Sealhat.com

After having K2 for quite a while now, I’ve decided to use a new theme called “Andrea” since I was upgrading to WordPress 2.6 anyway. Not many people actually read my blog and I thought I might as well try to make it faster for those of you who actually make it to my little nook on the Internet.

Yes, K2 is quite robust, but it just seems to try to do too much and development is too complex for me to keep it up-to-date…or maybe that’s just my laziness.

I’m still making some changes, but let me know what you think!

I always knew the Blu-ray guys had to have cheated to win the whole format war. Take a look at Sony’s “cheap shot”/”low blow” to HD DVD:

Super Smash Bros. Brawl has finally been released in the US! Of course, I don’t have a Wii at my apartment, but Supercop007 has one hooked up to a 52″ LCD HDTV. I’ll have to play it some day.

Below is our friend Bill Amend’s take on the game’s monumental release in this Sunday’s FoxTrot:

I’m not sure why, but the television shows I watch look very similar…proof after the break. And, oh, the following picture has nothing to do with anything.

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What are you doing?!

“Mister, we’re trying to help the homeless here. It’s bad enough that we have some nut out there trying to strap ‘em to a rickshaw!”

I have a few new coupon codes for my host A Small Orange! I’ve been pretty happy with my services with them and you can see the uptime is quite good.

• SEAL5 = $5 off any order
• SEAL15 = 15% off any order

I hope to post more often in 2008. Last year was a downer with a total of one post!

First post of 2007 is in mid-June? Inconceivable! Anyway, this post might be a bit shorter than I wanted it to be because Wordpress decided to delete my original one when I hit “Save and Continue Editing”…GG.

So for the past couple weeks I’ve been working on this Xfire Stats application for Facebook. All it really does is take information from your public Xfire profile and display it in a nice way on your Facebook profile. Pretty simple, especially since the developers at Xfire Plus created a PHP script that parses the Xfire profiles for you and puts the data in a nice array. After that, it’s just a matter of displaying that data in HTML. Overall, the concept is pretty simple, but the whole Facebook development platform is kinda wonky (that’s the technical term).

Basically, Facebook apps show cached data on their servers. The data originates on my server though. This way, they can ensure the responsiveness of the data I suppose. The issue that I have is the whole “push” rather than “pull” model. Instead of Facebook pulling data from my server to be displayed on a profile, a user (or a crontab iterating through your whole database…eww) must push the data out to the users. This is very important for status applications. Unfortunately, many times my data isn’t refreshed. It might be an issue with my site’s responsiveness, but I don’t really think so since it’s really quite fast loading the same data through a regular browser. With only about one MySQL query per page load, it’s not all that much to transfer. What’s the deal? I dunno. It’s all quite hard to debug when there isn’t any log that I know of.

Anyway, I probably will only release this application to people that I know so that I can regulate its usage. After all, there really doesn’t seem to be that much of an upside to releasing a Facebook application as a single developer. Companies? Yes. They can quickly get hundreds of servers to handle the load and create a huge user base utilizing the Facebook users. Me? I don’t see anything but a large server bill. At least it looks nice on my profile.

Don’t let this discourage you from developing anything though. It was quite fun using Notepad++ for the first time, and I learned quite a bit about PHP (not that much about MySQL though since I use MSSQL so much at work).