Brian Ortiz

Just wanted to make a quick note about the progress of OrtzIRC.

It’s been pretty slow lately. I really want to get commands in before I do anything else, just to get it in a semi-usable state. So this means taking a step back and trying to work out how to do plugins.

We were kind of at a loss at first (I was anyway) but then I found out that .NET 3.5 had this new system for adding plugins to your apps System.AddIn. So far this looks really nice, and I’ll be implementing it soon unless Max has any objections. The only issue I can see so far is that I don’t know how this will jibe with possibly adding scripting later on.

You can get updates more often by following me on Twitter.

I’d never understood Twitter but I’ve finally discovered its virtue.

Follow me

If you love music like I do, then you should have a Last.fm account. Go, right now.

When I first found Last.fm I was listening to a lot of classic rock. Mostly Santana, Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin. Then it introduced me to Massive Attack. I’m not sure how I found Last.fm or how I ended up listening to Massive Attack, but I loved it. “Trip-hop” was very different from anything I had listened to. Well, not exactly, because my first impression was that it sounded like the kind of music that plays during movie credits. It kind of gives you that “time to stumble into the lobby and take a leak” feeling. (You know, that vulnerable time after having sat in a dark room for 2 hours matching a suspenseful movie staring at a bright wall and you feel like someone could steal your pants and you wouldn’t notice. Anyway…)

Massive Attack – Butterfly Caught

Well trip-hop then got me into hip-hop, which I had been exposed to a lot in high-school but never got into. I’m not talking about 50 Cent or Ludacris, I’m talking about what I would consider “real” hip-hop. Like The Herbaliser.

The Herbaliser – The Hard Stuff

So then I was introduced to turntablism. You know, scratching and all that. Starting with DJ Shadow’s album Endtroducing. The entire album is 100% samples from old vinyl records.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54_7m-CVTMY
DJ Shadow – Midnight In A Perfect World

He completely changed my perception of hip-hop.

Then I started to get into other electronica genres. Right now I’m listening to downtempo, though electronica genres tend to blend together a little. Basically, right now I’m listening to Bent and Air.

I could listen to this song forever:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr4fP9A3Oi0
Air- Surfing On a Rocket

This one too:

Bent – Private Road

So that’s the condensed version, I guess. This may be old news to you but finding new and different music to listen to is very exciting.

You can look at what else I listen to or add me as a friend here:

http://www.last.fm/user/ortzinator

You can also check out this awesome graph(pdf) made by Lastgraph.

EDIT: Embed-disallowed videos fixed.

Progress has been slow, but it hasn’t stopped. It’s been a while since the last update so forgive me if I repeat anything.

The biggest news to tell is probably FlamingIRC. I decided pretty early on that there was no need to reinvent the wheel and so decided against writing my own IRC lib. So I went with what seemed to be the most popular IRC library for .NET, Thresher. After having it pointed out to me how old and outdated the code for Thresher was (I think it was written for the first version of .NET) I decided to fork it and name it FlamingIRC. Sadly it’s under the GPL so it has to stay that way. I hate how viral GPL is. It’s very heavy-handed.

Max Schmeling sort of gave OrtzIRC a shot of adrenaline, cleaning up some of my code and improving a lot of things overall. I just wish I could code as fast as him…

I’m still thinking about features to add, mainly plugins and scripting. I’ve been thinking that both a plugin system and a scripting system would be over kill, but that seems to be how XChat does it so I’ll have to do some more research. If you have any experience with implementing plugin systems and/or scripting systems or know where I can get some information on implementing them, please leave a comment!

I don’t think I’ve linked to the project page yet, so here you go. You can take a look at the code if you want but there really isn’t anything to see yet. However if you do happen to see any bugs, or if you have any feature requests feel free to open an issue. I also started a page on planned features, mostly for my reference., which is obviously subject to frequent change.

This is my mouse:

As you can see from the worn spots, I’ve been using it for many years. About six, I think. The bottom label simply says “Optical Mouse”.

Today Lifehacker had an article on the best mice according to the readers. Of course most of them were Logitech mice. And as you would expect, there were mice like the G5 and the fancy MX Revolution.

Now maybe other people use mice differently, but when I use mine, especially when I play games, I pick it up a lot. Take the MX Revolution:

I’ve never used this specific mouse, but I’ve never been able to lift these off the desk as easily as with regular $10 mice. And although it appears to be ergonomically designed, these types of mice seem to be presumptuous about how you like to hold it. Here are some more photos to help explain:

How I hold my mouse:

As you can see, I hold it with my fingertips. Maybe others hold it this way too, but I find that I have much more control this way. Not only can I pick it up easily, but side-to-side movement is easier too.

How mice like the MX Revolution seems to presume that you like to hold your mouse:

Kind of with your entire hand.

Another issue I have is with wireless mice. I really like the idea of not having a cord to interfere with the movement of the mouse, but look at where they put the sensor:

It’s way on the side! I guess maybe I use my mouse strangely because whenever I use a cordless mouse, the cursor goes in all sorts of crazy directions and makes me want to toss it across the room which I can do because it’s cordless.

I dunno, maybe it’s just me.

I’d like some comments on this though…

Note: If you saw this post unfinished it’s because I couldn’t figure out any other way to get it from the web interface to Live Writer than by posting it and editing it from Writer.

Well since everyone and their mother is blogging about how horrible it is…

It’s a commercial about nothing. Like Seinfeld. Why doesn’t anyone get that?

If you don’t know, I live in North Carolina, about 60 miles from the coast. Hurricanes that head for the east coast tend to move right on top of us.

Tropical storm Hannah came through last night. I slept right through it. We got a lot of rain but that was about it. So all is well.

It was a bit disappointing to be honest, we had prepared for something worse, and we haven’t had a hurricane in a few years.

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: