Josh-Kerr.com

A couple weeks ago I got myself a Flickr account and have been posting all my photos up there. I then added the FAlbum plugin to my blog so that the photos would be viewable while keeping the same theme. There was of course some CSS issue with the layout of FAlbum and my theme. Obviously I’m using a “Left Colum” design where all navigation/links/polls/etc are on the left and all the content is on the right. This type of design is widely used, as is the “Right Column” but FAlbum didn’t integrate too well with it. FAlbum uses Float: left; on all the thumbnails to place as many thumbnails on one “row” as possible. This poses a big problem since I too am using Float: left; for the navigation column. The long and short of it is when you do a clear: left; or clear: both; it clears the left column too. My photo album is up and running however it doesn’t look at good as I’d like. I’ll be working on a “Right-Colum” design to see if that helps.

I moved almost all of my posts from Jokerr.com over to this site today. I say almost because I moved them manually and decided to skip a few entries that were not relevant to this site. Also, a few comments were not moved over.  If you notice that your comment is missing and would like it put back, let me know and I’ll move it over.

I was checking out my usual sites during my lunch break when I came across this article on CNN. After reading the article I was shocked by the number of mob beatings going on up in Milwaukee. What exactly are parents doing up there? If I would have done anything remotely similar as these kids when I was there age my father would have had my head on a plate. It was “yes ma’am”, “yes sir”, “no ma’am”, “no sir” when I was growing up, no “if ands or buts” about it. It’s called the Golden Rule people! Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. ALL parents should be teaching and enforcing these principals.

WordPress 2.0 came out not too long ago and it’s worth a look. The admin panel has been given a facelift and makes it easier to manage posts and pages. A variety of tools have been added so you can import your existing blog from other sites too. 2.0 is still only a release candidate but no problems here just yet. I’m interested to see what else it can do.

This is it, FP @ Josh-Kerr.com! I’ve been having issues with my other site, jokerr.com, and decided to go with another provider. At the same time I registere another domain name for “free”. I like having Jokerr.com seeing as how it was my username in college and I still use it in a lot of places however Josh-Kerr.com sounds and looks more professional. Unfortunately JoshKerr.com was taken as was JoshKerr.net. The .com guy actually updates his site frequently and looks good too. The .net guy is squatting on the name. I’ve offered to buy the name from him but he never replied. Now I have a lot to do, transferring my old site to this new one and setting up all the emails, access, and “hoop in las” that come with it.

– Josh out.

Hope you all have a safe and wonderful Christmas. God bless you!

A while back when I first went to work for Avanade I had to go to Charlotte, NC. During my time there I worked with William Tan. William was a great guy to work with and a strong Christian. Unfortunately he and I only got to work together for about a week and a half. While up in Charlotte we played soccer. William came in one game during the last couple of minutes and was injured. At first we all thought that he twisted his ankle or something like that. Boy were we wrong. The “Tan Man” ended up rupturing his ahckeles heel and was out for some time. Thankfully his injuries have healed and he’s doing just fine. We later ran into each other at a company event and got to catch up. We’ve kept in touch since I left Avanade back in November but he really surprised me with this one. I came home today and found a box of goodies on my poarch. The Tan Man sent me a ham! Thanks dude.

I’ve been working on this old school ASP website for work now for about a month. So far everything is going well and I’m about ready for a beta release. Or so I thought. I was asked to develop the site with the assumption that all users would be accessing the site via a Treo 650 or like model. If you’ve ever done any coding; stand alone or web, you know that developing for one specific type of device/user can be bad. However, since this website is designed to compete with a Palm app and I just started the job I didn’t dwell on the matter too much. So after about four weeks of working around all the shortcomings of Palm and limitations of the Blazer browser my boss comes up to me and tells me that we’ll be changing end user devices to Pocket PC. This is a mixed blessing. The good thing is that Pocket PC, or Windows Mobile, has a fairly decent browser and can actually render thing correctly. The bad thing is that my boss wants me to add all the JavaScript features that I had to exclude because Blazer couldn’t hack it back into the website for the beta release. We’ll be discussing the website again on Monday and I’m 99% sure I’ll get him to say that the JavaScript features can be included in the beta 2 release.

One thing that I should point out is a vast difference in emulators. Palm had a couple of version of the Treo 650 emulator, one for each of the cell phone carriers, and they worked OK. I had too many crashes to count when using Blazer. Go to any site with a multiple select drop down list and it would work 75% of the time as opposed to the Pocket PC emulator that hasn’t crashed on me yet. There was also a big difference in size of the emulators. The Treo was 12 Megs zipped and used 150 Megs of memory when I upped the amount of memory to 128 Megs. 20 Megs of overhead give or take. The Pocket PC emulator was a 3 Meg exe, and 130 Megs if you wanted a skin. 80 Megs for the SKD which had to be installed to install the 50 Meg Windows CE Emulator images and skin. The Pocket PC emulator is actually a Virtual PC application though there is no virtual harddrive to save your prefences to. The Treo would at lease save some of your settings that you made while running the emulator in an ini file. Pros and Cons to both but I think I’ll like working with the Pocket PC a little more than the Palm.

Tonight I bought FEAR, a new FPS game that I’ve been checking out. The game is graphic intensive and then it’s got great graphics.  Lets just say that it’s rated M for a reason.  I installed the game, all 5 CDs, and started it up only to see the Visual Studios .NET 2005 Just-In-Time Debugger come up and say that FEAR caused an error.  Perplexed I checked my running services, made sure that I didn’t do anything in error and tried it again.  Wham!  Debugger again!  So then I tried uninstalling VS2005 from my box.  I figured I have a gig of RAM; I’ll put VS2005 on a VPC and call it a day.  After a successful uninstall I start FEAR again just to see that the Debugger was still there!

Visual Studio Just-In-Time Debugger
An unhandled win32 exception occurred in FEAR.exe [####].  Just-In-Time debugging this exception failed with the following erro: No installed debugger has Just-In-Time debugging enabled. In Visual Studio, Just-In-Time debugging can be enabled form Tools/Options/Debugging/Just-In-Time.

Check the documentation index for ‘Just-in-time debugging,

Here’s my first question.  If I’ve uninstalled Visual Studios, why is the debugger still on?  Would it not make sense for the uninstaller to check to see if I have another debugger with Just-In-Time debugging and if I don’t disable the feature?  Silly me, too much common sense I guess.  So after Googling the problem some people suggested modifying the registry and setting this value to that value and this that and the other thing.  Start FEAR back up and same thing.  After a grueling 20 minutes trying to fix the problem I finally did the only thing that makes sense.  Check for updates.  Sure enough there were two patches for FEAR.  I installed both of them and at the same time completely removed all instances of the .NET Framework from my machine.  Started FEAR and finally, it worked!  Since I did two steps in the last attempt, patches and removing the .NET Framework, I can’t exactly say what was problem.  Obviously there was something wrong with the “out of the box” FEAR but at the same time there was something wrong with the JIT Debugger.

So far the game has been awesome.  Great visuals, game play, and thus far the story is catching.  The feature that stands out the most is “slow-mo”.  Your character has super human reflexes and by pressing the right key you can slow the game down for a few seconds.  This gives you a cool Matrix’ish feel with ripple effects coming from the bullets, shells slowly flying out from your gun, so on and so on.  Aside from slow-mo, I love the voices in the game when you attack the enemies.  “Oh shit!  Incoming.  Incoming!”  It’s the small things like that that make the game seem more realistic and fun.  Supposedly the AI is top notch in this game truly simulating a squad environment however I haven’t gotten that far yet having only played for a little while.  I will say that the enemy AI is impressive.  So far I’ve been tag teamed three times.  I’d go after one guy and as soon as the shooting starts two more guys come at me in cover formation while another one or two come in and try to flank me.  Go to the FEAR website for more info on the game.

It’s about time that we finally get some information about Xmen 3. Seriously, they made X2 almost 3 years ago. If you’re trying to keep a franshise going don’t wait so long between movies unless your up to par with Star Wars (Episode 4-6 that is).