So.. fish. Why fish? Well, honestly, why not. We can’t have cats in our current place (legally), so dogs are out of the question too, so we went with something that doesn’t need to be walked or trained. Sure, they have the huge aquarium and the cost associated with all of that. Need to make certain the pH and oxygen levels are stable, got food, filter is working, water temperature is correct and ALL THAT.. but it’s a lot of setup and basic maintenance to look at some cool looking fish. So the tank we got is a 28 gallon euro tank, water weight is ~240 lbs. After determining that our first location in the living room wasn’t safe and viable, we set the tank up in our bedroom on one of my plastic tables. 200+ lbs bends that table quite a bit.. so we moved it to a much more sturdy wood table and that is where it sits currently. When they say to not move even partially filled tanks, that’s probably good advice, but hey.. we did it anyways. 150 lbs is awkward between two people but at least it got moved and we didn’t have to make another 30+ trips to empty it and then another 30+ to refill it. Screw that.

Either way, it is setup currently and being allowed to run for a few days before even considering the idea of adding some tropical fish to it. We’re hoping for 2 different types of shark (bala and rainbow), some green tiger barbs, and a bottom algae-eating dude to boot. We’ll see how that goes. Not a whole lot of fish will go into our tank, following the general advice of 1 gallon of water per inch of fish in the tank (especially at full length), but it should be a fun and interesting adventure along the way. Oh, and here’s a sucky photo of it for your viewing pleasure.

[singlepic id=49 w=320 h=240 float=center]

In other news, GDEV class is going well. Got past the first voting period and I am fleshing out the idea for a quick demonstration sometime soon. The class meets Wednesdays for 2.5 hours and thus far has been very long in the tooth, but hopefully the first hiring and second voting periods go well. I’d like to keep on a team lead, not only so I can be the bossman, as that seems like a much better use of my talents and gives me something to work on that I can apply in other parts of my life, personal and business. Platforming concept that is a smash-up of different concepts from various games but ultimately the idea will be to have a Mario-esque platforming experience with the puzzling of Lost Vikings 1&2, including the abilities and character swapping. I’m tempted to thrown in some effects from the portable Castlevania games, and probably will in the long run, as long as just refining the feel of the game to include what I feel is the best pieces of different games out there. Either way, looking forward to the class again.. and will be quite annoyed if I have to do it completely solo but that might be for the best if I have nobody useful to hire/work with.

Oh, and it was quite neat to see some more of my Taekwondo students obtain the rank of black belt, either 1st Dan or 1st Poom. Body is still repairing itself from the destruction that was Saturday but at this point, it was totally worth it and looking forward to congratulating all of them further in Tuesday’s classes.

That’s it for now. End transmission of ramble..^D

Due to this srs fffffff-up, all of my accounts that use the email associated with my Gawker Media account, that I only used for Kotaku, have been getting hit on all fronts. Had I lost control of my LinkedIn, World of Warcraft, or Gmail account due to this exposure, this would have been not only horrible because I was using the same password across multiple accounts but that they got hit in the first place. It’s a tad embarrassing for Gawker as a whole and really reduces the faith in what they do as a whole, even if they fix the issue so it is even less likely to occur again. Nonetheless, when I am given the chance to delete my account, I likely will. And it seems I’ll have to go about finding the different places that use said email and password I had on Gawker Media. Hell, maybe it’s time to get a second email account going for sh*t like this…

Email I received from Gawker at 8pm Monday night follows below:

This weekend we discovered that Gawker Media’s servers were compromised,
resulting in a security breach at Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel,
io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin, and Fleshbot. As a result, the user name
and password associated with your comment account were released on the
internet. If you’re a commenter on any of our sites, you probably have
several questions.

We understand how important trust is on the internet, and we’re deeply
sorry for and embarrassed about this breach of security. Right now we
are working around the clock to improve security moving forward. We’re
also committed to communicating openly and frequently with you to make
sure you understand what has happened, how it may or may not affect you,
and what we’re doing to fix things.

This is what you should do immediately: Try to change your password in
the Gawker Media Commenting System. If you used your Gawker Media
password on any other web site, you should change the password on those
sites as well, particularly if you used the same username or email with
that site. To be safe, however, you should change the password on those
accounts whether or not you were using the same username.

We’re continually updating an FAQ (http://lifehac.kr/eUBjVf) with more
information and will continue to do so in the coming days and weeks.

Gawker Media

==============================

================
You are receiving this email because your email
address was associated with a Gawker Media user
account. We are using this list only for the
purpose of sending you this important notification.

Yet the other questions have either been really rather dull, like should all if statements have a set of encapsulating braces when they are not needed or should they always be there (rather dull, but makes a big difference in readability.. I went with always, for now), and others are neat in a different way. In my GUI class, the professor uses Moodle to manage the class and her habit is to have every link to a document, such as a tutorial that she finds great or even the assignment pages, must open in a new window. Generally, this wouldn’t bother me in the least as I am used to center-clicking links to open them in a new tab and will only occasionally run into a website that futz up my browser. Thank goodness for browser override on that targeting behaviour. But with Moodle, when you set it to always open in a new window, it checks to see if the page is in a new window, and if it isn’t, it gives you a stupid sh*t-eating-grin error message with a link to the page again. Luckily, you can finally get the page open in a new tab instead of a whole new window but it took two page visits and two clicks to get there because the UI didn’t respect your environment settings. This only amuses me because it’s a UI design class where we spend more time on programming iffy assignments in Java and finally JavaScript at the end of the semester. Thankfully the professor didn’t have time for databases.. might have to throw a fit and likely a few chairs. This is probably the only UI design-related question I’ve had all semester for a UI design class. … Oi. But this issue made me question what I think about how hyperlinks are designed for targeting the web page. Well, first.. let’s break down what the targeting is…

<a href=”http://TheWebPageUrl.com” title=”Some fancy title” target=”_blank”>Link text</a>

The bit in bold above is the targeting section of the entire hyperlink. That’s some generic non-standard-specific HTML, btw. Target can be defined to a few different values and that are:

• _self
  • Default action. Whatever window/tab/frame the link is in is focused.
• _blank
  • Open a new window.
• _top
  • Essentially _self outside of multiple frames, but opens in the whole window (if there are 3 frames, this will cause there to be one frame with the document in it)
• _parent
  • Open in the parent frameset. Dealing with frames.. ugh.
• framename
  • Open in that frame. Ugh, frames!

The ones that generally matter are _self and _blank as they have the most meaning still. The others are generally when dealing with frames (ugh, frames). I like to pretend that frames died out a long time ago. (Looking at the old Nintendo of America websites is always interesting for not only the frames but fully image-based navigation.. things I did when I was 14 and early into web development.) So either way, one opens in the current frame and the other is a whole new window, by specification. Of course, that doesn’t mean the browser has to do what the specification calls for, which is obvious with all of the browser presentation differences, but in this instance.. this is an awesome thing. My browser can choose to just open _blank in a new tab and it’s all dandy. But another user can have a new window. No fuss, no UI difficulties. Yes, the browsers should follow the spec but when it comes down to it, is that piece of the spec still meaningful and is it all that bad for a browser to do what the user wants instead? After all, the spec is the guidelines for what things should be. The user is the one getting the experience so why are you catering to the spec? The spec doesn’t care, but the user does.

Anywho, the whole question is do you want to control the user or just let the user do what they want. There is only so much you can do the save the user from hurting themselves, and there is a back button for a reason. And there’s even a multiple-back button by clicking the little arrow or right-clicking the whole thing. Magically, it all works out that the page is stored somewhere. I know my idea is still to just let the user open the link however they want and I won’t design anything that checks to see if you opened a new window or not. Seems like a lot of wasted development time and user time for something that really shouldn’t happen in the first place. Now if only I could get my professor to see that so I don’t have to have either 10 windows or double the clicks to get it in a single window with multiple tabs. The semester is almost over either way. . .

As you can see above, I have two windows shown for comparison. The top is the Design portion of the editor in The Netbeans while the top is the executed version of the exact same window, from within The Netbeans. Why they look different and have different sizes of elements? No fscking clue! <.<`

What. The. Hell. The. Netbeans?!

I should just go back to using vi for everything again…

Besides that, spent Saturday at my girlfriend’s parents for her dad’s birthday (he’s only 45.. my mom turns 55 later this year with my dad not too far behind..) and got back at nearly 2am. Was a ton of fun heading out there to see them and pester their kittens/cats. And today my girlfriend and I biked around the city the bit. Went to Pancheros for an awesome burrito, and then to a couple movies afterwards (Airbender /sucks/ and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is pretty awesome throughout [nice visuals, good PoP feel, good stunts, good story surprisingly]). So all in all, fun weekend and… NO TAEKWONDO THIS WEEK!! WOOOOOO! =D

Anywho, back to the grindstone in the morning. Whee..

So yay for new apartment.

And.

Scheduled posts.