Some demotivational poster said "When you need it done right, do it yourself". Of course in that context it was referring to masturbation, but sometimes you just need to apply the same logic elsewhere. After waiting for several years for Xfire website to have some kind of feeds for blog comments, video comments and community news comments, and now even the main forums no longer can alert you on new replies, it seems like I need to do something about it myself. (I'm not blaming the Xfire web devs for not having those, though. Would be quite a lot of work for such a little target audience)

There are two ways I thought of how to get notification of new replies:

1. Create a news feed of it that can be subscribed to like to any Atom feed
   
2. Make an Xfire bot to message you of the new replies

This is where you come into play. Which way would you prefer? To get the news in your feed reader, or to get the messages by Xfire?
Also, which of the subjects mentioned above would be the most important one to get information from? (blogs, videos, news, forums?)

Of course I do this all for myself, but since it can be turned out to public for others to have benefit too, why not do it? Vote your preference by commenting on this blog post. I'll try to check the comments every once in a while...

I guess I have the pleasure to announce that today Xfire suddenly had an increase in the number of official gaming communities. One of those is very special to me, the Official Left 4 Dead Xfire Community.

If you wonder what makes it so special other than that I have played that game a lot lately, then join the community and find out!



Thanks!

So making my bug tracker I encountered a problem with MySQL. I have a view that holds information of bugs such as "last time edited".

For Atom feeds I needed to get the name of the person reporting the bug. Well, I thought of just adding this information to this view as it would make sense there. Trying my theory with an SQL query showed promising:

Quote

SELECT
bugid,
COUNT(*) AS historycount,
MAX(time) AS historytime,
(SELECT who FROM history WHERE bugid=bugid ORDER BY time ASC LIMIT 1) AS author,
(SELECT who FROM history WHERE bugid=bugid ORDER BY time DESC LIMIT 1) AS editor
FROM history
GROUP BY bugid

It worked nicely, for each bug it listed the number of edits done to it, when the last edit was made, who was the author (first history event for the bug) and who was the person doing the latest edit.

Okay, so those subqueries there worked great to achieve what I wanted. Now to apply them to the view where I could query the data from:

Quote

CREATE VIEW `bug_history` (
bugid,
historycount,
historytime,
author,
editor
) AS SELECT
bugid,
COUNT(*),
MAX(time),
(SELECT who FROM history WHERE bugid=bugid ORDER BY time ASC LIMIT 1),
(SELECT who FROM history WHERE bugid=bugid ORDER BY time DESC LIMIT 1)
FROM history
GROUP BY bugid

When selecting * from that view, everything looks the same as in the query itself... except for the "editor" column. Both editor and author columns had the same values, the name of the author. It seemed weird why this view would give different result with identical query.

After I read a few MySQL documents and tried changing ALGORITHM and playing around different variations, I came to conclusion that it could be a bug in MySQL. So I searched a bit through the MySQL bug database. After a while I found the answer: This is not a bug, it's working as intended.

While it doesn't really make sense for the VIEW to give different result than SELECT query...

If you want to add me to your friends list, first make sure I am not playing a game. Xfire still has not fixed the current behavior that friend invites in game override all other functionality (you cannot do anything with XIG before responding to the invite) and if you go out of the game, the invite is automatically denied.

And as I always look up information of the person trying to add me, it means your invite will be automatically rejected by Xfire if you send it while I am in game.

I'm also waiting for the day when one can use Xfire when a friend invite is pending. As it is now, a friend invite blocks you from using Xfire at all. Only the existing chat windows are accessible but the main interface is locked.

So if your friend invite got rejected, don't feel bad about it. I just want to use Xfire and your invite prevented me from doing that.

(PS. If you actually want a chance of your invite being accepted, remember to state some kind of reason for your friendship request. "Add me to your friends list" won't cut it.)

I wonder when Xfire can manage to change the forum software. The current phpBB 2 hack-up is failing in so many ways. And I know I am not the only one thinking so.

It has happened to me more than a few times that after I post a message I notice a little typo so I go edit the post and submit the fixed version. The forum software would complain "You are not allowed to make another post so soon." But I was not making another post, I was fixing an existing one! So in other words the forum software does not want people fixing their mistakes quickly.

Then another thing: when you post a new reply and double-click the Submit button. It allows that and does actually post two identical replies with the same submit time! So you are not allowed to edit your post quickly, but you are able to post multiple replies in rapid succession? Doesn't this seem a bit backwards?

I guess you could call this to be one of the "GJ only" bugs. http://godjonez.ath.cx/~godjonez/jing/2009-10-06_1019.png

So I was "online" in Xfire to my account but the only friends online were for my AIM and MSN accounts, none of the Xfire friends. Amazing, isn't it?

Well, if I can get weird bugs happen, so can other people too. Or what do you think of a case that sending a text message in Xfire chat breaks up computer monitor by causing a physical crack on it? http://www.xfire.com/xf/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=254331

Forget about smaller and smaller microprocessors creating heat by running an electric current through them. Researchers Minsoung Rhee and Mark Burns at the University of Michigan have created an 8 bit processor using logic gates made of pneumatic valves. That's right, this processor is not powered by electricity but air.

See more at http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/09/claims_of_pnuematic_processor_full.html


And by the way, sometimes just saying something doesn't really seem right when all the signs elsewhere point out otherwise: http://godjonez.ath.cx/~godjonez/jing/2009-10-02_1430.png

Listed in approximate order of completeness or importance:

1. Bugtracker
   
2. Openfire-C
   
3. cmdxfire
   
4. ofbot
   
5. Xfire Plus Base
   
6. Simulation Engine
   
7. WfWiki
   
8. MapWiki
   
9. unnamed project (tactical turn-based online game)
   
10. Another Earth
    
11. many other little things that just pop in mind

A couple of words on each project:

Bugtracker is a web application for myself to keep track of bugs in other projects. That's what makes it currently the top priority, it's essential for the other projects. It will also host an unofficial Xfire bug tracker. Thankfully most of the basic functions are already implemented. The most important piece missing is the ability to post bugs in there...

Openfire-C is a project you should already know. If you don't, then perhaps its not for you.

cmdxfire is a command line Xfire client for Linux (or compliant) system. I have already used it for quite some time to be able to log into my Xfire account from Linux servers and to make Xfire available on my mobile phone (SSH connection to Linux server having the client)

ofbot is an Xfire bot project of which moderatorbot is one subproject.

Xfire Plus Base is a platform for various plugins and enhancements for the Xfire client.

Simulation Engine is what some people might call physics engine, but since it is to do more than just physics, including chemistry, it's called Simulation Engine. Graphics rendering (without the actual rendering part) is a major role for this engine since seeing stuff is reacting to light and how the light goes is a matter of physics simulation.

WfWiki is a lightweight wiki website project.

MapWiki is a wiki style mapping platform.

The unnamed project is a multiplayer turn-based tactical warfare game played in a web browser where thinking and planning your next move is the main idea. If you have some nice name in mind for this type of game, or for any of my other projects, please leave your suggestions in comments.

Another Earth is a wannabe MMORPG (wannabe because I doubt it will ever get massive number of...

The last missing part for my new computer just arrived!

Behold! The rare HD4770 card, from XFX:


Opening the outer box reveal plain stylish box, right what you would expect from XFX:


Opening the box a bit more reveals all the useless stuff such as installation guides and cables, but the main thing was there too, in a bright green box:


As a nice detail the box also had this in it:


And finally before putting the card in my computer, here it is in all its glory:


Photos or it didn't happen, right?

First test was running Audiosurf. Previously it could just run nicely on Normal graphics details. Now I could use Premium details and broadcast the gameplay with Xfire and still have a nice framerate. Without Xfire broadcast it was very smooth, the live video had some impact on the performance, you could see the lag, but it was still playable.

Apparently I hit the maximum post length for Xfire blogs... continuing here.


Now to Wednesday. The morning at work as usual, then afternoon continuing with the new parts. I already had opened the motherboard box at Tuesday to try if the cooler at least would fit on it, and it did. Anyway, here's the unboxing of it:



Wiser from yesterday installing the giant cooler for the new AMD Phenom II 955 was a lot easier, especially since it could fit on the Gigabyte motherboard without cutting off the metal. It still had only one hook on each side, so most of the holes were unused, but at least it fits there nicely and doesn't even move around like the previous installation. Here you can see the new black Nexus Cloudius case with the Corsair TX650 PSU installed in it, and the motherboard with CPU, it's cooler, and the DDR3 sticks on it. Of course the floor is filled with all kinds of other necessary stuff such as the hard drives and PCI cards as well as the old GPU since I still don't have the new one. Fortunately the server's BIOS is able to boot up without a graphics card, my previous server couldn't.


Here's a more close-up view of the motherboard:


And here's the whole stuff inside the case:


Thanks to the many hard drives in it (3 of them, 2 with SATA, 1 with PATA) and the small case, it was quite difficult to arrange all the cables and wires for best possible cooling solution. A bigger case would have helped with that tremendously, but since I have a specific place to place the computer to, the possible size is limited. Even this case was a bit too big to fit to the "hole" dedicated for it. I did clean up the wires a bit before closing the side panels, but it's still not perfect. But it is good enough for me. After all, I didn't even buy the most expensive and fastest stuff like Core i7 and GTX 295, because what I bought was cheaper and follows what I said: "good enough for me".

The next two days went with adjusting the computer's settings and installing Operating...