Archive for January, 2007

In his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks devotes an entire chapter to one particular idea in software development: plan to throw one away. Though I failed to complete the planning part of his recommendation, I do intend to throw away the current version of my photo album package, MonkeyAlbum, which I employ here at this website. There are a number of improvements I wish to make to the package:

• Allow user comments for each photograph.
• Use cruft-free URLs instead of the ugly query strings currently in use.
• Improve captioning capability, allowing URLs and HTML formatting.
• Other, behind the scenes improvements.

All of this is in the concept stage at the moment, so what suggestions might you have for improvements? Are there things you dislike about the way I present my photos here at this site? Feel free to comment.

A coworker and I were recently reminiscing about our elementary school days, and we brought up something that I hadn’t thought about in years. Does anyone here remember “Swish Day” at their school? You know, the day when the teacher would bring out the big bottle of mouthwash, dispense it into little plastic cups, and make you swish it around in your mouth? They said it was “bubble gum” flavored, but in actuality, it tasted nothing like anything you’ve ever had before.

Searching the web doesn’t yield many hits on swish, but I know it’s something we did. Does anyone else remember this? If so, feel free to share your memories.

Over the holidays I had the chance to finally beat Yoshi’s Island DS. I also got Meteos for Christmas, and have had a substantial amount of time with it. As such, here are my two short reviews of both games.

Yoshi’s Island DS (A-)
This ’sequel’ to Yoshi’s Island for the Super Nintendo is faithful to the original, while adding enough new features to feel fresh. Introducing multiple babies for Yoshi to carry around (subsequently giving him new abilities) was an interesting idea that works well. My only real problem with this game was that a number of the later levels are ridiculously difficult. I don’t recall the original Yoshi’s Island being so tough, but I played it a long time ago, so I only have the vaguest recollection. I had to play through several levels 20 or 30 times to get past them. Needless to say, this quickly got frustrating. Sounds, graphics, and gameplay are all top-notch, however, so this gripe pales in comparison. Overall a great game, and worth your time. I only wish one could trade their extra lives for red coins, stars, or flowers in each level; getting 100% in some of the levels is nearly impossible!

Meteos (A-)
This puzzle game is reminiscent of Tetris (as are most puzzle games), but it’s use of the stylus is incredible. In fact, I consider this a ’stylus-only’ game, even though you can play with the D-pad and buttons. The goal of the game is to launch falling Meteos back into space by lining them up in groups of three, either vertically or horizontally. Each planet that you play through has different gravity and so varying strategies must be employed to succeed. For example, some planets require that you create secondary ignitions of launched Meteos by lining up another set of three or more in the air. This game is fast paced, fun, and highly addictive. For a few days after I got it, I actually spent time thinking about ways I could line up items in the real world in groups of three or more. It’s been a long time since a game has affected me in such a way, which should be a testament to how addicting this game is.

Does anyone have any recommendations for games I should get next? Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime is currently on my list. What else should I get?

I have tweaked the style sheet here at the website fairly considerably. Internet Explorer users will now see the site just as Firefox users have always seen it. The latest version of WordPress (2.0.6) is now also being used to drive the site. Let me know if anything is broken.

I have recently been seeing some very strange networking issues on my home computer, and I’m not certain I understand where the problems are coming from. Because my computer is a long way from our cable modem, I make use of a wireless networking adapter (a Netgear WG311 v3, to be exact). The signal strength I receive is somewhat low, due to the adapter’s tiny antenna and its lousy location at the back of my computer.

The actual problem I’m seeing is a severe degradation in performance over time. When I run the speed test at Speakeasy right after a reboot (or when I initially turn on my machine), I can consistently get ~4500 kbps down and ~300 kbps up. After an hour or two of usage, running the same test consistently gives me ~750 kbps down and ~50 kbps up (sometimes slightly higher; the numbers vary). None of the other computers in my house see this issue, and all are wireless.

Last night I flashed the latest firmware onto our DLink DI-624 wireless router (the one that was installed was really old), but I saw the issue again after I made the update. Seeing that this issue is limited to my machine, it makes me think of two possibilities:

1. It’s a problem with my wireless card (though another computer in my house has the exact same type of card, and doesn’t see the problem).
2. It’s a software issue (something is screwing over the network settings system wide).

Does anyone have an idea of what might be going on here? I’m thinking about buying a new networking card with a better external antenna (this one at NewEgg is what I’m currently looking at), with the hopes that better signal strength will make this problem disappear. But I’m grasping at straws; this is driving me nuts and I want it fixed!

Born Geek has been redesigned from the ground up. The site is now powered by Movable Type, which makes my life way easier. Be sure to check it out and please let me know if you run into any problems. Lots more goodies are coming soon: Googlebar Lite 4.6, Paper Plus 10.0, a new C++ article, and more.