If you don’t know who Randy Pausch is — well — you should. He was diagnosed with cancer last fall - told he had 6 months to live. Well - his time to return home has come, he passed away this morning - he beat the 6 months, but cancer finally caught up with him. Fortunately for us - the cancer didn’t really beat him though - he showed each of us that we have the power within ourselves to reach our dreams, regardless of what odds are stacked against us.
I watched his “Last Lecture” just a few days after it was posted online. It inspired me to action - and his death reminds me of the commitments I made to myself nearly a year ago. I have dreams to accomplish - and need to set out to accomplish them - regardless of the trials that beset me. If you haven’t seen it yet - I’d start by watching it (it is an hour - so be sure to set aside an hour that you won’t be interrupted - it is worth it):
Randy - you have left a legacy behind you. To Jai and your children - we are praying for you - and I know that Randy is hard at work preparing the path for each of you once you one day meet again in the life to come.
Thanks Randy for making this world a better place than it was before you came.
In a world that is being filled with more and more blogs every day, how do you keep track of them all? Well - you don’t… but, google reader is sure a nice way to keep track of those you are interested in, as well as share those posts you find interesting with others, etc… give it a try if you haven’t already!
You can keep up to speed with the blog posts I find interesting either on the right hand side of this site, or directly here (all via google reader):
So, this semester (my last one with classes) is now over. I was in a video game development class this semester, and had a ton of fun making an educational (and fun) video game targeted at the 1st grade level (in math). It’s not all math problems - but rather primarily a space war in which you pilot your ship in order to catch up with Distractor and take him down. The math comes in as you attempt to use power-ups found along the way… they are locked, and the only way to unlock them is by solving math problems…
(Intro Sequence for Space War)
(Molly helping you with a math question)
(Fighting the Boss “Distractor”)
… it was a true group effort - I was one of 3 in my team, and we spent quite a bit of time and effort coming up with a back-story, etc… which is somewhat integrated into this working demo. You can listen to the story-line in the game by selecting the Story option — or if you want to just jump into the action - select the Space War option (the only module we had time to implement). I’m actually interested in furthering the game a bit, as my kids actually enjoy playing it. I’d love to hear any feedback you might have!
So, how do you install it then? Not as easy as I’d hope — but you’ll first need to get some prerequisite applications on your Windows XP or Vista computer:
Once you’ve got the above pre-requisites installed… then download and install EgdelWonk (26MB). If you happen to have an XBox 360 controller - plug it into your computer and use it… as we designed/tested/developed the game specifically for the XBox 360. You can play it with the keyboard - but the gameplay is much better with the XBox controller.
Again — let me know what you think! It was fun to make, hopefully you’ll enjoy playing it (or having your kids play it)… Bonus quesion — who plays the voice of Molly?
I’m quite impressed with the amount of data that Google has collected by camera mounted cars driving through all the streets across the nation. Albuquerque in particular has been covered quite well - in fact, you can get a perfect view of my house as good as if you had driven by yourself. For those of you that know my address - just enter it into http://maps.google.com/ and click on street view and there ya go — that’s my house :)
Just to show an example - so you can play around with it - here is the street view of the chapel that we attend church at:
Quite impressive both in the amount of data they have collected (both satellite, and now street view) as well as the seamless way they present it to the end user. I’m sure there are privacy concerns from many - regardless - this is quite an amazing piece of work that Google has done, and continues to do.
You can even see the car that the pictures were taken from:
So - I’ve finally migrated over to an actual server that is not located in my own home. Don’t get me wrong - I still have the old server at my home, but I’m hosting on an external server now, in hopes that it’ll free up more time. Time will tell - if I actually do free up some time, I suppose that means I might have time to blog some more - which is something I’d like to do… cross your fingers :)
I originally created a website / alumni tracking tool for my 10 year high school reunion (see http://www.mayfield95.org/) about two years back. My wife, who also graduated in 1995, saw the site - and figured, hey - why not re-use this for my 10 year reunion? Thus… I ported the code over for her 10 year reunion (see http://www.goddard95.org/).
One of my brothers is getting ready to help put on his 20 year reunion, and asked if he might be able to take advantage of what I did for our reunion to track alumni, get tickets purchased, etc… and so I figured I’d take the opportunity to make my code more generalized so that the next time I’m asked to port it for another high school - it will *cross your fingers* hopefully require only copying some files, copying a database structure, and then modifying a single configuration file.
Anyhow - so taht is what I did… the site looks awfully similar - but the code behind it is much more general pupose now (see http://www.mayfield88.org/ for my brother’s site). Yup… leave it to me to spend more time just make the behind the scenes stuff look better w/no change to the front end :)
I’ve been using ImageMagick (a great image library / toolset by the way) for some time now. Recently, I ran across a bug in the library when trying to draw straight dashed lines. You can get the details on the ImageMagick forum itself.
As that forum doesn’t allow posting of images (as far as I can tell) - I’m posting the error condition and the output of it here in hopes to aid developers more quickly find a fix for it :) The problem is Read more
Well… sorry hackers, but I’m getting fed up with your little games. I’ve found what appears to be a great module that works with apache to help monitor/block your hacking attempts. I’m impressed by what I’ve seen so far.
I’ve gone ahead and implemented a mod_security service to logwatch as well, to aid in parsing through the audit_log that mod_security spits out as it does its work. I couldn’t find a decent one out there already written, so decided to write my own. It’s nothing fancy, but gets the job done. I figured I’d post it here in case someone else might find it useful.
Just place each file in the appropriate place… for my fedora core install, that happens to be in /etc/logwatch/* — exact locations for each file are then (click to download):
