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So I kind of got into a hurry making a post for 2009.  I wanted to spend some additional time talking about some things in more detail.

Gaming

I spent a lot of time exploring different interests in gaming through the year.  In 2008, I covered my interest in this a lot better, and I want to get back to that.  A quick look at my Raptr profile shows I’ve been pretty busy:

http://raptr.com/XingYuen

There’s some games there I finished and need to review, some that are an ongoing interest and some that I’ve stalled on and need to get around to finishing.  One thing I do want to point out about my reviewing; that is that I am a cheap ass for the most part and it’s very rare for me to fork over $60 for a single player game I’d probably beat once and never come back and play again.  Couple that with the fact I’m still years behind on the console gaming scene means the stuff that I’m playing and is new to me, will be old news to most people.  Don’t say there wasn’t a warning.

Games I finished in 2009 that I am going to review for sure:

• Warhammer 40K: DoW2
• Left 4 Dead
• Fallout 3
• Titan Quest
• Torchlight
• Plants vs Zombies
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance
• Company of Heroes
• Burnout Paradise

Games I’m still playing that I will write something about at some point:

• Street Fighter 4
• Tekken 6
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Guitar Hero series
• Mass Effect
• Assassin’s Creed
• Various 360 Arcade titles
• Borderlands
• Halo 3
• Bioshock

Other topics of interest:

• Various MMO experiments
• Call of Duty series and why they can suck a goose egg
• Hellgate London (die already!)
• Steam and digital distribution
• MMO’s in general
• More up to date progress in WoW/EVE (yeah EVE)

As you can see, this will give me plenty of subject matter over the year.  If I can get half of it done, it’ll be a huge step in the right direction.

Music

Quite honestly, I have been completely stagnant on this interest for the past couple years mostly.  I grew pretty tired and uninterested in the digital sampling production methods I had been using and felt blocked creatively.

I’ve thought about trying to pick up an actual instrument of some sort and explore that interest.  We’ll see where this goes.

Professional Life

Things in my professional life are going well.  I am working for RestorePro in Sandusky, OH.  They are a disaster damage restoration company and have been kind to me and given me a great opportunity to support their IT infrastructure from within the company and help develop some marketing solutions all while trying to keep up with the insane speed of web technology development.

Personal Stuff

As for personal stuff, I keep this pretty simple on purpose.  As always, I despise drama and bullshit in my life so this is pretty straight forward.  Sorry, no Springer to be had here.

Going on two years with my wonderful girlfriend Michelle.  Things are great on that front.

Got a new Jeep Liberty in the fall to get ready for the frozen tundra that is Ohio during the winter months.  So far this has been a good investment as last Saturday’s 4 foot snow drift in my drive way proved.  Fuck you snow drift.  Jeep > Snow Drift.  The downside of course is the thing sucks down gas like a crack head on the first of the month.  Guess that’s the cost of not pushing my car through a Blizzard.  So be it.

I started a weight loss regiment 6 weeks ago.  Down 30+ lbs so far.  Not too bad.  Moving into the IT industry 10 or so years ago did a number on my health but I’m going to fix it while I still can and so far things are progressing as intended on that front.  I’d like this to lead back into picking up my training in martial arts where I left it.  Still got a ways to go.

That should just about do it for now.

Started getting this error today while working in Dreamweaver.  Turns out, there was a pretty simple fix.  Just delete the WinFileCache-7A9586CB.dat, MacFileCache-BFE7CE2E.dat, or FileCache.dat file from the Dreamweaver user configuration folder.  File name may vary slightly.

Was located in: C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration

I’ve updated the site to WordPress 2.7 and added a “lifestream” as the new default home page to the site.  The updates in WP 2.7 are pretty nice.  Especially like the Google Gears addition.

Rounded corners are the craze with this Web2.0 stuff and I had to find a solution to create them with no images and no JavaScript.  Here’s how I did it.

The basic idea was to make colored lines to create the corners.

Here’s the HTML to get the corners:

Here’s the CSS you’ll need:

I used the b element because it can be nested in almost every kind of tag and doesn’t have a semantic meaning.

Google Chrome

If you’re remotely interested in IT/technical news, I’m sure you’ve heard Google released their new Google Chrome web browser on Tuesday.  Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine which is also what is used by Apple’s Safari web browser.  Google does use a new JavaScript VM though which makes it a bit faster with JScript than Safari.

My first impression with the browser is pretty positive.  It really looks like Google is making progress towards a browser to capture the power of new web technologies and ideals.  The way it handles multi threaded tabs and sandboxes the web site is definatly a step in the right direction for performance, stability and security.  The biggest thing holding it back right now is lack of features gained through AddOns for Firefox.  It does offer some things Firefox doesn’t though out of the box.

Performance wise, it seems to be the fastest browser out at the moment:

Source

For me personally, there’s some hangups at the feature department with the lack of a Delicious AddOn and I’m pretty partial to FireFTP as well.

Firebug is huge and while there’s some nice developer tools in Chrome it isn’t quite right yet.

Some of the out of the box features of Chrome did appeal to me though and after some digging around came up with some Firefox extensions to capture that functionality.

• Incognito Mode = Stealther
• Download Status Bar
• Domain Highlighting = Locationbar2

With a few AddOns I’ve got most of the best features of Chrome in Firefox except the awesome process handling and sandboxing.  Based on my personal workflow, I can’t quite replace Firefox with Chrome yet but I do like where it’s going and look forward to it’s development.

Ran into this problem today on a website project that I am working on.  Turns out PHP has some of the most bizarre nuance’s.

Here’s the deal; headers are sent by the server to the client which contain important information the client may need.  Things like content type, encoding, cache, etc.  Headers are sent before any output to the client by the PHP engine, if you try to send “header” information after the client output has started, you get this warning.

Even including “space” output!  That’s the kicker right there.  By simply removing the extra line break after my ?> closing tag removed the warning.

If that doesn’t work however you can still use the ob_start(); function if you can’t control the ouput.

I ran into some issues with a script kiddy group called Xtech taking advantage of my web hosting provider being idiots and leaving the “register_globals” PHP flag on over the holiday weekend. In order to lock down this problem, you will either need to have your host disable this in the default PHP config or write your own php.ini file and place it in all of your web directories.

Here are the files I used to resolve this issue.

Google has released a web development “wiki” with a lot of it’s own techniques and code samples available. Pretty interesting stuff on there so far.

Google Doctype

Video preview: