Whoops.

Let’s commemorate my return with a little project centered around the reason for my delinquency!

Girlfriend-kissing Countdown Google Gadget!

This here's probably the sappiest piece of web technology I've ever assembled!

Today’s bundle of joy is a Google Gadget that counts down the seconds until the next time my adorable and talented girlfriend and I meet. We’re on opposite coasts, she and I, and so we only get to fly to see each other every other weekend or so.

I forget if this widget was her idea or mine, but she contributed the artings and I contributed the codings. And here it is! And it’s even installed on my wubsite for you to see if I’m having makeouts right now or merely waiting pensively for makeouts!

For those of you looking to take a gander at the source, http://www.sheisept.com/gaywidget/w/gaywidget.xml is where you’ll find the code. It’s a work in progress, and it presently seems to break on IE, disappointingly. Even more disappointingly, it’s swallowing the errors so that Microsoft Script Debugger cannot catch them thereby illuminating me.

Other Happenings

Internets!

That’s right. After I got her in the sack I got her in the console. Once you go black (with green text) you never go back.

I also bought her her first domain name, because that is a thing I do. I need to go to Registrar’s Anonymous soon.

This totally beats the little hardhat guy.

Hmmm… registrarsanonymous.com is available…

Anyway, after an hour-long tutorial she produced a very barebones index manually. It’s displayed above and to the right.

And within minutes of that groundbreaking session, she went on to change her prototyped page via some putty and winscp fu into the item displayed to your left.

It’s mesmerizing and cute! Visit sheisept.com to see the mesmerizing cuteness!

And that’s about it. Next week: more games, websites, and widgets. And probably more girlfriend. Sorry. :3

Arting!

To the left you will find animated versions of the main character from Rusty Larner and my Sokoban clone for the iPhone. This is heavily, amazingly, tremendously inspired by a 16×16 sprite named “bobo” made by Jon “evilbob” Wofford back in the early v3 days. I gained his permission to derive a work from his, him stating that most anything from those days are now derilict.  

I always remembered it because it was so simple in design.  The slightly-pissed-off, slightly-defeated blue orb.  I loved the eyes, and the way that the shading stayed in the same orientation no matter the view (showing that it was light shading on it’s orb body instead of any particular coloration).  I also like the lack of connection between the feet and the body and the eyes.

So I upgraded it from 16×16 to 32×32, but of note is that I actually preserved, without almost any alteration at all, the eyes and eyebrows from the original.  The rest of the sprite was redone for a native 32×32 sprite.

Anyways, the sprite is done. The game will shortly follow, now several weekends overdue from the original “deadline”.
 

lateness

So, last night I spent entirely setting up backups to amazon s3 for this server using Brad Fitzpatrick’s “Brackup”. Actually, I killed a lot of time trying to use duplicity, but in the end debian’s apt-get defied me and I threw my hands into the air.

Anyway, at any time I could’ve made a gruedorf post, but I didn’t because my Gruedorf Competition Widget said I had 1 day, 2 hours left! So I was all “oh, cool!”, and went along with my system administration.

Unfortunately, when I first built the first one, it wouldn’t auto-refresh. So I was looking at page results from the previous day, which was when I last hit the update button.

Oops.

Here’s an Updated Gruedorf Competition Widget, which auto-updates every 15 minutes. ]]> http://www.egometry.com/gruedorf/clocks-and-art/feed/ 0 http://www.egometry.com/gruedorf/the-economicist-in-me/ http://www.egometry.com/gruedorf/the-economicist-in-me/#comments Wed, 12 Nov 2008 07:03:23 +0000 mcgrue http://www.egometry.com/?p=172

The Gruedorf Widget!

Why are “widgets” called “widgets”? Really?

That’s rhetorical, don’t answer that. 

This weekend my main task was the creation of this Yahoo! Widget, showing the current 10 competitors in the gruedorf competition.  I’d've posted on Sunday, but I was hoping it’d be actually reviewed and accepted into the Yahoo! Widgets Gallery, but apparently they’re at least a fortnight behind as of this posting.

As this widget displays, I was almost 2 hours late for this week’s entry.  Due both to the delay in posting and to my working my buttocks off at work lately.  Yay for buttlessness!

Get the Gruedorf Widget Here.

Get Yahoo! Widgets Here.  (necessary to use.  Also: neat.)

This experience in particular made me realize that online documentation without inline examples of use are inferior to forms of documentation that have runnable examples alongside their functions and objects doc pages.  There’s nothing more frustrating than finding out you were interpreting docs in a linguistically valid, but contextually invalid, way.

Or, put more succinctly by Zeromus:

Docs without examples are worthless. 

In other weekend events, I helped Hyptosis set up a new webpage, I helped Zeromus get verge 3 running on the Wii some, added more testing infrastructure to vrpg’s beta site, and made the working copy of The Sully Chronicles more stable.

So that’s all neat, too!