Wells Blog

March 4, 2010

Imperial Flagship

Filed under: Lego — Tags: , , , — Wells @ 11:39 am

So, I managed to get my hands on the Lego Imperial Flagship (10210) on Tuesday, despite it not being available for at least another two weeks. For whatever reason, the Lego store in Orlando has started selling them early. Yes, it was an expensive night for me, because I also bought the Grand Emporium (10211) at the same time. Let me just say this: The Lego sets in the 102xx series are bloody expensive (though worth it). I am not amused with them releasing two of them so close together in time.

I worked on building the ship last night (and a little bit this morning), and I have yet to get up to the main deck. The keel is laid, the bow is complete, as is the stern, but the guns have not been laid in yet. The bowsprit I think is going to be coming up quite soon, as will a completion of the anchor windlass.

I should mention that the galley is complete, though I have to put together any of the minifigs… so it is not occupied with a cook at this time. There is a chicken roasting, though!

I was thinking of doing a pictorial log of the build, with minifigs and stuff working on it, but it doesn’t really fit the storyline that I want to present. Instead, I think I might get the pirate ship (Brickbeard’s Bounty, 6243) and do a pictorial of that getting built by normal folk, then right before the sails are raised, have a bunch of pirates come in and take over the ship, hence it becoming a pirate ship.  :)   Just some thoughts, I guess.

I have some other plans that I am thinking about, once I have completed the Grand Emporium. The first is to see what kind of parts I have that I can use to put together a sailboat or two. I have seen one put together on the web that I really liked the lines of, so I am thinking I might emulate that a bit. Beyond that, I have plans to redo my city layout a bit so that I can incorporate the train. I also want to see about incorporating some of the buildings from Town Plan (10184) and molding them into the form factor of the modular buildings. In particular I am thinking of the garage and what can be done with it.

February 23, 2010

Upgrade mediawiki

Filed under: Databases — Tags: — Wells @ 2:35 pm

OK… so when it comes time to upgrade mediawiki, and you happen to have more than one mediawiki site enabled on your website, you have to do some trickery in order to get the database to update properly.

In my case, I have a script that matches against the $callingURL in the LocalSettings.php file. If it matches a specific case, it changes the site name and database name to a different one so that a different set of data is presented. Not that big a deal really, until it comes time to update the database due to a new version of mediawiki.

When that happens, and you run the upgrade.php script as they state, it will only upgrade the default database, and not the other one, because the $callingURL won’t match. In this case you have to temporarily modify your LocalSettings.php file so that it forces the other database, and then it will upgrade that other database without issue.

February 17, 2010

GatorLUG Meeting

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Wells @ 7:20 pm

Here at the GatorLUG meeting… talking about Google Fiber in Gainesville… at least as a possibility. There needs to be a lot more organization than I have seen so far in order for this to proceed, as well as a good bit more information. I feel so far that information is going to be the main thing that they are going to be needing at this time.

The discussion has devolved into a political discussion, which for the most part is boring and ridiculous.

Ed Allcut then gave a discussion about what good GPG is for. Eh, seeing as I don’t even like to admit that I have even used GPG, and that I feel that in most cases it is pretty much pointless, I have basically tuned it out. Instead I am being snippy about it on IRC.

One question that has come up (at least to me): How would I implement a GPG enabled vacuum cleaner?

The meeting is ending with a GPG signing, which quite frankly I am not going to participate in.

February 16, 2010

Microsoft vs OSS

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Wells @ 12:40 pm

OK… I know that a lot of people consider Microsoft to be the bane of all things good. Well, sometimes they do come out with things that make sense, like the beginning of this article:

MSDN Article

Let’s just say that I agree, and that while everyone CAN read the source of OSS projects, it doesn’t mean that everyone DOES. I sort of liken this to the lesson learned in the movie Ratatoullie, where we learn that anyone can cook.

February 13, 2010

A couple of things

Filed under: Fulong, Me, gentoo — Tags: , — Wells @ 10:45 am

Lessee… a couple of things…

First, work is being a bit annoying. Our home area for the users went down, and of course there are no backups (no big deal, really… it is a part of policy and the users know that) but we really like to keep things running, so getting the home area back has been a priority for us for a couple of days now… and there has been no fruition. We are basically at the end of the rope now, and are trying to simply recover what we can.

It sucks.

And of course this is all happening now, when I have the first weekend in six months completely free with no plans whatsoever. Which means I will probably go in to work to see what I can do to fix things. *sigh*

Got a new cable modem last night, though… DOCSIS 3.0 compliant. No idea if Cox cable is going to be providing me with better connections because of it, but by god I am ready for it when it comes… except that my router is maximum 100mbit, and the thing has a gigabit port on the back of it. Now I might have to start looking either for a gigabit port for the router, or a new router that has a gigabit port on it.

In other news, the woman whom I mentioned earlier will be leaving the country in about a month or so. This is part of the reason why I didn’t pursue it further… I knew she was leaving for parts long and far away…  :(

I have a new harddrive for the Fulong, but haven’t put it in yet… I figure that might be something I do tonight… not sure if I am going to put gentoo on it, or go with the debian variant that is now available and not sucking so badly.

February 11, 2010

GPG Spam

Filed under: Me — Tags: , — Wells @ 5:08 pm

So a discussion came up just recently concerning spam scanners on mail servers and their tendency to score on emails that happen to be GPG encrypted, simply because the contents is a bunch of gobbledy-gook. Things were thrown back and forth concerning the computational expense of scanning emails for spam in the first place and stuff… then the conversation took a bit of a left turn when I started going off about how I was going to become the next spam king, whose sole purpose would be to generate spam using nothing but GPG signatures and encryption, as well as generating new keys for the spam every day so that a filter could not be placed on any single GPG key/signature.

They whined a bit about how it is still computationally expensive, and that all of the key generation and encryption would actually reduce the amount of spam being sent, to which my reply was that they did not understand the goal I was trying to achieve… not to make money from spam, but instead to kill GPG forever.

Yes, I was a bit bored…

Website work

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — Wells @ 1:03 pm

Modified the css code so that even when a page is shorter than the full page, it is a bit taller than the screen. This forces the browser to always have a scrollbar. Why, you might ask? Well, because I center the webpages, they are always in a specific spot… but when a scrollbar appears automagically because the page is longer than the browser can display, the entire page shifts slightly to the left, which is bloody annoying. So, if we always make the page slightly larger than the browser window, there will always be a scrollbar and therefore there won’t be a shift between pages that have a need for a scrollbar and those that do not.

February 9, 2010

Faire is over!

Filed under: Food, Me — Tags: , — Wells @ 11:07 am

So, the Hoggetowne Medieval Faire is over for another year! Thank god! Really, I enjoy the faire, but the hours are killer for the job that I do. Next year I plan on doing one of two things… Either cooking for the guilde again, or not cooking for them and just cooking for the encampment. Whichever it happens to be, I am NOT going to be the quartermaster during the year. That can be someone else.The menu was basically the same as last year:

  • Sausages with grilled onions and peppers
  • Macaroni and cheese
  • Grilled chicken with onions and peppers
  • Baked Beans
  • Vegetable platter
  • Scrambled eggs and biscuits and gravy for breakfast
  • Assorted danishes for breakfast

Some other things that were added to the menu this year:

  • Kabobs for kids day
  • baked Potatoes

Of course, I also had to do some special stuff, and I did the following this year:

  • Curried venison for the second Saturday. This was a particularly strong hit, because it was simply incredible.
  • Some elk roast. This wasn’t quite as good as I had hoped, but it wasn’t bad. I was glad to share it out to people because it was something special, and something that most people have probably never had before.
  • Another lamb roast. This was a lot better than the elk roast, and because it was so big I was able to save half of it to take home. I later threw it into a crock pot and make a lamb stew out of it.

For that matter, I plan on dropping my role as the Director’s Committee Chairman. I’ll stay on the Director’s Committee, but not as the chair. That can go to someone else as well. I have enough meetings to deal with these days as it is.

Faire was good, though. I enjoyed myself, despite now being sick because of it. I should be clear of the sickness that I caught tomorrow morning, though.

In other news, I think I managed to fall head-over-heels for someone very special this past fortnight. I am not going to mention any names, because quite frankly I have had really bad experiences with that sort of thing in the past, and in this case I am going to keep it to myself. Needless to say if she reads this, she will probably know it is her. I don’t know how she will handle it, but this is my position on it (at least at this point in time…): I am not going to do anything about it. I just feel that there might be too much drama, and quite frankly I would prefer not to be with her and have her as a friend than to lose her completely, because she really is a special person to me.I made that mistake once… I’ll never make it again.

This is a long collection of thoughts, and it is very likely that some of these thoughts are truly messed up in the process. Suck it up… I am a bit under the weather right now, and thinking clearly is not at the top of the stack right now. It’s just a good thing I didn’t post this yesterday, because I was really loopy then.

January 29, 2010

Southeast Linux Fest

Filed under: Biking, Me — Tags: , — Wells @ 4:44 pm

The Southeast Linux Fest has opened registration. I am seriously thinking of going to this con, because I figure there might be some really interesting things there, and also because it should be a really nice ride up there on the bike. Yes, I have ulterior motives for things like this!  :)

Medieval Faire in the news

Filed under: Food, Me — Tags: , — Wells @ 1:19 pm

Looks like the acting troupe I work with got into the paper recently:

Orlando Sentinal

Sun Sentinal

I have been working with this group for eight years now. I started out as a fighter, moved on with the group to become a trainer, and have now hung up my fighting boots in order to cook for them instead. Next year, I’m just going to run around and do stupid stuff, because cooking is bloody tiring. Yeah, I have become a bit burned out from it all, so I need a rest from it. There are others in the group that are becoming the same way, so hopefully this coming year we will get a number of new people to step up to the plate and take the reigns for a while.

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