Failed Attempt at a Speed Run

Posted on 31st March 2011 in Something Daily

When I miss a day of blogging, it’s pretty often for one of two reasons. Either I’m working really hard and obsessively on something and I let it carry me into the evening without looking back, only to realize at 1:30 AM that I didn’t write today, or I’m video gaming. Somewhat predictably, yesterday was the latter – I foolishly attempted a speed run of Ocarina of Time in one sitting. This is of course something that I’ve tried before, and, historically, it’s always had the same outcome. I start off so enthusiastic, celebrate when I finish the Deku Tree in ten minutes, get annoyed by the long interval between that and Dodongo’s Cavern, and push doggedly onward until about the point where I get the horse. At that point, about halfway through the forest temple, I get really sick of it and I’m forced to quit. Maybe it’s too long of a game to do in one sitting – I mean I literally tried to do it in one sitting, like I didn’t stand up at all. My legs were starting to go numb, which is bad. The experience of failing at the one-sitting run of OoT yet again just makes me want to eventually do it even more. I think it’ll happen one day, I just need to really have nothing else to do, and be willing to stay up all night. And a treadmill or something. But if I can watch all of the Lord of the Rings movies in a day, I can certainly do this. So that’s why i didn’t write yesterday.

On the topic of my developing website, I today implemented a tagging system for the entries in the gallery of creative work I’m including on the site, which the user can use to filter the list by any of a set of chosen criteria. I’m learning PHP very well during this process, and it also occurred to me that it could be a very viable option for me to do freelance web design jobs for extra money. So I’m going to start getting my name out there, which will be made a lot easier once I have a site to show for myself. Coming soon – probably within the next week or two. Not probably, definitely.

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Free SNES Sprites? Yes Please.

Posted on 29th March 2011 in Something Daily

I discovered a site called nes-snes sprites a few days ago that has a huge collection of (you guessed it) NES and SNES sprites, often in all of their animation states, available for download. Right now it’s just great for nostalgia value for me, but I’m thinking about making some gifs with them, or maybe putting one on the header of my site. The site also has a decent collection of soundtracks from those two systems, which I’m almost inclined to put on my iPod and listed to for fun. I have a serious thing about chip music.

Posting daily starts to become difficult around the middle of the semester, for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s the increasing workload from classes, but it’s always the “stuff is happening” mindset that starts to kick in soon after midterms. Even if it’s not incredibly busy, there’s this feeling of having places to be and stuff to do. At least there is for me. Of course, I feel like I always have some project or another, and the more enthusiastic I get about whatever it happens to be, the less time I find myself having to do almost anything else. But that’s just me. Also, my living space is quite often much louder than it needs to be, mainly due to myself and my roommates all being close to 20 years old, fans of music, and owning big speakers. This sometimes makes it hard to concentrate on anything, which is a big reason that I’ve been spending more time in the courant library recently.

Speaking of my website, the design/development process is going well. The method I had been using to retrieve a Twitter feed via the Twitter API wasn’t working under Ubuntu, so I figured I’d at least attempt to make that better. As it turns out, I’m able to use a very similar method to the one described yesterday to get the tweet data from an RSS feed. Also, I’ve added some cool-looking stylistic elements to the homepage design, and given the header (my name) the Double Dragon treatment, which I was able to do with a font I found here and a bit of Gimping.

Also, my roommate gave me his GameBoy Pocket today! The stars have aligned in my favor! I was just starting to think about buying one, and then this happens. Seriously, that is awesome. I also picked up Street Fighter II Turbo yesterday, which is of course much harder than I remember it being. Ryu is quite annoying with the Haduoken.

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PHP Howto: scrape an RSS feed

Posted on 29th March 2011 in Tutorials

Since I’m building my own homepage, I recently learned how to scrape an RSS feed in order to dynamically create content for a website. The idea is that I would have separate feeds from my twitter, tumblr, and this blog all in one place. The tumblr and twitter feeds are offered by those companies in the form of API calls, so using those two is very straightforward in both cases. When self-hosting a wordpress blog, though, as I do, there is no readymade option for a feed that one can just call and have ready to go. So I had to make my own.

An RSS feed is essentially just an XML markup document that browsers interpret and show you in some type of feed form. What I wanted to do with this document (which wordpress produces for me) is essentially the same as what the browser does with it when you click an RSS link – it parses the tags in the XML document and applies predefined visual styles to make the information accessible to humans.

PHP can perform this process quite simply, via the simplexml_load_file function, which provides a simple framework for parsing XML documents.


$feedUrl = 'http://emmettbutler.com/threestegosaurusmoon/?feed=rss2';
$ret = array();

// retrieve search results
if($xml = simplexml_load_file($feedUrl)) { //load xml file using simplexml
$result["item"] = $xml->xpath("/rss/channel/item"); //divide feed into array elements

foreach($result as $key => $attribute) {
$i=0;
foreach($attribute as $element) {
if($i < 3){
$ret[$i]['title'] = (string)$element->title; //assign the desired elements to array entries
$ret[$i]['timestamp'] = (string)$element->pubDate;
$ret[$i]['summary'] = (string)$element->description;
$ret[$i]['link'] = (string)$element->guid;
$i++;
}
}
}
}

After the initial call, this code examines each unit of the divided document and assigns the contents of certain tags to elements of the $ret array. For example, there is a line in each item of the feed that is denoted by the pubDate tag, which contains the date that a certain post was published. The line $ret[$i]['timestamp'] = (string)$element->pubDate; finds those tags and assigns their contents to the $ret array. Once this loop is complete, you’ll have an array full of all the pertinent data for your feed. You can loop through the array and print each element between the appropriate tags, style with a bit of CSS, and you have yourself a homemade and very professional-looking RSS feed widget on your website.

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Triceratops Party/Attack

Posted on 27th March 2011 in Something Daily

For some reason, not quite sure what exactly, I have spent the last three days working feverishly on a pixel drawing of a triceratops with big muscles standing in front of a ruined city at dawn. I get like this all the time with projects, where I get into it and really just can’t seem to stop myself from doing anything but work on it until it’s done. And it’s not like this was even really that thought-intensive, it’s more just that I wanted to have a mildly awesome looking picture of a sweet dinosaur in shades. And it’s cool that I drew it, I guess.

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Johann Sebastian Box

Posted on 27th March 2011 in Something Daily

I do actually have homework this weekend, which is thankfully a quite rare occurrence in recent weeks. I will be writing a short paper comparing Wendy Carlos’ performance of Bach’s 14th invention on Switched-On Bach with one by someone else where it’s the same thing but on piano. This should at least be more interesting than my earlier comparison of two performances of the same madrigal by Montiverdi (written in about 1638). I don’t have a problem with the idea of learning about baroque music, but in practice, it’s often uninteresting to me. Not Bach, though. Bach is sweet. It’s more the pre-Bach baroque that I’m talking about. If you’ve never listened to Bach, go do it right now. And then if you’ve never listened to Switched-On Bach, go do it now as well. And also, if you’re a pianist, try playing one of his inventions sometime. They’re not very easy, but so much fun to be able to play if you feel like practicing them enough. Ok yeah, Bach is the man.

So I’ll be writing that paper today, and also doing a bit more intensive design work on the “coming soon” emmettbutler.com homepage, which I hope will be up and running by about the second week of April. I just went through the process yesterday of learning how to scrape data from an RSS feed with PHP, and I built myself a little blog feed that shows summaries of my most recent posts on this very blog in a nice feed-y format. With that and the Twitter and the Tumblr feed, it’s shaping up to be a mighty fine homepage. Mighty fine indeed.

I decided that I’m going to live tweet during the hackNY hackathon on the 9th. That should be super fun.

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My Skateboard Will Go On

Posted on 26th March 2011 in Something Daily

I don’t know if I feel like writing about my projects today. I do that all the time. Instead, allow me to write about how skateboarding has been going recently for me. With all the time that I spend in front of a computer (I was about to estimate the number of hours per day, but then I thought better of it), I try to take the opportunity on weekends to get out and skate a little bit. I haven’t really gotten back into skating to class yet, mostly because it’s been really cold, but also because I find it kind of difficult to skateboard with a backpack on. On the weekends, though, I usually manage to get out to one of two places: either the Stuyvesant Town village of apartment buildings or the outdoor concrete park at Chelsea Piers sports complex.

My roommate introduced me to the skatepark some time early last fall, and we usually go together, although I did go there by myself for the first time recently, mainly because I was feeling bold. I go there when I feel like trying something specific, because at my skill level, there’s not a whole lot of stuff there for me to take advantage of. Essentially I can ride the small box off a ramp, ride the hill of downward ramps, and carve around. That’s really about it. The park is a bit tough on weekends, because that’s usually when lots of younger kids show up and mill around on all the ramps, making it difficult or impossible to skate certain routes. That’s what happened last week when I was there; I saw a lot of the more experienced people there getting kind of angry about it. As such, I was trying my subtle best to not be one of the kids who was constantly in the way and clogging up the ramps. I think I did a pretty good job.

In light of my still-developing set of skateboard skills, it’s often more common that I go to Stuyvesant Town. It’s like a little development of apartment buildings, and the street grid doesn’t reach inside it, which means that there are much fewer cars, and much fewer people walking around. With a small amount of care for the occasional car, it’s a good place for me to get some big wide, smooth streets where I can practice 180s and curb ollies endlessly, and not risk getting hurt too badly. It’s a good time. That’s actually where I was today. I landed a few 180s in a row – I still can’t do it reliably, but I’m getting there. And I’m teaching myself to push regular after that one guy called me out on pushing mongo. That’s a little embarrassing, as I feel like I’m back to square one in terms of board control, but I’m constantly getting better at that as well.

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My Online Life Expands

Posted on 25th March 2011 in Something Daily

Today involved my first use of an API in any real capacity, as I used some websites I visit as examples of how to add Twitter and Tumblr feeds to a page. (By the way, I started a Tumblr.) It occurred to me today what I really want emmettbutler.com to be: ideally, it will be the hub of all aspects of my internet life. It’ll have this blog, my twitter, and my tumblr all represented in the form of feeds, as well as my resume, bio, and a gallery of stuff that I’ve made. In terms of these feeds I’m talking about, they’re surprisingly easy to implement – a lot more so than I expected. In the case of the tumblr feed, it’s actually just one javascript call that returns your ten most recent posts, and the twitter one is just two calls. Very nice. This is quite helpful in getting ready for the HackNY hackathon on April 9th, as I was looking for an excuse to learn practical applications of APIs like these (who am I kidding…I really don’t need an excuse). But to make a long story short here, as of today I’m starting to pick up steam on this personal website project. Also everything that I previously had on my roommate’s web host is now here on my own, so it’s certainly a good thing that I don’t have to keep directing people to emmett.ericsluyter.com. That was a little embarrassing. Not really though.

I once again haven’t really had a time since Tuesday in which I wasn’t doing anything productive, and that is continuing, as I’ve been either web designing, writing html, drawing a triceratops with aviators, or doing studio maintenance all day today, and I plan to continue this at work until I go to bed tonight. I will eventually burn myself out and be forced to take a break, probably. I’ll just watch a few more episodes of Dragon Ball Z. I’m going to see Eric’s show tomorrow at Gallatin, which should be super rad (and also something that’s not ‘work’).

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New Site – too bad it’s not doabarrelroll.com

Posted on 24th March 2011 in Something Daily

You may have noticed that this isn’t threestegosaurusmoon.com anymore. That’s because it’s not, I migrated the blog to my own web host this morning, and spent the day getting the URLs moved around and the theme working properly. I say that I was working on this, but really what it amounted to was me closing my eyes and randomly clicking around until the files were all on my server. The old threestegosaurusmoon.wordpress.com site still exists, but I won’t be updating that anymore – it’s here at emmettbutler.com from now on. The one big advantage I’ve noticed so far to being on my own server is that I’m now allowed to install plugins, which means that I now have a random post button; to the right, just below the “about me” section. It’s fun!

Also, as you can see, emmettbutler.com is now a thing. If you go there at this moment, it’s just a “coming soon” image that links back to right here, but it will, within the next six to eight weeks, become a glorious and fully-functional homepage for me, where I can keep all of my drawings and music and resume and all that. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, keep keeping it really real right here. Thanks for reading.

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One does not simply walk into the internet

Posted on 23rd March 2011 in Something Daily

It may be a little bit easier than getting into Mordor, but it’s still a bit of a process to build up an internet presence. I’m starting the process of writing a personal website for myself, which should be a great experience. I just bought the web host, which means that in a few hours I won’t have to use my roommate’s hosting anymore – it’s already been a bit weird telling people the URL for Spaceratops and having it include “.ericsluyter.com/”. Something’s wrong with that, I feel like. Still, awesome of him to lend me the space while I was learning.

So as a result of me now having web hosting, this blog may start to behave strangely in the near future. I’m going to move it to my own host, which means I’ll then be able to edit CSS myself and use custom plugins (like a random button – I’ve really been wanting that). I’ll do my best to never let threestegosaurusmoon.com actually go down at any point, but it may still happen. If so, rest assured that very soon it will be back and probably better.

As for the personal website, you may be thinking “but Danger, you already have a personal website – it’s called Three Stegosaurus Moon, which I know because I visit every day and have read everything you’ve ever posted.” To that, I would say thank you, first of all, and secondly that this website on which you read presently only represents a part of what I’d like my web presence to be. Here, I can talk about whatever’s on my mind, update daily, do sloppily-written video game reviews and shameless plugs of my own work, whatever I want, basically. It’s kind of fun. The idea I have for this new one is that it will be slightly more serious/professional and less dynamic than this blog. This isn’t to say that I won’t give it a crazy 8-bit rainbow theme, which I will, don’t worry…it’s just that the content there will be probably more interesting to someone looking at it from a professional standpoint. Like I can put up my resume (which is extremely impressive (<sarcasm)), a little bio (not a sci-fi story that I wrote in 45 minutes), a big compendium of things I've created, and a list of links to everywhere that I am on the internet. You know, like my home base. I'm just beginning to consider the design, but I'd like to have something going on there by the end of the term. I think it'll end up being awesome.

If I start doing more visual art, I may also start a tumblr, because I like their default layout for showing gifs and images.

Get excited. Stuff is about to start going down. And play Spaceratops.

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Spaceratops Update

Posted on 23rd March 2011 in Something Daily

There were a lot of false starts and many attempts to get Spaceratops up and running properly, as I was just learning how to use Java Web Start this morning. But now, it appears as though you can follow this new, semipermanent link to the launcher. Click the Launch button, open or save the file, and then wait for the download to complete. After the download is done, the game should launch automatically (and you only need to go through the lengthy download process the first time you launch). Also, here’s the slightly updated source code if you care to view it.

As it’s turned out, this project has come right down to the wire. But it appears to be pretty much complete and working right now (knock on wood)(actually that’s an exaggeration, the leaderboard is broken, but I’m working on it). Anyway, have fun playing it in a form that is much more likely to actually work for you. Thanks for reading.

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