Delusioned

Published by Philip G

I have to say, one of the most frustrating things in the world is trying to troubleshoot a problem with a hobbiest coder that doesn’t know the first thing when it comes to code. He knows “this does this” but he does not understand why “this does this.” The most annoying case is when you tell him it can only be one of three options, but he insists it has to be something. I mean … hello? I am a programmer by profession; I’ve been debugging and troubleshooting code for well over 10 years now. When I say it can only be one of n options, it is only one of n options. Never-the-less, he doesn’t take my advice, even though he is the one that came to me, and we spend tones of more time than necessary debugging the problem. I finally tell him to make a change, to test you know. He does and wouldn’t you know it: he now realizes “omg, it’s this one problem” (which happened to be one of the n items I told him previously).

Here’s a tip for your new programmers: code does exactly what you tell it to do. It doesn’t so any more or any less. If it’s not doing what you expect it to do, it is because you’re doing something to make it not process like you expect it. It’s not the HTTP protocol that’s broken. It’s not PHP that’s broken.

Anyway, I just had to get that off my chest. This guy is a nice guy, and he has a ton of connections … but my god, he doesn’t know the first thing about programming. He also refuses to learn as I’ve tried, many times, to get him to read a book on programming. It’s sad; he has the desire to learn, but he doesn’t desire to learn properly. I fear this mod of his is going to get ass raped by the vB community once he releases it. However, I don’t dare to tell him this or else he’ll want me to go through all his code, line by line, to find and fix all his coding problems. 0.o

Post a comment . Jan 29, 2008
Filed under: Delusioned

Published by Philip G

I was planning on writing some kind of post today, but I’ve spent the last 5 hours absolutely frustrated with my internet connections. It got so bad once, I couldn’t even load up www.att.com. It is absolutely horrible. I’m totally shocked I can run this internet radio stream flawless (so far). There are packet losses everywhere. Traceroute shows things dropping left and right within TimeWarner’s network. I don’t know WHAT they did, but they sure f’ed up something bad.

Sadly their customer server is closed….it’s good tough. I definitely did NOT want to be on the phone for over an hour, waiting for a customer service rep.

Our broadband market is completely fucked up. TimeWarner RoadRunner cable or AT&T DSL. Those are my only two options and nobody guarantees bandwidt, even if I bought a higher package. Sad, isn’t it?

Post a comment . Jan 28, 2008
Filed under: Delusioned

Published by Philip G

I know it’s been a bit since I’ve updated. And I know I say that a lot. I hate that. But I’m working on trying to change that.

Outside of Delusioned, I have been working on a new project of mine. It’s an MMO raid tracking + signup tool. It’s purpose will be to merge the two current main market ones that I know of: EQDKP and phpRaider.

The reason I’m going this is because I’m tired of the crappy interface of phpRaider; we, as in my guild, needs something that can keep track of raids on top of phpRaider; and we have to have a single sign-on. I, personally, got tired of having to log into three different sites, to do three different tasks. My new app is designed to allow a simple plug-in-play interface for user authentication and authorization. At this time, it’s fully functional with phpBB3’s authentication and authorization methods.

However, with all that said, there really isn’t much up, yet. Just a bunch of code on the project page and a quick site, with a forum, for posting updating and gaining feedback.

It’s going to be good, I promise. I already have a couple pages functionally complete and I like where it’s going. Very user friendly, quick updates, use of AJAX and old fashion POST requests for edits and fully modular user auth. I’m poring everything I can think of to make the user experience as friendly as possible.

Stop by, say hi. If you have any remote interest in the project, let me know! I love hearing from people. If you’re a coder and like critiquing code, feel free to browse the code base. I can’t guarentee it’s functionality. I just kind of check things in as I go, but it’s all there.

Post a comment . Jan 27, 2008
Filed under: Gaming, WoW, gpcraids dpk raid mmo

Published by Philip G

I saw this story pop-up a couple times: once on Slashdot and again on Engadget. MS has killed the kill switch to Vista. Windows XP had something similar going on with it in the past, but that too was actually killed or rather removed from XP. Now it just annoys unregistered copies.But then I got to thinking — what is really wrong with the WGA kill switching?

Well, I noticed some stories start talking about illegal distributers handing out illegal version of Windows, often at a cost, even if it’s pennies to the dollar. So, what would happen if an unsuspecting user bought a copy of that OS only to be told, buy MS, the OS they just paid for is invalid? That would indeed be an error on the part of the seller; however, it also causes issues and frustrations with the consumer. Now they are stuck here, with a purchased copy of Windows that happened to be invalid. Your average consumer, however, will not know it’s illegal and will call Microsoft, per the instructions, only to be told they have to re-buy the OS at a substantial increase over what they may have already bought the OS for initially.

This brings up the reals problem — it’s hardly a user friendly method and their WGA annoyer assumes the user intentionally installed an unauthorized version of Windows. This assumption is, as you can guess, pissing off the consumers. And this lays into the real problem; the assumption your users are pirates right off the bat. What makes matters worse, your average pirate will know they have a pirated version and will either work around the annoyance or find a way to hack the OS to make it work indefinite. Who wins here? The pirates. Who looses? The consumer. I hardly see how this is beneficial for Microsoft.

Post a comment . Dec 04, 2007
Filed under: Microsoft, killswitch, pirates, vista

Published by Philip G

Last night, I played WoW, like I normally do. I decided to run a heroic instance to get a couple things I wanted for my druid. I got into a group that seemed to form quickly; things were looking good. We had a mage, rogue, hunter, warrior and druid (myself). A good mix of classes, no? On top of that, the mage, rogue and hunter knew each other and played together not to recently. Good omen! Or so I thought… Read more…

Post a comment . Nov 27, 2007
Filed under: WoW