Mark's Blog

I have added a new section to my website on NHL shootout stats, since I couldn't find a good place for them anywhere else online. Check it out and feel free to leave me any suggestions.

Well, I haven't posted since March, so I figured I would do some random rambling. A couple of my friends have launched blogs recently (Klopzi's Mediocre Poker and Evening Tipple) so I guess I have some catching up to do.

Installed Ubuntu a couple of days ago. The whole installation process was very easy. Installed GnuCash and some other software. I want to get back into the good habit of using a personal finance manager. I used a very old version of Microsoft Money for a few years, but due to a meltdown of my old computer that slipped. I think this will be a good New Year's resolution.

I need to find some new blogging software. I like b2evolution but I need a fresh start. There are thousands upon thousands of spam comments in the database and it's not practical to delete them all. I might give Wordpress a shot, we'll see.

Added a new page to my website on dexterity tricks. And I'm practising my poker chip shuffle with 10 chips in each stack as I type this...

Might as well do a quick movie review summary of the last three movies I've seen while I'm here:
* Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. 8. Enjoyable, but we've seen this movie three times before.
* Walk The Line. 9. Terrific performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. Highly recommended.
* A History of Violence. 8. A strange movie by a strange director. Close to being a classic but too implausible.

Saw National Treasure last night at the Coliseum. It was the usual Bruckheimer fluff, but mostly entertaining. I hadn't been to the theatre in ages (I believe the last movie I saw in was Team America: World Police so I figured a light action movie would be worth checking out. It was good mindless entertainment, the type of summer "popcorn" movie that all the critics hate but still does well at the box office.

I spent a few minutes in the movie trying to figure out where I had seen the lead actress, Diane Kruger but could not, until I got home and learned she was Helen of Troy. Oh, I almost forgot, I was in a generous mood and rated National Treasure an 8.

Back on the topic of blog spammers, I had forgotten that one remaining way of spamming my blog, through the comments. Fortunately I have an automatic email sent to me when any comment gets posted, so I can easily delete those vague one-line posts containing a link to a pr0n site. I've only had maybe five so far, so I'm not going to worry about that unless it gets out of hand. I was also looking through my traffic logs today and noticed that the pr0n spam had actually been getting me a fair bit of traffic -- several hundreds of hits due to people searching the names of pr0n sites and stumbling here because of faked referer hits. Sigh.

I have written an overview of SSARC and SSRESTOR, the archive and restore utilities that come with Microsoft Visual Sourcesafe 6.0. These are poorly documented, and I've had to experiment a fair bit to get these to work properly. Maybe it's just me, who knows, but in any case the page is: Guide to SSARC and SSRESTOR.

I did a quick scan of my access logs for September and counted up accesses to my RSS feed of the Wikipedia:Announcements page. I decided to estimate the number of people who had subscribed, as of the end of September. I took the number of IP addresses that had visited the page at least 25 times in September (58), plus Bloglines subscribers (24), plus My Yahoo! users (13), plus Live Journal users (11) to get a total of about 106 subscribers. Kind of cool, although still far from World Domination ™.

I also wrote up a short piece on Six Great Firefox Extensions.

I have added a page to my site, Deus Ex: Invisible War Biomods Guide. Hopefully this proves useful to other players. By the sounds of things, the game is getting really bad reviews by people. I can certainly understand some of the complaints, and it's a tough legacy to live up to, but the game is still fun in its own right.

It's been ages since I took some planned time off work (somehow the week that were off after the great blackout of August didn't count, since one never knew when one was returning to work). I don't have any huge plans, just tidy up the house a bit and maybe get a couple of new pieces of furniture, and generally take it easy for what should be a pretty hectic few months at work coming up.

I added a couple of "cheat sheets" to my Rubik's Cube page (Solution #1, Solution #2). These are one-page reminders with the moves. I'm not sure why I didn't do this earlier, since they are proving to be reasonably popular. After having been up for about 12 hours, they have received around 60 page views together.

I've been playing quite a bit of Deus Ex: Invisible War. I'm definitely getting into the game more now that the graphics issues have been resolved. I'm trying to make a couple of FAQ documents about the game, but I'm still a long ways from any sort of completion. The game feels a bit "dumbed-down" from the original Deus Ex. Everything seems a bit simpler, probably because it was geared for console gamers as well as PC gamers. Also, the game has crashed on me a few times, sometimes requiring a reboot, and this is after I installed the 1.1 patch (which is critical to getting a good gaming experience with DX2). Still, I would recommend the game to others, as long as you have a reasonably powerful PC.

I got some new blogging software working, which is kind of neat. It's b2evolution, a GPL fork of b2. It took awhile to set up, but that was mostly porting my old posts from my previous blogging software, GreyMatter. b2evolution is cool because it has a lot of features, is being actively developed, and uses a MySQL backend. And as they say in a Dilbert cartoon, "We like databases". Not to mention it has multiple categories per post, a sophisticated template system that I understand about 1/1000 of right now, some cool access logging mechanisms and a lot more.

There are a few things left to do, such as figure out how to get it to generate a static version of the page automatically, and get it to write the RSS feed to the existing location, so as not to break backwards compatibility. Also, I'd like to figure out how to rewrite URLs so that any existing links don't break. I have left in the text files from the old blogging software for the time being.

Any ideas on this? I basically want to change /blog/archive/00000012.htm into /blog/index.php?p=12&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1. I looked into mod_rewrite and it seemed like I could put something like

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/blog/archives/0+(d+).htm$ /blog/index.php?p=$0&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

in my .htaccess file but no luck (I did have the slashes escaped, but b2evolution didn't seem to like that). I tried a very simple RewriteRule in an .htaccess file and that did work, so it should be possible.

Not much else to say right now, since I should get some sleep.

I've been getting substantial amounts of traffic to my Rubik's Cube web page recently, averaging around 550 hits a day. A number of blogs and general link sites have been kind enough to link to me. I did get a link from TotalFark one day, but thankfully it did not make it to regular Fark, as the bandwidth bill would have been unpleasant. One fellow blogger linked to my page and said: "I do have to say that solving a Rubik's cube is one of those things that blurs the 'cool/loser' line."

I've been thinking of learning a third solution to the cube. Phil Marshall's solution looks promising, requiring 65 moves. I think the solution I use takes more like 100-110 moves on average, so this could potentially speed up my times by 40% or so, assuming that the solution doesn't take much more thinking or looking time that can't really be done in parallel with the moves.

I lubed my cube tonight (is this on the "loser" side of the line?) using some silicone spray, in the hopes of improving my times a bit. I think I put a bit too much on, as the cube now turns very freely. Next time I will use a little less. My cube is not in very good shape, with a lot of the stickers peeling, so I will probably have to get a new one soon anyway.

Given that I had a faster cube, I tried timing myself with The Ultimate Rubik's Cube Timer. My best average time was 61.4 seconds (the average is calculated by taking 12 consecutive times, and discarding the fastest and the slowest time) and my fastest single time was 48.25 seconds. I had a few 80-second times, due to various mistakes, which drove the average up a bit. I don't have a recent carefully-timed session to compare with, but I think this was probably 5-10 seconds faster than my recent average has been.

I noticed one neat site while checking my referer logs. An Irish student implemented a Rubik's Cube solving Java program using at least part of Solution #1 on my page. It looks like some of the moves towards the end of the solution are different though.

I think I've gotten an RSS 0.92 feed working for my blog. So feel free to point your news aggregator (such as Amphetadesk) to my blog. I basically followed some very helpful advice and everything looks as it should. I've also added a link to the current entry on my home page.

Anyway, things I do when I should really be getting some sleep tend to go wrong, so if this doesn't work, please leave me a comment!