Mame Video
Yes, someone made a video about video gaming in Mame.
http://www.powerstrike.net/Tehkan/mamejump.html
Our good friend Donkey Kong sings “Jump”.
Mame is “Multple Arcade Machine Emulation” which allows you to play classic arcade games.
New Car
Yeah! My new car finally arrived! Mazda Rx8, “Xmen 2 Blue”.
They had to get it from Ohio because I wanted blue and they only had black and gray here in Michigan. I’ll post pictures when I get a chance, work has been very busy this week.
I joked with my wife that it was just a very expensive garage door opener (has one built in) with a navigation system and 250 horses.
Its a little smaller on the inside than I’m used too, but it does have a back seat. The interior lights are red at night which I’m not super fond of, but it is pretty easy on the eyes. The number of cool features is just amazing.
Bye to the Vette
Today I had to say bye to my Corvette. My lease ran up today so I National City took it back. I had it for 3 years, though 6 months of that I was in Brazil.
It was a great car, so much power! The ride was a little bumpy and noisy but that expected from a sports car.
I put way under the miles I had available. It had around 29,000 on it, but I was allowed to drive 45,000. I was very tempted to keep it for that reason, but looking at kbb.com and ebay.com the car was not selling for a high price compared to what National City wanted for it.
I should be posting about getting my new car, but yet again there is a delay so I won’t have it until tomorrow. The cause: Paperwork! I can’t believe that this day in age we are held back by paper work!
Gato is not a cat
I can’t believe our cat does not like tuna! All cats like tuna!
I think our cat is not a cat. He’s more like a dog. He talks all the time, he follows us from room to room, he licks, sits and waits for us to return, and he doesn’t like tuna!
Retro Gaming
Wow, this site is cool: http://www.remakes.org/
Free games (for the PC) that people made based on “classic” games.
I love R-Type. An excellent remake is available, called G-Type. Plays well in a small window, a little choppy on my laptop when I make it full screen.
Just TONS of other things I haven’t had time to look at available on that site. Wow!
Gato Goes to the Vet
So, we named the cat Gato (until we think of a better name). I like “Ping” (Luciana thinks it sounds too asian). She likes “Geek”, I think it sounds too insulting (although we are both geeks).
I took Gato to the vet to get some shots, checked for fleas and treated for worms. He was VERY nervous because I think that he thought he was being returned. Previously someone had taken him home but found out the roommate was alergic so they brought the cat back to the shelter. So I bet he thought he was being returned again when I took him out of our house.
The treatment for the worms must have caused him to poop because he left a stinky one in his cat carrier that stuck to his butt and leg. I have some nice cuts on my hands from washing him, though he was rather calm considering how much cats normally hate being washed.
New Kitty
We got a cat!
Very cute, but older than I wanted. But he knows how to use the litter box so that’s definately cool.
We still need to pick a name. He’s a boy. And we want something internet/computer/gaming related. I like telnet, ascii (but sounds too much like “ass key”), servlet, tag (has too many non-computer related meanings).
We are probably going to get another kitten as well.
Bugs
There’s always bugs.
I thought I’d download bugzilla to track bugs in stuff I work on, but damned if I can’t get it working! Something screwy with the Apache configuration. Hopefully when I get some time to look at it I’ll be able to fix it (but I’m more experienced with IIS than apache).
Though Bugzilla did come highly recommended, I’m wondering what other solutions might exist. Anyone?
Code IDE
At work we use WSAD, IBM’s version of Eclipse.
Its a very cool, free IDE (Integrated Development Environment) we use for coding Java with.
I plan on using Eclipse at home on my personal projects. It also has a Perl plug-in so I can use it to update MovableType. (Probably has support for other languages, but those are the ones I use the most).
While the tool is very cool, myself and a few other co-workers end up spending a LOT of extra time trying to fix errors in it instead of doing things we should be doing.
Today I updated all my code on my hard drive and now I can’t run any tests. I fixed the first problem, which made no sense, but the NullPointException I’m getting now is a mystery. Fixing the problem is not a high priority because the cause is likely in a temporary class we created because we are not integrated with the security team (so we made a stub).
One thing we always struggle with is: How to code and test. Before people would code in a text editor and send it to a test server (that was shared by everyone on the team). This was horrible because your changes could cause other people to have problems. Finding your error messages mixed in with everyone else’s messages was a pain! However, there was only 1 server to support.
After this we got Visual Age from IBM. Its was pretty cool as you could run JSPs and Java code, but itself didn’t support JSPs nor did it support EJBs so it was VERY limiting. After we got used to it, we changed to WSAD.
With WSAD, we all have our own development environment, but we all have to support it. Can’t win, can we?
Another Success
Erica successfully imported her comments into her MovableType blog.
She informed me that HaloScan was going to charge $10 for her to export her comments. Glad I could help.
Zack had a suggestion: He (and Erica) were confused by the way the email addresses looked in the database. HaloScan has them “encoded” on purpose to try to avoid spammers. I wrote code to undo that, but did not execute it because my wife (and I) thought it was a good idea to keep them encoded. However, after Zack’s email, I thought it would be cool to add a radio button the import comments page allowing you to keep them the way they are, or to unencode them. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to make that change.