How many times do you go to watch a video on a site that's not porn and it asks you for your date of birth? There's plenty of videos out there that do that... video games are the ones that annoy me the most. Especially since the sites that I watch videos on, I am registered for and my date of birth is stored with my profile. Sometimes it's just a 3 box combo of month, day and year where you have to type, other times it's 3 drop down boxes where what is automatically selected is January 1, 2004. Other times it's 3 drop downs for month day and year but no default date is selected. On GameTrailers.com, these are the least annoying. They don't have verification code built in so you can just press "OK" and it'll let you watch the video without selecting anything. On the ones with the 3 drop downs where January 1 2004 is automatically selected, I just drop the year down to 1980 or earlier, even though 1990 will suffice now (jeez, people born in 1980 are already 28). The only ones that get my real date of birth are the text box variations where it's easy to type. Seriously, the drop downs gotta go.

These are so dumb and annoying. But I guess you gotta be responsible. Annoyingly responsible to those who could watch R rated movies for 12 years now. To those who can buy anything where an age restriction is in place. To those of us who could almost run for president of the USA (35 is the minimum if I recall correctly). The only thing I can't buy, age-wise, is a house in my parents' community because you have to be 55 or older.

But I guess you gotta be responsible. You definitely want to make it a good warning that you should be of X years (13 for PG-13, 17 for R, etc) before you watch the movie, play the game, drink the beer, etc. But of those, I think it's only actually illegal to drink if you're not old enough. Still, those sites should save your birthday as a cookie or something so you don't have to enter it 120 times. That can't be used to track anything that they wouldn't already know or could even get any information from... how many people were born on March 23, 1979? Well, I guess, how many people were born on March 23, 1979 in the IP range that I use? Probably far less. But still. Hold onto my date of birth or make it so if I just press "OK" I get to watch it anyway :) I like that bug.

This new server is about 4 times more powerful than my previous server, but for the same price. I will now definitely be putting lots of new stuff up on here to get the full use out of it. I have my subversion server running off of it, and again, an open invitation to anyone who wants all the free awesome code they can handle :P

Be wary of hosting companies installing MySQL for you. They might install the latest version of it (5.x), but in my.cnf specify that it should use the old password hashing method, the insecure one used before MySQL 4.1. This old method only generates a hash 16 bytes long, whereas the new one is 41 bytes (with a leading *). I did notice it but didn't think anything of it until I tried to login to my website here to post a new item. I had just finished getting all of my passwords for my websites input too. This required looking in the config file that I read to connect to the database to get the current password out, then running "grant all privileges on database.* to 'user'@'localhost' identified by 'password'" for each one. Ridiculous. I think I got them all right on the second go, I didn't feel like reading in the config files again. This site works, and so does Jim and Kate's site (which is awful and is long overdue for an upgrade). Vacre Tei works too. Stringed.org might work but not all of the name servers are pointed correctly yet, so I can't see it. It might work for you, it worked at the office.

Also, if you get "Can't connect to MySQL" and it's running, chances are it isn't allowing networking. I just commented out those two lines (old-passwords and skip-networking) and if I got all the passwords right, everything should work fine. Overall, the transition from the old server went without a hitch, but was a pain in the ass. Here's the breakdown:

1. Zip up the websites on May 24 and promise not to upload any new files because then they'd also have to be pushed over.


2. Zip up the databases and promise not to make any new posts or anything.


3. Zip up tomcat since I don't want to have to reconfigure it


4. Download them (the size of jasontconnell.com gzipped up is currently over 600 MB)


5. Upload everything to the new server.


6. Extract everything where it belongs.


7. Update the MySQL passwords


8. Set JAVA_HOME


9. Hope it works

If you want access, let me know, I'll create you an account and let you access all the code on all of my websites! There's lots of neat stuff up there.

Subversion is a code versioning system that is heavily used by developers on teams who want to keep their source code in a single place, let people edit or view it, and keep versions of it. Branches are often made when projects are going to be upgraded from, for example, 1.0 to 2.0. The 1.0 branch is kept so that any bugs that come up for 1.0 users can be fixed without them having to upgrade to 2.0. Patching is also very easy with a good versioning system. There are many reasons to use them, and hardly any not to.

But why am I using one? Frankly because I had to set up a Subversion server at work (svn for short), so I knew somewhat how to do it. Also, because it's a good backup system. Like, hmm, this code used to work, I wonder what I did. Then I can just look back at the history of a file and see what changed, and revert back to what worked. Also, for backup, if I ever want to work on it anywhere, I can, because it's on my server that's on the internet 24/7 with the same IP address. Also if something were to happen to my computer and I haven't backed up recently, I'm screwed.

I've set up SVN about 5 times now, so I'm pretty much an expert. One thing that I am not an expert at is the authz file. The other stuff is simple though. Here's a rundown:

yum install subversion (or apt-get install subversion or emerge subversion) (or download it and run the exe or dmg on Windows or Mac)

svnadmin create /var/data/svndata

edit the configuration
vi /var/data/svndata/conf/svnserve.conf

edit the passwd file (add your user)
echo "jason = jason123" > /var/data/svndata/conf/passwd

(I actually haven't tested that exact syntax... it may put it on the same line as a commented line, which wouldn't work)

svnserve -d -r /var/data/svndata

This will create the repository and start the server daemon.

Then you can test it out.

svn mkdir svn://localhost/dev

It might ask you for a username and password then hopefully spit out the message

Committed Revision 1.

Then you can use your favorite code editor plugin for svn and start sharing! Simple as that.

You can get Short Circuit for $4.99?!? That's AWESOME! Of course, knowing my luck in movies, it'll be on all next month on HBO or something.

Also, Amazon might finally not lose lots of money on my Amazon Prime account. I just ordered tons of stuff... glasses for the kitchen since they all seemed to have disappeared recently... movies... silverware since most of them have also disappeared... napkin holder. It said it's all shipping in one package. ?? Yeah, we'll see. One shipment from one warehouse, definitely, but one package would be hard to believe.

I watched the debate in Philadelphia tonight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. I thought I liked Obama better even though almost everyone who they interviewed after the debate said Clinton did better. They had a focus group of college students, and talked to them after the debate, and they said Hillary did better. I would have to disagree that she did better. But I can't say any of them did bad. I just felt like Barack was more comfortable up there, actually making eye contact with the person he was talking with. Debates are funny though. The first person who talks loses. If it's a debate between two people of the same party, you'll hear "Well, I agree with most of the points blah makes, but here's where we can approve on that." Basically, whoever gets in the last word. They'll never 100% agree. You'll never hear Obama say "Wow, I think Hillary has a great way to fix the blah problem in this country and I have nothing to add." You'll never hear short answers. You'll never hear an answer directly related to the question asked. I just laugh. I'm voting for Nader anyway...

My brothers and I have been working on the new patio for my house. Yesterday we laid the brick. I have video of the process. Contrary to the video, I wasn't standing around the whole time :P I actually moved about 350 bricks from the sidewalk to the patio, at about 25 bricks per barrel load, probably 50 pounds a pop. Here's the Kodie head tilt video:

My living room's a mess, and I'm not cleaning it until later today since we're not done for the weekend yet.

And here's the patio video so far. Next we'll be working on the lawn, putting in trees and a rock garden, and getting rid of all the grass and replacing it with mulch or rock or something.




I have to say, thank you to my brothers, Pat, Bean, and Scott, for their help / doing it all :)

I also have to say, I am glad that Google is around to upload my videos to for free and embed them in my website. And to Apple for iMovie '08, and Sony for the 30 GB HDD on my camera, and USB hookup, so I can record crap without worrying about tape and digitizing. Thanks.

Oh internets, how I hate thee.

Some days I would just be better off without it. With all the blatant lies and corruption going on, I would love to just stay away. I should. Case in point, OOXML standardization in ISO. Just google "OOXML ISO". Also, I can't stand whiny HD-DVD fans complaining about Blu-ray winning the HD format war. More on that later. Some sites I hate include ZDNet... that's about it.

However, there's some oh so goodness to it. Like xkcd. I'm not gonna link or mention my favorite sites, but some are Amazon, Slashdot, Wikipedia, and iTunes science podcast directory.

Ok, onto my ZDNet-hate-HD-DVD-Blu-ray-hate rant. So, this dude on ZDNet works at Microsoft and posts to that site. Is complaining about Blu-ray today, or whenever, that "the more expensive format won". But then he goes on to call blu-ray "more future proof". I've caught this dude on so many contradictions like this, it just makes me angry. Of course, he never responds to my posts, and he keeps making asinine statements and I keep responding and he keeps ignoring, it's just a frustrating mess. Of course, "more future proof" means less expensive in the long run. It just points to the quality of worker they have there working at Microsoft.

Of course, the non-Microsoft world has its shining stars too. Like the writers of PHP. It's ridiculous. For instance, today I wanted to find the first paragraph in an HTML string, and I'm fairly familiar with regular expressions, so I checked the syntax on how to match a string to a regex and get the matches (groups in any other regular expression library terminology) out of it. This is easy: /<p>(.*?)</p>/g. But not in PHP.


$matches = array();
preg_match_all("/<p>(.*?)</p>/", $htmlString, $matches);


OK, looks easy. $matches will then have an array of matches. But that's where it gets tricky. The fourth parameter is optional, and it's called "flags". Read the "flags" part here.

PREG_PATTERN_ORDER - Orders results so that $matches[0] is an array of full pattern matches, $matches[1] is an array of strings matched by the first parenthesized subpattern, and so on.

PREG_SET_ORDER - Orders results so that $matches[0] is an array of first set of matches, $matches[1] is an array of second set of matches, and so on.

PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE - If this flag is passed, for every occurring match the appendant string offset will also be returned. Note that this changes the value of matches in an array where every element is an array consisting of the matched string at offset 0 and its string offset into subject at offset 1.

Yes, the "matches" array will be different for every flag. In Java, this looks (half-hearted with no syntax check) like this:


Pattern p = Pattern.compile("/<p>(.*?)</p>/");
Matches matches = p.match(htmlString);
for (Match m : matches){
m.group(1); // always contains the first set of parentheses in the regular expression.
}


I'm tired so I have to finish writing another time. Tune in for part two soon!

Sometimes I'll add an item to my amazon.com cart, only to end up leaving it there for months.

When I added that MicroSD card for my phone, it was like $30. Buy!

Now, Jaws on the other hand... Damnit, I missed the $9.99 price.

Another item, I think it was Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, just reached below $6 earlier this morning. Might have to hop on that one.

Did you take Acid3 with your browser?

My FireFox 3 beta 3 scores 61 out of 100. The best reported was Opera 9.5 at 65. The cofounder of Opera was a designer of CSS or something. Acid3 was more of a Javascript + CSS test, whereas Acid2 was strictly CSS. FireFox 3 beta 3 passes that easily.

Microsoft's IE6 doesn't fare well. I think it got 7 out of 100. IE7 is probably way better? Nope. 12. Linux based browsers like Konquerer scored in the mid 50s.

I read a comment somewhere, probably Slashdot, that said these tests aren't to see if it's a good browser, but more to push the browser makers so that developers can use the things that they test for and take for granted that a wide variety of users will be able to support them. That should make a lot of developers happy. Except for Microsoft! They just got done making sure their latest version of IE, 8, which is in beta, passes the Acid2 test. That's where free software owns. Release cycles based on business fiscal schedules are no good for anyone.

I like rap and stuff with good beats that can make you dance. My next few songs will be like that. My favorite thing about guitar is its percussion. Particularly about my Gretsch going through the Blues Deluxe and my microphone to my computer etc. I love the sound of it. Before I start recording, I usually sit there for a good hour with my eyes closed just listening to the output of the microphone through my headphones. It just sounds so f#%@#$ing good. Compared to my old way of recording, you hardly got any percussive variations no matter how much you tried. Now, just hammer on that B and roll a bass line in E, and it just sounds incredible. No more old way for me!

Also a word on guitar. Again. I noticed that when someone who doesn't play guitar listens to my song from last week (here), they usually judge it based on my soloing ability. Whereas when I listen to it (over and over for hours), I listen to it for the rhythm guitar. Just a thing I noticed when my coworker, the smercenary, and I were on our way back to the office after a client meeting in Exton, and we had to take a back way because it was around 5pm and the Schuylkill Express was jam packed. I decided to put on Jimi Hendrix' "BBC Sessions", a two disk album, which got us through, and "Driving South" made me easily do 90. I didn't know the area that he was taking me, and we were coming up on a turn and he almost missed telling me to take it, and he said "I almost missed the turn there because Jimi's guitar playing is so f%@$ing good." It was just rhythm playing :P Scott's a musician too. But I typically love Jimi's rhythm playing too.

When I practice, lately, I'm practicing my rhythm, so my soloing skill has been declining. I don't wonder if it's because I'm getting better at rhythm that I tend to favorite it and practice it more, getting even better in the process. It's my favorite whether I suck at it or not.

In totally unrelated, totally geeky news, I saw an article about a moon on slashdot that was tagged with the most hilarious tag ever: thatsnomoonitsagasstation. Be sure to read the article.

I had beta 2 installed for a while, and scrolling certain websites was a bit slow. Today the update was released, and it's a whole new browser. It looks a lot different, it's fast, and the last thing I have to check is if it stops working after a while like beta 2 did. But I mean, a while as in a few days. Check out the release notes here.

Me: i'm gonna have to ditch my yahoo im account
Me: you have to get me on AIM or google talk
Jared (on AIM): hello
Me: for some reason i thought you only had a yahoo account
Jared: nope, i have gmail, yahoo, aim
Me: i have no one else on my friend's list in yahoo :P
Jared: hahaha
Jared: you're my only yahoo account too!!
Me: good, i can get rid of that account
Me: hahaahah
Me: man, we shoulda just said something years ago

Let's see. First thing is my new putter came. I'm golfing with it tomorrow. Next, I ordered a bunch of CDs from Amazon (namely some Cracker that I didn't own yet, Nirvana that I once owned about 13 years ago, and Busta Rhymes, which I've never owned), and an electric shaver. It's the Braun 360 Complete with the self cleaning thing. I'm lazy and don't like wet shaving anymore.

Another thing is I ordered an iPod touch! 16 GB. So I'll be able to have all of my music on there still, plus room for about 7GB more, and more battery power, which is the big thing for me. I've wanted a new iPod for a while, and luckily I waited long enough for this beauty. Today, I was the only one in our room at work after 2:30, and I wanted to blast Beastie Boys for the remainder of the day. I went to plug in my iPod to the speakers, and after about 3 minutes of play, it died. I'm pretty sure there's no battery capacity left. I tried to borrow a coworker's USB adapter but it wouldn't charge. I think this model only charges through Firewire, not USB. Another HUGE thing about the new iPod is the interface. Mine shows just a list of Artists or whatever I select, and I can only shuffle all of the songs. Today I wanted to shuffle all the Beastie Boys songs I have, and I couldn't. I'm not sure if I can do that on the new one, but I know you can shuffle songs in an album, so I'm just hoping you can with an artist.

One last big thing. On Wednesday, my employer offered me a full time position as a Sr. Web Developer (really, a Sr. Developer who does a bit of web development and a lot of other development, like our code generator, multithreaded apps, database stuff, etc). I was contracting there for about 10 months over the past year. It's a job I really like, so I'm thrilled.

I am a big fan of Amazon.com. I will frequently buy movies or general life needs, like milk, on there. So, I got an email from them saying they've got this new awesome site up called "Askville". I'm like whatever... so I visit it, and there's all these people asking questions and other people answering them. It uses a reward system, kinda like my Vacre Tei site. You get these things called "Quest Coins" whenever you do stuff, like log in, answer a question, ask a question, rate an answer, and other stuff. However, the site that you can use "Quest Coins" on is not up yet. It's called "Questville". Vacre Tei used gold, and you create works of art and sell them...

One site that I saw absolutely no purpose for is twitter.com. It's like, you just say something, and a million people say something too, so whatever you say is immediately drowned out by the other million people saying something. I have no need for that since I find that the most annoyed I get is when I finally have something to say in a conversation, but everyone talks more than me and always get in their 10 "says" before I get in my one. Next thing I know we're 3 topics away in conversation from what I wanted to comment on when there's finally an opening for me to say something. So Twitter is pretty much garbage to me.

I'm still coming up with new technology that I will make a new website with. Unfortunately, that's all I can say at the moment on that.

I'm starting to use Google Notebook. It's neat. Although I think Basecamp or writeboard might more useful, but I'm pretty much committed to Google at this point. The one thing I hate about the web is that everything, before Google, that was useful at all, was all on different sites, with different logins, different URLs, and of course, different user experiences. The last one has come up in work quite a bit, because we're committed to bringing the best user experiences to our clients. But, with different companies, different user experiences are unavoidable, simply because everyone thinks differently. But, after a long while and many successes, there starts to be de facto standards. You have the same thing in first person shooters with movement being WASD and shooting being left click, jump usually being space, etc. You wouldn't want to be the jackass FPS maker that moves that crap around. Although, I was an "arrows" guy at the beginning of my FPS gaming life.

Notebook is neat though because of all the Javascript goodness going on. Also, it's easy to just type up a few notes, save it, and go on with your bad self. There's a plugin for Firefox, so you can have it a click away at the bottom of the browser, open it up, and type in a quick note. Another thing with the plugin is you can highlight some text on any website and click "Add to Google Notebook". I haven't tried this yet, but I'm sure as I use it more I'll find a use for it. The only thing I used it for was to remind myself of stuff that I needed to do or get for the Phillies game tomorrow. I haven't forgotten anything yet :) I'm sure it'll replace my "software ideas" in Google Docs! See, I'm totally "Googlized". No one else has tons of great apps accessible with one sign on.

That's about it. I'm largely difficult to please / impress when it comes to websites / anything / everything. It's not about the technology either, it's about how useful and easy to use it is.

It's actually five days with a slight lapse (one smoke) three days ago...

Part of the trick to quitting smoking is that you need to disassociate stuff that you used to smoke a lot while doing. For me it's most things besides going to church or sleeping. Disassociation takes a lot of doing everything that you smoked during, doing it more often and longer than you did when you smoked, and doing it without smoking. The first of the disassociation process for me was video games.

This weekend Beaner and I played the Wii pretty much all weekend. It was indeed another "Wiikend". Tanks on Wii Play is awesome. We pretty much played three games on Wii Play the whole time, which were Tanks, Shooting Gallery, and the one where you have to find Miis. I'm not sure what it's called. Bean made a Mii, too, which looks a lot like him.

Besides the Wii, I played a lot of STALKER, Rainbow Six Vegas, Company of Heroes, and Sid Meier's Railroads! The latter game was played the most because I bumped up the difficulty from where I'm used to playing, and I bumped up the graphics to 1280x1024 with anti-aliasing on. It looked f@%#@$ing beautiful. It's a slow paced game where smoking would be easiest. You're not always doing something with the keyboard and mouse. You'll set up a route and wait until you're able to make enough money off of it to set up more routes. It's a good financial strategy game. Lots of time to sit back and smoke, which is what made it all the more worthwhile to play it a lot.

Did I mention that my new computer is a goddamn beast?! I think it actually runs cooler than my liquid cooled PC. And I'm telling you, Company of Heroes never looked so good. I have it maxed, but the thing that makes the biggest difference is having the effects maxed. So when my rifle guys are shooting their Browning Automatic Rifles, they kick up dust next to the German soldiers they are shooting at. Or when I drop a howitzer artillery strike on an enemy base, the dirt, concrete, and dudes that it hits all go flying. And I'm so damn good. Zatko and I played a multiplayer game at about 12:30 am Sunday on Seine River Docks. It was him, me and a hard computer vs. an expert, a hard, and a normal computer. Zatko was backed into his corner sucking his thumb, while I was trying to make forward progress the whole time. :) It was a brutal match, but I finally broke through the computer's defenses across from me, and eventually made my way through to the other computers. All without smoking. The only bad thing about online multiplayer is that you can't tell which computer is which. Meaning, I would love to know if I had at least the hard computer across from me. Zatko and I were split with the hard computer between us, and the hard computer wasn't doing anything. So he had a good opponent across from him. I know the CPU player across from me was getting help from someone, so it's not like I couldn't take out a medium. The expert was definitely helping. Anyway, after an hour and twelve minutes, the match was over and we emerged victorious.

Rainbow Six Vegas is a fun game, and it also looks terrific. I had started it on the old computer, but decided that I wanted to go through it from the beginning when I got the new computer up. Well worth it. The combat in it is fun. First person, or even third person, shooters haven't really innovated in terms of combat. I can name a handful... FEAR, Max Payne (1 & 2), Brothers in Arms, and Rainbow Six Vegas.

In FEAR, it was just incredible. I have to install that again. Running up to a dude in slow motion and bashing him across the face with your gun could never be equaled in any game. Or throwing a proximity mine then switching to slo-mo and watching it jump up and explode at eye level with enemy. In Max Payne, again with slow motion, diving and watching all the bullets fly was great. Max Payne 2 introduced a more interactive environment with physics, which became apparent from the start when you shot a dude into a tray full of medical supplies in the hospital and watched it all fly all over the place in slow motion. Brothers in Arms had a less interactive environment than both of those games, and no slow motion, but still it was very innovative. You couldn't kill a guy unless you suppressed and flanked. You could sometimes score a lucky shot, but you had to use the situational awareness (pause and view from above the battlefield) to find the best place to suppress from and the quickest path to flank. Each map was like a puzzle. The third one in that series is sure to be a blast, with a more interactive environment (built on Unreal Engine 3, with destroyable buildings and the like).

I just noticed I'm missing some movies. Sometimes my movies will make their way downstairs. I like to watch them on my MacBook Pro, so the best ones are usually in my bedroom. But sometimes my brothers will take them downstairs where they'll pile up until I collect them. Tonight I collected about 30 of them and brought them back upstairs. That's like half of my collection. But I know that I'm missing some, like Minority Report. I should really keep a better catalog... but once I buy a house, it'll be easier to keep track, since I also have some movies in Jeff's room, like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'll collect them tomorrow. I'll probably end up buying Delicious Library... if there's a way to export it to some format that can be put onto a website easily. That would be a great use of a webservice... send an image with a barcode and get back the details of whatever it is you scanned. Or just a website with an exportable format where you upload images of the barcode (or ISBN for books) and it adds it to your library. The new applications will not be run on my computer, which is what Google has figured out. There's no need for anything but computational intensive applications, or just stuff that you can't do on the web, to be running on my computer. Figure it out, already, stupid internet. I'm out.

I will be guest contributing on PlexNex.com (the Complexion Connexion). To start, I put up the post I made yesterday about my haircut. Look for more exclusive posts (which I'll probably link to from here) in the coming weeks and months. Also, the site has two more guest contributors so far, so be sure to read their posts as well. Ben from SolidOffice.org, and Solveig from OpenOffice.blogs.com and GetOpenOffice.org. As you can see here, we demand attention. Now attend to us. Sam is the Senior Editor and will be posting stuff that I and others find interesting, which is why I visited the site in the first place. I'm sure it'll start picking up steam.

Your safest bet would be to just visit it every day and send an email to all of your friends and relatives to tell them where you are going, in case you get lost.

Sam wants to make the site a very highly visited site. Imagine that... something I write might be read by (hmm, zero * infinity is still zero... we'll call it a hundred) a hundred times more people than read my site. That's exciting.

Some topics I plan on covering are baseball, software patents (my new passion), stories where you don't have to know my whole history (like yesterday's), and whatever else happens to pop up in my mind.

Don't worry, there'll still be stuff on this site. Like, all the stuff that I don't want lots of different people seeing. You know, the shit posts. It'll be a good time. Just as long as you visit plexnex.com 8x daily, I don't care what my site stats look like :)