A List of Recommended Software

I decided to post a list of the software that I use. Most of this software is open source, and basically all of it is free. Enjoy. Read more

Surrealist Compliment Generator

I was linked to this fun page a while ago.

So I decided to make a LSL script that pulls compliments from that page and spits them into chat.

Enjoy!

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//Script by Richard Keast
//SL Name: Sam Darrow
//
//Surrealist Compliment Generator (http://www.madsci.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~lynn/jardin/SCG)
//Is Copyright 1994-1999 Banjo Ruthless Creations

key requestid;

default
{
touch_start(integer total_number)
{
requestid = llHTTPRequest("http://www.madsci.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~lynn/jardin/SCG",[],"");
}

http_response(key request_id, integer status, list metadata, string body)
{
if(requestid == request_id)
{
integer strpos_1 = llSubStringIndex(body, "
<h2>") + 6;
integer strpos_2 = llSubStringIndex(body, "</h2>
") - 1;
body = llGetSubString(body, strpos_1, strpos_2);

llSay(0 ,llDumpList2String(llParseString2List(body, ["\n"," "], []), " "));
}
}
}

Hi there, my name’s Richard.

I was greeted with a rather humourous email this morning. I was added to the contact list of drawbelly on Flickr. Curious of who this person was, I went to see their profile and saw that they had over 2,300 contacts. Then I began to read the names of these contacts, and saw something very funny… every single person was either named Richard, or had Richard somewhere in their name.

Honestly I don’t know whether to be honored or to be scared, but either way it’s very humourous.

Check out his contact list yourself if you like.

Edit: Seems this guy is no longer active on Flickr.

Remember The Milk

I’ve always used Google Calander to organize my events, even more so since I got my BlackBerry, but I never really had a good way of electronically keeping track of tasks that I needed to get done. The Blackberry does have a tasks application, but that does not notify you of pending tasks, and the only way to see what tasks you have to do is to manually go in and view them.

Today I found a tool that may be the solution to what I was looking for, it’s called Remember The Milk. It’s an easy to use task application that is free to use for basic use, but the really cool thing about it is that you can link it to your Google Calander.

You can also have it sync with your BlackBerry, but that require subscribing to the service, which costs 25$ a year. The price isn’t bad at all, but I think I’m going to have to use it for a bit longer before spending the money. :)

Finally put together my web portfolio

I had Monday and Tuesday off from work this week, so I used that time to get some work done that has been sitting on the back burner for a while now. One of these things was to put together a web portfolio, so I had some content to put on the root domain of spazghost.com.

It didn’t take me long to put together the site, since It’s really only two pages, and they both use the same stylesheet. In fact the most time consuming tasks were writing the stylesheet and making the graphics for the page in photoshop.

I really like the way it turned out, and I feel it is very effective at communicating what I want without being too fancy and cluttered. Feel free to take a look at it here.

DOS and it’s lack of power makes me rage

So I was going through my photos folder on my computer, and organizing things by when I took the photos. And I noticed a bunch of hidden thumbnail cache files for a program I no longer used. Now, rather than go through and delete these by hand, I decided to simply “simply” open up command prompt and delete all of them at once.

So I fire up command prompt and goto my photos directory and run the following command, which, I thought would work perfectly…

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DIR /S /A:H | FIND /I "Zb" | DEL

It’s pretty simple, take a directory listing of hidden files in all subdirectories, pipe that into a find to search for the “Zb” in the file name, and pipe the output into a delete command.

Wrong.

I apparently can’t do that with DOS. And I had to write a batch file to do it:

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@echo off
DIR /S /A:H /B D:\Photos\ &gt;&gt; temp.txt
echo Y | FOR /F "tokens=1, * delims=: " %%j in (temp.txt) do del "%%j:%%k"
echo Y | DEL temp.txt
exit

Yay for batch files :(

Email hoaxes are funny

I just received a very humorous email hoax chain letter from one of my co-workers. Funny not because of what it describes, but because of the language it uses.

Here is an example of the type of language they used:

It is a virus that opens an Olympic Torch which ‘burns’ the whole hard disc C of your computer!!!!

And:

This virus simply destroys the Zero Sector of the Hard Disc, where the vital information is kept.

Okay wait, those two statements, which are describing the same virus, are very contradictory.

The first quote, is insinuating that the virus will destroy all data on the partitions of the hard drive, sectors 1 through n. However the second quote insinuates that the virus destroys sector 0, otherwise known as the Master Boot Record, the sector of the hard drive located before the partitions which tells your computer what to boot to. How can it destroy the partitions and the master boot record, since they are completely different things?

I love emails like this, especially how they try to use fancy terms to make people think they are legit.

2009 New Years resolutions

I don’t normally make New Years resolutions because I always find myself breaking them within the first few weeks of the year. But this year I decided that was going to be different, and I actually made some resolutions that make sense, and that I can actually acomplish.

My New Years resolutions for 2009 are pretty nerdy though, and consist of:

  1. Stop being a lazy piece of s***.
  2. Learn a high level programming language, C++.
  3. Learn a server side programming language, PHP, and a database to power it, PostgreSQL.

I haven’t really started on the first resolution, but I am working on it. As for the others…

Read more

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PURPOSE

This blog is very simple in it's purpose as it is merely a place for me to rant about the events of my life and the projects that I am involved in.

I hope that you might find something within my posts that you will find enjoyable.