Admin’s Log

I just got finished with the first part of the redesign of ES.  It uses a custom AJAX library to load pages.  If you don’t have an AJAX capable browser, then get with the times!

I’m so glad I got this spam filter on this blog so that all of these spam bots I get from linking from my MySpace blog are blocked. This script isn’t a stupid script either. As more people use it and report spam, the main database changes and recreates itself to catch more spam. It’s great.

If you have a Wordpress blog, go pick up an Akismet blocker. Continue reading Spam Bots Galore (and Halo 3)!

Recently I’ve been playing ranked Gears of War matches, trying to get my rank up and my Achievements, and running into players that exploit glitches in the game.  One such is the ‘crabwalk’ where the person is roadie running and firing at the same time.  Now, In Gears, the roadie run is a way to get to places faster.  You crouch down and start running.  The game is coded so that when you pull the trigger to fire, your person stands up, slows down, fires, then depending on how long you hold the trigger, gets back down and starts running again.

Now, when I confronted these players after the match and asked them why they were glitching, they all told me “Because it’s in the game.”  Now, if that is true, then why can’t soccer (European: Football) players use their hands?  They all have them?  Why can’t they pick up the ball, run like mad to the goal, punch the goalie in the face and throw it in?  It’s in the game.

Because it’s cheating, that’s why.  Now, If you’re glitching in a player match (a match that isn’t ranked) with your friends and, before the game starts, you tell everyone that it’s a glitching game and they all agree, then it’s not cheating.

But what happens if you’re playing legit and happen to glitch accidentially?  Well, an accidential glitch is fine unless you exploit it.  Like if you happen to crabwalk and think “OMG! I’m crabwalking.  I’m gonna go kill those guys.” That’s cheating in my book.  But if you’re crabwalking and think “OMG! I’m crabwalking.” and ask your team mates how to stop it, then that’s not cheating.

It’s all about circumstances.  And here I’ve layed them out in an easy to read list:

Ranked Matches

Intentional Glitching

Cheating

Accidential Glitching

Exploiting the Glitch

Cheating

Trying to cancel the Glitch

Not Cheating

Player Match

Intentional Glicthing

Agreed upon before the game that it’s a glitching match

Not Cheating

Not a Glitching match

Cheating

Unintentional Glitching

See ‘Unintentional Glitching’ section in ‘Ranked Matches’

Anyone found glitching me in any of the ways that I’ve marked ‘Cheating’ will automaticall be kicked and or reported to XBox Live and it won’t matter what team they’re on.

I can’t tell you much because I really don’t know what it’s going to be when I’m done, but I can tell you it will be a template driven CMS.  More later.

Gears Of War Minisite – click here
This design is a simple yet effective design for a rotating header image. The images are from the game Gears of War, hence the name. There are 4 header images and by default the site randomly switches between them through Javascript. If you select one of the words at the top, it will set the header to that image and cache it to a cookie. When you reload the page, it will load that image. The only issue is that this design uses transparent PNGs and IE < 7 doesn’t render them correctly.

There is now a bog feed from my account on 360voice.  It automatically pulls data from the RSS feed and puts it in the sidebar.  I’m going to tweak it later to make it work better.

This is my blog. It is awesome. If you disagree, I don’t care. I am not going to be using my MySpace blog anymore. It now tells you to go to this site.

Ok, bad news first. I only have 15 megs of space to play around with on this server. That’s not alot at all. Most games are half that, some are more. So that means I can’t host demos of my scripts here. On that subject, I’m starting to write a gallery script that, well, I’ll let the list do the talking.

• Javascript resizing of images on the fly.
• AJAX and iframes to handle loading the thumbnails and fullsize images
• PHP to generate thumbnails and save them to a seperate folder so it only has to generate them once.

I’ll release it later when its fully stable and faster.