SpriteWorld nearing Stage 1 Completion

Posted by Etch on July 16, 2011 No comments

Well, after working on my bukkit server for about a week now, I’ve realized today that I’ve hypothetically wasted about a week of time.  Seems attempting to reshape the world via WorldEdit was a noble cause; however, using TOGoS’s Minecraft Map Generator seems to prove a more benefit to my time as a whole…  I’ve been able to create an initial starting land of 1600×1600 compared to my manually carved world of 400×400.  Due to the nature of Minecraft, I will be able to constantly increase the map as I go along and fill it up (create a new map, paste that into the folder, then copy over the previous map files).  This will reload/overlay the chunks for the old map onto the new map and poof, expanded.  I initially attempted to create a 100,000 x 100,000 map….however, that would have taken about 53 hours to generate (no joke, I calculated it out).  Thus, I have decided to take the expand a bit at a time route.

TOGoS’s Minecraft Map Generator

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Pony addiction is no laughing matter.

Posted by Etch on July 6, 2011 No comments

Well, it seems I’ve neglected this site long enough.  I am putting together some more information to post up here, plan on updating my game library, and will work on creating my minecraft server for public viewing.  Not to mention I’ve recently become highly addicted to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic…  I’ve lost…so much sleep lately watching user videos, reading fanfics, and surfing deviantart for new images…but we’ll not get into that now.

Minecraft Server: I am currently setting up a bukkit server and working out the kinks.  I currently have a world set up as flatland; however, it’s not what I need.  Once I can figure out all the commands with WorldEdit I will begin on my Sprite World.  I plan on creating giant neighborhoods of sprites in the game.  Everything will be made by hand, I’m debating if I’m going to enable the flying mod or not.  I may do it just in case I need to mass move sections around, but I plan on doing everything by hand.  Sure…I could use a mod to just import the sprite in 10 seconds flat, but where’s the fun in that!  Anyhoo, my ultimate goal is to create large sections with the sprites, with tracks set up allowing visitors to view sprites as they cruise along.  My first section(s) will be that of My Little Pony….once again, back to the addiction.

In addition, I’ve been neglecting my FFXIV Linkshell as of late, and am planning on stepping down and letting one of the more active players take it over.  I’ll still run the forums and the other WP front-end site that I never update lol.

My goal is to make this site 20% cooler, so I’m working on that now :)  Stay tuned….to all those who aren’t actually watching what I write here!

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Building the Beast

Posted by Etch on April 11, 2010 1 comment

So, I have nearly all my parts together for my new rig.  I’ve decided to start building it as far as I can.

3:41PM — I have the motherboard installed into the system.  It looks like a lost puppy dog.  This case is ridiculous.

Read more »

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Nasty Milky Way Bar

Posted by Etch on April 6, 2010 No comments

I’m not going to say anything other than

Candybars should look like this NOT THIS

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

This was purchased from our vending machines by one of my co-workers today (mind you our management company just installed new ones, we got rid of our old provider since they never stocked it and the machines constantly broke).  I think after this point I’d rather have those old ones back…

Edit: Becky just got back from telling management about this upstairs.  Their response “Yeah, that is disgusting” and left it at that.  They didn’t even give a refund or nothing.  From what she said, I guess it might be too hot in that machine so maybe that candy bar wasn’t old but it was nasty!  Funny thing was, about 10 minutes after she came down, they started replacing all the candy bars in the machine.  lol, she got a replacement.

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PANTS IN YOUR EYE

Posted by Etch on April 5, 2010 No comments

There, I said it.

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Web Form – Highlighting the Current Field

Posted by Etch on March 29, 2010 No comments

So I recently had to put together a form at work that people will be using to interface with our Mortgage System. One of the suggestions I came up with during the meeting (yay for me creating more work for myself?), was to highlight the current field that you were on. This adds a level of YOU ARE HERE as well as provides a reference marker in case someone has to walk away for a second, to come back and be like … “where was I?”.

So without further adieu, I provide to you the code that I used to fashion this together.

Javascript

window.onload = function() {

var ele = document.myForm.elements;

for (var i = 0; i < ele.length; i++) {

element = ele[i];

if (element.type) {

switch (element.type) {

case ‘checkbox’:

case ‘radio’:

case ‘password’:

case ‘text’:

case ‘textarea’:

case ‘select-one’:

case ‘select-multiple’:

element.onmousedown = function() { this.className = ‘clrFocus’; }

element.onfocus = function() { this.className = ‘clrFocus’; }

element.onblur = function() { this.className = ‘clrBlur’; }

}

}

}

}

CSS

.clrFocus { background-color: #FFFF00; }

.clrBlur { background-color: #FFFFFF; }

As you can see above, I am essentially setting the class of the object via javascript upon both a focus shift (Either by tab or mouse click) as well as by mousedown (This was put into place since if you do not have this, you will be forced to click twice on dropdown boxes.  Once for the focus, twice for the list.  Don’t believe me?  Try it out!

Initial Research Sources:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/scripting/focusBGColor.aspx – I used the case functionality and element loop out of the bottom of this one.  I initially tried to just use this; however, it didn’t work properly because of the mousedown issue identified above.  I did try to add a listener for mousedown; but….this didn’t work so well as the boxes would stay yellow.  For whatever reason it wasn’t triggering the onblur.

http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-151530.html – I got the idea to use CSS classes instead of the listener from the link above.

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Killing your will to live one group policy object at a time

Posted by Etch on March 25, 2010 No comments

So about a month ago we rolled out our SharePoint Intranet site. We forced the homepage for all employees to this site, and for many users it was upsetting as we removed custom home pages/tabs. We’ve gotten some complaints about it, but I don’t think anything takes the cake like this one does.

Being stuck on our slow loading intranet *every time* I open ie is destroying my will to live. Who do I have to talk to in order to have this policy rectified? Please let me know. I’m losing minutes of loading/day… which doesn’t seem like a lot, but is slowly degrading my working environment. Thanks.

I wonder if I should report this to HR? I am sincerely worried about this individual and what harm they may cause to themselves or co-workers around them. hmm… >:3

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Full Height Web Part

Posted by Etch on March 25, 2010 No comments

http://blogs.msdn.com/malag/archive/2008/09/15/story-of-a-mischievous-page-viewer-web-part.aspx

This will run a javascript in a separate but hidden content editor.  It will force all IFRAMES on the page to be 100% height, perfect for single page web parts (forms and such).

Note: This only works in IE (at least the script provided).  Then again, if you’re using SharePoint and anything other than IE you have a serious identity crisis going on :)

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Windows 7 Network Dropping Upon Large File Transfers

Posted by Etch on March 21, 2010 1 comment

I’d like to share an issue that I’ve had for a while and just recently decided to tackle it. Ever since I’ve installed Windows 7 on this computer, I have had issues where large file transfers will break the network, causing both the host and client (whomever is trying to transfer the data) to lose connection to it. It seems that the gateway was breaking or something along those lines (At least according to the Network Diagnostics). There really wasn’t any clear cut explanation of why this was happening, and I never had to do large file transfers across the network so I ignored it. As of late, my roomate attempted to stream some videos from my computer and of course, this issue happened again. However, upon setting up my PS3 Media Server, I had to make a stand…and get this shit fixed.

My current motherboard is an ASUS P5B-E, with an Integrated Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet Controller. I finally did some heavy searching and here is what I found.

For those running an NVIDIA chipset (NFORCE) your Ethernet card is different. I suggest you look at this link as it gives an explanation and way to potentially fix the issue.

Here is the blurb about where to fix from the link above.

1. right click computer
2. manage
3. Device manager – double click
4. network adapters
5. Nvidia nForce 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet (i am using nforce 15.51 Ethernet drivers atm) right click
6. Properties for the adapter that you are using be it one or two
7. Advanced
8. Receive Side Scaling – (disabled!!!!!! not enabled) this is most important.

For anyone running an ASUS board with Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet Controller, I suggest you look here.

This is what was said in the link above, and I can confirm that this fix did work for me as well.

I also got this problem: When transfering large amounts of data over the network the network card would disconnect, requiring a “disable/enable” to fix.

I am running Windows 7 64 bit RTM and the latest Atheros driver (2.4.7.27).

To resolve, I went into the driver properties, clicked Advanced / Task Offload, and I turned this feature off.

Now, the driver works fine for me

Huzzah, I can now finally stream videos and do some large file transfers.

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Using PDF Printers for the Good of Mankind!

Posted by Etch on March 17, 2010 No comments

I would like to vent a bit of my frustration in regards to these wonderful things known as PDF printers. Back whilst my ignorance got the better of me (which is like 15 minutes ago) and I thought that these things were the end-all-be-all solution to creating PDF documents from your Word/Excel/HTML/etc. applications, I have come to an abrupt halt on why these aren’t as awesome as I thought they were.

Back many years ago I ran across two very wonderful and simple tools: CutePDF Writer and BullZip PDF Printer. Both of these, among many others, PrimoPDF, PDFill, etc. are all tools for creating PDFs from various other sources.

Getting back on why these aren’t the best, and why they have a special place, one word needs to be said: Hyperlinks. Without getting into a whole explanation of how printing actually works on a computer, I will come up with a simple flow which honestly I never really thought about until I had to troubleshoot why this person’s hyperlinks weren’t creating properly in the PDF. Read more »

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