Four Island

Well! It's good to see that people are reading my posts! Even if I don't seem to be posting anymore....

Of course I do! - 5 vote(s)! No, I use Four Island for other things - 2 vote(s)! You have a blog?!?!?!? - 0 vote(s)! Indifferent - 0 vote(s)!

About not posting or even being on for ages.... Yes, I've been sick since Saturday. Sorries! Not my fault. So if anyone's been yelling at me via email, I don't know about it! :) I'm sorry, I'll try to post again ASAP. Yes. I think. As soon as I'm better. I guess. Hi mom. Look, a four! :)

Ooh, here we go with a series of coincidences that happen to make a problem, just like the Rubiwin Glitches. What do you get if you have Ubuntu, BIND and no internet access? A 50MB log file full of entries like below, of course!

too many timeouts resolving 'weather.noaa.gov/A' (in '.'?): disabling EDNS

Nah, I didn't find it that funny either. In fact, along with my Apache error.log of death, mah log files were spiralling out of control because they like to repeat cyclic data out of order so they cannot be shortened into:

last message repeated 303 times

Something had to be done. At first, I hadn't a clue why the negative my computer was attempting to access a .gov domain over three hundred times a second. Was it a conspiracy?

Um, no, probably not. I finally remembered that Ubuntu comes with a handy weather lookup feature in the time panel. It was constantly attempting to access weather.noaa.gov--where it, apparently, got it's weather data--and because I don't have internet access, it was resolving through MY BIND server instead of a root server's. And since I don't have any entries for weather.noaa.gov, it failed. And computers take the mantra "If at first you don't succeed, try and try again" VERY seriously.

I thought, "Oh, okay, I'll just go disable the weather thing." Wasn't that easy. I disabled it, but something was still querying the remote server. I then came up with a cheat: I'd add weather.noaa.gov to my BIND server! Then, it'd resolve, but nothing would come of it so everything could be the same just without the 50MB log file!

YAY! There's that done. Now I just have to figure out what the negative the below message means in Apache's error.log:

[debug] mod_deflate.c(619): [client 127.0.0.1] Zlib: Compressed 16400 to 4363 : URL /index.php

That was.... pretty unanimous. Love to see that people still vote, though, even though they don't post anymore! :) :(

The Hat - 3 vote(s)! iNetSneak - 0 vote(s)! Rubiwin - 0 vote(s)! Other - 0 vote(s)!

Ok, I'll start working on The Hat. I think.... I'll try. :) Sorry, I would love to get working on it, but there are a lot of other things in the way such as LFS, the Sabrina FanWiki, FourChat and more.... But I promise I'll work on The Hat sooner or later. :)

Also, I'm sorry I haven't posted on mah blog recently. I've lost inspiration, I don't know what to write. Does anyone think that maybe I shouldn't try to post every day? Maybe a few times a week, but not on a strict schedule? I don't know, I just want to make you (the viewers) and me happy at the same time.

Ok, I admit it. I'm a little too obsessed with Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Don't think so? Then explain why I made a wiki about it.

I made The Sabrina FanWiki as a collaborative resource for Sabrina and her fans. It will contain episode guides, quotes, pictures, characters and more. If you are a Sabrina fan, you're allowed to add content. If you're not a Sabrina fan, you can but I really don't see why you'd be contributing anyway.

I plan to write episode guides for episodes on a weekend daily basis. However, there are a few episodes that I have a problem with (for instance, low voices in at least two of them) and that I'd prefer someone else wrote the guides for. For more information, see the Community Portal.

Oh yes, and just a shout-out to someone in mah Math class who will probably never read this: "Melissa Joan Hart is not a terrible actress!"

Anyway, I hope you enjoy The Sabrina FanWiki and feel free to contribute!

OK. Because of the audience approval from my proposal in Tetrgi Poll about making my own chatting module like Yaplet, I have started writing one codenamed FourChat! (Name can be changed if it's terrible)

I have written the very basic things into it: You can send messages, have new messages popup with seconds and you can change your name. What I need now is for you, the users, to try it out and tell me what you want in it. Do you want [Private] chatting? Smilies? /me style actions? Profanity filtering? (Well, that'll probably drop in there anyway.... :)) Just let me know by commenting on this post.

Oh yes, nearly forgot. For you to be able to try it, I need to post a link! Silly me! Here's the FourChat for fourisland.com. Thanks!

Mm. Feels pretty stupid once you think about it. I mean, really. My whole thing on "pick something when you're not as informed and stick with it forever, constantly ignoring the fact that there are better solutions" is annoying.

The thing I'm going to rant about is <!DOCTYPE>. I learned HTML at a young age, young enough to think that whatever I read must be right and nothing would sway me from that, even if the author did change her mind in the next book. I thought that not using <!DOCTYPE> was a good thing, a declaration of independence, the right thing to do. Not using it also makes writing webpages 10 seconds easier.

And don't even go there with that last comment. I'm hardly a perfectionist, maybe I'm passionate in some fields such as computing and mumble, but I don't have to be perfect all the time.

Anyway, back to <!DOCTYPE>. To this day, I still do not see any merits in using the loggy tag other than to ease W3C's validator. My theory is that the tag explicitly tells the client browser what DTD to use so it can render the document exactly as I wanted it to be rendered. BEEP. Slow down there, we've got CSS resets for that. So, why use <!DOCTYPE>? I'd be much obliged if someone told me.

See? I'm ready to get off of my high pedestal. I started by admitting IE wasn't the best and now I'm trying to set this whole <!DOCTYPE> thing right.

However, you must admit that I am right about Wordpress. I know I made the correct decision not to go with Wordpress for my blog. I can use it for other websites, just not for Four Island. I am also right about Apple. They're still evil and they always will be. So there.

Well! It turns out people actually care about Tetrgi! WHO KNEW? :) And for those who haven't a clue, try reading it's project page in the projects section. :)

Yes - 3 vote(s)! Ewwww! - 1 vote(s)! What IS it? - 3 vote(s)! Indifferent - 0 vote(s)!

At least I updated the poll on the right time this week!

Anyway, I have to say something about Yaplet. We on Four Island have been using Yaplet a long time for our synchronous communication, ever since Drifty found it, but lately it's been rather unreliable. It goes down alot, freezes so we talk to ourselves for hours and slows down. I may just end up writing my own replacement because Yaplet can be rather annoying.

Yes, that's right. I've rewritten Tetrgi in another language. :)

First it was Visual Basic .NET. Riiiight.... it was implemented in a bad way in a language that would only run on Windows with a lot of libraries installed on the side.

Then it was C++. That was pretty much a literal translation of the VB.NET version, it was still implemented in a bad way. It also only worked on the platforms I could compile it for.

Now, I've rewritten Tetrgi in Java, which is pretty much guaranteed to work on any platform. Plus, it's implemented as XML, instead of the "search and replace the string" thing I had going on before. Right. I really don't know. However, now the language is much more stable and it even has a couple of new tags. It's also much easier, now, to create new tags.

One small problem, however, is that the language specification changed slightly when I changed the implementation to XML. Now, all tags must be closed (they can be closed in the starting tag, though). There are a few more slight changes such as the fact that you now cannot put <COND> tags in a room's <TEXT> tag. There is a workaround for this, however, with the introduction of the <INIT> tag. I am going to try to write the documentation so the language is usable.

Anyway, Tetrgi 3.0 is now available from its downloads page. The file is called Tetrgi-3.0.jar. Have fun. :)

You may have noticed that I haven't been working on any Four Island projects recently. Perhaps it's recoil from the InstaDisc Incident, but I think it's because I'm plain lazy. Because of this, I'm sorry to say that I will be discontinuing a few Four Island projects. Here we go.

InstaDisc In light of the InstaDisc Incident, there is no sane reason for InstaDisc is be continued. RSS is a perfectly fine alternative with an advantage: It's much simpler. Plus, InstaDisc's main advantage, the ability for Push notification, only worked for a small percentage of users.

Xidet Xidet was a mistake. There are other IDEs and text editors available that are better. For instance, I use nano on a daily basis to write PHP web applications. I also use it to write C++ and Ruby. For Java (and Ruby), I use NetBeans.

SimpleBlog Unless anyone really wants me to continue this, I will confine it to The S Site because it's more of a tweak-yourself kind of blogging engine.

Single Four As Single Four was never anything other than an extremely esoteric interpreted language, there isn't really a reason to continue developing it. However, I would still like to see some Single Four programs (so far no one's turned anything in).

FoureverNET I discontinued this a LONG time ago, but I never actually announced it. In fact, I never announced its creation either.

Trac Tickets This never really had any point other than a small convince script that didn't deserve to be classified as a "project". Plus, we don't even use Trac anymore, so there's no point in it.

Soshibi I have a strange habit of naming projects after characters in The Hat. Anyway, this was supposed to be an LFS OS, but I got bored of it, and I want to free the name for another project, because, as I said before, I like naming projects after characters in The Hat.

So, there we are. Unless someone really wants me to continue developing these projects, I'm going to close development on them. I do still plan to continue developing Tetrgi and to start developing iNetSneak and Rubiwin sometime.

I like programming. I especially like C++, Java and PHP. However, I decided that I want to learn another language.

Perhaps inspired by the PMS I use, Redmine, I have decided to learn Ruby. It's actually not that bad. It's pretty interesting, simple and easy to use. For instance, unlike many languages, Ruby doesn't require classes or main functions to display its "Hello World" program. This is it in its entirety:

puts "Hello World!"

A great way to learn is the "Try Ruby!" interactive prompt available from tryruby.hobix.com that teaches you Ruby from your browser. It's a lot of fun, it's fun and I'm repeating myself.

Another fun aspect of Ruby is the Ruby on Rails framework, which was the base of the popular PHP framework CakePHP. Rails makes it much more easy and fun to write Ruby web applications. I plan to write a certain upcoming website in Rails, too.

One thing that does annoy me about Ruby, though, is that its command-separation character is, like BASIC and all derivatives, the newline. I fine semicolon separated languages so much better. I just do. :)

puts "So, do you like Ruby?"
likeRuby = true
puts "YAY!" if likeRuby