Arcadia, my emulator frontend that manages a wide variety of classic gaming system files, is just around the corner!  I have a stable version right now, and am looking for beta testers.  (Contact me if you’re interested!)  Once I give Arcadia the ability to check for update to itself I’ll release it publically, but for now email me and I’ll give it to you.

Apparently Sony requested to have it’s own video removed from YouTube.

I assume someone at Sony ran a search for the music video and included their own (in error) in a submission to YouTube to remove other copies of the music video.  still…

First, have a Windows 7 ISO (duh)

Next, download and install Microsoft’s ISO tool here. (That is a direct link, originally found the link here.  If you’re doing this on Windows XP, go to that page and scroll down to “For Windows XP Users” to find two more downloads you will need.)

When you open the program, it will look like this.

Click “Browse”.

Select the ISO file and click “Open”.

Click “Next”

Click “USB device”.

Select the drive you want.  Make sure you don’t have any data on it that you want to keep!  Click “Begin copying” and wait for the process to finish.

Congratulations!  You now have a Windows 7 installation hard drive.  You will still probably have to do some fancy stuff in the BIOS to get the computer to look at the flash drive while the system is starting up.

This isn’t necessary, but I like to put a copy of the original ISO on the flash drive.

I’m not sure why I instinctively personify computers as needy and with low self esteem, but anyway…

In rewriting Roomie, I built up the infrastructure in the core engine to allow me to easily add commands.  In the old Roomie, I tried to organize commands’ code as best I could, but I still ended up with big files with lots of functions, and a hulking switch statement at the top.

Here is the switch statement for the Z-Wave commands code file:

There was also another junction point higher up the line that would decide which kind of command was being called.  In RoomieRemake, I do things a bit more generically.  Every command is represented by a class, which all derive from a “Command” class.  That means I can just have this:

As I continue development I will optimize things like command selection, but the point here is that I don’t have a whole bunch of special cases for different kinds of commands.  This is just part of the code that makes a command run, of course, but part of the redesign included breaking up functionality into neat, orderly bundles.  The master list of commands is populated dynamically with reflection.

A big time-waster in the old Roomie was validating variables, so in my new approach that is all handled in the definition of a higher-level “Command” class, while subclasses of Command register what arguments they expect, their types, and even default values if applicable.

Here is the old code for the ZWave.PowerOn and ZWave.PowerOff commands.  Look at all of the duplicate code.  Several times after redesigns I would have to go and manually change many lines of very similar code.

Comparing that to the new approach, here is the ZWave.PowerOn command:

By the time the command class is actually defined, Command has been abstracted into ZWave command, which has been further abstracted to SingleZWaveDeviceControlCommand.  Verbose, sure, but by the time I get to defining the command, I know that all of the validating of variables and finding of the device and connecting to the ZWave controller have already been taken care of.  Plus, if I ever want to add functionality to a group of similar commands, I can just write in the code in a parent class’s definition.  That’s inheritance and type safety at work.

You might have noticed that I didn’t include the whole method signature in the above screenshot.  That’s because it’s reaaallly long.  Some might see this as a disadvantage, but a big problem I had with the old Roomie is not having enough information to work with to make the proper decisions.  Basic commands recieve as arguments the CommandInterpreter that is calling them, a Scope object that represents the nested scopes containing variables, and an XmlNode containing the original command XML.  (Did you remember that RoomieScript is an XML based scripting language?)

That Z-Wave command was already really abstracted, with arguments defined in higher abstract classes, so here’s an example of a command that derives directly from Command:

Here the constructor calls a method defined in the Command class that defines an argument of type String.  By the time Execute_Definition is called, the engine has already verified that the Text argument is specified.  If there’s a problem, the engine reacts appropriately.  The CommandInterpreter, which represents a thread, doesn’t care about all of these extensions to Comamnd, of course.  It simply calls the selected command’s “Execute” method, which is concrete in the base Command class.

Finally, here’s a shot of the two Solution Explorer windows.  On the left is the old Roomie, and on the right is RoomieRemake.  You can see that in the remake, extra functionality is in other projects, which RoomieRemake hooks into as plugins at runtime.  That way, anyone could write a pluggin for Roomie.

SO that’s what I’m working on.  I hope to release this sometime in the near future.  If you’re interested in testing, either Roomie or Arcadia, shoot me an email.  If you think I’m a huge nerd, well you’re wrong.  I’m more accurately a gigantic geek, but you could call me a dork anyway.

(link)

Gross!

(link)

I just got a 2TB hard drive for my Windows Home Server.  Swim around in your bigger pool, my precious data!

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(found here)

Usually now when I get an IM from such an account I just block it.  I figured I’d try to help the other poor victim out, though…

edit:

Whoops!  I should read my own blog.  Here’s all the info on Wikipedia.

(link)

(scroll down)

It’s nighttime in China. >.<

CowsayIfPossible()

{

  if [ -z "${1}" ]; then

    CowsayIfPossible "Supply some text!";

    return;

  fi

  if which cowsay >> /dev/null; then

    cowsay "${1}"

    echo =======================================

  else

    echo "${1}"

  fi

}

Cowsay is win.  EEEPPIIIICCC  WIIIIN.

This BASH script snippet allows the unashamed use of cowsay within bash scripts without fear that it isn’t installed.  World peace?  That’d be nice, but for now cowsay moooooo!

sudo aptitude install cowsay

(name that sorting algorithm!)

A few days ago I submitted three email addresses for invitations.  I got two invitations last night, and interesting the one that didn’t get the invite was my gmail account.  Everything works the same anyway. Here’s a screenshot walkthrough of the setup experience.

After I clicked the invitation link in my email and signed in with my gmail account.  I was presented with this screen.

I clicked “Choose a number,” and I was presented with the main interface and an overlay with setup options.

Here I fiddled around until I got a good phone number.

The next step was to put in my existing cell phone number so that when people call my Google Voice number they get me.

The next step has Google Voice call my phone.
 

*ring ring* “Verifying your phone…” stayed on until I answered my phone and input the number.  The call was from my Google Voice number.
 

Success!  My impression of Google Voice has been very positive so far.  I’ll post more about it as I discover.

Read about it from Google here.

Today I moved my Windows Home Server from the corner of the basement to on top of the basement fridge.  This moves it away from the TV room, where it makes noise and can get bumped around (my precious hard drive enclosures!), and it also moves it off the ground… you know, in case there’s a flood or something.  I also took the UPS off of my desktop computer and put it on the server.  I figure that’s the data I’m really trying to protect anyway, since the Windows Home Server automatically backs up the data on my desktop computer.

Viewing the source of the homepage reveled that there were unexpected linebreaks at the top of the document.

This suggested that there was something wrong with the index.php file or the header.php file of the WordPress theme.  However, viewing the RSS feed gave the following error:
 

And looking at the source…

And finally, when I tried to submit a post through Windows Live Writer, I got the following error:

Navigating to the xmlrpc page…

(Clearly I can’t just look at the page through a browser, but there are those strange linebreaks anyway.)

Here I was left scratching my head wondering what might be inserting these mystery linebreaks.  I even wrote a little test.php file to make sure the server wasn’t doing it.

The problem?  Linebreaks after the closing php tags in included php files.  The main culprit: plugins.

As a test I could type “hello, world” where I have highlighted, and it would appear in every HTML page and RSS feed served by my WordPress blog. >.<  For this to truly make sense, you’d need to know about PHP’s include function.

So I disabled all my pluggins and re-enabled them one-by-one to find the offending pluggins.  Counterize II was the only one.  I used WordPress’s built-in plugin editor to fix Counterize II’s code.

My wp-config.php files was also an offender.

*sigh* problem solved.

echo -e "#include <stdio.h>\nint main(int argc, char ** args){printf(\"%d@facebook.com\\\n\", 0xFACEB00C>>2); return 0;}" > fbmail.c; g++ fbmail.c -o fbmail; ./fbmail; rm fbmail.c fbmail