Ok so I've been using every version of Mac OS X since it's release all the way back to before it was called "Mac OS X" when it was called Rhapsody, when it was called Mac OS Server, and when it was NeXT Step and Open Step. I've used each one all since their release to the public and there's one problem with them all that I just cannot stand. The problem seems to be at the core of the OS and also seems to have never been addressed or mentioned. I'm talking of course about Mac OS X's inability to choose a random Desktop Picture ACTUALLY at random...

Apparently a google search for "why does mac os x random desktop-picture suck so bad?" yields nothing very useful. As far as I can tell the OS seems to use a really "dumb" random algorithm that's based on some commonly reoccurring seed value or something; like the last digit of time represented in binary... In my collection of 191 desktop pictures, the OS's random chooser function seems to always pick the same pictures very frequently. I have 2 displays on my Mac and both are set to randomly choose a new image from the same folder of 191 pictures every 30 minutes. In a given day I've seen the same picture get chosen 2-4 times. Each display in theory uses it's own random selection. THis happens with such frequency that when I do happen to look in the pictures folder, I realize that there are some pictures that I've not seen in months, and basically forgot I had.

This issue seems to affect more than just the Desktop Pictures. It seems to also affect iTunes' random/shuffle function. I'm sure it's a different randomizer function, but I bet it's based off the same initial code. It seems to want to choose the same songs and the same albums over and over again. Who knows why?

Additionally, Today I got locked out of the http://developer.apple.com website when I tried to log into my account. When you do fail at typing your password 3 times your account is "locked for security reasons" offering no way to unlock it. Locking after 3 failures is nothing new, but there's no indication it will lock after 3 attempts. The only option once it is locked, is to "contact us" and fill out a whole descriptive form... It seems logical to me that their system should send an email to the account's registered email address with information about a failed login attempt and instructions on how to unlock it. That way, if you were legitimately trying to log in, you could continue to, and if you weren't, that prick trying to hack your account would just be locked out. Why is this such a foreign concept? Come on guys, it's not government secrets' it's the iPhone SDK and a bunch of useless documents on WebObjects and the Core Audio update from 2001...

I just found the hardest have ever made. It's very similar to Super Mario but it's more like Mario's Worst Nightmare. It's seriously fun while unbelievably frustrating at the same time. I decided to make a mirror (and in english) of the original creator's page so it won't get lost.

Here's a direct link: Hardest Game Ever

Friday we'll be hosting another MeatFeast party with all the fixin's you can think of. This time with slow smoked ribs and grilled kabas. These will be in addition to all the usual meats we'll be grilling; bratwurst, cheddarwurst, BBQ marinated jalape?o steaks, turkey sausages, and chicken breasts.

Additionally this time we have a chocolate fondue fountain. Mmmmm. Plus all the booze you can handle. Imported and domestic beers, and an assortment of hard alcohols with plenty of mixes etc. Guests are encouraged to bring either some meat/food they'd like to eat, or a donation to help cover our costs for the party. We are expecting guests at 6-7ish on Friday the 16th. It will be at our parents place, but they won't even be there! Thank you Jazz festival. Call Blake's cellphone for more details.

Between Christmas and new-years, I went to Greece with my wife and family. We had a really good time and actually experienced the New Year celebrations in Athens with 50-100 thousand greeks. Interesting to say the least. The full compliment of pictures is available in the newly redesigned "Photo Archive" section of the site. The wife and I also stayed on vacation a little longer to revisit some parts of Washington DC that we missed during our honeymoon trip. We ultimately wound up taking a train back to Florida which was pretty cool in itself.

Over the past 2 years I've been highly involved with the popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. I'll leave the description of that whole time for a later date, but in a very loose nutshell, www.orgrimmar.org. More recently tho, I've been working on this site once more. Basically now a master script sort of runs a ton of stuff on the site. Any file list, Thumbnail page or Walkthrough page is dynamically generated by this one script. It is pretty cool. Some quick examples of it would be the Photo Archive, Software Section, and Desktop Pictures. Once on one of those you can navigate around the site using the little crumbs at the top or the links on the page below. About the thumbnails generated pages, it will also automatically generate fresh thumbnails for folders that don't have them if I tell it to generate them. Once its told to do so, it will even save them to the hard drive so they don't need to be generated a second time. It also adjusts the file permissions to slightly more strict during the thumb creation process. Neat huh. The links in the menu and 99% of the site is already converted over to the new method, so if you've been around here lately you'll notice the new stuff.

The server has been increasingly difficult to get to with it's recent router issues. I am thinking about a fix and it should be implemented soon.

On a positive note I have committed to do a new secret project that should be quite popular once it is released. I can't say much about it, but what I can tell you is that the everyone I've discussed it with has been very excited.

I've finally invested the time and money into setting up a new, better, faster server. The whole reason for upgrading is that the old server's system software was halted at OS X Server 10.1.5. It could not physically be upgraded due to actual hardware limitations and it would have been too unpredictable or unsafe to attempt an unsupported manual OS upgrade without a viable backup.

Anyways, This server has 355 GB of high speed storage, 900MB of RAM and is roughly 120 MHz faster than the old server; which was only 75GB and only had 160 MB RAM.

The things that aren't working just yet are higher level functions like perl's GD.pm which lets perl create graphics dynamically. Those issues are due to the lack of certain undetermined developer files being installed on the server. I am hoping to correct it soon but the tools I am using won't tell me what files I'm missing, so its pretty slow going.

I've got some new story ideas so stay tuned. Also the server should be back up to working again once I fix it (goes without saying, haw haw haw) but I am workin' on it.

Work + Graphics: I am starting to do more graphics and getting to show off some 31337 photoshop skillz by making some stuff. Ex. they wanted to see some concepts for a new library website, so I'm like "gimmie about an hour" and then an hour later they return and see the 3 imaginatively different styles that I've come up with (all in finished states and looking very very nice. Lately I've just been tinkering with creative Pegasus designs where the logos intertwine and tile seamlessly, vector versions of the logo that are scalable to whatever size I like (before i spent 30 min creating the vector logo, all uses of the logo were done with bitmaps... vomi). I love that it is very difficult for them to find a programming or graphics task that takes even 1/4 the time they expect it does. I'm just glad that I really am good at the things I claim to be good at.

Moving: Once the wedding is over with, My apartment will become a virtual tornado. My roommate Adam and I will be swapping rooms to give Manda and me some more space. That means all my junk and all his junk is gonna have to move. I would like to be done with the move in 1 week time and if we do some large object planing properly, we should finish in a fraction of that time. We are still deciding where things should go, bed, bender, desk, server racks, etc. I'll want all you readers to help in the move wether it is in the form of monetary donations or actually helping us move. Thank. ;)

Honey Moon: We have decided to wait with the honey moon until after we swap rooms at the apt (roughly 1 week). This will help us get settled in and give all our friends and family ample time with us before the vacation. We are very VERY excited to stay out after midnight because that is not something we have been able to do. It gets extremely frustrating when you are out with friends and you have to be the first ones to leave or you can't go see a movie that starts at 10 PM because of a rule set in place which shouldn't even be there. Guess what. The curfew will still be in place even the night before the wedding! angr Regardless, only have to deal with that foolishness and lack of trust for another few days. Anyways, Back to my point; sorry, I got side-tracked. Yes, I know, I was gonna say something but... I know I know, Its just been bugging me so I had to say something. Ok please continue. Ok I shall. For the actual honeymoon we decided to drive far up north. Manda has never been there and it is still cool there this time of year. Se we shall take some camping stuff and just go drive up to New York, Maine, Canada, and head back via Niagara Falls. 3 weeks is our target time. So we should be back by like July. OH thats perfect. In time fro my brother's birthday. That will be good. Until next time; Zip it up and zip it out!

The last few weeks have been quite busy. There are so many things going on that it's hard to sometimes keep track of them all. Luckily I have been doing more planning of just how things should go and they have been working along my ever-so-loosely laid plans. I present the following.

World of Warcraft: Amanda and I were accepted into the World of Warcraft (WoW) beta just over a month ago. We are happily to say, very addicted. Her main character is an Elf Warrior Female named "Arseisis", and my two characters are a Human Paladin Male named Djspaceg and an Undead Rogue Female named SCSI. I have been spending a lot of my time in the game exploring the different lands and finding neat stuff along the way. I'll soon build a WoW section onto this site to share some of my neater findings. Complete with screenshots, descriptions and maybe even some stories.

SQL Menu: If you are truly on the ball you noticed a slight change to the menu on the left. This is because I recently recoded it yet again. Now the HTML code that makes it up is simply an unordered list for each of the categories. Each menu item is a List item. The CSS on the page and in the theme files makes it look like a table and float on the left side. Each theme does other specific custom things to it as well. The benefit to this is it is now much smaller code and less explicitly defined IDs and Classes. Smaller code == Faster Load. Now taking the aforementioned into consideration. I also converted the menu to a SQL Database. Now its much more advanced than you are thinking. First off it is NOT linear. so record insertion order doesn't matter (it dun matter what order I add the menu items or categories to the database.) Secondly, the database data has a series of sort order priority columns, parent category columns, and identifier columns; this in addition to the obvious: name link url, description, new, and disabled columns. Now, the database is parsed by a CGI script that loads the data into a 4 dimensional hash (hash of a hash of a hash of a hash) basically an array with key reference names. I.E. %Menu->Category->Item->Name. Once the data has been loaded into the hash, the data is sorted in two different directions, then printed with all the right information it is supposed to have all with correct code and any extra options. Here again I am telepathic and know what you are thinking. You are thinking that would be so incredibly slow why would he do something so complicated unprovoked? Well Your wrong and I'll tell you why. See the menu used to be stored in a plain old HTML file that with SSI (Server Side Includes) was included into every page as it was being sent out. The speed problem with this is it has to read the whole thing off the hard drive. So the needle/arm on the drive has to stop reading whatever else its doing, then go grab the menu then go back to what it was doing, for every single page load. Quite a lot huh? Oh yes it is. I'll continue. Please, by all means! Now that the data comes from a database, the information is stored in RAM while the MySQL server is running, access time is usually in under 0.02 seconds which is really quick. Parsing and loading into the 4D Hash takes literally three instants (Also quite fast.) So benefit: lass hard drive reads, smaller RAM footprint, faster processing time, quicker load time. I rest my case.

The corprate powerhouse that is 'TheResourceFork.com' has just gobbled up another Domain Name. Our biggest complaint is the size of our gargantuan URL: http://www.theresourcefork.com; weighing in at 23 keystrokes (26 if you always capitalize it like me). People just dont have that kind of energy, or a memory that will yeild more than 2 words. Alas, I have solved their problems, yet again. The new domain that was sucesfully propogated to all 5 DNSs yesterday is now active. You can now simply type ResourceFork.com instead of TheFullURL.com. Also Ive setup things like Software.ResourceFork.com, www.ResourceFork.com, and even some others that I won't tell you about te he he he. Just think about this for a moment. Now you will be saving 7 keystrokes every time you visit here. So that's like enough to type 1 phone number per month! incredible.