www.tasteslikepurple.com

Looked the other day and found out there were a lot of accounts created on this site from bots. I've removed all the accounts and changed the permissions so that visitors can't sign-up anymore, it was a pain to delete tons of accounts that had never actually logged in. Thank goodness for e-mail verification and secure settings :). If anyone actually wants to sign-up for an account, highly unlikely in my opinion, you can send me an e-mail at nurple @ tasteslikepurple.com and I'll set you up.

So as probably no one has noticed I've switched the site over to Drupal, it has a lot of the features I was looking to add to Wordpress already available and it's just a but nicer to do the more complex things with. The main reason I made the change it that I'm going to start to slowly spew my PKI knowledge out in to a Wiki/FAQ style thing that people will be able to look through and hopefully learn interesting things. With the workload I have at work right now it will probably be a slow start but I've already taken the first step in getting my tools ready.

Ok so I must first say that Vegas is awesome. Now that that's out of the way. Everyones first visit to Vegas should just be written off as just a getting your feet wet experience. You'll most likely spend all your time just walking around doing the touristy stuff. Which is cool since there's a lot of stuff to see, the strip alone is worth a couple of days, and especially nights, of walking around and just looking at all the casinos. If you can be on your feet for a few hours then walking down the strip at night is definitely worth doing. Between all the lights, 30 foot TV screens, fountains and the casinos all lit up it's like wandering around a Disneyland for adults.

Even if you're not up for gambling there is tons of stuff to do, I spent way more money on attractions than gambling. With all the different roller coasters and rides you could spend a couple of weeks just seeing stuff and not have to worry about hitting a show or a slot machine. The view from the Slingshot on top of the Stratosphere is also breath taking, being 1150ft above the strip gives you a great perspective of just what Vegas is all about. You have the strip and not a whole lot else. If you get more than a couple of blocks from the strip then you wander into just a regular small town, not unlike most of the small SoCal that are just across the border. Aside from the fact that most the waitresses in the casinos wearing little more than what you'd see at the beach, it's also pretty kid friendly. I'd probably take my son there for a few days when he gets a few years older and can be let to wander if he wants to.

I went down with my folks, which kinda led to me not doing all the heavy partying that I was planning on, but did have a good time. Next time I go I'm totally going either alone or with a couple of friends, 'cause it's going to be all about me and some heavy abuse of my own body through lack of sleep and alcohol ingestion. I'm trying to make plans for going out during the week in February when they host the porn conventions, not that I'm that into porn but hey if they're throwing a convention it's something I want to experience it.

Oh, almost forgot I got a couple of tattoos while I was there. I know, it's cliche but I've been wanting them for a while and figured it would make a nice souvenir. I got a couple of Japanese cherry blossom based tattoos, one on each shoulder. They're kinda the start of a chest piece I want, have it all planned just need to get someone good to do the drawing and ink.

I took a bunch of pictures that I'll be uploading to my Flickr account, they'll all be tagged with the Vegas keyword if you're interested.

-nurple

Since we last left our intrepid blogger much has happened.

I picked up a new digital camera, a Canon Powershot SD1000 Digital Elph. Really nice little camera, nowhere near the Nikon D80 that I want, but its definitely a very passable day to day shooter. Ive put up some of the shots I took of the fireworks on the 4th into my flickr, just hit up the photos section here to see them.

Speaking of the 4th brings me to my next topic. I spent the Wednesday of gunpowder worship at a friendsfor a BBQ. We had a good old time sitting in the back yard with thesprinkler going for the kids to play in. Eating ribs and bratwurst. An all around enjoyable time. After the food and revelry I went to meet my folks for some big booms and pretty lights. The small town they live in seems to have a Napoleon complex and puts on huge fireworks shows to make up for its relatively low population. Having Casinos and beer distributors as sponsors helps too I guess.

To go along with the frivolity of my personal life, work has been taking a larger chunk of my awake time than usual. Im trying to get several projects done at the same time so the number of conscious hours spent in the office has gone up by quite a bit. Im also trying to get ahead on work as I plan on spending all of next week in Sin City itself, good old Vegas. So aside from having a short week last week and having a short week this week, as I have a cousins wedding to attend on Friday, and not being in next week Im trying to cram 3 weeks of work into a week and a half. Im failing. Im trying but it just doesnt seem to be working as it should. Oh well, Im the only one around work who knows how half the stuff we make works so I never really get in much trouble when I mess up.

With all the non-work activities I already have planned for the next few months my friends and family just keep convincing me to go out and do more. Ive recently been talked into going to a little music fest thrown by a local radio station (ok it wasnt that hard, Smashing Pumpkins and Social Distortion are headlining so it was something I wanted to see anyway). Im also going camping a couple of times this summer. I appear to have been volunteered for a trip to Disneyland as well. Damn my friends and family. Dont they know that I should be just sitting home alone, staring at the wall and wondering why Im not doing more work.

-nurple

So it looks like Wizards of the Coast is putting out a new version of the Star Wars pen and paper game. I must say I am definitely stoked about it, I've already ordered mine off Amazon and am just waiting for it to ship. I've been playing pen and paper games for bout 14 years now. I started with Rifts and moved on to D&D (3.0 and 3.5), the first Star Wars version and some other smaller independent games. Done some D6 gaming also, mainly Shadowrun.

From playing around with the different systems I can kinda compare the differences, and I must say on average the D6 system used in Shadowrun is way simpler to understand than the D20 system used in almost any other system. So it's really great to hear that they've simplified the rules in the new Star Wars book. Starting with combining some of the related skill into a sort of skill group, meaning you roll against the skill group for any of the skill in that group. For example if you need to make a spot or listen check you would roll for the perception group. The skills levels are also gone, meaning you are either trained in a skill or not and all rolls for that skill are based on your character level.

Also gone is the horrible tracking of how many attacks per round everyone has, you get one. If you try really hard you can get more than one, but by default you get one. Nice, simple, no more of the crazy warriors with 12 melee actions taking out the whole enemy army in 2 melee rounds.

Now I know that there will be some "hardcore" players that will think that WotC is just nerfing the system to let the lamers casual gamers in, but personally I think that the changes are going to be appreciated by all. And if any of the number crunching, stat min-maxing, love to argue semantics of minor details, "serious" players want to complain about the changes all I have to say is: My Light saber, your "where the sun don't shine", savvy?

-nurple

OK so is anyone else wondering what's happened to SOAP? I remember a couple of years ago SOAP was all the rage. By allowing websites to communicate and transfer data in an easy to use method that was almost seamless to the app developer was just awesome. I did my share of SOAP deving, used SOAP to make a web service for an old site to handle my blog which made my life a lot easier. For the app developer SOAP was amazingly powerful and easy to use, just grab a SOAP library and away you went. With just a couple of extra lines of code you could turn your PHP script into a SOAP app.

But nowadays it seems that unless it's a browser driven call nobody wants to touch it. AJAX, REST, JSON, Flash(well Flash was always a contender but moreso again) and the other client side technologies have seemed to take over the web app space. Don't get me wrong I'm not against these new technologies, I've dabbled in AJAX and think the idea of dynamic client updating of only specific parts of the page is great, it's just that we had a perfectly good framework for app development that is now languishing in obscurity when it's still a perfectly valid answer to many of todays needs.

I've been reading some recent posts by Dare Obasanjo about GData and some of the issues with implementing a good data transmission standard. With many of the problems being pointed out as proper data type definitions and the flexibility to be able to define custom structures, something that SOAP takes care of very handily. The other major issue pointed out was data freshness which will almost always be an issue when dealing with clients talking with a multi-user server, the sugesstion of using versioning for the stored data would help mitigate this but it's not a perfect solution.

I know that my view of things is being tainted because I've always been more of a desktop application developer than a web application developer, but I've found that on average code is code. Seeing SOAP pushed to the wayside becuase it's not easily directly callable through Java-script is a shame. I've looked into direct calls to SOAP from javascript and must say I am a bit disappointed in Microsoft. Firefox/Mozilla have a fairly decent looking solution in the form of javascript objects to do the calling for the script. Microsoft on the other hand seems to make you hand build the XML to pass into the call, bad form guys, especially for a company that was one of the biggest supporters of SOAP with it's entire .NET platform being based on it. I may have missed some great method that everyone else knows of, if I have please enlighten me because I would love a simple, cross platform way to call SOAP from the browser.

I guess for now I must lament the passing of a protocol that, to me at least, had far more potential than most people gave it credit for and have now tossed aside like so many other pieces of tech because something newer and shinier has come along.

-nurple

So here's the deal. I'm starting a blog that's going to be about tech, music, cool stuff I find on the web and my life. Unique I know but hey this is my little social experiment. So I'm going to just be posting whatever I feel like and not worry about someone I know seeing it and thinking less of me :). I'll probably be doing a lot of "borrowing" from other blogs/news sites as sites like Boing-Boing, Slashdot and Engadget are my main news sources. I don't watch TV news, well really don't watch TV at all if you don't count a couple of torrented British shows, and don't read the news paper, the only stuff on there is either doom and gloom we're all going to die because everything in this world is somehow harmful or it's some BS that they just put in because they ran out of doom and gloom.

So here you'll see some of my rantings, some news stories and some bands/artists that have caught my eye, umm, well ear I guess. So stay tuned to this space for what I have to say. If you don't feel like checking the page manually that's what RSS is for by the way, so just use the RSS link at the bottom and subscribe in your favorite aggregator so it'll tell you when I post.

-nurple