Blog of Ortz

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:

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.

I’m trying to decide if I should take the CAPTCHA off my blog. CAPTCHA is the part where you have to enter a weird looking word before commenting. If this is preventing people from commenting then I’d like to remove it.

(Let’s see if this poll thing works)

Testing out Windows Live Writer by showing you this demon heavy I capped.

(It’s awesome so far, btw)

I decided to give Tumblr a try. You can check mine out here.

I’ve been collecting XNA videos on Youtube into a playlist for a while now. Check it out. I’ve got about 40 videos as of this posting.

If you have a video you would like me to add, feel free to contact me or leave a comment.

I also idle in #xna on EFNet. If you have a video you would like added, feel free to PM me. I’ll add it when I’m around.