Category Archives: Site News

IndieGamer.org

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So Begins: Indie Gamer

Until recently, I was sure that I would blog only here on joshkim.org. After all, why split up the small population of readers who frequent this lovely establishment?

But then again, I realized that I’ve thrown away video games as a plaything for far too long. I think finishing Braid at the tail end of summer last year started this “indie gamer” mindset within me. Finishing Psychonauts tonight really helped me make this decision to go through with starting the Indie Gamer blog.

To begin, who is an indie gamer? I’d like to think whoever games and thinks critically of a game is an indie gamer. I know it seems a bit hazy and pretentious at face value, but I intend to flesh this out fully as I keep blogging.

IndieGamer.org is specifically my views on games, as well as other people’s views if they choose to join in on the fun and submit posts. While IndieGamer.org is a blog for now, I have some plans to make a service for gamers.

Now, I picked IndieGamer.org and not IndieGames.org for a reason. While I have a huge craving for indie games ever since Braid hit me in the face with the awesome (and I’ve got a whole list of indie games and mods just waiting to be written on), I want to emphasize that any game is up for criticism (for example, Psychonauts, a game which I’d call pseudo-”indie”). Also, I don’t necessarily want to write on a per game basis only, but also write about general trends in games as well as in the gaming industry. (I have a doozy on Valve’s Steam cooking… I <3 puns.)

I’ll be posting all my game related posts on IndieGamer.org from now on. And a better definition of what I think an indie gamer is.

So welcome, yet another project. The important thing here is that I’ve started another project, and that now there’s an outlet for all this criticism I have towards games.

Blog Is Being Worked On

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Downtime? Probably today and tomorrow.

Finally thinking a bit more like a developer than a user with respect to WordPress, and being a lot more proactive with maintenance and scaling issues. Hooray!

An Empty Drafts Folder

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Feels great to not have anything to write about.

In reality, they always keep popping up in my mind. But at least, on paper, my mind is free to do what I deem is awesome.

And that’s that. I thought I was going to make this blog into something more than just a personal reflection, but the time is not now.

So we’re reverting back to my personal thoughts and shenanigans, rather than trying to become a tech blogger by any means.

I’ll share links as I find them, and maybe comment on them, but that’s pretty much it.

I’m going to probably use this podium, more so as a chronicling of how I’m going to fail at building a feed reader, but we’ll see where this one leads. I’ve still got time, and fingers to type code with. Money’s running low, but I can’t focus on that just yet.

Moving… To A New Old Host

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I’ve been using Slicehost for more than a year now (since March 4th, 2008, with a little break in between May to October of that year). All the while, I’ve become a huge huge fan of their service. Why?

Montastic tells me that Slicehost suffered a bit of downtime during my time with them (via a quick Gmail search), but it happened so rarely that I can’t recall ever being frustrated at the service. (How about Dreamhost, you ask? Ahem.)

It’s been quite the experience, trying to admin a VPS at Slicehost. It was a lot of fun and pain trying to set up an Ubuntu server from scratch. I learned quite a bit, and found respect for all the unsung sysadmins out there.

But lately, learning more and more about the art and science of system administration almost feels like premature optimization. That’s not to say that the subject matter is not interesting (or easy, because it’s completely insane how the Internet exists), but I’m going to wait until when the optimization becomes that much more effective.

This feeling is magnified by what I’ve been doing with this slice. The full potential of this $20/mo slice has gone to waste, being used to host only this WordPress install.

The fact is that I bought this slice, thinking that I would be deploying some major webapps. You see, past-JK would have thought that future-JK would be awesomeing all over the place. Current-JK is sad that this is not the case.

But he is hopeful. Uh, back to first-person.

I’m hopeful. I also have a couple non-programming projects I want to start up, and it’d be nicer to have a solution that has a more pay-as-you-go style of billing. I am back to NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Change. Change always brings something new and exciting, doesn’t it?

And this post is how I end the first half of the year of 2009. Kinda not very exciting, but I’m learning to find excitement apart from dates that have merely numerical quirks.

Spur Of The Moment Posts Vs Focused Essays

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Both are important. And for once, I’m realizing the reasons and ramifications of each style of blog posts.

It’s great to get something off my chest at a very quickly. It’s also easier to put together since it can be a lot of content, but with a probable drop in quality. This “morning’s” post can be grouped into this category.

The more recent posts can be grouped in this spur-of-the-moment style category also. I think it’s good to have a method to have a self-check, now and then… If I don’t tell myself to do it just once a day, I end up either never doing it or going as far as logging what I did every 30 minutes (a feat only possible by Twitter). But sometimes I just get lazy, and stop.

And what’s my excuse? The excuse is that I want to write in depth, analyzing. But what ends up happening is I just end up getting bored, latching onto the next shiny thing.

At this point, I have to talk about my wrists/forearms being in the state they are now, disabling me from writing anything for too long, anyway. I have this feeling that this pain actually is doing more in stopping me from doing anything productive in general.

Which brings me to the lovely conclusion, the obvious parallel: I’m not just talking about blog posts, but the general attitude that I’ve been having towards my projects.

The solution is simple: create smaller tasks. And I think the problem is that I’m still not in HanMeta mode yet: I’m still taking that month-long vacation I’ve been wanting for so long. And the freaking wrists/forearms/eyes/physical pains… the question is should I even be doing anything other than coding on the computer?

Looks like it’s going to be difficult for me to write any focused essays. See where this post is going?

/scream

For GetMyTweets Users

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I needed a very very very simple Twitter plugin for wordpress, just to show my latest tweet. I found GetMyTweets to be just simple enough. Then I started to get some warnings, and reflexively hit the Google.

But to my surprise, doing a query on “getmytweets” on google got me this:

Picture 5

I recently had a couple of warnings with the GetMyTweets wordpress plug-in. These weren’t the same warnings, but you’ll get the gist of it:

Warning: XMLReader::open()
 [function.XMLReader-open]: php_network_getaddresses:
 getaddrinfo failed:
 Name or service not known in
 /blah/getMyTweets.php on line 38

Warning: XMLReader::open(

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/joshkim.xml?count=1)

 [function.XMLReader-open]: failed to open stream:
 No such file or directory in /blah/getMyTweets.php on line 38

Warning: XMLReader::open() [function.XMLReader-open]:
 Unable to open source data in /blah/getMyTweets.php on line 38

Warning: XMLReader::read()
 [function.XMLReader-read]: Load Data before trying to read in
 /blah/getMyTweets.php on line 39

(Note to self: Fix <pre><code> later. Sorry about that, to everyone who got this post multiple times.)

Obviously, the problem is with being unable to grab the xml provided by Twitter. Due to it’s ridiculous open architecture, I don’t blame Twitter when it chokes now and then (and not as much as it did when the whole Fail Whale was in vogue). For now, I just decided to hide it. Just append the following at the top of getMyTweets.php, just like with any other PHP warnings.

ini_set("display_errors", 0);

I’m fine with this fix, because I made the title for “Recent Tweets” link up to my twitter page anyway.

Now back to Rails.

CHANGELOG: The Ads

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The Moneys

Ads are back. This can only mean a good thing, because that means I’m making a conscientious effort to actually write something that’s of value.

I’m currently messing with three different sources for making a bit of money on the side with the blog:

  • Google Adsense: One ad per single.php, for more focused targetting
  • Amazon Affiliates: Omakase, for now. I may want to make the JKStore a big more accessible soon.
  • Text-Link-Ads: Not sure how this works just yet.

Online Identity

Finally added more interaction with Twitter. Not sure if people were really wanting it, but I kinda wanted to do this for a long while.

I ended up just putting up links to Flickr and Twitter under /etc/ for now. I would like to lifestream like I did before, but I don’t know if that’ll actually be useful… or maybe a project I’m working on will obviate that anyway. And plus, I suck at this server admin stuff: I tried for a few minutes the lifestream wordpress plugin (which seems amazing), and I almost had a heart attack that the server was going to go down again.

Posting Schedule

I have this general feeling that I’m going to do more personal posts during the weekends, and more interesting and relevant posts during the weekday. I kinda want to make sure that I post something really beefy on Sunday night, kind of as a weekly deadline for something in-depth.

Don’t hold me to any of this. This is just me thinking out loud like I normally do. (And, as some will notice, I won’t be linking this on a tweet.)

Look/Feel

Back to the redness. Oh, how I’ve missed you.

Started adding new tabs to the navigation. Not sure exactly what’ll end up here.

Blah blah blah

I’m hungry. Working on the blog for 4 hours straight is pretty fun, but very draining.