smalldeath.net/blog

Mr. Martin has updated his livejournal with exciting new info! His latest update tells us all about football… or a convention he’s visiting… or some minor characters in the upcoming TV show. Sigh, I guess Brandon Sanderson will have another series to finish up when he’s done with Wheel of Time.

Not that I mind the occasional update on where he’s headed, or hearing his thoughts on the Jets’ latest loss, but it really seems he has no intentions of actually finishing the books.

I have to say, I’m really tired of all the 3-D being pushed everywhere.  Where is the market for this stuff?  No one I know cares, and many are utterly annoyed and/or unable to use it at all.

I have no desire for 3D TV or games.  I love video games, and I love pretty graphics, but making it “3-Dimensional” doesn’t seem to add anything to me.  At least not in its current form.  I love new technology and change, but this doesn’t seem to be a step in the right direction.  Now I have to wear glasses (which I purposefully take off every time I get near a computer, I wear glasses for distance viewing) just to watch a sporting event?

Some might argue that it’s no different than going from standard definition television to HD, but I disagree.  HD made things easier to see and watch, it made larger screens more enjoyable for more people, since sitting a bit closer to a large HDTV is OK, whereas with SD it was horrendous.  It made eye strain less of an issue – no more squinting to figure out what the scores are at the bottom of the screen.  3D does none of that.  It makes it harder to see, less viewing angle, and it’s uncomfortable with the glasses.

Not to say 3D will never be useful.  I can’t wait for the day things are interactive in 3D with no glasses (like Ironman movies or not, those computer interfaces were pretty damned cool).  Or better yet, Star Trek Holodeck style 3D, where your actually inside the action.

Most of this rant brought to you by news of 3D cameras, TVs, and other stuff I see pushed down our throats every day.  Send help!  Preferably of the two-dimensional, no glasses, viewed from any angle variety!

I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to do this, and after finally figuring it out I thought I would share.  I had a couple things that I wanted to know when they would arrive, but I had to add each of them the “track shipments” box every time I wanted to see where they were at.  So I searched around Google and the UPS page for a way to have multiple tracking numbers in a single URL without much luck.

Making a single URL is pretty simple, its just http://wwwapps.ups.com/etracking/tracking.cgi?tracknum=xxx (where, obviously, xx is the tracking number).  This only allows for a single tracking number, so it didn’t really help much.

I finally found out how to do multiples after putting a tracking number directly into Google.  If you didn’t already know, you can put your tracking number in, and Google will return a direct link to the UPS track page.  Useful stuff, but most of all it was interesting for the URL it links to:

http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/processInputRequest?sort_by=status&tracknums_displayed=1&TypeOfInquiryNumber=T&loc=en_US&InquiryNumber1=xxx&track.x=0&track.y=0

You can simply add more to “tracknums_displayed” and put each tracking number in “InquiryNumberX” to have multiples on a single bookmark.  For example:

http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/processInputRequest?sort_by=status&tracknums_displayed=3&TypeOfInquiryNumber=T&loc=en_US&InquiryNumber1=xxx&track.x=0&track.y=0&InquiryNumber2=yyy&InquiryNumber3=zzz

Hope someone else finds it useful!

Finally get to do some programming/development work again, this time with Google Maps and creating a map for the Trimarc traffic cameras.  It’s not overly difficult, but the biggest issue is that I started doing this way-back-when and was designing it in Maps v2 and when I started back up, without realizing it, I was trying to do things with Maps v3.

It seems as if they have nothing in common.  At first everything was just errors until I realized what was going on.  Then the infowindow wasn’t acting right.  Buried somewhere in the documentation I’m sure it tells you that the infowindow should be a single object that you “move around” as opposed to just creating a new one, but I didn’t see it.

http://smalldeath.net/tests/gentest03.php

I obviously don’t post much, but I think this is my new favorite spam mail.  I’m sure people fall for it, but the amount of terrible grammar and such in this email is just astounding.  (Note that I don’t really play anymore, and have a real authenticator anyhow).

Greetings!

Recently, the problem of account invasion is getting worse and worse which cause enormous players’equipments and virtual currency stolen. This severely damages the benefits of mass players, also causes our company lose a lot of customers.

Our company has to adopt some measures to safeguard our common benefits in order to strengthen the safety of mass players’accounts, and firmly resist the account to be stolen again.Through our company’s research and investigation to xxx customers,we will make the following decisions: we launch a package of updated code strengthen system and dynamic code protection card which can effectively prevent the accounts invaded. We will send this package of code protection system to players free of charge.

Please open this connection:  http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/secure

If your account passes the check successfully, we will send this package of dynamic code protection card to you in the form of e-mail.

In 3 days after you receiving the e-mail, if you don’t submit your information, we have right to freeze your account, every player is obligated to protect the safety of the account. You must work together with us to be determined to crack down all the behaviors of destroying games.

If you had already authenticator your account, please disregard this automatic notification.

Regards,

The World of Warcraft Support Team
Blizzard Entertainment

http://www.blizzard.com/support/wowindex/

Mmmm… Spam…

Awesome news for any fan of Fantasy, this really surprised me yesterday. HBO has acquired rights to produce “A Song of Ice and Fire” into a television series. There’s already plans for how it will be produced as well. I don’t think anyone knew of it before 2 days ago, and now it’s all over the internet.

They will show one book per season – that’s about 13 hours for each book, which is much better than any movie, or series of movies, could possibly hope to achieve. This is the perfect way to put Martin’s series to live action.

Judging by how good Rome was, this could be the next great HBO series. Here’s hoping they don’t screw it up, but HBO usually does awesome work.

I ordered a mouse from woot.com on the 19th of May. I expected to get it in about a week or so – I wasn’t in a huge hurry so I didn’t worry too much about when it got here. Well, apparently things went awry Fedex country.

Probably around the 25th or so, I decided to check the tracking of the package. This is what I saw:

Well, that’s definately a bit of an error, it’s not even in the right state?!?!? I mean, I could understand maybe going to the wrong side of Louisville since all the zip codes are similar, but going to Indiana is fairly interesting. I assumed at this point there must be an error on the packaging address or something, but that would be odd as I’ve never had my address set to Indiana at woot.com, so I’m not sure where they would’ve gotten it.

I made a note of calling fedex and letting them know what was going on, but it was Memorial Day weekend, and I didn’t really have the time to do it, so I was going to call them on Tuesday the 30th. This is where the fun part starts!

Tuesday I had to go to the DMV to renew my plates, and since I work nights, that meant I slept in when I got home (woke up around 5:30pm or so), and when I woke up I was surprised to have a package from woot! But there was something strange about the packaging…

So apparently someone had to drive from the Indiana fedex hub to my house for one package (that’s at least a 30-40 minute drive, assuming you don’t get lost at all). I got a real kick out of this, and thought it was actually pretty cool that they would do this.

My mouse has arrived in grand fashion. Funny enough, I have yet to hook it up after having it for a couple days now.

Kudos to Fedex for actually going out of their way to get a package where it’s supposed to go, and for giving me a good laugh.

I’ve had a lot of people ask for help when building their new computer over the past 6 months (I think I’ve helped with 4 computers in that time). I enjoy doing it, and will continue to do so, but obviously not everyone has someone that can help them do this. Hopefully I can help a few people enjoy one of my favorite past-times, PC gaming.

I will be putting together a complete guide to building a gaming machine over the next month or so. It will start with where to buy your components, and end with setting up the machine once you’ve got it together, and every thing in between of course.

Some of the main things I will talk about is:

• Building a great machine within a budget you can afford
• Why building your PC is better than buying it from a Company (Dell or Alienware for example), and why it will allow you to save money later on as well
• What things you should spend more or less on when building a machine that will be primarily used for gaming as opposed to other tasks
• Making sure you buy components that work together
• A list of all the components you will need to make a working computer
• Step-by-step guide to putting everything together
• Configuring your PC for maximum performance once its complete, both in a game and Windows settings

I will include photos and personal thoughts on what are the best brands/parts to use as well.

I hope you enjoy the guide once it’s started, I will post the first portion of the guide this weekend.

So apparently Godaddy hosting only offers 1 FTP login, so, whatever, scratch that idea. Still switching DNS servers, but that shouldn’t really affect anything. At most the site would go down for a few hours until ICANN gets the new info once it’s switched.

I’m changing host, so hopefully it will go smoothly, I’m transferring files tonight, but I’m not sure it will go as smoothly as I’d like.

Should be back up in less than a day if it isn’t, mostly this affects me since I’ll have trouble getting the files if I have to go through the back way, in the cpanel of my current host.