hoopajoo.net | Older News

This only includes news posts, no project release information is here 2005-09-16 - I just finished converting my cvs trees to a single large subversion repository. It was quite frustrating figuring out the quirks of migrating my data in the way I wanted, but I documented how I did it and the problems I encountered, and how I got around them. Also, my FOSS projects that are still active are now available via subversion from http://svn.hoopajoo.net/svn/projects, you can do an svn list on that url to see what is available.

2005-07-25 - I've added a small woodworking section which I hope to add things to as I build more stuff. Some things are a bit incomplete but oh well, such is the web.

2004-04-21 - I've added several new databases to namoid, so now it also generates NES game titles, atari titles, horror movie titles, super heros, and lots of other junk too. Check it out!

2003-05-06 - Well I've tweaked the proxy some more, now even images are completely stripped from all pages, and on the main proxy page it displays links to view what sites people are visiting. Hopefully that will discourage the abuse. On some positive notes, many scripts have been updated under quick scripts, my MUME scripts have been expanded and updated as well, and I've added the soffice2html script to the projects page that can be used for offline conversion of staroffice/openoffice documents to HTML, including images.

2003-03-06 - Seems the other stuff didn't help, so now I've set it to allow only 40 connections every 5 minutes from any particular IP. After that you have to wait another 5 minutes to get another 40 connections. Yeah it sucks, should get you about 4 pages though.

2003-03-05 - Due to some recent abuse to the proxy filter, there have been restrictions put in place which make it less usable. First, no authentication sites allowed, e.g. no password cracking using my proxy. Second, only 15 total connections can be made at a time, otherwise you'll get an error message. I'll probably change this to throttle by IP instead, so it might go away.

2003-02-11 - I'm moving some stuff around to make more sense, and added a small penguin gallery of penguins I've drawn. Got motivated to do it since I bought my Wacom Graphire II USB and got it working under XF86 4.2. It works surprisingly well, and The Gimp is far and away a million times better than Photoshop Elements that comes with the tablet.

2003-01-04 - Wow too many updates. Heh, well I added a MUD section, mostly for MUME but maybe if I play more MUDs in the future they will go there. Many of my MUME scripts for powwow are there, good for examples or even just to drop in and use them. Also, a few more dictionaries added to the namoid section, animals, arcade games, and medical terms.

2003-01-02 - I added a couple more namoid dictionaries, one for elvish names, orkish names, and computer professions. Be the first Admineer in your IT dept! Try it out here.

2002-12-29 - I got some time to update the look of the site while on vacation for the last week in California. Beats the heck out of the snow here, but I'm back now. I've also added some minor features here and there, look around to find them. I also plan on sticking up my powwow scripts for MUME soon, including lots of actions for mundane annoyances, and some scripts to help walk roads, which while not hard, is also usually pretty boring.

2002-11-30 - Added some new stuff to some sections, most notably (or not) a word generator. The namoid script creates words or names based on letter frequency to make stuff that sounds like the example input. Dictionaries for male and female names, normal words, and one based on the characters from Lord of the Rings, useful perhaps if you play MUME.

2002-07-25 - I'm releasing some of the tools I used to create Ignignot that allowed him to find letters on screen and feed them to the spelldown script and the click the letters, and score his whopping 3 million points!

2002-07-16 - I've got the spelldown cheat script basically done, and now I've got a spelldown playing bot called Ignignot of Aqua Teen Hunger Force fame. Quick, run to the spelldown page and find out how to watch it play!

2002-07-08 - The time bonus stuff has been figured out in the spelldown cheat! Now it will rank by the time bonus you'll get, so that you can play virtually forever. Now that I've got it, let's hope they don't screw with it. :) Check it out here or download it here!

2002-07-05 - I've been playing Yahoo! Games a lot, starting with pool, then got in to the word games. Spelldown was sucking up a lot of time, but I could never break 500 points, and there were guys with more than 50,000 points! I didn't under stand (and actually still don't) but now I can at least break 1000 with my Spelldown Cheat script, also available for download standalone. If you can figure out how they award time bonus points, please tell me!

2002-05-13 - Added a tiny Links page with a few links. In other news, my pool table will be here tommorrow. I am prepared for a massive drop in productivity. :)

Also, whoever created the damn CICC-Agent and DIA-Test bots, they need to stop crawling my freakin website. I get like 20 errors a day on the website caused by these things mis-reading HREF tags. Stupid bots. For now, they are being banned so I don't see the messages, but I'm sure more will come. Stupid progammers.

2002-05-02 - I've put up a Phone-a-gram script which finds words using your phone number, alternately using a dictionary as well to minimize noise. It's in the Quick Scripts section and there is an online version available in the Toys section.

2002-04-29 - I'm all moved in now, and even mowed my lawn last weekend. For those interested, there is a photo album that will be up for a while, and may come down later or be filled with more crappy photos.

For others, I've added the Quick Scripts area that has one-off or other too-small to be project type scripts. Lots of stuff in there already, and I'm always making more.

2002-04-17 - Well it's finally happened! I got the keys on Monday, spent all day Tuesday moving stuff, and now on Wednesday I'm cleaning my old apartment.

Funny (or not) thing today, the cable co was supposed to come and transfer my service today. Between the hours of 8 and 5 they say. "No way!" I think, but they say they'll call me 15 minutes before they show up on my cel phone. So I show up at the house, about 10AM, brought the TV and router, so I could test the internet and stuff, and I find a message on the door. "Sorry we missed you, we tried to call but couldn't get through" it says. Yeah right, my phone didn't show any missed calls.

So now, I'm a day behind moving in and I've gotta wait until Friday for my internet that I need to do work... Grr. Not to mention the $2000 I just spent on appliances.

Good lord a house is expensive!

2002-03-29 - I'm in the middle of trying to buy a house, and everything is done. Except the appraisal, which I need for the loan. It's all been done since last week, and the appraisal was supposed to be completed before the end of the week, but for some reason my lender has been unable to get in contact with them.

C'mon now, does anyone want my money here? Or do they just want me to sit around until they think they're ready? This is ridiculous.

In other news, I've been working on a media directory. First I checked out freshmeat to see if anyone had made something like that, and I though, "Wow, the freshmeat code would be perfect!" However I've found that the code isn't anywhere, interesting idea, promote open source and be the number 1 directory for open source apps, but don't offer your directory as open source. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, I'd love to check out the freshmeat code.

2002-02-12 - I've just finished moving our small /28 of routable space to the new address space because an un-named provider failed to secure our IP space after buying out our current provider, but that's the way it goes I guess. There has been minor activity in the projects section, I'm adding new and useless stuff now, just some smallish scripts that I like to use almost daily.

2002-01-04 - Before I mention the newest project, I though I would gloat about my new uber-cool joystick that should be here soon from x-arcade.com. MAME here I come!! WHOOO!
Anyway, the new project is my sentinel that does system monitoring and now can even react to adverse conditions. It's got some older stuff in there too becuase I just made it visible today after many enhancements.
Hope to bring more documentation to it soon, but it's probably already got more documentation than anything I've written. :)
This is already being used in production on a few networks I work on and seems to work well. If anyone tries it, lemme know.

2001-12-11 - I've added a few patches, not really projects, but they are on the project page. The patches are for a few emulators out there, snes9x and fceultra. If you don't know, they are a snes and nes emulator, respectively. Anyways, I have a USB gamepad, with like 16 buttons or something, which means I have more buttons than I know what to do with. So I figured, well it'd be nice if I could bind one of those buttons to the save-state command, so I wouldn't have to take my hands of the controller during the heated parts of the game where the save-state is needed most. Yes, it's cheap, but with it I will someday beat all those games that caused me so much grief when I was younger.

2001-11-21 - Along with the regular project updates, I've finally put a few minutes in to cleaning up some of the HTML in the site, and just learned how really cool the <link> tag is. If you have mozilla, lynx, or another browser that understands the tag you'll get some extra useless links. Yet another reason to use the latest mozilla, besides the cool tabs, popup blocking, css compliance, great png support, and of course it's free.

2001-10-22 - Updates have been few lately, I've been pretty busy. Also I swapped out my server with another box and took the old server home since it was an AMD Athlon 650 and my home machine was just a PII 300. But damn, that VIA board is giving me headaches and lockups. If anyone has tips, send them my way.

2001-08-15 - I've been working on my idea to make an ebonics proxy filter for the web. Details about the proxy are here.

2001-08-13 - I've added a new project, an indexed pdf converter. I'm using it in our report archive at work, this is mostly a re-vamped older work that allows unlimited indexing and has autoconf support so others can build it easily. See it here and a demo is available here.

2001-08-08 - I've added my new Color Wheel of Death. It's basically just an interactive navigatable color wheel that shows RGB and HEX colors. Handy for making color tags in HTML. Check it out.

2001-08-02 - I've been working out bugs, adding tips, and updating projects but most changes are pretty minor. I'm currently working on our LUG webpage for Yakima. If you like to see the demo, see it here. When that's done, maybe I'll push forward on my own site.

2001-07-19 - I broke it somehow. I think I typo-ed in my httpd.conf or something. Anyway, works now. Also, I added a little sync daemon/client that I threw together because I haven't found anything that was simple and easy to manage for that kind of thing. Rsync/cvs/whatever were just too bulky. Have a look.

2001-07-16 - I'm revamping the tip section, new interface, searching, and more info. Check it out if you have a chance.

2001-07-12 - After fighting with sendmail/qmail/whatever trying to make things more secure, I suddenly had a great idea. Go here and read all about it. Basically I realized that you could dynamically replace the view of userid/names to a program by replacing the getpw* related functions, either through LD_PRELOAD or by -laltpw at compile time.

2001-06-25 - Power went out. Server wouldn't boot. Isn't that how it always goes? I think I need a new hard drive.... argh...

2001-06-15 - Fixed some bugs related to the PObject updates and some real bugs in the Site Tools like unpredictable badform() handline and some stability enhancements to the Template package. Also added some (rather pathetic) example scripts. Be the first on your block to download it today!

2001-05-23 - My site is on a new server now. Things shouldn't change much, the only real difference is it's off my workstation now. This did however make me wanna write my sys info script. Enjoy if you can.

2001-05-11 - The site modules are documented now!! Download them, tell me what you think. Available through the Project Page and notes are on the Site Modules project page. Email me with questions/comments/flames or use my lazy person form for quick submissions. There is a demo available.

2001-05-08 - Creative title, eh? Anyway, I'm tweaking some layout things now and there's been a few updated modules in the last week. The SQLObject has been sped up quite a bit for SQL_SELECT calls, and there is a mksqlobj.pl script for creating skeleton objects from a postgresql database. I've also added an online mail form for those that hate mailto: links. I know I do. I think I might be putting in a rant section too. You can never rant too much.

2001-04-24 - I've been fighting with apache for weeks because my DocumentRoot and ScriptAlias / are the same. Unfortunately, under a script directory, it will not do the / -> index.html thing, so I've been using a permenant redirect. I didn't like that, so then I fought with mod_redir for a while. Also very inefficient. Now I have found the answer!!! Apparently you can ScriptAlias to a FILE which means the / can actually be aliased to /index.pl!! Anyway, I'm excited. I'll throw it in the tips section soon.

2001-04-19 - I got an account at www.cafepress.com today. It's a pretty cool site, you upload images and they can make t-shirts out of them, or you can start a store! My store is here. Buy lots of stuff. I know I won't get rich, but they say it's OK to just print off 1 shirt there for yourself if you want, and you get it at your store's cost. So if you've ever wanted your very own t-shirt, go get one!

2001-04-17 - I'm in the middle of changing all the site classes to use CGI for major backend stuff since it's a common module and changing all the functions to use lcase_ type naming. Trying to be 'perl compliant'.

2001-04-14 - Added the wonder 'all your base' reference at the top here, and also added some more descriptions to some pages. My resume is also available on the 'Me' page for anyone who cares. As for the modules, I'm in the middle of an API change (again) to make things work more like traditional perl stuff. Using _'s instead of mixed case for one.

2001-04-04 - Brought back my old translator app. I think I might add some new languages to it, I did it back when Y2K was big and it had a Y to K translater. Heh, the good ol' nieve days when I didn't even shift(), had to open( "|" ) to get web output, and join(", ",$_ -> PKey(),grep( defined( $_ ),map( $_ -> fields(),@{ $Self -> { FIELDS } } ) ) ); wasn't even grok'able... heh.

2001-03-17 - The project page has been updated with the new site::* code to handle SQLObject bindings. And stuff.

2001-03-12 - The new SQL forms/tables library is working and it's much cooler now. I can create an object based on an SQL class and then it will create the forms and tables for me, and I can even bind template to them!! Too cool. Anyways...

2001-02-28 - The projects section sorta kinda works now, I've been rather distracted by some new perl objects I'm working on to create bindings for SQL tables easily which (hopefully) will integrate in to my Forms/Tables/Templates modules.

2001-02-25 - Things appear to be moving forward now, the tips section at least is "working" somewhat and new sections are planned, including hopefully a section with emulation gaming/reviews/ratings and possibly more! Same bat time, same bat channel!

2001-02-22 - Well, I've spent the last few days beginning the port away from php back to the friendly world of perl. I've been on a big perl object kick lately so obviously my website needs to reflect that. :)

2001-02-21 - Testing out phpPgAdmin for database updates... Sure beats the hell out of creating all custom forms!

2000-10-02 - I know I haven't updated in a LONG time, and the site is lacking in "Cool Stuff" so I'm starting to work on content again. Hopefully an update will be forthcoming soon.

2000-07-09 - The tip system works, somewhat, and I'm starting to add tips to the archive now. Stay posted.

2000-07-08 - I've been on vacation this week and had hoped to work on the web page, well, I'm finally going to do it tonight. Hopefully I'll finish up my tips section and actually put some in there.

2000-07-08 - The stupid escape string bug in my forms code is fixed now, so hopefully development can continue as usual.

2000-07-08 - Still a bug in my form handling code, and I cant use apostrophes. I have to see if I can fix that so I can work on more important things.

2000-06-20 - I have finally got around to building a tip database I had an idea for, and will start building content for it soon. Keep an eye out.

2000-06-06 - Finally put up SOMETHING on the project page. It should get more elaborate from here. :)

2000-05-31 - Got a new computer, so the programming frenzy should resume soon.

2000-05-30 - I've upgraded to Postgres 7.0 so there should be some speed improvements, and the forms and tables modules are more robust now.

2000-05-16 - Underlying project tables are in place now, hopefully I'll have something to show for it soon.

2000-05-15 - I updated the forms module I use to keep data in the database to include text-area support, so now I should do regular updates to the page. There were also some bugfixes, so the project area may work better now. Fixed a bug that made that last message not work too. :)

2000-05-15 -

2000-05-14 - Another test

2000-05-12 - This is a test.