June 11th, 2005, 01:55 am
Over the past little while I have been ordering parts for a new computer. All of them are here now except for the most important part, the processor. My excitement has gotten the best of me and I have put it together. So it is ready to start installing everything on once I get the processor which should come either Monday or Tuesday.
I could have had it all done today except the processor I bought from a local computer dealer was the wrong socket. It was a socket 754 when I need a socket 939. Something like this usually always happens to me. The local dealer didn’t have any of the socket 939 so he has to order one for me.
Enough about that, lets get on to the specs of the machine. If it wasn’t late, I would give you a link to all of the parts. I might add them later.
- AMD Athlon 64 3000+
- Two sticks of 256 MB DDR pc3200 (400mhz) RAM (I got two sticks of 256 because it was cheaper than buying one 512 MB stick)
- 250 GB SATA hard drive
- 128 MB Geforce FX 5200 video card
- 12 x DVD ROM
- 52×32x52 CD RW drive
- Floppy drive
- Mother board is a Chaintech S1689
- To top it off, a silver window case with lots of blue LED lights in the case fans and the front of the case
On this machine I plan to partition the drive into two parts (I haven’t decided on what sizes). One partition I’ll install SuSE Linux which should be showing up soon. The other partion will hold Windows 2000 Profeesional so I can still play all of my games 
I’m hoping to start using Linux more than I use Windows.
On June 20th there will be some big EasyMOD news so everyone will want to head over to area51 on that day to find out what it is. I can’t say anything more until that day.
I’m tired so I’m going to go to bed. Good night.
Posted in Computer, Technology, phpBB • 3 Comments »
May 8th, 2005, 11:50 pm
I have decided to go with this layout for the layout. The sidebar will be about the same as the middle content and what it is like now. When I get a chance, I’ll start coding it. Comments are welcome.
If you haven’t heard already, phpBB 2.0.15 was released, update your message boards ASAP! While you are at it, give your input on the XML MOD Template if you are a MOD Author. In order to make it perfect, we really would like the communities input.
Posted in Programming, phpBB • No Comments »
March 23rd, 2005, 04:26 am
I haven’t had a chance to post here recently. I have been very busy with school, phpBB, and XtroCMS. I’ll breifly go over some them.
With school the end of the quarter is tomorrow (Wednesday) so lots of big projects have been due the past two weeks. Right now I am writing a book report. Its really easy though. Nothing big will be due after that book report for a while and usually the last quarter of the year doesn’t have any big projects although I have two AP tests coming up 
Lets just say being Team Leader isn’t all that easy. So many decisions need to be made by me and lots of dicussion has been going on about some cool new tools we hope to be using by the time Olympus is released. You’ll just have to wait and see what these are.
I haven’t had a chance to do any validation for a while. Good thing I have four other great guys that are doing it! They are doing awesome on making sure the queue doesn’t get backed up. Great work guys!
Catdb for Olympus is coming a long fine. A little slower than I would have liked but it is getting there. I’ll be posting some of the features when it get closer to being done. I probably won’t release it to the public so it will only be used on phpbb.com.
I have been working on the frontend for XtroCMS. Thats coming a long nicely. I just need to iron out the little things and actually code a little part of the template system. Backend still needs some work. I can’t remember if I have done any updates.
I have been seriously thinking about releasing XtroCMS for free. What do you think?
Posted in Programming, School, phpBB • 2 Comments »
February 23rd, 2005, 01:19 am
If you haven’t heard already, I’m now the phpBB.com MODifications Team Leader. You can read Nuttzy’s announcement about stepping down here.
I’m really excited! I can’t really think of anything else to say. I’m just really amazed that this has happened. I never dreamed that I would be the MODifications Team leader when I started using phpBB a little over two years ago.
I’ve said this a million times already but I’ll say it again, thanks everyone for your support! I don’t have any major changes planned. Most of the changes are really little and most people won’t even notice them.
At school today I finished a project for one of the courses I was taking. The teacher looked at my work, ask me how big the folder was so I showed her, it was over 300 mb. She tells me she wants a back up of it and hands me a 100 mb zip disk. I’m thinking its not going to fit on there. I didn’t say anything and proceeded to copy the file over onto the zip disk while the teacher watched me. When it started copying, the teacher talked to me about the next course and got everything I needed.
While she was getting what I needed for the next course and helping other students, I stopped the copying of my work to the zip disk. I went through and cleaned out a lot of the files that I didn’t need. For some reason the movie (it wasn’t anythin spectactular) I made was duplicated multiple times in many different folders. This got it down to about 125mb. Still to big.
I then compressed the folder and that made it less than 80mb. I was then ready to copy it over. I started to copy it, got all finished, tried opening it to make sure it worked correct but it said it was corrupted. When I was deleting the files that did make it onto the zip drive from the first copy, I think I corrupted the zip disk during that. Some of those files weren’t being deleted even though it said the file size for them was 0kb.
Well, I just took the disk up to the teacher and told her my folder was too big. She handed me a blank one. This was even more of a mess. I ended up having to format this disk. In the end I got it working.
What makes me laugh is that the teacher doesn’t know that the zip disks only hold 100mb. I sure hope see knows that 300mb is bigger than 100mb.
Thats a useless boring story. It was the most exciting thing that happened to me at school today. Hopefully tomorrow at school it will be just as exciting as today!
Posted in phpBB • 2 Comments »
February 14th, 2005, 12:09 am
Happy Valentine’s Day! I know it is a day early but I probably won’t have a chance to write anything tomorrow.
Yesterday I took the ACT. For those of you that don’t know what that is, it is a standardized test that Universities use to determine if you are accepted or not. A lot like the SAT. Here is Utah the schools look at your ACT score and don’t really care about your SAT. It wasn’t hard or anything like that. It was really long though. When I get my score in four to seven weeks, I’ll be sure to let you know what I got. I hope it is around 30.
XtroCMS now has two developers! I’m not the only one! A guy contacted me and he was interested in buying XtroCMS. He said that I could stay on as a developer. Right now is a bad time for that to happen since I have an idea in my head on what I want the first release of XtroCMS to be like. Also I’ve put a lot of work into it and I want to see it through until the first release. I asked him if he would like to help me finish the first release and then we can talk about him taking over after that is finished. He accepted.
You’ll probably see more features since two of us are working on it. I cut a lot of things that I wanted to do for the first release because I didn’t have time and I wanted to get it finished. Now that two of us are working on it, things should get done twice as fast.
I’m thinking of releasing an alpha within the next two weeks. Be on the look out for it.
About a week ago phpBB.com was hacked by a group of people that were in it for the glory. That is the only reason I can see why you would want to hack the website of an open source, free to use software. During their hacking they ended up messing the server up so the site was down for about a week. A couple days ago a temporary server was put in place of the old one while more investigation was done on the the server that was hacked.
No one needs to worry that phpBB.com was hacked through phpBB. The phpBB Team is pretty confident that the hackers got in through an exploit in Awstats. If it was through phpBB, you’d probably see it on all of the security trackers and a new version of phpBB would have been released. This isn’t the case so don’t worry about your phpBB board having security problems if you are running 2.0.11. If you are running anything lower than that, upgrade ASAP!
Posted in Programming, phpBB • No Comments »
February 7th, 2005, 10:57 pm
Last night before I went to bed it started to snow. I was surprised to wake up and find 8 inches (about 20 cm) of snow on the ground. I wasn’t expecting this much because the past couple weeks has been decent (High 40s to low 50s, F). It has continued to snow all day and I bet there is atleast 10 inches of snow.
If I had a digital camera, I’d take a picture of it for everyone to see but I don’t so that’s not going to happen.
This has been the best snowfall we have had all year. I don’t think it snowed at all during January. I was getting a little sad because we always have atleast a little snow on the ground for most of winter but this year it hasn’t happened. This should make my winter complete!
I’ve made up my mind on what I am going to do with programming. The catDB for phpBB will wait until I have finished XtroCMS. The reason for this is because with the catDB, I just have to get something that is useable for when phpBB 3.0 is released. It doesn’t need to have all of the features. So all time that I have to code, I will spend it on XtroCMS until it is finished.
Once XtroCMS is finished, I’ll work on the catDB and quickly put together something that is useable. When it is useable, I’ll start on all of the cool features that I am planning to add.
This should make me happy and other people as well. Maybe at the end of all this I’ll be able to work on some of my MODs again.
Posted in Programming, phpBB • No Comments »
January 21st, 2005, 11:02 pm
The weekend is finally here! This has been a long week.
Tomorrow afternoon some friends of my dad that are from New Zealand will arrive at our house. They will be staying for two weeks. Not much will be different for me except three new people in the house.
I made a decision on my XtroCMS problem. It didn’t take me as long to code the section that I was thinking of cutting out so all planned features will still be there and I won’t push back the release date (even though one hasn’t been set). It didn’t take as long because I thought I had to rewrite the auth system but that wasn’t the case. I was able to make it work with minor changes.
Modifications are being submitted faster than we can look at them at phpBB.com. I think it is because those of us on the Modifications Team are helping out in other areas and getting ready for phpBB Olympus to go gold. We don’t have as much time to work on the queue. This should get back to normal once Olympus is released. We may have to get more members for the Team.
Posted in phpBB • 1 Comment »
January 17th, 2005, 11:27 pm
Probably the biggest news is phpBB 2.2 is no more. Say hello to phpBB 3.0 codename Olympus. Here is the offical announcement.
With the release of Olympus, I get the joy of writing the catDB for it to use at phpBB.com. It has been interesting trying to figure out how Olympus works. Its been tough but well worth it. It is an amazing piece of software! Very Powerful!
Like always, all of my MODs are on hold. We’ll see if I can write any of them for Olympus once it has been released. I should have more time then to work on them.
MOD Validation is still going strong. Not many MODs in the queue and we are working through them. Our break of the holidays has set us back some but we should be able to make up for it. There was a time when we had over 100 MODs in there and we cut it down to about 15 - 30. I haven’t had much time to work on validation because I have been working on the catDB. The other guys are doing a great job though.
I don’t think I wrote that I am now in charge of XtroCMS. William, the owner, decided he didn’t have time to work on it and is giving it to me. Of course once money starts coming in, I’ll have to pay him for all of what he bought for XtroCMS. The other developer also wasn’t working on it and I couldn’t get ahold of him so I removed him from the team. So right now it is just me. If anyone wants to help, contact me!
I can’t decide right now if I want to cut features in XtroCMS and release earlier or if I should keep the current planned features and push the release date back. I have too many coding projects! Yesterday I was leaning towards cutting the features but today I’m leaning towards not cutting them. I don’t know! Now I’m thinking about cutting them so I can stop worrying about getting it finish right now. Later I can add those features that I want.
Posted in Programming, phpBB • No Comments »
