Here is the old site look, for posterity:

First, I needed a way to access and display games that a user is currently playing. This can be done with the API: http://weewar.com/api1/user/[username] and is already partially done with the Weewar Profiler Greasemonkey script, which I was already somewhat familiar with, having had to edit it every time there was a Weewar UI change that broke it. I adapted that to take in a username from an HTML form and use the Javascript XMLHttpRequst object, but then it didn’t work. It turns out that, unlike Greasemonkey, using normal Javascript, you can’t make calls to pages outside of your domain, for security reasons. That makes sense, but was a bummer.

So I had to make the API calls from my webhosting server and decided to learn how to do it using PHP, which I barely knew. (What other easy ways are there?) I used this as a reference, and just now realized upon exploring the Yahoo Developer Center that my approach was already documented here: Fixing AJAX: XMLHttpRequest Considered Harmful. Ha! I guess that doesn’t leave much to say except that I pretty much did method #1 there.

Also, since I had to make many XMLHttpRequest requests, I had to make an array of those objects to keep them from confusing one another. It took me a while to figure out why that was happening, why I was only getting one or a couple requests returned correctly. So I guess that’s it. Now I know how to make REST calls using sockets in Java, Apache HttpClient in Java, the Spring 3 REST template in Java, XMLHttpRequest objects in Javascript, GM_xmlhttpRequest in Greasemonkey Javascript, and the cURL extension in PHP. Whoo!

Aside: I just realized that the Poster Firefox add-on, which I had downloaded a couple weeks back, makes REST calls as well, and in a much more general-purpose way. Oh well. I wouldn’t have learned much had I not done all that I had done yesterday, so it was not all for nothing. =) Here is what resulted from it, by the way: Weewar Bot Control

Hm. Am I an aspiring web programmer? It certainly is fun and the Internet is the Wave of the Future/Present. I’ll have to think on that some more. I’m still quite attached to neuroscience research. At the very least, web programming is a nice, useful hobby. =)

Also, in searching for code to deal with chunked responses, I came across Apache HttpComponents. I knew something like this existed by Apache but I didn’t realize that it took care of so much for you. Now I’m wondering why the Citrus Framework doesn’t use this to handle HTTP requests. Right now, it uses mostly Spring to handle a fair amount of the configuration and message building, but it doesn’t yet handle chunked responses, at least not that I’m aware of. Now, to code it manually or use massive amounts of code already written? That’s obvious. I should talk with the Citrus developer, get onboard, and see if he has a preference first though, since these changes to the Citrus source would be useful to others too.

Also, let me know what you think of the design in general and if anything should be changed.

For the last week, working through this project, I’ve re-learned and learned quite a lot about HTTP requests, Ant, DTD/XSD, and XPath, and I feel much more comfortable dealing with those now than I did a week ago. It’s a good feeling to have learned and done something new that’s kind of on the cutting edge of things, and to have fun doing so too! Ah, I sound so corny. Anyway, I can’t wait to get more involved with the company that this project is for and delve into some code that has a lot of potential and fun-value. I’m just waiting on approval from the developers now, but so far things look good. Wish me luck! =)

Text/cursor control:

History control:

(There are many more history control commands, but I don’t need to use them as frequently. See the last two references for them.)

Other useful shortcuts:

Also, I learned something new today while fixing up the CSS for the site. Margins can overlap. =O

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_keyboard_shortcuts#Command_line_shortcuts
http://www.computerhope.com/ushort.htm
http://blog.macromates.com/2008/working-with-history-in-bash/
http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#History-Interaction

Lately, my hard drive has been having major startup problems. It would whir and clackle when trying to start after a night or a few hours off and would usually not get detected by my laptop until after ten or fifteen tries to start. So today, I went over to a good friend’s house and swapped my failing hard drive with an old hard drive that he was no longer using. It ran fine in my computer and mine wouldn’t run in his computer so it was the hard drive that had problems and not my good old laptop.

After returning home, I put in the windows 7 repair disk I made yesterday to reinstall Windows. The first few tries didn’t work apparently because my external hard drive was attached. After it loaded, I plugged in my external, loaded the system image that I made yesterday, and replaced the contents of my friend’s hard drive with the image.

Once that finished (and a couple restarts), I used the Win7 backup tool to get all of the files and directories in my data partition back. That didn’t seem to restore everything (visibly, the positions of my desktop icons weren’t restored, but there were other problems) so I sent my system back to the restore point made during the system image/backup yesterday. That fixed the desktop icon positions, but:
1) my Windows Explorer “Favorites” in the sidebar was empty and I could not modify it or restore its contents to the default,
2) (minor) the folder icons for special folder such as “My Music” and “My Documents” didn’t appear, and
3) (minor) in the control panel, all of the user images except for the guest one were blank – changing the picture did change the picture elsewhere on my system, but for some reason the frame showing the current picture in the “control panel” > “add or remove user accounts” was white, even after creating a new user and selecting a picture.

I dug for solutions on the interwebs and remembered that Favorites actually maps to Links in my Users/ directory (not intuitive at all). Once I made that folder, right clicked “Favorites” in the sidebar, and selected “Restore favorite links,” the folder populated with the three default links and I could modify its contents! I was ecstatic since I use the shortcuts that I place there frequently. Also, moving “My Documents” and “My Music” around and back to my E:\ brought back the appropriate icons. I have yet to find a fix for the user image problem, but that doesn’t really affect anything.

Edit: Also had to make all of my data in E:\ not read-only in order to do certain things. Not sure why it was read-only before.

So in case I ever do this again (likely) or any of you do, I hope this helps. =)

Started around 5:45 or so.

Update 5:50pm – I reformatted my hard drive using the disk utility in the install dvd but was unable to create and resize partitions, which kinda sucks, since I was planning on keeping a separate partition for my OS and for my data. Maybe I can do it after finishing the installation, using the Disk Management Tool? Maybe?

Update 6:05pm (ish) – Done! Now configuring computer settings.

Update 6:10pm (ish) – Windows Update running.

Update the next day – All is working fine and all of the important and relevant files in my life today have been migrated over from my external. I had some annoyances with partitioning but I think it will be okay. The new directory structure and windows explorer sidebar is going to take a little getting used to from XP. The jump lists are pretty cool, and I will probably spend a good chunk of today reading through the many Lifehacker posts on the cool new features in Windows 7. I’ll also be trying to keep my desktop clean and clutter-free as well! Only the recycle bin and very temporarily relevant/important files will be there. I hope I can keep that up. Overall, Windows 7 is pretty sleek and a nice upgrade from XP. I haven’t tried any of the new functionality yet, but appearance- and usability-wise, I like it.

Update the morning after the next day – It seems that adding shortcuts to a folder in the Start Menu is difficult when not logged in as an administrator. I tried to create a shortcut to CCleaner in a new CCleaner folder I made in the Start Menu programs folder, but Windows said it could not be done and asked me if I wanted to make one on the Desktop first. I said yes and it did so after prompting for the admin password, and then I moved the Desktop shortcut into the CCleaner folder in the Start Menu programs folder. It worked (with admin password) and created a new shortcut there. I made sure that the new shortcut pointed to the original .exe file and then deleted the one on the Desktop.

It’s weird that I had to use the Desktop as an intermediate copy area in order to create the shortcut; it probably has to do with problems requiring admin permission for more than one step of the process or creating a shortcut from an admin-only area to an admin-only area. I never used a non-administrator account with XP so I don’t know how that worked before, but this is kinda odd. By the way, I am using a non-admin account for an extra level of security, as recommended by Coding Horror.

Hopefully these changes plus the smackdown on spam will encourage me to blog some more. (Comments will still be moderated until I am sure spam is under control.)

Now for some miscellaneous things:

In the meantime, for my reference, I like to keep two aliases for my bash shell:

alias ll='ls -l'
alias ls='ls -aG' # for the BSD ls
alias ls='ls -a --color=auto' # for the GNU ls

I also like to change the default color for directories (blue) to cyan when in BSD (cyan foreground not otherwise used) so that I can see it better.

export LSCOLORS="gxfxcxdxbxegedabagacad"

In GNU ls, there is a different method and cyan is used for symbolic links, so rather than have two different colors for directories, which I see far more often than symbolic links, let’s change the directory color to blue and symbolic link color to yellow:

—-I’ll finish this up soon—-

For compiling a Java program using Cygwin and including the jxl.jar library (typical bin, lib, src setup):

#!/bin/bash
javac -cp `cygpath -wp lib/jxl.jar:.` -d bin $(find src -name '*.java')

For running a Java program using Cygwin and including the jxl.jar library (two parameters passed):

#!/bin/bash
java -cp `cygpath -wp lib/jxl.jar:src/:.` main.class.Name $1 $2

For running the above Java program on a Mac without the Mac top menu bar and with a specified dock name:

#!/bin/bash
java -cp lib/jxl.jar:src/:. -Dapple.laf.useScreenMenuBar=true
-Xdock:name="Program Name" main.class.Name $1 $2

Note to self: <pre> tags do not have word wrap. Consider using a special scrollable text field or plugin for displaying code.