jorge's jome

So I successfully defended myself in traffic court on Monday, despite the officer lying during his testimony. I was going to type a really long rant but I figured no one really gives a shit and I knew after a few days I'd cool off. I'm still quite upset about the incident, there is something fundamentally wrong with the system when a law enforcement officer feels that lying in traffic court is acceptable. I'm convinced I would have lost, had I not had a witness in the vehicle with me at the time I was cited, who testified on my behalf.

Anyway, on to the more interesting stuff...I realize that this is very much a knee-jerk reaction to this incident, but I've starting building a video recording unit for my truck. I would have loved to present a video of the incident during my testimony in traffic court, had such a thing been available to me. Of course, not before I would have led the officer down his merry little path of lies. Am I bitter about the incident? Hell, yes!

Incidentally, had I known the officer was going to lie I would have argued my case in a completely different manner. So if you're going to challenge your ticket in court, you should be prepared for the officer to lie so you'll be ready when that happens. I sort of assumed he would tell the truth, and had no contingency plan in place.

I'm off topic again...so I'm building this system for my auto. Here is the list of items I have purchased so far:

Swann DIY Security Cam
VIA EPIA M Mini-ITX motherboard
Adaptec VideOh! CD video converter kit (The newer version is USB 2.0)
Fujitsu 80GB 2.5" laptop drive

About the only thing I'm missing is a case and an automotive power supply so I can run it in my vehicle.

Initially, I'm going to go with Gentoo for the OS, and probably use FAME for video encoding. I'll have some photos up in the next day or two. I hope to have it working tonight.

I hate cops.

Posted by at 3:46 PM | Permalink

World of Warcraft is my current gaming addiction. And, of course, I have even more fun when I can combine two things I like...such as gaming and writing code. So I've written a combat log parser for World of Warcraft. It's pretty easy to use. If you play the game, you can start logging your combat information by typing '/combatlog'. This will create a file named PlayerCombatLog.txt in the /Logs subdirectory of your WoW installation directory. My parser is browser-based, so you just need to put the name of the file in the edit box and hit the Parse button.

There are a couple of known issues at this time that I am working to resolve, mostly the result of how Blizzard is writing the combat information.

1. Monster names that have a ('s) as part of the name do not get parsed properly. For example, consider the following two lines:

Sneed's Shredder hits you for 74.
Sneed's Frost Bolt hits you for 82.

The format is identical, but in the first line I am getting hit by a monster named Sneed's Shredder, and in the second line I am getting hit by a Frost Bolt cast by a monster named Sneed. It's probably just a matter of arranging the regular expression matches and the lookahead, so I should have that fixed soon.

2. Special attacks are not counted as part of the parsing process. This is because all special attacks by friendly players have the exact same format (e.g., Sneed is afflicted by Rend). It would help if Blizzard added the PC name to this message so I would know which player performed the attack, but since I have no way of knowing, it is impossible for me to get an accurate count.

Here is a screenshot of some sample output.

So, give it a try and let me know what you think.

Posted by at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

If you want a good laugh, check out this product information page at Amazon. First, read the system features (pay special attention to the OS, hard drive size and processor), and then read the reviews. You might want to hurry, they'll probably fix it soon.

Posted by at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The desert wildflowers are at their peak, so grab your camera and head out to the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park for an amazing display of color. One of the best places to see them in bloom is the north end of Di Giorgio Road. Just drive east from the state park visitor center, around the traffic circle, to Di Giorgio Road. Then make a left and head north until the road ends. I've made two trips to Anza-Borrego so far this year. I'll be camping there this weekend, most likely, and plan to make at least one more trip later this month. I have a few pictures that I'll be posting in the next few days as soon as I get my last batch of slides back from the photo lab. I'll also be pitching some article ideas to several magazines and see if I can get an article published.

Posted by at 11:35 AM | Permalink

The press announcement from last month can be found here. If it lives up to the hype, this will probably be my new film of choice, with color saturation similar to Velvia 50 but with an extra stop. And pushing it one more stop would make it very attractive for shooting wildlife. Can't wait to get my hands on this one.

Posted by at 12:16 PM | Permalink

Well, this all started because I couldn't find the name of one of the guests on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. One thing led to another, and next thing you know, I've written a web page to search DirecTV listings for the coming week. It's amazing, the stuff you can find out there these days. First, I use XMLTV to get a week's worth of listings in XML format. Then, I use Perl and XPath to suck out the data that I want and stuff it into a MySQL database. Lastly, I wrote a CGI script to allow me to search programming information by channel and/or keywords.

A few things I should mention...first, I only grab a subset of the total number of channels that are available, since I don't watch that much TV, but it's fairly trivial to add more so let me know if your favorite channel is not in the drop-down. Also, you must specify at least one search criteria: channel or keywords. Keywords will be matched against program title and description. Finally, the script performs a boolean full-text search on the keywords, which is a fairly powerful search, allowing you to do things like exclude certain words while including others. One requirement is that your keywords MUST be at least 4 characters each. Look here for a description of some of the things you can do with this type of search. Oh, and I should also mention that the information is for San Diego DirecTV programming only.

Now that you know all about it, why don't you give it a whirl?

Posted by at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It has been a while since I used the Google APIs for anything, some of you may recall that I had added a Google search to my site, which I removed a few months ago. Well, now Yahoo! has announced their own search API, which has a lot more functionality than the Google API. You can do a web search (duh) as well as image, video, news and local search. Good for them. I was really disappointed that Google hasn't done anything to enhance their API, you can basically only do two things with it: web search and spelling suggestions. Also, Yahoo! allows up to 5,000 queries per day as opposed to Google's 1,000. This sort of reminds me of what GMail did to Hotmail. We'll see if/how Google responds. In the meantime, I have yet another project to keep me busy.

Posted by at 11:50 AM | Permalink