Blog of Ortz

One of those miscellaneous blog posts.

• I’m back from Mississippi obviously. Here’s some things I learned: South Carolina has the crappiest roads I have ever seen. It’s impossible to sleep while driving through SC. Georgia: meh, but Atlanta: holy big city. Alabama: beautiful. Mississippi: smells like horse butt. 10 hours in a noisy Range Rover SUCKS; luckily my dad has noise-cancelling headphones for those occasions when I thought I was going to lose my mind.
• I installed Vista (64-bit) on a separate drive last week. The biggest problem I’ve had so far was all my paging files being completely disabled for some reason… Besides that, I don’t see why so many people don’t like it.
• I haven’t had much motivation to work on OrtzIRC since I got back. I think the trip over and back did something to my attention span… I need Max to get me excited again.
• I’m taking a 3D Modeling course, even though I’ve done it a lot before. I usually use Maya, but the course uses 3DS Max, which I’ve never used before. After a little over a week using it, I’ve decided I don’t like it.
• I got a new gfx card. An Ati HD 4850. It’s pretty nice, except I’m pretty sure I’m not getting the framerates I should with this card. I think I have a bottneck somewhere, which I’m thinking is my CPU. (AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 2.5GHz)

It’s kinda weird that I feel like I need to notify people that I will be away from my computer for a weekend. But this is really just in case anyone’s wondering.

I’m driving 12 hours (that should be interesting) to Mississippi to spend time with relatives. I should be back Monday night. If there’s an emergency, like my site being spammed or the second coming, please email me, I may be able to check my email.

After practically rewriting it 3 or 4 times, I’ve made some real progress on OrtzIRC.

The basic structure is complete. Server and channel messages appear in separate windows, channel messages are formatted nicely, the nickname list is filled correctly now. Although commands aren’t parsed or handled yet, the command box keeps a history of commands like mIRC and other clients do. Although it’s not anything new and it was simple to implement once I figured out how, I was really proud of the way it worked when I was done.

As far as actual features there’s not much to speak of at the moment. There’s still a lot of basic funtionality that needs to be worked out, like persistent user settings, server settings, favorite channels, auto-auth/identify, etc. I may write up a list of things that need to be implemented and post it.

I need to send a huge thanks to Max Schmeling for the loads of advice and direction as well as letting me pelt him with questions on a daily basis. Thanks Max!

Update: Here’s a screenshot: