Basternae.org

If you’ve explored this blog much in the past you would have noticed that I had a “to do list” published.  It wasn’t well-sorted, and not all that easy to edit.

Since much of what I do in life is todo-list-driven, I’ve always tended to fill post-its and notebook pages with lists of things I need to get done, lists of ideas, tasks, etc.  While I’m at work, I’ll think of things I need to do and jot them down on whatever scrap of paper is handy.  It helps me stay focused, but I tend to have quite a clutter of papers on my desk.

The perfect solution for me to get rid of some of the clutter and make these lists available to me in more places than just my desk is an online solution.  There are already a solid handful of sites you can use to do that, but I’m far too hardcore for my own good.

Instead, since I wanted to get more familiar with the Django web framework and the jQuery JavaScript library, I built my own online task management application.  It was fun, challenging, and immediately useful.  I’ve moved the Basternae to-do-list to it and make use of it for everyday organization.

It’s free to create an account, so feel free to try it if it’s something you might find useful.  Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

Check it out at http://got-it-done.com.  It’s pretty beta, so feel free to offer suggestions and/or let me know if you have any errors.

I finally went and set up a Technorati profile for the first time and claimed the Basternae blog.

I’m still not quite sure what you can really accomplish with Technorati. I guess I’ll find out. In the meantime, you can “favorite” this blog if you use Technorati:

I hate software “upgrades” and updates. They invariably break something that I didn’t want to be broken. I’ve learned the hard way time and time again that switching to a newer version of something is a bad idea if the new version hasn’t added a feature I desperately need.

So the rule here is:
If it ain’t broke don’t upgrade it.

… because something important *will* break.

I’ve been meaning to get a laptop for a while.  One might say that I don’t need another laptop.  After all, I do have five already.

Of course, all five of these have bad hard drives.  The newest one is seven years old.  One has a blown motherboard.  One lacks a power supply.  One has a dead keyboard.

So maybe it’s time for a new one.

Newegg.com had a sale on one I couldn’t resist — a Gateway T-6345U Pentium T3400 2.16GHz dual core system with 2GB of RAM and 250 GB hard drive for $399 (normally $549).  Since it’s pretty much the same spec as an $800 machine I was considering, it was a no-brainer.  I’ve always thought you had to have no brains to buy Gateway, so in this case it was a done deal.

Believe it or not, the hardware doesn’t actually suck.  You get a lot for 400 bucks.

It shipped with Vista Home Premium.  Resizing the partition to make room for Ubuntu Linux was a bit of a pain — I couldn’t squeeze more than 110GB out of the Vista partiton in the resize, and that was with page files and snapshots turned off and a good solid defrag.  And, of course, after all that ridiculous junk that gets bundled with a new PC was removed.  Why do they even try to sell people Earthlink dialup?

After trying to install Ubuntu 8.04 and totally botching the partition job (it boots, but can’t login because home directories can’t exist — Whoops!), I’ve thrown in the towel on 8.04 and will be installing 9.04 after it finishes downloading (at a blazing 25kb a second — why do I have this 4 meg high-speed connection again?)

Eventually I’ll have the sucker set up for dual booting Vista and Ubuntu and not long after that, set up for developing Basternae 3 and all of the other web miscellany that I’ve been working on (Django, ASP.NET MVC, etc.)

As if the random name generator from a week ago wasn’t goofy enough, I’ve created a version with umlauts, accents, and all manner of weird-ifying characters added to the mix.

Try it here: Odd character name generator.

Expect some extremely unpronounceable names.

I wrote a random character name generator in Python today. It’s HERE at Xangis.com.

The system used is:
1. Roll a d6. 1-3 = consonant (1d20). 4-5 = vowel (1d6 with ‘y’ counting as a vowel), 6 = end name.
2. Names must be at least 3 characters long, ignore a roll of 6 if the name is too short.
3. If you get three consonants in a row, end the name.

I used to use that method to generate horrible character names for AD&D a decade and a half ago.

As you can probably tell, there hasn’t been any real activity here for a while.

I really enjoy working on Basternae code, but there’s no money in it, so for now it’ll be on hold while I work on more lucrative projects.

Don’t worry, I’ll return to B3 at some point…

Cheers,
Xangis

If you have a list of objects, say List<Widget> it’s mighty easy to to sort them using .NET.

First, derive the Widget class from IComparable:

public class Widget : IComparable

Then create the CompareTo method. In this case, we’re sorting the list of Widgets by name:

public int CompareTo(object obj)
{
  if( !(obj is SynthProfile ))
  {
    return 0; // We could throw an exception here if we wanted to.
  }
  return this.Name.CompareTo(((SynthProfile)obj).Name);
}

Once that’s done all you have to do is call:

WidgetList.Sort();

Easy.

There’s only so many times I can see a message like:

“Error loading operating system”

Before it starts to get frustrating.

Won’t be much progress today.  I love computers.

I hate updating software.  Many years of painful upgrade experiences have taught me not to upgrade a piece of software unless it’s horribly broken or lacks the ability to get anything done.

That’s why I was dreadfully, terribly afraid of upgrading from Windows XP to Vista on my home desktop.  Sure I’ve been running Vista since summer 2007 at work, but I don’t do much other than software development on my work PC.

Knowing full well that a clean install is the only safe way to go and that Windows always needs more RAM, I picked up a new hard drive and an extra gigabyte of RAM (memory sure is cheap these days!)  It also doesn’t help that I was running an original Windows XP Pro install from late 2001 (which has gone through half a dozen hardware upgrades on the same install).  It was tired and in need of a clean slate.

The install was remarkably, stunningly painless.  There were all sorts of things that just worked without the installer wizard having to ask me dumb questions.  It was so smooth — even to the point that it auto-capitalized the registration key while I was typing so I didn’t have to worry about whether I had caps lock on.

I almost wish I had something bad to say, but nothing went wrong and everything worked.  This is nothing like setting up an NT 4.0 system, which had a way of running differently every time you installed it on the exact same hardware configuration.

The folks who fear Vista, think it’s broken or too evil to use:  They’re idiots.  It works, and it works better than any Microsoft OS yet.  If you have the hardware to run it you probably ought to.  Now that it’s SP1 and most software developers have worked out their compatibility glitches it’s mature enough to use regularly.

My only complaints:  Folder views defaulting to music (it’s a folder full of DLLs you idiot, show me the size, date, and version — not artist, album, and rating!); kind of annoying navigating in Windows Explorer (it’s an extra click or two to get where I’m going); the folks at Winamp still haven’t gotten their act together for Vista (crash, crash, crash!)