MyTechspot.NET

WotLK Releases Tonight!

You got me! I play World of Warcraft (WoW). My wife and I have been playing WoW for 4 years now. It has had its ups and downs, but in all we've enjoyed the experience. I believe we both still play more for the friendships we've generated in the game then the game itself.

So I've decided to be a complete geek tonight and go hang out in front of GameStop for them to open to sell Wraith of the Lich King (WotLK), the second expansion to WoW. To be honest I probably won't play the game when I get home considering I have a job and it'll be well after midnight before I get home and get the games installed etc. I am however very interested to see who shows up and what the culture is like.

My initial hope was to film and record the pre-sale party (if any), but I believe I'm going to just head there with my iPhone. Do some twittering, take some pictures, maybe exchange contact information with a few people, grab my copy and head back to the house. Where I'm sure my wife will be eagerly waiting for her copy of the expansion.

I do plan to post any points of interest from my night with photos and commentary.

Let the COUNT DOWN BEGIN!

Posted in java | No Comments »

New Site Coming Soon!

I've decided to start writing about another passion in my life [insert drum roll] Video Games. I have been playing video games since I was 4 years old. It started with my parents getting a "Kaleco Vision". Then when I was 7 I got a Commodore 64. I have been a PC gamer ever since. I've bought the occasional hot console system, typically a year or two after release, but I always come back to the PC.

As much as I have gamed I finally decided to join the fold an create my own site about my gaming adventures. I have also been motivated to create this site as I have a personal project in the works related to gaming that will most likely be promoted via the new site.

So without further a due I bring you "impulsivegamer.com". At present I'm squating on domain, but will soon give the domain its only little place on the bigger interwebs.

Posted in development, gaming | No Comments »

Editing WordPress via iPhone

Just a quick update to say I'm still alive. I'm working on a couple of projects right now which I'll provide more details about in the coming weeks.

Posted in iPhone | No Comments »

Understanding the Closures Debate

JavaWorld has an article discussing three of the closure proposals for Java. The article is titled "Understanding the Closures Debate by Klaus Kreft and Angelika Langer.

So, what are closures?

Essentially, a closure is a block of code that can be passed as an argument to a function call, which will execute the block immediately or some time later. To some extent, a closure is similar to an unnamed (or anonymous) function. There is more to it, but for the time being, let us stick to this definition.

Posted in development, java | No Comments »

Doing Open Source Alone

JavaWorld had an article this morning by Kirill Grouchnikov detailing lessons learned when working solo on open source projects.

In you're interested in working on open source or creating your own project give this article a read. "Party of one: Surviving the solo open source project".

Posted in development, opensource | No Comments »

Busy, Busy… and MythTv

I'm still around, most of my personal projects have been put on hold. We're finishing out a development cycle at work so we're pulling out all the stops. In addition to work consuming a large portion of my time I have been taking a little break from the comforts of the inter-tubes to spend time with friends and family. It's the time of year we people want to visit and they expect you to come visit. My idea of visiting the family is a video conference on Skype. Fortunately though, my wife is a little more personable than I and sees to it that I have human interaction.

So I say that I've not been doing much on the computer, but I managed to find the time to download the latest copy of MythTv 0.21 and Ubuntu 8.04 together as Mythbuntu.. The setup was pretty straight forward -- a ton easier than it was the first time I installed/setup MythTv version 0.12.

In case you are interested here's the box I installed everything on... I'll warn you it's not fancy.

Posted in java, mythtv | 1 Comment »

Sun Game Server (SGS) Example POM file

I have always had a passion in gaming and decided to see where that passion takes me. I've been following the development of Project Darkstar: SGS since before release canidate one.

I have started to work on a few tutorials or examples of using SGS recently. I'm also a big fan of Maven, and being that I am thought that it would be a good fit for SGS and it's dependencies.

This version of the POM file does not have support for Berkley DB, but all of the other packages are available. To date the SGS project itself is not available in binary format from one of the maven central repositories, but most of its dependencies are.

 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project>
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>com.sun</groupId>
  <artifactId>sgs</artifactId>
  <version>0.9.5.1</version>
  <description>Sun Gaming Server API</description>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
      <artifactId>slf4j-api</artifactId>
      <version>1.4.0</version>
      <scope>compile</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
      <artifactId>slf4j-jdk14</artifactId>
      <version>1.4.0</version>
      <scope>compile</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.apache.mina</groupId>
      <artifactId>mina-core</artifactId>
      <version>1.1.0</version>
      <scope>compile</scope>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</project>
 

Posted in java | No Comments »

Adding an External JAR to Maven

One of the things I don’t do very often, so I always forget, is how to install a external jar or 3rd party jar into my local maven repository. I recently needed to do this for a prototype I was working on.

 
mvn install:install-file \
    -DgroupId=external.jar.domain \
    -DartifactId=name.of.external.jar \
    -Dversion=version.of.external.jar \
    -Dfile=/full/path/to/jar \
    -Dpackaging=jar \
    -DgeneratePom=true
 

If you have no clue what maven is, then you might want to check out their website.

Posted in java | No Comments »