Jason Hancock

It’s no secret that pirates is using NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Installation System) to build the installer.exe file to install the game. You can see that information plain as day when you are installing the game. The only experience I had before Disney building installers was at Intel. I had used some MS tool to build an installer package for a tool I wrote. It was a pain in the ass. I fought with the damn tool for hours upon hours until it worked correctly.

So there I was…trying to distract myself from the task at hand while at work and was reading some online news. I stumbled across this article about a new amusement park that offers the experience to try and cross the border into the United States from Mexico. I can’t believe that people are actually paying for this. I think we live in a sad society when we can take pleasure in others’ misery.

What I do at work now is pretty cool…I take the code from the developers, work some magic on it, and turn it into the stuff that our customers can download and play. It’s a pretty cool gig, but I really want to write my own code, help build the game, etc., so I’ve decided to learn Panda3D, our 3d graphics engine. I took the first steps last night by downloading and installing the pre-compiled Win-32 binaries.

I did something stupid yesterday. Let me start with a background on my day. I woke up, felt a little better than the day before, got dressed and went to work. I worked a solid 9.25 hour day, ate dinner at work, and stopped at the mall on my way home. I went night shooting the night before and immediately realized that I need a tripod. I found a tripod at the camera shop for $20 (probably not the best, but when I get a real tripod sometime down the line, it will make me appreciate it a lot more).

I’ve been talking about it for a while now, so I finally went out and did it….I bought a DSLR. Not any Digital SLR, a Nikon D80 with a 18-135mm lens. Out of the box, I was pretty impressed. I immediately plugged in the battery to start charging (longest 2.25 hours of my life). While it was charging, I started reading the quick-start guide. I also unpacked the camera bag, extra battery, and flash card (2GB SD) that I bought.

It’s really easier than you think. Why would you want to set up your own web server? Well, if you like to share photos/music/etc. and NOT pay for hosting, then you should set up your own web server. What you need: an old computer that meets fedora’s min specs a hi-speed internet connection a dyndns client some time Follow these instructions on installing and configuring fedora core 6.

My frustration with Windows is continuing to grow. I have been doing a lot of web development on my XP box lately. This required me to run MySQL and Apache on my machine. I could have run Microsoft’s IIS web server, but Apache is just sooooo much better. I’ve also been running a couple other services in the backgound on my machine. I would just run it on my linux box, but until last week, I didn’t have one.

I’ve been lucky…when my last hard drive started to go out, it made a slow whining sound. Luckily, I was able to get all the data off of it and onto another drive before it died. When I say all the data, I’m talking 80GB of digital pictures, movies, music, etc. in addition to all my school work from UC Davis and all my personal financial records and documents. After this brush with near-data-loss, I decided that I had better get smarter about my data management.

Laura and I went to the Calico Clean Up yesterday. Calico is a town about 8 miles North of Barstow along I-15. It’s mainly a tourist attraction. It is operated as an old ghost town. However, outside of the town are several 4×4 trails. Unfortunately, lots of people go out there and camp, shoot guns, and dump trash. Some organizations were threatening to shut down the trails, so a few people got together and organized a clean up.

Hmmmm….I’m 25 now. I’m looking forward to my car insurance dropping in price and being able to rent a car. I went wheeling yesterday. It was freaking awesome. Best trail yet in So-Cal. It’s called the Cleghorn trail. It’s off I-15 just north of the I-15⁄215 split. I was supposed to meet some people from yotatech.com out there, but they all bailed. Luckily, some Nissan people were out there and invited me along.