PINE 4.58 MESSAGE INDEX Folder: INBOX Message 76 of 8,310 DEL

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oops, it’s been a while since i checked this email account…

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fear me, for i have gotten you!

man. that was just too much effort for a couple of lines of code. but i’m a happy man, it’s all done now.

time to play some super puzzle fighter.

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when i first learned about regular expressions, i thought they were pretty neat. it was back in college in one of my computer science classes where the language used in the class was perl. this is the class that started my love affair with perl and regular expressions.

i immediately saw the beauty of regular expressions and i started to use perl extensively to leverage the power of regexes.

i think the cool thing about regexes is that they are like little puzzles that you are trying to figure out. but right now, there’s this one regex i’m working on that it totally kicking my ass. it isn’t pretty. every time i think that i’m getting close, it just comes back and takes me out for another round of (head|heart)ache.

but, worry not, i will get you. die, regex, die!

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i woke up late tonight. not sure why i couldn’t get out of bed today. i thought that i had been doing so much better with this new schedule, but the warmth of my bed was just too comfortable and as a result, i ended up leaving about 20 minutes later than i usually do. it wasn’t too bad, the traffic was a little worse than usual, but i guess that’s just the way it is.

i’ve been working on some templating things at work. i’m at the delicate point now where i have to decide whether or not i want to use a templating engine for this need or if i should just fudge my own mini-templating system. using a full blown templating engine just seems like overkill. ok, well, back to work.

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last night was a pretty interesting night for the xbox. earlier in the day, paul, leeya, nelson, cheng, and i were hanging out at paul’s place playing some super puzzle fighter on paul’s ps one. as we were playing, i started to wonder why we had to go to such great lengths to play such a classic game. dig up the old psx just to play a game…and then i thought that someone, somewhere must have made an emulator for the psx. it’s a relatively simple console, can’t be too hard to emulate, right?

then i looked around and got a little bit more ambitious. i’m still new to the whole xbox scene, so i did some research and found out that there is indeed a psx emulator for the xbox. that’s right, you can play psx games on the xbox!

there were a few hiccups, though. you have to make an image of the game and copy the image onto the hard drive. you can’t play straight off the CD. it also turns out that the cdrom drive on my computer doesn’t read psx games. one of my other computer’s cdrom drives did, though, so i made the image and brought it over to the xbox.

the [url=http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?act=ST&f=17&t=54141]psx emulator for the xbox[/url] is pretty cool and seems to work well. there’s only one game that i immediately wanted though and that was super puzzle fighter. the emulator works great, though there was a little hitch with it working.

i think the part that makes the emulator install a little bit of a hassle is the fact that it does not come with the playstation bios. what i think is kind of funny is that it appears to use the actual playstation bios to function. as a result, you have to find a copy of the psx bios on the net somewhere after you install the emulator on the xbox. aside from that, it appears as if i’ve got a fully functional psx on my xbox now.

and since i was in the nostalgic mood, i decided to install a nintendo emulator too. this was a much easier install, though the ROMs for it were a little harder to find. the only game that i really wanted to play was my childhood favorite, super dodge ball. mmmm.

back in middle school, i remember there was this one sleepover i went to at my friend sumit’s house. it was about a dozen guys or so and we had a HUGE super dodge ball tournament. we stayed up until the wee hours of the night playing until we got to the final championships. ahhhh, memories.

last night my xbox received a little boost. it now boasts a 200GB hard drive and a little new hardware. the install process is actually drastically more complex than i thought it would be. the actual hardware install is a pretty delicate process which requires hands far more steady than my own. but even after the hardware is installed, the software setup is actually quite a bear as well.

it turns out that the only way to get certain things for a modchip’d xbox is via IRC. you have to go to a specific IRC server, look for a specific IRC channel, type a specific thing in that channel to get the ftp information that will then give you access to the bios for the modchip that you need to flash into memory.

once that is done, you then have to find another utility that will install the dashboard for the xbox and prepares your new hard drive for the new applications on your xbox. that utility was a little bit easier to find as there was a bittorrent file for it.

then you have to construct your own BIOS for the xbox.

then you have to create a dummy filler file because the xbox dvd drive has trouble reading small files burned onto media, so you make a 100MB dummy file, add that to your image and then you can burn your bootable bios flashing CD.

then you flash this new bios into the xbox.

are we done yet? no.

then you have to burn the CD that contains the other software that preps your newly chip’d xbox for its new life. insert that CD, format your hard drive with their utilities, and then finally, you are able to do something meaningful.

sheesh.

anyway, the process started at 7:30pm. there was a small mishap during the hardware install which required pulling the header pins out of the circuit board we just put in and finally resorting to using wires to get the thing working. we took a long break and then finally around 1AM the whole process was completed.

crazy…but cool.

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one of the reasons why i am not particularly fond of bittorrent is because each instance of bittorrent is independent of each other. this is bad for me because i have a limited upload rate. as a result, when my uploads reach my upper limit, my internet connection slows to a crawl. this, by itself, isn’t a big deal except for the fact that it limits me to downloading only one thing at a time. sure, i can set my upload rate low for each torrent, but i haven’t figured out what the relationship is with upload rate and download rate, but they seem related to each other somehow.

oh well, the one thing that i do like about bittorrent is that it appears to have a more steady rate of acquiring stuff compared to overnet. the thing i really, really hate about bittorrent is that it requires the use of a seed and it doesn’t have a built in searching mechanism. so unless someone has published the seed to something that i want AND i can find that seed, i won’t be able to get it.

i’ve been making significant progress with the pearl tea pages. i’m pretty happy at where i’m at now. i think that i’m pretty close to ready to launching the second phase which allows people to write their own reviews. overall, though, it’s pretty cool.

i’ve also been getting some work done for the real job. because most of last week was spent in meetings, i’ve been unable to get any real code work done. as a result, i’ve been a little backed up in terms of actual progress on some of my projects. i guess it’s been about a week since i’ve done any coding. it’s kind of fun. sort of. i almost miss it. almost.

one of the things that i really love to have is a whiteboard. i don’t know why, but i’ve always, always loved using whiteboards for designing projects. there’s just something about a piece of paper that makes it hard for me to just fit everything in and be able to look at the whole project at one glance. i used to toy with the idea of having a whiteboard in my apartment, but think that would just be overkill. but at every job i’ve been at, i’ve always insisted that i get a whiteboard for myself. it’s one of those things that i need.

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you know, it’s weird. at work, i’m coding all day and complaining about how draining it is to be coding all day. i tackle the problems of user management, ACLs, and all sorts of other technical things that are not particularly exciting, but still very much a part of my job.

and so one would think that on the weekend, i would be doing something drastically different to get away from the toils of the week. but what am i doing instead on a gloriously sunny saturday afternoon?

i’m writing the code to handle the authentication and user management of the pearl tea review site. the first phase of this project has been done for a while now, but it’s time for me to move on to the next part. letting the users submit reviews of their own! of course, that comes with a whole set of other issues. first the user needs to be able to create their own account. then they need to be able to edit their password and manage their account. and what if they forgot their password? they’ll need some way to retrieve it.

and then there’s the whole notion of whether or not i want to have some kind of approval process for reviews or if i should just let users post whatever they want. decisions, decisions.

oh well, at least i have a personal interest in this project.

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i’ve been staring blankly at my screen for a while now. i’ve been struggling with this bit of code for a while now. i don’t get why it wasn’t working. i have these four variables, i called them field1_variable, field2_variable, field3_variable… and so anyway, i was getting all these null errors all day and i couldn’t figure out what for the life of me was wrong.

of course i assign values to these variables and then later when i want to do something with them i reffered to them as field_variable1, field_variable2, etc. so, heh, of course they were NULL!

err, ummm…i’m just stupid.