Brian Ortiz

I saw a shooting star last night. I’ve seen meteor showers before but this was many times brighter, brighter than any star I’d seen, and it stayed visible a relatively long time, about 2 seconds. I was taking the trash out at the time, it stopped me in my tracks.

I was working pretty hard on OrtzIRC (compared to other projects). I discovered the awesomeness of the class diagram system and I was getting a lot of the classes laid out. Then some guys in IRC were talking about IRC fameworks and someone mentioned Thresher.

After looking at Thresher’s code I realized I was completely reinventing the wheel and that my own backend would probably end up looking a lot like it. So I decided to use Thresher for my IRC connecting and stuff, although I will probably make a lot of changes to make it do the things I want it to. Right now it doesn’t do things like keep track of channel info, it looks like it’s mostly event-based, like for bots. It just passes around channel names as strings. Needs moar OO.

So now I can concentrate a little more on scripting, which is where I believe OrtzIRC’s power will lie.

Last night I dreamed a bunch of undead skeletons were throwing onions at me.

In other news, new theme by Andreas Viklund. I’m not sure I’ll keep it though, since it looks like it doesn’t display properly in Live Writer. Horribly, in fact.

Maybe it’s just me. I really don’t get Twitter. I’ll just assume you know what it is since everyone seems to use it. I don’t have an account and I don’t think I ever will. This is mainly due to the fact that “Twitter” and “addicted” are so often used in the same sentence. Which gives the impression that nobody knows why anyone uses it. It’s like a freak of nature.

In other news, I’ve started another programming project. I’m making an IRC client in .NET/C#. I’m going to model it after the popular mIRC/NNS combo. Basically I’m going to take the best parts of mIRC/NNS, remove the fluff that nobody uses (or that I don’t, at least), and hopefully. It will basically be a client for people who keep IRC open 24/7. For “power users” if you want to put it that way.

This will be my first proper non-web app, and my first time doing sockets (if you don’t count that IRC bot I made in PHP). One thing I’m trying to change with this project is the fact that I never finish anything. Hopefully announcing it like this will help with that. I really wanted to use WPF but I want to opt for “finishing” rather that getting it exactly the way I want it, since I don’t know that much about WPF. Another way I want to accomplish that is by planning out exactly what the first version will look like so I have something to shoot for. Although, I have never done that before. If you have any links or suggestions I’m all ears! (PS, I turned CAPTCHA off) Hopefully I can do proper versioning too. I’m not too big on planning. D:

I’m still working on the new version of the site (in CodeIgniter) but don’t expect it any time soon.

You may remember Garry talking a while back about switching from iGoogle to Google Reader for his RSS feeds. (I can’t seem to find the post) Well what he didn’t mention is that there’s an iGoogle gadget for Google Reader that will show the latest unread posts. Just make a new tab for it and set the layout for one column. That way you can keep track of feeds more efficiently without giving up all those gadgets.

I recently switched to Google Reader for my feeds. I had no idea I had this many feeds in iGoogle. (about 30 feeds, 200 items a month) The trends page is really cool. I discovered that one of the political blogs I visit makes an average of 16 posts per day.

Speaking of blogs and feeds, anyone know any good PHP/webdev blogs?

Got my hard drive on Monday, so by now I’m pretty settled in. I know it sounds like I’m moving to a new house or something, but for the past two weeks I’ve been using Linux on my server, and I’ve felt like I’ve had a bag over my head. This is absolutely nothing against Linux, I suppose it’s just the effect of being in a different environment. It’s really hard to get things done with this sort of feeling. It’s a bit like jet lag I guess.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry about the 404 errors, it’s all been fixed.

Please contact me if you see anything else wrong, I’ve been doing a lot of updating and reconfiguring on my server while waiting for my hard drive. Which gets here Monday BTW. Finally.

Here are some songs I wrote, both works-in-progress. I made them in FL Studio:

High Orbit

Unlevel

I’m working on another that is really more my style, but I can’t work on it until I get my hard drive back. And about that…

I had to send it back, I think my PSU killed it. So I need another one of those too.

PS: Does the top of this look reflective to you?

One of those miscellaneous blog posts…

So yesterday my fresh Windows installation on a new hard drive started freezing on me. Not only that, but I was getting write errors. (Little yellow popup in the corner saying Windows couldn’t write something to the hard drive.) I was afraid that it was dying, especially since a lot of the reviews said things about the drive being DOA or dying shortly after installation. So, trying not to panic, I tried using different data and power cables. Which thankfully worked. But like an idiot, I switched out both at the same time so I don’t know which it was. I’m thinking it was the power cable though because it was using a whatever-to-SATA adapter, which I switched to my PSU’s only SATA power plug.

Also, the 200GB hard drive I had Linux installed on decided to jump on the death bandwagon and die too. Unlike the other hard drive that died, this one had things on it that I will miss. Although they are probably replaceable. So now I have to figure out how I want to install Linux. I’m thinking of trying out Ubuntu. I had Gentoo installed before. I like Gentoo, but it’s much better as a server than desktop because people don’t generally want to have to recompile their kernel when they decide to install a CD burner or the like. (I’m not saying it’s completely necessary, blah blah…) Some people just want it to work. And you can’t say I’m lazy cause my server runs Gentoo.

Well, sort of.

I’ve got Windows installed and got a lot done as far as updates and installing apps I use most like mIRC and Firefox. And about Firefox; you realize how awesome the way it does profiles is when you’re restoring one and Firefox is completely back the way you had it, extensions, cookies, bookmarks, everything. And all you had to do was copy one folder over.

I installed TF2 and got a chance to play Badlands for a few minutes. It was fun, although I need to play it some more and get the hang of it. (Meaning play it enough to overcome my horrible sense of direction.)

PS: SATA drives are awesome [/obvious]