I have been working on a programming project. It is a card game called Tarabish,  played in a very remote section of Canada where I grew up.

I’ve been learning a bunch of different programming languages trying to decide which one would best be suited for the project. I decided to go with Flash. The programming language in flash is called Action Script.

There are 3 versions of Action Script. They are very different from one another in the complexity of what you can and cannot accomplish.

Creating a one player against the computer version would be fairly easy.  Unfortunately it wouldn’t be a lot of fun. One of the fun things about Tarabish is that cheating is allowed to a certain extent.

You are not allowed to communicate with your partner or sneak a peak at their cards… that’s unacceptable. But there is an order in which you have to play your cards. For example, if the first person to play lays down a spade,  say the 9 of spades and you have the Ace, 7 and 8 of spades in your hand, you must play the Ace.  The reason is as follows; you must follow suit and you must play your cards with the intention of beating the highest card played when you played your card.

Now the way that cheating is allowed is as follows. In the above scenario, you played the 8 instead of the Ace and no one calls a misplay when you play the ace a a later time, you got away with breaking the rules. If you get caught perpetrating a misplay, your opponents get all the points that were possible that hand.

The reason why a one player version would not be that funs is twofold. First, a computer will always know if you misplay if programmed correctly. Second, it’s very difficult to program a computer with the ability to cheat in a non blatant way.

So as a result of this I have been working on making my project multi player. I finally have things to a point where when a multiple users connect to the server they will see the same deck of cards.

If you go to http://bish.servegame.com/test/ and click on the show cards button, it will bring you to a screen with 4 hands of cards dealt face down. You can click on the cards to turn them over and anyone that connects will see the same cards. I can change the cards at the server level to a new deal at any time. Believe it or not this is a big hurdle, most flash games that you see out there are just executing a bunch of code within the flash file. Once it is on your screen there isn’t any communication with the server.

With the file that you are seeing, when you press the show cards button, it is going to the server at my house, asking what the cards should be and then returning the values to your computer. For your average professional programmer, not really a big deal. For someone just starting out, it’s actually very difficult and I am very happy I got it working.

**Note

Depending on the speed of your computer and internet connection there may be a delay between when you press the show cards button and the cards showing up on your screen. It’s just the time it actually takes to login to the server and get the original card info. I haven’t refined the code to give a connecting or loading bar yet so it’s very raw. Be patient.

So, Darlene and I are in our way to the drug store Saturday. There is a guy that begs for money outside the drug store on a semi-regular basis.

Beggers always hit me up for money. Always. 15 people will pass by a begger on the street and they won’t get asked, yet I walk by and they will hit me up every single time. Ask Darlene, she’ll tell you this is true. She has observed the phenomenon in action and has mentioned it to me on occasion.

It’s obvious that they know a particular mannerism or body language or style of person that will give money to people begging, because I will indeed give spare change or even a few bucks to people begging on occasion.

I know that probably 30-40% of the time it will go to drugs or booze and maybe 10-15% of the time it’s someone who does not need the money at all. But I don’t mind, I’ve been very down on my luck before and have had to rely on the charity of strangers. It’s one of the ways I like to give back.

Anyway, I don’t like regulars when it comes to begging. I feel that if you can come back and sit in the same spot day after day like clockwork and bother me for money, really you do have the ability to show up at a job and can theoretically make your own money. I do work for mine.

But to get back to the occurrence on Saturday outside the drug store. We go in and get hit up. I say sorry man not today and he’s pleasant about it.  We don’t see him on the way out until we get back into the car.

He’s moved over to a bench away from the entrance and he’s chatting away on his cell phone. Nice to know he’s making enough to stay connected.

I’ve been trying to create an online card game.

Last post I mentioned that I was going to stop trying to re-invent the wheel and use tools that other people have already created.

Well, I found a very key tool in the last few days. One of my problems was that I couldn’t figure out how to handle persistent server state functionality. In online games, if you create a routine where a deck of cards is shuffled and dealt and you hand out the program for your users, you have to obviously make sure that they are all playing with the same deck.

Well I found a program that does this and I can see all the code. While I don’t understand it yet, all the steps are there and it’s just a matter of tearing apart a small amount of code to figure out how it’s done.

If you want to see what a persistent server state environment looks like,  go HERE to see a brilliant little piece of code written by Chris Lindsey.

So, a couple of weeks ago I saw a deal on dedicated server hosting.

I reallllly wanted to buy it.

Now I realize, that the better solution is to just use the second computer at my desk as my hosting server until I get to the point where I want to test live connections.

Even better, I do have a way to test live connections at home. I have hosted a sever from home in the past, but when I want to get into really stress testing someting I can get a dedicated server. That’s a ways down the road yet though.

But I’ve also decided to stop trying to re-invent the wheel too.

While I’d like to learn enough to be able to write the thing I want from scratch, there are perfectly good tools at a reasonable price that have a lot of the hard stuff written for me.  I’m going to try and learn to use those tools. It looks a lot easier.

So, here’s hoping that the tools can do what I want. I think they’ll help.

The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan has always been one of my favorites. There are few authors that I had been willing to spend the extra money for the hardcover, he’s always been one of them.

I was really bummed out when he died in 2007 and not just because it was a possibility that the series would never get finished. He’s also one of the few authors I made the effort to go out and meet at a book signing event.

After listening to him speak to the fans that showed up and getting maybe 5 whole minutes of one on one time when he signed my book, he struck me as a genuinely down to earth nice guy. Now I know, you can’t make a proper assessment of someone after just an hour question period and 5 minutes of one on one, for all I know he could have delighted in hurling puppies at Orca whales, but damn he really seemed great.

So yeah, I was bummed when he died outside of the self interest way, he was nice to me when he signed my book and seemed to like talking to me.

Anyway, when I heard that Brandon Sanderson was going to be the author to finish the series, I picked up the books that he had out to see if I liked his style.

I did. To an extent. I very much enjoyed his stand alone work Elantris . I also loved his Mistborn series but I was pissed at the ending. I am not going to spoil it, but go read it and send me an e-mail when you are done and I’ll tell you why.

So I had great hopes for the ending of the Wheel of Time series. I liked the author that was going to finish it and I knew that Jordan had left a crapload of notes and had verbally informed his very competent staff and wife how the story wrapped up. They got a good author and he had great crib notes to make it easier.

Now Sanderson and Jordan have completely different writing styles. Jordan I feel better on plot and story idea by a smidge, Sanderson, much better control and structure. Put together Jordan’s crib notes with Sanderson’s ability to structure a story, well shit, that’s a good damn book.

So if you felt that Jordan was just floating away on too many tangents and stopped reading the books after number 8 or so, I encourage you to pick up the first 11 read them and then pick up The Gathering Storm. Sanderson has picked up the pieces and is doing a great job of tying up the story to an exciting finale. There will be 2 more books after this one and I am  very much looking forward to them.

The hardware side of network administration is very much like a mechanic’s shop.

People just don’t get this.

If your car blows a tire, you carry a spare and can be up on your merry way in about an hour.

If your car throws a piston, you’re not going to get back on the road today.

If you are driving a 2008 Toyota Corolla the odds of a dealer having your parts in stock is pretty damn good. If you are driving a 1960 Studebaker… not so fucking likely.

So if your 1960 Studebaker throws a piston and drives off a cliff, would you really expect your mechanic to have you back up on the road tomorrow?

Computers age much faster than cars due to Moore’s Law.

I guarantee you that my 5 year old server (that’s my second newest one) is at least considered a K Car ok?

So, the fact that I had you up and running at 93% capability within 7 hours of a server failing by essentially shoving people into different cars and shoving their luggage where it would fit, really is pretty damn amazing considering the luggage was packed in the old car at the bottom of a cliff.

The fact that two people at work understand this and one of them is my boss, is the only thing that keeps me from really going off the deep end.

How bad are things going when you really want to label yet another blog post FUCK! instead of Question?

Yet another catastrophic hardware failure today.

Yet another creative workaround using existing equipment until I can get parts.

Disaster recovery skills are proving to be the reason they pay me what they do here.

On a side note however, support from my 2 software vendors today was simply fantastic.

If you sent out an e-mail saying programs X, Y and Z will more than likely be unavailable for the remainder of the day, what would your response be if you got a reply to that e-mail saying, does that include program X?

I think I was too nice.

There is a dedicated server hosting deal up on one of the deal a day sites that I frequent.

The deal is out of this world. You will find no better deal on the internet.

I desperately want to snatch it up.

There is no fucking way I can possibly justify spending the money for the amount of use I would get out of it.

If I would get off my ass and start back up on coding the Tarabish game I’ve been dreaming about, then it would be justifiable.

But only once I got to a certain point in the programming and that point can’t come until I figure out a couple of earlier roadblocks.

So, in short, must not spend… really want to spend.

In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

I do still have a blog believe it or not.

I have been a wee bit too busy to post however. My mother-in-law passed on Oct.27th. It was unexpected although she had been ill with various ailments for some time, we were not prepared by any outward signs.

She passed peacefully in her sleep and her daughter who is in the same nursing home was with her.

Darlene and I were in Canada for 11 days. It felt like 4 or 5 at most. The trip was a whirlwind of obligations and appointments from the start to very near the end.

I commandeered 1 evening and the last full day to spend with friends that I have not seen for many, many years.

I will make sure that it will not be many, many years until I see them again.

Ethel will be greatly missed.

So,  a message queue on a mail server, is like a  straw in a boba (“bubble”) tea.

If someone puts an attachment on their e-mail, the rest of the office isn’t going to be able to get much tea when a piece of boba comes sucking through that straw.

So imagine my chagrin, when a user tries to suck up a watermelon (10Mb pdf catalogue) instead of a piece of boba.

Then imagine upon further examination, while I am clearing the catalogues out of the message queue and lecturing the offending user, that I see yet another different person is trying to suck a Buick up through the straw (32Mb video file).

Some days the IT department tools should include a hammer.

I read my blogs via a feed reader, every time there is a new post on a blog I follow, it shows up in bold font and I simply go to the listing for that blog and read the new entry.

Every once in a while though, I try to organize my feed reader.  Some blogs that I’m really no longer enjoying I just unsubscribe. But for some, I’ve ended up making a folder called “possibly dead” for feeds that don’t add a new post after 3 or 4 months.

When I made the folder, I meant “dead” as in no new posts for a prolonged period. But now, sometimes I wonder. One of the blogs I followed was from someone who was fairly ill. One of the blogs was from a woman who’s last post was about this creepy guy where she worked.

Blogs can be odd ducks, people just lose interest and stop writing. But due to the anonymity of the internet, sometimes you really don’t know who these people are and really, for all I know they could be dead.

I think I’ll rename the folder to “post deficient” and just wish for their return.

Have you ever done anticipatory work and then forgotten about it?

It’s so awesome, it’s like finding money on the ground.

We got a new network laser printer at work. Normally with a network printer you install a driver share it and you are done.

However I’m in a special case with this particular printer. Our sales/accounting department uses different colored paper for different purposes on various types of sales orders, or different copies.

Normally not a big issue, most software will just let you save printer settings and let you choose the proper color when you send the printjob.

We’ve got a particular piece of custom software however that will have none of that. It sends crap right to the printer and your driver has to be set to use the color of paper you want, no choices can be made at time of print.

The workaround is to set up as many printer drivers for that printer as you have different colors.

The new printer came and it had 2 default paper trays with the option of adding more, but the optional paper trays were on back order. We had decided to add 3 extra paper trays.

Apparently anticipating the delivery of the new paper trays within the next week or 2 I figured I might as well install the needed drivers last week and just share them as the trays came in. I remember doing it now,  but when I went to start the driver installs today I hadn’t.

So, the hour of work I did last week setting up the extra drivers and setting the default print settings is an hour of work I don’t have to do today. Wohoo!

You see these photos and you always wonder what happened.

Well, this is my friend JR’s car. He was at the head of a 4 car pile up. I imagine each of the 2 cars hitting the one behind him, drove it a little further up his butt.

It’s a shame too, looks like he had just gotten it washed.