Looks like I spoke too soon. You know, I was all "Looks like it won't be as bad this time" in my last post. But unfortunately no. You know, it didn't have to happen. I could have stayed in my happy and content state. But no. First, there was the Katy Perry story. And now, the Beck story.

If you're really that determined to p!ss me off, then by all means you've done the right thing. And you know who I'm talking to. The fact that you deem it right to, once again, pick out my musical tastes, and step on it until it's known to Neoseeker as cr@p, then by all means you've done the right thing to p!ss me off. The meer fact that you deem it right to call my musical tastes cr@p, and even to advertise it in a thread title. You've p!ssed me off. And now you've pushed it. I'd bet you hoped I wouldn't do this. Advertise it to the public like this. But I suppose this is what you get for unnecessarily annoying me to such an extent. And you know who you are. Just because you might not like Alternative Rock, Jazz, Blues, or whatever Beck decides to turn to next, oh, wait. It's suddenly cr@p. That's right. "Ohey, this kid likes this game I've never even heard about. It must be cr@p".

You know, I hate Eminem. I hate him with every fibre of my being. But I don't pester you by extending the hate to the whole forum. And by that I mean stating that everyone (or Neoseeker, in this case) hates this artist.

By saying 'Beck sucks :P', you're basically saying that Beck sucks in general and no-one even remotely thinks his music is good. See saying 'I think Beck sucks' or 'Beck sucks IMO', then you could have avoided the misfortune of having me distribute the story to the public.

But no. You intentionally did something that you were fully aware would p!ss me off. What you thought would stay in a small forum community was just yelled over a loudspeaker to the world. You get what you deserve.



musingsthoughts beck music

Dear blog, it's been a while since my last entry. Synergy and I are still going strong, and I also have my school certificate!!! Because we were busy with other things, Synergy and I went a couple of weeks without spending time together- it was tough but I managed it. We finally went on a date this weekend and we had a lovely time gfx battling each other- she's still waiting for me to submit an entry, lol!!!

Afterwards, I went home and played Gears of War 2. While the story and particularly the writing for the emotional scenes was weak, I did enjoy the 'I heard there's a shitload of grubs over there!' 'More like 10 shitloads' exchange and was thrilled by the gameplay. I think that while I enjoy the tightened mechanics, the first Gears had a better campaign. But that's okay, because Horde is very good fun. I haven't played online yet, because i'm too lazy to get live, but that's okay too because i've heard bad things about the online. I have concluded that despite its faults, I prefer it to Fallout 3, which I am having a lot of trouble getting back into, and Mirror's Edge. Of all the games I have spent a significant amount of time this year with, it is my favourite, excluding Fallout 2 and Pokemon Blue. I think I might buy Gears 2 for Synergy for christmas, which coincidentally marks our 26th day as a couple, so then we can bring in the new year mercilessly slaughtering locust!!!

musingsthoughts

musingsthoughts gaming related

So now that I have some spare time to work on NAMFox again (and what sweet spare time it is...), I thought about what I actually want to do with it in the next version. There are a lot of suggestions and bugs out there for me to take care of, so there are definitely things to do. However, as of late, I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the internal architecture of NAMFox.

Most (useful) pieces of software are built from many different components working together to meet some need. If you think about it this way, then it's not a giant leap to compare software to cars. There are a lot of different parts that go into them, and none of those parts on their own meet the same need that the car as a whole does. Both can upgrade their parts to provide more value for the consumer, and both can lose value just by aging and hence, not staying up-to-date.

One circumstance that drifts away from the analogy is when software upgrades, it may still provide additional value to consumers, but it can start to degenerate internally. As it becomes easier and easier for developers to "hack" new features rather than building them correctly, then the development cycle enters this spiral of horror until no one wants to touch it again. There are many horror stories involving real software that met this fate on The Daily WTF. It's funny when you're sitting on the outside, but you can get pretty desperate when you're on the inside.

Fortunately, NAMFox is nowhere near that state, but I think now is a good time to re-architect it so that its parts are working more cohesively than ever before. My end goals are to (1) make maintainability easier and (2) provide a better environment for other people to make their own tweaks to the tool. This also means faster turnaround time for bug fixes and suggestions. Back in early 2007, I did much of the same thing with the code that Oz and I had been working on, and after learning yet another slew of new things, I'm ready to tackle the challenge again.

So how do I achieve this? There are a couple of specific means I have in mind.

1. Build software on the Firefox platform in the way it was meant to be built.
   
   When I started working on this tool, I was familiar with JavaScript in the browser, not JavaScript in a Firefox extension. As a result, most of the new code I added may have been great ideas for web pages, but not the best for extensions. Over time as I learned more about the extension model, I improved, but when there is already of lot of infrastructure built (especially one that works), one becomes wary of making large changes that could rock the boat.
   
   
2. Disentangle the components' dependencies on each other.
   
   A major problem that leads to software rot is when many parts depend on each other to survive—that is, they cannot be separated from the infrastructure in which they are cemented. I feel that this is the case with too many of the current NAMFox components, especially in the areas around the user interface—markup buttons, drop downs, or simply just managing the HTML that NAMFox puts on the page. I think it's fine for dependencies among components to exist, but when they become too interleaved to see what depends on what, then it's time for a change.
   
   
3. Utilize ideas from other tools and frameworks to build better software.
   
   Over the past couple of months, I have seen a few other developments in the software industry that have given me great ideas for how to make NAMFox better (internally). Specifically, researching and taking little bits and pieces from the architecture of jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, and even Firebug has yielded some interesting results.
   
   Just tonight someone messaged me about making a tweak in his own NAMFox, but he made a mistake in rebuilding the package; Firebug's build system uses Apache Ant, which is great because it's cross-platform and you could do a hell of a lot more stuff with it than with a batch file, which was what Oz and I were using. Although you have to download Java (collective groan) to run it, it's a phenomenal build system that probably will eventually let me automate deploying new versions to the web. (The manual process is tedious and error-prone.)
   
   ASP.NET MVC had a visible implementation of URL routing (similar to Apache's mod_rewrite) where requests that go to a certain URL are received by certain "handlers." Today I have a problem in that an event is raised when a page is loaded, and then I have to check about 50 different things to determine what I should do on that page. But now, I can restructure how functionality is added to pages. This means that this particular code goes away:
   
   

   code

   function onDOMContentLoaded(e) { var url = e.originalTarget.location.href; if (url.match(/forums\/\d+\/t\d+/)) { pageController.addQuickThreadFunctionality(context); } else if (url.match(/forums\/\d+/)) { pageController.addQuickForumFunctionality(context); } else if (url.match('edit_profile.html$') || fn == 'forum_settings') { //Add markup buttons to Forum Settings or guestbook pageController.addSignatureButtons(); } else if (url.match(/members\/guestbook/) && fn == 'sign') { pageController.addGuestbookButtons(); } } // And so on...

   
   
   And I can replace it with something along these lines:
   
   

   code

   // SETUP var r = new RoutingHandler(); r.addRoute(new Route("{subdomain}neoseeker.com/forums/{forumId}/t{threadId}-{*threadname}/", new ViewThreadHandler()); // somewhere else... function ViewThreadHandler() { } ViewThreadHandler.prototype = { handleRequest: function(routeData) { // routeData has properties for all of // the wild cards in the route. For example: // subdomain -> "www." // forumId -> "115" // threadId -> "867089" // threadName -> "sandbox" // Add Quick Reply, Quick Edit, etc. } }; // Now handle requests. function onDOMContentLoaded(e) { r.handleRequest(e.originalTarget.location.href); }

   
   
   I can be as granular or as specific as I want with these patterns. This example showed one of the more complicated patterns, which matches the URL that appears whenever I view a thread on Neoseeker. This will make it much easier to add new functionality to other pages, because all I need to do is add a new route and handler for that URL, and BAM: we're golden.
   
   jQuery is a particularly quaint API for JavaScript developers that abstracts away a lot of the complexities and cross-browser inconsistencies of JavaScript that deters a lot of people from getting into JavaScript in the first place. (Look here for some tutorials.) I don't develop web sites, so I was never interested in jQuery for the longest time. What finally attracted me was its simplicity. Really, how cool is it that all you have to do to make every div on the page fade away when you click it is this:
   
   

   code

   $(function() { $("div").click(function() { $(this).fade("slow"); }); });

   
   
   Hundreds of lines of painful code reduced to fewer than 5. Awesome.
   
   So I thought why not bring the same sort of simplicity over to NAMFox? An example is the repetitive code you normally type to invoke an XPCOM component.¹
   
   Before, to get the preferences service:
   

   code

   Components.classes["@mozilla.org/preferences-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIPrefService);

   
   
   After:
   

   code

   $("@mozilla.org/preferences-service;1").service("nsIPrefService");

   
   
   So it's not as elegant as what the jQuery guys have put together, but simple time-savers like this can make working with NAMFox a much more pleasurable experience.

I apologize that this got a little long, but I am genuinely excited about making these latest upgrades to NAMFox, the right way. I'll continue to blog more about these architecture changes more for myself as a journal that I can look back on, but I would be happy to answer any questions people have.

¹ XPCOM components are usually services which exist only once within the scope of a Firefox session, including across multiple windows. An example of one is the NAMFox Custom Message manager, which is the data store for custom messages; it's an XPCOM component because custom messages can't get out of sync across different windows. Otherwise, you can have some very frustrated people out there. :(

namfox software architecture technology neoseeker related

Oh geeze.

A few weeks ago I noticed that my thoughts were becoming increasingly depressing, even a few that were morbid. When I close my eyes to go to sleep, my mind meanders through the day's events, but lately things are a bit warped to fit my new perceptions of reality. When I try to think about a dive I did in practice, I think of smacking on the water and how bad I am and blah blah blah.

I feel pretty ridiculous, to be honest. I swear, I'm not trying to think of this crap. Like today, for example. We were getting ready to leave to go out to dinner, and my dog ran outside in the garage. My dad called for him to go inside, and as he was doing that I shut my door. Right as I heard the slam I thought about what it would have been like if my dog had been in the door when I closed it. I had a very grotesque image in my mind of my dog being decapitated, and then of me picking the head up and petting it.

How morbid can you get? I felt really disgusted after thinking that, and so I was pretty upset the rest of the night, and it brought about this little rant. It also got me thinking about how lately I am dwelling on the negatives much more than I normally do. I wrote a depressing story a few weeks ago in this very blog, and tonight I even started to write another one. But then I stopped and realized that I didn't really have anything to complain about. I was just looking for something to be upset about for the sake of being dramatic.

And the irony of it all is that Christmas is just 5 days away. Everyone is getting into the holiday spirit and I'm thinking of grotesque torture instruments and wallowing in my own melodrama. I'm glad I caught myself today, because pitying myself isn't really the route I want to take right now.

Anyway, just thought I'd share with you my brush with insanity. At least, I hope it's just a small occurance. I don't really want to become insane on the eve of a new year.

musingsthoughts insanity emo morbid depressed

My new favourite website:

http://www.archive.org

Great way to spend a saturday or sunday, no? They've got a ton of game footage and stuff..a guy from the Good Old Games forums says they have lots of interesting war footage too:

quote

The WW1&2/communism/cold-war footage is rather interesting. I believe the old Warner-Brothers cartoons on the subject and of the era are there as well. And while many are unavailable without subtitles, you can find footage from Germany and the Russia/USSR(?) did in response to the 'allies'

Watching 'Sex Madness' at the moment, here's the description:

quote

This is a typical sex exploitation film from the early 1930s - complete with wild parties, sex out of wedlock, lesbianism, etc. A chorus girl's exposure to the "casting couch" also exposes her to syphilis.

Exploitation filmmakers hoped to capitalize on the taboo subjects of venereal disease, sex before marriage, lesbianism, etc. while skirting the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 which forbade a film from containing such content. Films like this would tour the United States for years - mostly being shown in rundown, skid row theaters. This film has been re-edited and re-titled ("Human Wreckage", "They Must Be Told", "Trial Marriage", "About Trial Marriage") many times to attract the same audience to film, to take advantage of a taboo subject which may have gotten press recently or to appease local censors who disapproved of the film's content.

How cool is that? Kinda makes me wish I was born in 1910.

music movies books gaming related

Yeah Random Title.

My sister said that the other day. We were in the car and she was looking out the window. We were talking about something "cool", and she said as we passed a field of cows, "Yeah its the coolest thing since sliced Milk!!!"


I laughed soooooo hard she didn't even realise what she said!!! Well until I told her then we were both laughing our heads off!!

Hee Hee.

Randomness is like moon-monkeys on earth?
Now that would be weird.


Bróna

x.x.x.x
Happy Christmas!!

cows random monkeys moon milk other musingsthoughts

I figured I'd post this up for a bit of fun to see what kind of things you guys come up with about what you think fills up most of my day (and consequently my slave lover Deathsythe). I'll start this off at midnight and go part way through a little bit of the day and leave it up to you guys to use your imagination before I post what my typical day really is like. Your ideas can be funny, realistic, or just plain stupid. It's as much for me to get a laugh as it is you guys, so feel free to debate to your heart's content. Yes, some of this is censored. Don't want to spoil all the fun for you now. :P

Deathsythe, don't spoil this with my real schedule just yet :(

12 AM: Log in after work, checck PMs, wiki forums, etc.
1 AM: Wonder why *top secret* hasn't been done or why we're still waiting on *wiki admin* for a simple *answer*
2 AM: Check MSN, ponder why Vermillion is using another loli image as his display pic...
3 AM: Sleep.

Ready? GO!

other musingsthoughts neowiki wiki admin life krunal deathsythe

As usual, woke up and watched TV. Human Nature was on (yay!) Saturday Disney(Boo!). They sang a song off their album (Yay!) and Last Christmas(Meh.). I decided to do a 750 piece jigsaw (Hmmm...) just as Dad left to work (Yay!). The cat wanted to go in (again) but disappeared soon aterward(Yay!). I found him in the shadehouse (No suprise) and let him into the house... Where he... Um... Crawled up into an armchair and slept. Then I went onto Neoseeker (Finally!), and I ended up getting some Email Friend (like penfriend) from England. Apparently she's almost anorexic. (Did I spell that right?) Well, we'll see about that. Any guys that wanna tell her you're not interested in those sorta chicks, PM me. Well, that's all for now!

musingsthoughts

So I've been itching to get Mass Effect for a while since the price dropped, and my friend paid part of it as a Christmas present to me. It's really nostalgic for someone who loved the KotoR games but felt cheated by KotoR II. Really, the game has the same aura, even a few bugs for that extra awesome authentic BioWare feel.

Of course, in KotoR II I had a thing for the geeky yet tortured zabrak, Bao-Dur, and of course there were no real romance options with him. Hell, his interest in the General was minimal compared to Atton and Michel gushing all over the place. I guess Atton was an alright guy... he sure beats Kaiden, the... canon love interest for a female Commander Shepherd in Mass Effect.

The controversial softcore sex scene only works with human females and the asani, regardless of your character's gender, and imagine my disappointment when I read this because... I'm a turian fangirl. Naturally, I totally wanna get in Garrus' pants, but that's not really an option. Thanks a lot, BioWare. Guess a girl can always dream; I'm keeping him in my party, along with Wrex because he's just one hilarious mother *bleep*er.

Garrus' voice is almost as sexy as those mandibles and razor sharp teeth. SIGH. They don't address turian courtships, from what I understand, and you learn through dialogue that they're a pretty rigid species. During one of the many long-ass elevator rides, I found myself staring at his crotch, thinking, "What if they impregnate their females by making out?" Because that would be totally inconvenient if his mate were human.

mass effect xbox 360 pc musingsthoughts

Today I turn, well my age isn't important. It's the occasion that's important. To be quite honest, this years b-day has been the quietest it's ever been. I didn't really want anything special, but to just have time for the things that I wanted to do. I went and got a few games from the EB Games bargin bin (money is a bit tight atm) and some off the shelves. I also got a few books of my interest, such as the Dexter series by Jeff Lindsay. Although I've heard that there are vast differences between the show and the novel, I'll still be as eager to read them.

Funnily enough, my parents forgot their wedding anniversary, which was 10 days ago. They were so shocked that they'd forgotten it (again!) that they weren't sure whether or not to try to make up for it. I told them as a B-Day present to me, they should both make up for that event and do something for themselves for a change and really enjoy themselves as best they can. It's something I'm sure they don't have much time for, I mean they've been working like crazy over the past month, it's no wonder they forgot.

Also, just yesterday I received a call about a job interview for a call center. Thank god for that, I was beginning to wonder if I'd get any reply from anything at all. Hopefully I'll be able to land a job sometime soon and gather more money.

Anyway, just hoping that all you guys can give your best wishes to myself on this 'glorious' day. Don't forget, it's Twin_Master's birthday as well, so as a sign of goodwill, send him a PM wishing him a great birthday. Don't tell him it was me though, I want to see the shock on his face when he receives B-Day PMs from loads of people he most likely won't know.


other machienzo birthday celebration

other

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/RIAA-Will-Stop-Mass-Lawsuits-99761

Well if you know anything about the RIAA, for the past couple years they have been having many mass lawsuits again people who upload music, illegally. Well now they are dropping all current lawsuits, and will not be pursuing more lawsuits. Woo Hoo!... Right?

Not so much. The RIAA won't be suing you exactly. What will happen is if you are caught uploading music, the RIAA will let your ISP (Internet Service Provider) know about it, and your ISP could restrict your bandwidth usage, or completely shut off your internet. Now that would suck.

other musingsthoughts riaa lawsuits downloading p2p

Well for me atleast. Today was my last day of school, and my 2 week break officially begins. I have absolutely no idea on what I am going to do now though seeing as how I have a lot of time just to practically be on neoseeker, play some sports, watch some TV, and meet up with some friends! I certainly hope that this Winter Break will be better than last years. I also cannot wait for Christmas day seeing as how it is only 6 days away! I'm very excited for the holidays ^^!

other

this blog we will be devoted to my REC basketball season.

Game 1- L 38-40 We blew a 28-10 lead in the 3 and 4 quarter

Game 2- W 33-16 We held the lead the whole game

Game 3- L 38-39 The whole team was acting like retards

Game 4- L 25-31 2nd straight loss

Game 5- L 21-30 3rd straight loss

Game 6- L 18-23 4th straight loss

other