian package soon. My path is:

/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games:/home/bradshaw/bin

and so I should just being using your installed subversion package as soon as it makes it’s way onto malt.

Thanks again!

Travis Bradshaw

That’s the kind of support that I really appreciate from a company. I’m excited that in another six months or so it’ll be time to give these guys more money. This kind of “above and beyond” support is exactly what makes for incredibly profitable companies. I hope the DreamHost guys make major bank, they earn it.

(I’m really just overly estatic that I don’t have to figure something out for svn hosting, I really wanted to keep everything on DreamHost, and now my wish comes true. )

So the news that Google is getting into the instant messaging scene is really exciting. Not because I want yet another protocol to be used for instant messaging, in fact, quite the opposite. It’s awesome that Google has decided to use an existing Open protocol, Jabber, for their IM.

Even more over, this section of the FAQ is just freaking fantastic:

16. Can you tell me more about Google Talk’s commitment to open standards and user choice?

We believe that you should have a choice in how you communicate with your friends, that you shouldn’t have to use one service because that’s where you keep your contacts and other information. We launched free auto-forwarding and POP access for Gmail so our users could take their messages with them and use any service they want, and we’re committed to upholding this idea of user choice for Google Talk as well. Today, with instant communications, you can’t talk to your contacts or buddies in one service while using another service. We hope to change that. We want to work with other willing service providers to enable their users to communicate directly with Google Talk users. And while we hope many people will use and like the Google Talk client, we’re committed to making it as easy as possible for you to communicate with your friends using the client that you want–even if it doesn’t happen to be ours. That’s why we’re also supporting open standards and the same protocol that clients such as Trillian, GAIM and iChat do. For more details, please visit our FAQ for developers.

This is exactly what IM needs. And now it’s story time:

Once upon a time there was a new thing called the Internet and all the people in the land had to join feudal communes to participate in this Internet. These communes, called Prodigy, Compuserve, and more, realized that communication between their peons was a Good Thing and instituted the Electronic Mail to facilitate their people.

But the “e-mail” was not complete, for each of the feudal lords implemented the “e-mail” in very different ways and that made it impossible for people from different camps to communicate. To compensate, some peons would have to become members of multiple feudal communes in order to communicate with all of their friends and aquantances.

But then there was a period of great enlightenment and the new up and coming internet lords decided instead of building their own private and secretive electronic mail implementation, they would embrace an Open Standard for the “e-mails”. And like Arther pulling the sword from the stone, a new era began with all peons on the Internet able to communcate via email to all of their fellow peons, and even with the lords!

We are currently in the fuedal dark ages with Instant Messaging. Everyone has to have an account with each major provider in order to communicate with everyone that they want. But maybe Google is the force that can break open instant messaging, bring on the enlightenment, and make it possible for everyone to communcate to everyone else using whatever client they want.

Sure would be nice, and I don’t know of anyone else that’s ever been in a better position to pull it off.

I ran across this link while reading p.g.o. today and I just couldn’t resist blogging and perpetuating the meme.

It is The ORIGINAL Illustrated Catalog of ACME Products Here’s a snippet from the page:

ACME is a worldwide leader of many manufactured goods. From its humble beginnings providing corks and flypaper to bug collectors (”Buddy’s Bug Hunt/1935″) to its heyday in the American Southwest supplying a certain coyote, from Ultimatum Dispatchers to Batman outfits, ACME has set the standard for excellence.

For the first time ever, information and pictures of all ACME products, specialty divisions, and services featured in Warner Bros. cartoons (made by the original studio from 1935 to 1964) are gathered here, in one convenient catalog. For more information about any ACME product, simply click on the thumbnail picture.

I’ve loved cartoons since I was a little kid watching Tom and Jerry sitting on my Dad’s lap, and I still love cartoons. This link is just too fun not to click on some ACME products and remember the cartoons that the products were featured in.

Last night Dan and I made some great progress on the Bunker management software application, to the point that we’re finally ready to start committing some resources to the repository.

Only… now my subversion repositories no longer work. I find this really depressing, as it is a huge part of what I do with my hobby coding. Any action with a svn client or administrative application generates the error:

$app: Error opening db lockfile
$app: Can’t get $type lock on file ‘/home/bradshaw/svn/qcvs-2/locks/db.lock’: No locks available

Where $app is whatever svn app is trying to access the repository at the time, and $type is either ’shared’ or ‘exclusive’ depending on whether it’s a client or administrative svn application that’s going for the lock. And before anyone reading gets too much in a hurry, I’m not using bdb, I’m using fsfs and it worked as recently at QuakeCon. That places it working at least on Sunday, August 14.

So first thing I do is rebuild subversion in case something is wrong or changed. (I’ve also been moving the prefix that I put custom built software too, so I’ve been wanting to do this for a while.) No effect, same error.

So I’m reading about the new features of subversion 1.2 and see that there is a new locking “thing”, so I remove 1.2 and downgrade to 1.1. No effect, same error.

After reading around for a while, everything points to some kind of NFS server configuration dealie. But I didn’t see what could have changed… then I remember something from the DreamHost announcements and go to check there. Sure enough:

System Software Upgrade (Upgrade)

Posted: Aug 19th, 2005 - 01:21:39 PM PST (4 days 18 hours ago)

In an effort to provide you with better support for new software, we will be upgrading your Operating System Software to the new stable Debian release on Monday the 22nd. Total downtime will only be a minute or two and will only affect shell, ftp, jabber, and web services. Mail will remain up the entire time. Once the upgrade is complete, we will send another announcement.

Happy DreamHost Sarge Team!

Damn. I hope the upgrade to a different NFS daemon doesn’t break the ability for me to use subversion. I guess the fact that it worked at all could be a fluke resulting from a fortunate NFS daemon being used by DreamHost. Or maybe a daemon upgrade didn’t happen at all and I’m just wrong… either way I’m going to send a link to this post to the DreamHost support team and see if they have any comments or suggestions.

In my otherwise basic semester schedule, cis560 stands out as the only 500 level course I’m in this semester.

I had my reservations with this class, primarily due to my experiences in cis501 with Dr. Hankley. (They were less than ideal.)

However, during the first day of this class Dr. Hankley has thrown an interesting curve ball. He provides the opportunity to take the course entirely by exam. No homework, no projects, nothing but the three exams. I immediately found the option tempting, but I always worry that there will be some “catch” when this kind of deal is made for a college course.

After asking questions in class, there doesn’t seem to be a catch. Importantly, even if a person opts to take the course exclusively by exam, that person is still allowed to sit in on the class whenever they want and I even asked if I could turn in homework assignments and have them graded just for the feedback. Dr. Hankley seemed very supportive of that.

So I’m pretty sure that Cole and I are going to do it. I’ll still want to do the homework assignments dealing with his UML modeling, since I don’t have much practice on that aspect fo the course, and I think Cole might want to do the Access homework assignment (ahahah!), but besides that I think that I have the class licked.

I’m really happy with this option and I wish more computer science classes gave the same option. It would have saved me a lot of time towards the beginning of the curriculum (albeit not as much towards the end).

I had previously been having a lot of problems with work. There was the issue of a formal write up that I received and an evaluation period that followed that made for a lot of tense times. Not only because it just sucks to be evaluated like that for me, but also because it kind of sucked for my boss to have to do so much “crappy” management stuff. After that evaluation period completed, things were noticably better around the office.

However, besides the “in trouble” part of the job that was crappy, I was also fighting a serious malaise regarding the actual work that I was doing. It just seemed like nothing I did “made a difference” in that corny meaning-of-life kind of way. Every day I left work I left it exactly the same as it was when I got there. Minor fires were put out, but the slow burning, white hot problems still remained.

Things have changed lately. The last two projects that I have picked up really appear to have the potential to make a huge impact on the quality of computer services in our department and our ability to manage them. First, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m very pleased to be working on a project to have the physical wiring in our building replaced. That’s always been a constant thorn in the side of anyone wanting to get any significantly network-bound work done.

Now the newest project, a host mangement application created for host, address space, name space, software, and special permission management looks to be a great solution to a lot of our difficulty tracking our valuable (yet somewhat intangible) assets in the department. The potential for greatness when it comes to making the management and administration of our department easier and more effective is palpable.

As a result, I’ve really looked forward to coming to work over the last week or so. The atmosphere between co-workers has improved, the actual work is starting to matter, and I just couldn’t be more pleased. Work is kicking ass again, and I’m happy to show up for it.

It’s time for a new year of school here and Kansas State University and starting off the semester I’m very optimistic.

First, left overs from last semester are pretty much handled. After some finishing touches on the code for cis690 - Game Programming, that project is almost ready to ship out of the door. Just a little TLC from our team artist on a website and it should be good to go. The code never really left a beta quality, but there at least shouldn’t be any blaringly obvious crash bugs or anything.

Previously in the semester, Dr. Wallentine had offered to be mentor in our mentoring program and help me find a little bit more direction in taking classes. Coming up quickly on the new semester, Thursday I took him up on that offer. His much appreciated advice? “Only take three classes. You need to take care of some deficiencies so your GPA doesn’t kill you.”

I was worried at first that this suggestion to take less than a fulltime load of classes. I thought that full time status was necessary to maintain my employment here in the CIS department. It turns out that nine hours is enough, and I decided to follow every bit of advice that Dr. Wallentine had to offer.

As such, my course schedule this semester is:

• eece241 : Intro to Computer Engineering - I’ve started this course about four times now. Most of the times I’ve taken the course I’ve ended up dropping it. I’ve ranted about Dr. Stanton before and so I won’t go all into that, but generally speaking the attendance points killed me. I’m taking it again this time to get the A that I should have gotten the first time.
• biol198 : Principles of Biology - This is the first class that I ever failed in college. I had a nice low B going into the finals, and then after the attendence points were docked… they failed me. Ooooh it stings. I’m taking this class again to get an A or B. (I say maybe a B, because it is a little bit challenging at times and I don’t really like biology… so studying will be difficult.)
• cis560 : Database Systems - Keeping with the advice that a person should always take at least one “on major” class each semester, Databases with Dr. Hankley is the one I’m taking this semester. I’ve had troubles with Dr. Hankley’s teaching style in the past… but I’m coming into this class optimistic that I’m going to learn something.

As you can see, it’s not a particularly challenging course load as far as course difficulty goes. Instead, this is really a semester that’s about challenging my personal time managment skills. My motto for success this semester? Just Show Up! Going into this semester it’s apparent that semester hinges on my ability to suck it up and just do the easy stuff that it takes to get a decent grade. I’m hoping that I can pull it off, there’s no reason that I shouldn’t.

I’ve blogged several times about my keyboard dying, and I’ve finally had enough. I’m going to have to buy a new keyboard. However, the keyboard market as it is (sucky and completely lacking diversity) it’s been difficult to find out exactly what I want to get.

First, it has to be mentioned that this is no small purchase or decision for me. I use a keyboard (usually my own) more than any other object on any given day. It’s touch, feel, responsiveness, comfort, and asthetic appeal probably has more effect on my quality of life than any other single inanimate object that I come in contact with, coming in just behind my bed and just in front of my mobile phone.

Thankfully, I’ve been getting a lot of help from friends doing research for this purchase. Last night I took my first swing when I found out that none other than Wal-Mart had the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop Comfort Edition in stock. This is the latest revision of the “ergonomic” keyboard line from Microsoft. This time instead of being a “split” keyboard… it’s a “bent” keyboard.

I wasn’t sure if it was going to cut it, but if it’s at Wal-Mart then it is pretty much the lowest risk purchase one could imagine. Previously I wouldn’t even consider a wireless keyboard, but chatting with my good friend EvilJohn convinced me that it was at least worth a shot. He had no problems whatsoever with lag and stuff from the wireless keyboard.

Good thing it was from Wal-Mart… because it’s just not going to cut it. I’ll probably be taking it back today. Not that it doesn’t have it’s good points too.

• The Good
  • Looks snazzy. - Even just sitting on my keyboard tray it looked cool.
  • Lots of buttons. - Lots of extra buttons that look like they could be cool. I really like the five “favorite” buttons that are completely configurable instead of a bunch of “multimedia keys” that they just try and guess what you want to do with them.
  • Soft leather-like pad - The little wrist pad thing was very nice feeling.
• The Bad
  • Not “ergo” enough. - Eh, they tried with the “bent” thing, it just doesn’t work for me. It’s almost shaped like a “smile”, where the ‘A’ key for instance starts to curve a bit in relation to the ‘F’ key.
  • Didn’t feel natural. - Keyboards that just “feel” right… when you slap your hands down on the keyboard, 90% of the time you land right on the home row ready to type away. I was missing the home row at least half the time.
  • The caps, num, and function lock lights are on the “base” transmitter… not the keyboard. It looks like this might be normal for all wireless keyboards. Lame.
  • Poor linux support. - Most of those cool buttons do nothing in linux becuase the keycodes are above 255. (Kind of a weird thing with 2.6 kernels, I believe.) I was also getting an error starting up the USB device pretty often, but I had PS2 plugged in as well so it didn’t matter.
  • Tiny meta keys. - The alt, control, and start keys are all quite small in favor of a longer shift key. That kind of sucks for me, because I don’t even use the shift key with my left hand… it’s solely the meta-mod-key hand for Alt’s, Control’s, and stuff. It was almost uncomfortable to hit the alt-key.

So, as you can see… the cons outweight the pros. I’m going to try and find the Wireless Optical Desktop Pro to try next. The Microsoft website shows that they are sold at Radio Shack, and I think they are sold at Staples as well. We shall see.

Each year when I return from QuakeCon, I almost always have a strong inkling to play games again, especially id Software’s latest game.

This year is no exception. After being immersed in the gaming environment for a week, facilitating such a great time for all of the attendees, I got home and thought, “Damn, that is a lot of fun… I want to play some games!” The big draw this year for me is DOOM 3. While the game has been out and available for a long time, I never made any significant progress through the game. Not from a lack of interest, however. No, not at all.

I never made any headway in DOOM 3 because I was scared to death playing that game. DOOM 3 is a retelling of the original DOOM story, but using a much slower paced, deliberate storytelling style that fits firmly into the horror genre. However, the fact that I was terrified playing the game didn’t replace the feeling that I had missed a great experience playing the game. So I’ve came back determined to play the game again and actually make it somewhere in the game.

My DOOM 3 effort had a rocky start when I returned home and was unable to find my DOOM 3 cds. quite a long time ago I loaned my copy of DOOM 3 to Patrick so that he could try it out. He had the game for a long time, and then returned it just recently. But I have no idea what I did with the CD’s after he handed them back. They have to be around The Bunker somewhere or another. In the meantime, I ended up borrowing Cole Hoosier’s DOOM 3 cd’s so that I could get the game installed.

After completing the installation, I was ready to go pretty gung-ho into the game… but I ended up distracted literally on the loading screen for quite a while with phone calls and company. I found that by the time I actually got back to the game, I had already started weirding out over memories of getting scared from the game and worked myself into a froth. I didn’t even make it to the first bad guy before I did a quick Save/Quit and went off to do something else.

The next time through I started to look for ways that I could make the game a little more tolerable. First, I thought that maybe I would try “notarget”, a development “cheat” that makes it so that no monsters actually attack. That ended up not working. Literally, notarget only works maybe 20-30% of the time. The rest of the time the monsters behave completely normal. Not very helpful.

So next I downloaded a mod called “noattack” that modified the enemy behavior scripts so that they would never attack. I gave that a shot and started heading into the game again to see how things work. First, it did make the zombies a little more comical when they would run at me menacingly, make contact, then just get confused and turn around in circles. I experiment with shooting them in the face or whatever before moving on to the next batch of baddies. I played this way for a little bit, before I made an interesting observation.

First, the startle factor really didn’t change. Scripted events still took place and baddies would still jump out at me… they might as well have been attacking. Second, I’m a-scared of the dark and this flashlight/weapon swapping game just isn’t going to work for me. Importantly, I realized the pace I previously played the game was the recipe of my demise. With a little bit more courage I received by neutering all of the bad guys, I was zipping through the game at quite a bit faster pace. In one two-hour session I had already accomplished all of the game objectives that I had previously accomplished in the week of play that I tried a long time ago.

So I set out to fix my delimma. First, I hunted down a nice flashlight modification that literally straps a flashlight to the side of all of the guns. This made the game drastically more enjoyable for me in the form that it was finally tolerable to run around without having a panic attack. It still got a little spooky when in dark, claustrophobic areas because the flashlight doesn’t have that general “glow” that a “real” flashlight does… instead you get a very bright tiny dot on a very dark wall. (Even if that wall is clearly shiny metal.) Second, I found that by just moving through the game at a good clip I had avoided the huge problems I had with the game originally.

Previously I was creeping through the game as a snails pace, treating every single encounter as a very big event. Turns out there are too many encounters in the game to really pull that off without physically dying of a stress induced anxiety attack. By moving through the game at a faster pace, each of the encounters becomes a little bit more “expected”. Every couple seconds or so there is going to be something coming from around the corner… so one can just jump around the corner ready to shoot. Does wonders for the confidence level.

So now I’m clipping through DOOM 3 at a pretty good pace, having a very good time doing it. The visuals of the game continue to stun me with the fidelity and atmosphere, to the point that I feel like I might actually be sightseeing through this mars installation instead of becoming personally involved with the game.

An unfortunately side effect is that I’m missing a good portion of the story. The story is almost always unraveled as the “hero” picks up video disks and PDAs full of audio logs and email. Well, at the quick pace I’m briskly jaunting through the levels, I haven’t been reading most of it. The longer I stay put the more freaked out I get… so instead I’ve just be pushing on and letting the action be the relief from the horror.

I really think I’m going to make it through the game this time. The more frequent bad guys are taking the game more from the survival horror genre that the first couple levels felt like and now we’re moving solidly into the action horror genre. (The more action the better for me.) I’m enjoying myself, and I’m amazed at the general quality of the game. I could see were the great reviews and the bad reviews both come from now, even though I’m only halfway through the game. The great reviews come from those reviewers that play the game “as it was intended”. Creeping around slowly, checking every nook and cranny, listening to all of the videos and reading all the of the email. The game is amazing in that style. However, a person with adequate skills in the first person shooter genre can definitely bulldoze through every encounter and experience very little.

I’m playing somewhere between those two extremes… and having a great time doing it.

One of my most nagging questions when it comes to development is: To IDE or not to IDE?

On one hand, I greatly enjoy the hands on total control of developing with nothing but a text editor (no less than the amazing VIM) and a bunch of shell windows. Everything definitely does What I Want And Nothing Else.

However, sometimes development can become tedious and the tools available in a fine IDE can make a huge difference in the productivity that a sole developer can achieve. For instance, when I was developing on QCVS 2 I used PHPEclipse for a good while in hopes that the WYSIWYG html editing would save me some time. However, regardless of how good the features on an IDE can be, I always pine for the amazing text editing power of VIM.

So I was more than just a little bit stunned when I ran across PIDA (Python Integrated Development Application). It’s an IDE that is written in Python and rather than providing new implementations of existing tools, simply embeds those tools together to form the IDE. I haven’t worked with it much, but so far I’m hugely impressed with the VIM integration.

If this truely works out to be an IDE that provides all of the ease-of-use-timesavers that I crave from full IDEs with the same glory of text editing power of VIM, I could be in love.

I’m back home from QuakeCon, and damn does it feel good to be back. I’m definitely going to post a bit of a wrap-up of my QuakeCon experience soon, but not quite yet. I’m still a little tired and I just don’t feel up to any big posts yet.

However, I’m definitely going to try and do something sooner, rather than later, because last year I ended up posting nothing at all I took so long.

To my great elation and relief, today Uncle Sam deposited almost $800 of my money that he had been scraping off the top for the last year, and not a moment too soon.

Hopefully this jolt of income is just what I need to get things back on track. Already since I’ve received the cash I have:

• Paid off my car loan for my Camaro.
• Caught up on my second VISA (no longer in collections)
• Took Lindsay to lunch at Happy Valley.
• Bought dish detergent and rinsing agent.
• Bought some Cheetos.

Of course, that’s in descending order of importance. Paying off the car loan (or at least the unsecured personal loan that I was using as a car loan) was a big one. That final two hundred bucks means I get to completely remove a $175 bill from my monthly routine. I can avoid some massive fees with my Intrust VISA by getting under the max and paying the bill on time.

The meal at Happy Valley with Lindsay was great, and that was even before I realized that I had gotten my tax return back and was going to have a lot fewer financial woes when I got back home to The Bunker. And on the last two little bullets, the house can actually get some dishes clean now and Cheetos are neat, on sale at Wal-Mart and they are pizza flavored. Yeah… pizza flavored… crazy.

I partially temper my elation knowing that I only received about 45% of my taxes back as a return, and had I had the money all along I wouldn’t have been in such a pickle… much less so if I had a much more reasonable tax burden. But libertarian tax spite aside, it’s just too hard not to be incredibly happy that I can pay my bills and eat a couple meals a day now.

Damn good day.

Dave left for Europe yesterday morning, and on his trip I got the first couple images from his journey via MMS as he began his journey. I’ve posted the images on his photo gallery, both from his first class seat:

Ice cream or mimosa? Man, first class is rough.

Now for some gaming.

I was very pleased. I haven’t heard anything from him since though, so I don’t know what the current status of his journey is. Hopefully he can get some mobile phone coverage soon so we can get more updates.

And then on a completely unrelated note, I figured I’d post a couple miscellaneous photos that Dave has shot towards my phone recently. Both are really great. The first is a shot of Rebecca Teel at her first ever visit to Hooters. The posse in Kansas City has been frequenting the Olathe, KS Hooters for beers pretty often, and Dave caught this great picture of Rebecca to commemorate her first visit:

Next up, Dave sent this picture after finishing bowling for Big Brothers and Big Sisters on Nanette Jone’s team: (He was very proud of his score)

And finally, on the barely work safe side of things, Dave was at his final big night at Hooters in Kansas City before he left for Europe and then back home to Manhattan when he decided that I shouldn’t miss out of the wonderful experience. The experience was summed up as follows:

Meet Trina!

Ha ha! I replied. “Tell Trina Hi, and Hi.” Seemed fitting.

Anyway, just a little update from Dave’s phone while he’s away. Hopefully we’ll hear from him again soon.

I got an email today that asked a pretty important question for QuakeCon volunteers:

From: Dennis Gedeon
To: ash2quakecon.org
Subject: QuakeCon Volunteers
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 10:57:57 -0500

I still have not received anything beyond my initial volunteer section information. I filled it out as you guys posted on the web to do. I am wondering when you will be sending out the messages for people to confirm the scheduled work times.

Thanks

My response was thus:

Hey Dennis,

Unfortunately there isn’t any pre-scheduling this year, so there won’t be any verification process as there was last year. We’ll be running initial volunteer services a lot like we did before 2004, kind of first come-first serve ah hoc.

Travis “Ash” Bradshaw
ash2quakecon.org

The short story is that I dropped the ball for prescheduling volunteers. Real Life(tm) has been exceptionally challenging lately, and the amount of time that I’ve been able to dedicated to QuakeCon pre-event has been quite limited. It’s too bad that the executive board didn’t get a chance to begin as early as we would have liked, I really had my shit together back when we had originally planned to start.

So what does this mean for the event and specifically the volunteers? Not much, really, for several reasons:

• All years prior to 2004 had very little (if any) prescheduling of volunteers. - The somewhat elaborate prescheduling was something that I did last year because it really made the job of our head staff easier and a little less stressful.
• Prescheduling was a little messed up last year anyway. - There were more than a few people that showed up for their “scheduled” shifts only to find out that we were ahead of schedule and no longer needed them. Much to my surprise, they were very upset.
• The hardcore will be there for setup anyway. - You know who you are, crimpnation, cable run teams, and other dedicated QuakeCon volunteers. You’ll be at the even Tuesday morning at 9:00am no matter what. The prescheduling was more of a formality than anything else.

Well if the lack of prescheduling doesn’t mean much, then why the bother? Well some things will definitely be different:

• Volunteer Management just got a lot more difficult. - Compared to the rest of the week, handling volunteers for setup was pretty easy. It won’t be easy again this year, it will be much more like the rest of the already difficult week.
• Management is a little worried. - The bad thing about doing something super-organized like pre-scheduling the chaos that is QuakeCon volunteerism is that a lot of the great people that make QuakeCon happen kind of get used to it. I know Worm and the rest of the physical network crew really like to run a tight ship, and not having prescheduling is a bit spooky.
• Did I mention that volunteer management is going to be much more difficult? - Just checking, I’m kind of worried about it.

So my general advice is simple. The information that was entered online is still very useful for us to forecast the volunteer turnout and focus our efforts, but it won’t be used to preschedule… more like pre-plan. If you want to volunteer for setup, be ready to rock and roll at or before 9:00am on Tuesday morning and we’ll try and get you registered as a volunteer and on the team.

The Volunteer Desk at QuakeCon is where all the magic happens, and nothing has changed about the importance of that. So we’ll see you at the volunteer desk early Tuesday morning. (I’m going to try and have it open by 8:15am.)

My good friend Dave Plumb has joined the ranks of bloggers with his newly set up blog at dave.ksubunker.com. I’ve set him up a WordPress blog and an integrated (mostly) Gallery 2-beta-4 photo gallery.

I’ve long wanted Dave to start blogging because, besides the fact that he’s witty and fun to hang out with, he has a history of blog-like writing even before blogging was the big new thing. As trendy as that sounds, it’s not a joke. On his old geocities site one can still find archives of the classic Weekend Updates that he would sent out to friends each weekend to keep in touch. Besides the clear nostalgia involved in reading writings from clear back in 2002–awe, Dave as a freshman… how cute–it really seemed to be a perfect match for the modern “weekend update” form: blogging.

So then recently came the tipping point. Dave recently scored an amazing mostly paid trip to Europe in the form of a Mediteranian cruise from his uncle. We’d been discussing the steps necessary to make sure that he retains mobile phone coverage while overseas so that I can get a nice and steady flow of text messages and photographs while he’s galavanting around Europe.

Then it hits me, this is perfect blog material. Not surprisingly, it hits Dave the same way. So after a few exchanged text messages, I started doing all of the necessary legwork to start him off on the right foot with a nice blog and gallery to share photos and written word with all of us jealous land locked Kansans.

Things aren’t looking ultra sexy or anything yet (the embedded gallery is kind of messed up as far as styles go), but he’s got himself a nice theme and he’s ready to start writing. Now we’ll see if he remembers to actually do it.

I’ve been working nearly non-stop on the QuakeCon Volunteer System over the last several days, hoping to get something done in time for the Worm to preschedule some volunteers for setup. The pre-scheduling application is following the increasingly popular AJAX design style with relatively high success thus far.

In hopes of increasing the speed of development, especially in regards to rendering lists, I’ve also integrated ActiveWidgets Grid Widget for listing groups and volunteers. While I was hoping that this would speed me up, it hasn’t appeared to help with rapid development at all. It’s taking about the same amount of time it would take for me to write something similar myself, only the result is much higher quality thanks to the maturity of the javascript “widget”.

The reason using something completely developed instead of writing from scratch isn’t giving me a huge reduction in development time? Horrible documentation. Utilizing the widget has almost become an issue of a trial and error guessing game for where in the API I can find the information that I need. Really annoying.

This is certainly a reminder of how important at least decent documentation is for a library like project. This little “active widget” is incredibly useful and fully featured, but thanks to it’s abysmal documentation it’s incredibly difficult to use.

Shame.

I previous wrote about my experiences keeping my three plants alive. Since then, I brought in the cutting from my Dad’s plant and have been watering it each day… pretty much just as a funeral dirge as much as any real expectation of survival.

So today I go to water it, and I notice that it’s sticking up weird. A slightly more careful examination shows that not only is it sticking up weird… but it’s doing so of it’s own accord! Sure enough, at least the first six inches of this plant appears to still be alive. I examined it further, wondering if I should groom away any of the dead portions of the plant (which out number the apparently living portions of the plant). I was kind of nervous about removing the leaves, even in the poor shape that it is in, just because leaves seem like a pretty important element.

Then, to my continued surprise, I noticed that the standing-up-living-part of the plant has a very small bud starting at one of the plant segments and appears to be considering a new leaf.

Wow. This plant has got resilience that I can’t even fathom. In celebration of this new found hope, I’ve moved the plant into my room on a plant hook in the corner. I’ve also opened up the blinds on the corner windows in hopes that the additional sun will do good things for my mistreated plant. I’m excited to see if this revitalization lasts.