A WIFIGHT! chat room viewer and game archive browser.  You can even page through turns!  Not bad for an evening of coding :]

We recently moved from a warehouse in Emeryville to a warehouse juuuuust across the border in Oakland. Naturally, the first thing I did was write a poorly worded letter to the city, vaguely detailing our litter and pothole problems near the new ‘haus. The next morning (this morning, in fact) I received a reply:

Thank you for contacting the Public Works Agency Call Center regarding the email below.  Our street cleaning crew is at the location cleaning up litters and the service request for that is registered as XXXXXX.  Your service request for pothole repair on the YYYY block of Hollis street is registered as ZZZZZZ. Please contact us at (510) 615-5566 if you have further questions.

Who knew complaining to the right people about a problem would help fix it?  Here’s hoping they actually come down and do the work, and that it stays clean!  My theory is that people dump more garbage where there is already a pile, so maybe cleaning it up will resolve the situation.

Afternoon update: the sidewalks are clean and the potholes have been fixed, not even 24 hours after my complaint!  How long until the picture below returns to its garbage dump-y state?

Classic!

Since OQO, Inc. shut its doors, a lot of its customers have been left out in the cold and wondering where to go to get support.  Surely not OQO Talk, where dedicated moderators of many years have recently been de-modded with little or no explanation.

Due to this lack of support, the Cosmic CTO and I have decided to launch OQOasis.com.  There we provide hardware service and support, “like new” hardware and accessory sales, and forums where you can interact with other OQO users.  It’s very much a work-in-progress but we are dedicated to providing a useful resource; already we have the full drivers packages for all OQO models, and are working on getting a copy of the old OQO.com knowledgebase.

The OQOasis forums are already picking up steam but you could still be one of the first 100 users!  Head on over there and check it out :]

I recently upgraded from XP to Windows 7, and the latest version of Multiplicity was causing my monitors to fade to black when the mouse moved between computers.  I had the fade options disabled, so this was kinda confusing.  A quick email to Stardock tech support revealed the following fix:

On your primary computer:

-Right Click on the Multiplicity Tray Icon, choose ‘Configure’
-For each secondary you have in the list:
—Click the computer name, then the ‘Configure’ button
—Make sure that ‘Monitor Control: (Shares with)’ is set to ‘None’
—Click OK
-Click on the Interface Tab at the top.
-Make sure that ‘Darken the Screen when connected’ option is disabled.

Once you do this, right click on the Multiplicity tray icon on both machines and choose ‘Unload’. Then restart the app on both machines.

It worked like a charm here!  Thanks to Curt at Stardock for the quick turnaround and help on this one.

After a year of BACK BURNERING, Shup v0.27 was released into the wild last night. It includes a bunch of bug fixes and adds copy/paste functionality to the image editor.

Download it here.

Ruby has a neat method available for enumerating all constants defined within a namespace/class/module – constants().  As all classes inherit from the Object class, one can call Object.constants() to get a list of constants which can then be filtered into something useful.

For example, I had defined a bunch of *Parser classes in my code.  Rather than manually instantiate each one, I used the following to iterate over them automagically.

Object.constants().each do |const|
  if !is_my_class?(const)
    next
  end

  obj = Module.const_get(const).new()
  # do stuff here
  obj = nil
end

Simply define is_my_class?() and you’re good to go.

I guess it’s because he is old and wise but Justin just (?) launched “Ask Justin Frankel” (http://askjf.com/).  Go ask him a question!

The bathroom in the condo my bastard former boss pushed me into buying (while I worked for him – and did I mention he was also the realtor?) at the ripe old age of 21 had some problems recently.  Namely, the floor was sinking due to rotting wood caused by a leaky toilet.

So, aside from fixing the problem, I decided to do a little upgrading while I had the contractor there: linoleum was replaced with tile, and the toilet and vanity/sink were also replaced with new stuff.  The toilet can even flush a basket of golf balls, according to the attached info sheet, which is what made me buy it.

It was difficult handling the remodeling from CA (where I live) when the condo is in UT (where I grew up), but my brother and friend (who live there) were quite helpful in picking shit up from Home Depot for me.  I think we ended up with some items that go together at least moderately well, though I’m no interior decorator and have trouble choosing color schemes.

Here is a cellphone pic of that tasty action; note the sink is actually a light gray but the lighting makes it seem yeller.

It cost less than I was imagining, given the old toilet was sinking into the floor, and took less than 3 days, start to finish.  All in all, not a bad experience.

I launched camelsounds.com tonight, a tracker for zZounds.com.  Full details on that and all the other updates we included with this release can be found here.