My old Drupal-based site was both expensive and long in the tooth.

Trying to debug a printing problem on my Linux box, I found myself needing to read a file that was so temporary that it would be deleted automatically within a few milliseconds after its creation.

ExtendScript is a very powerful tool for adding custom functionality to Abobe products - in my case Photoshop. I’ve got a non-paid (family) project where I’ve got to convert a Microsoft PowerPoint file, slide-by-slide into a series of PSDs with lots of little rules: the correct images broken out into separate layers at the correct position and layer level, text combined from all locations in the slide and filled into the correct text layers, layers shown or hidden as needed, and more.

UPS WorldShip is a nice and powerful peice of software, but when things go haywire with the network share or WorldShip’s shared folder it gets a bit weird.

I’d nearly forgotten I had one of these. If you’re not familiar with these amazing pens go take a look at their website: LiveScribe.com However, since I’d forgotten it for several months, it’s battery has naturally drained. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that it’s now refusing to accept a charge. So I started some testing…

Anaximander is a tool designed for OpenSimulator, InWorldz, and related grids to create world maps fast.

CardMunch was a neat idea - use your gadget’s onboard camera to scan capture the contents of a business card and upload it to a free service where it would then be translated into contact information. With the built-in LinkedIn integration it would then associate the contact with their LinkedIn account, if they had one, allowing you to send a contact request at the push of a button - after all, if they gave you their card, you should be able to make instant contact on LinkedIn.

I have released version 2 of the Google Chrome extension that allows you to rearrange the order of the panels in Pivotal Tracker!

I’ve come to the conclusion that the module auto-downloader concept I’d been working on was not useful to implement - there’s no ability for it to scale. With potentially dozens or more of modules for the engine being possible, there’s no sane way of building an auto-downloader that can be easily maintained and kept up-to-date. It is much simpler just to provide simple instructions for how to install a module and let the users get them from wherever they want to get them. Thus I’ve turned my attention to getting the codebase compiling and working on OSX.

After losing my database during a system update (bad admin! Wait, that’s me!) I’m back up and running. Good thing I backed up all my client’s data, just too bad I forgot mine. If anyone has a copy of the one interesting article I wrote on here I’d be glad to see it again! (I’ve even forgotten what subject I wrote it on… :P) Oh well. Hey, at times it’s good to start fresh! :D And this time I promise to keep regular backups… Now to get that backup script written….

Version 0.1 of the NLS Engine has been released!

After an unexpected amount of work - and some “minor” interruptions like almost losing my vehicle’s engine due to buildup in the oil passages - I finally got the Rotation data type into the script API. Each API method is fully unit-tested in AngelScript using the unit test library I wrote. Using unit tests has saved my bacon more times than I can count thus far! While I used to just write quick once-off tests or just stepped through my code in a debugger to see if I got something right, the unit tests keep me from having to do that over and over again.

I’ve been a fan of Pivotal Tracker for several years now. It’s helped me organize and schedule iterations for everything from work tasks to school projects and more - all in the nice, fluid “Web 2.0” manner we’ve been coming to expect from modern web applications. It’s been great - until one day I suddenly needed to do some reorganization that required opening several panels at the same time.

Back when theNLS Game Engine was the school project, named “Saturn V” after the rocket of the same same, Adam and I pretty much threw the scripting interface together at the last minute just to get our game demo put together - the team that was assigned the task had no programmers, leaving all of us in a bit of a bind; one of the hazards of taking school courses. When we rebuilt the code and created NLS we kept a lot of the same hodgepodge scripting interfaces, putting in more as needed to get our final game projects produced.

SAM:DATA vs Dr. Mal Ware 2: Saving Your Friend’s Computer From Being Taken Over By An Evil Overlord, or How to Defeat the Evil Doctor Again is about to be released!

SAM:DATA vs Dr. Mal Ware II: Saving Your Friend’s Computer From Being Taken Over By An Evil Overlord, or How to Defeat the Evil Doctor Again, the fast action game produced by RWC Productions, is fresh off the press!