iamchung

happy new years 2012

andy — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:31:43 +0000

Happy new years! For this first post of the new year, I thought I’d take a look at last year’s resolutions and see how I fared.

Play MORE video games. Try and beat them too since I have a nasty habit of just dropping them midway through.
Learn Python and Java.
Try and complete more of my programming side projects instead of leaving them half-done (this seems to be a recurring theme in my life).
Learn to drive stick.
Try and do some more grad school classes. I had put them off to pay off some debt first, but I should really try and get this done.
Pay off debt.
Read more books.
Be less political.

I have managed to actually beat more of the video games I started playing this year rather than leaving them unfinished. Some exceptions include Castlevania and Oblivion. Now that SWTOR has come out, I’ll probably leave those unfinished for a while though. I’ve managed to learn a bit of python, as well as learned to use git to publish some of the stuff I’ve learned to the web. I didn’t get around to learning stick or take more grad school classes. Due to unforeseen circumstances, I wasn’t able to save up as much money as I would have liked this past year to pay off debt. I did manage to read a lot more books though and I think I’ve become a bit less political. All in all, not a bad run of resolutions.

For this next year, I’ll keep the resolutions simple.

Start working out more and possibly start a martial arts class.
Pay off debt.
Start working on a video game project.
Learn, learn, learn. Always try to continue the learning process.

jquery-querystring

andy — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:58:11 +0000

Just published a plugin that extends jquery to give access to querystring params easily. For the longest time, I was just copy/pasting one function into all my projects to do this, but finally decided to make it a jquery plugin for future use. Here’s how to use it:

$.querystring(param_name_here);

example:

var q = $.querystring('q');

Ezmode. get the code here: https://github.com/gehsekky/jquery-querystring

Github

Steve Jobs has died

andy — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:59:47 +0000

Steve Jobs has died at age 56. The internet has gone insane with everyone and their mother trying to eulogize Jobs. I even read an article where the author said he was “Moses in a turtleneck.” That’s just crazy, but whatever. While I didn’t agree with his business practices or philosophy, I acknowledge his role as a tech giant and someone who helped shape the industry we work in today. RIP. It will be interesting to see where Apple goes from here without Jobs at the helm.

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ShibalBot – A Python IRC Bot using the Twisted library

andy — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 06:01:19 +0000

I used to use eggdrops back in the day when we would idle in IRC channels for counterstrike and used to write custom TCL scripts to do all that annoying IRC bot stuff (like listing scrim availabilities, cs clan rosters, etc). So while I’m learning Python, I figured I’d try and write my own bot to see if I could do it. I first started off with this example that builds the core of the bot in less than 30 lines of code. While that was fantastic, I then came across this example which uses the Twisted lib and makes it much more robust. I didn’t implement the markov chains, but I wrote up some quick code that can handle saving and displaying IRC quotes. This version of the bot is now just under 180 lines.

You can view the code here.

To use it, you have to change this section at the bottom of the file.

if __name__ == "__main__":
    reactor.connectTCP("YOUR_IRC_SERVER_HOST",
                       IRC_SERVER_HOST_PORT,
                       ShibalBotFactory("YOUR_IRC_CHANNEL",
                                        "YOUR_IRCBOT_NICK",
                                        True, False))
    reactor.run()

Just change the parameters to your own IRC server address, server port, IRC channel, and bot nickname and you’re good to go. Some Todo’s include adding some code to fetch the titles of url’s pasted in the channel, making it modular so you can just drop in scripts instead of having to change the main file, and updating the quotes module to not load the entire quotes file at once (in case the file becomes huge).

Script to sync friends list across multiple reddit accounts

Script to sync friends list across multiple reddit accounts

andy — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 05:31:45 +0000

While teaching myself Python, I wanted to try and write something that I would actually use. Since I have multiple reddit accounts, a script that would sync settings across them seemed like it would be useful. So far, the only thing being synced is friends, but I’ll soon have something that also syncs subscribed subreddits as well (hopefully).

The script is being hosted on github and the link is here.

I developed the script using Python 2.7.2 so I don’t even know if it is compatible with Python 3.x. Using the script is fairly easy. Just edit the top of the file above the line that says “DO NOT MODIFY BELOW THIS LINE”.

Example:

login_info = [
["user1", "pass1"],
["user2", "pass2"],
["user3", "pass3"]
]

add_self_to_friends should be either "True" or "False"
(without quotations)

I think I’ll add in some logic to do interactive input if no settings are detected in the file. I’m also going to change the script to do dom parsing as opposed to regex because the regex could run into some weird issues (I know I’ve said dom parsing is a hassle before, but the goal here is to learn as much Python as possible so I’ll try attacking problems from all angles to learn everything).

Github

andy — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 05:29:02 +0000

Finally decided to do something with my Github account and actually set up a repository for some reddit utility scripts. This is really just a way for me to learn and improve my python skills for the future. Pro tip: Git is really meant to be used on linux. Using it in Windows 7 just doesn’t feel right for some reason…

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PeerBlock doesn’t play nicely with others

andy — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 02:30:20 +0000

I just spent a good 15 minutes trying to figure out why the hell Steam wouldn’t start up. It was giving me an error consisting of “Could not connect to Steam network…” but I was able to get on the internet and load up Steam’s own website. Turns out it was PeerBlock refusing connections from Valve. I just right-clicked on the Valve IP in PeerBlock’s window and allowed it permanently to fix the issue. Hope this helps someone else with this problem.

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Back

andy — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 16:02:28 +0000

I’m back from the depths of hell. Hopefully I can explain further soon. Related posts: Back to School Related posts:

Back to School

foodie mementos

andy — Fri, 13 May 2011 04:46:43 +0000

Posting some pics of food that I’ve made lately.

Cast iron skillet pizza with pepperoni and onions.

Tonkatsu with rice and shredded red cabbage.

Galbi tang (Korean short rib soup)

Dukguk (Korean rice cake soup)

Traditional Strawberry Shortcake.

April Update

andy — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 02:08:40 +0000

It’s been a while since my last post so I thought I’d just give a quick update. I got a new laptop to do some work on — a flashy new Lenovo Thinkpad T510. It is quite sexy and reminds me of how long it’s been since I’ve gotten anything new hardware wise. I remember buying laptops and getting friggin CDs with recovery software and backup discs with Windows with perhaps a recovery partition. Fast forward to today. No more optical media being shipped with anything. Just the recovery partitions. This is probably just the manufacturer’s way of cutting costs which they’ll argue is “more green” but really, it ends up costing you more to do the same shit. You can still get recovery discs. Only now it costs you $50-100 to order it from them when you used to get it INCLUDED IN THE PRICE OF THE LAPTOP. It could also be that as I get older, I am getting more and more concerned with my money and where it goes (read as: CHEAP). Maybe I’ll do a hardware review on the laptop on here when I get around to it. I’m still working on installing Arch Linux on that badboy (which is quite frustrating). Ubuntu installed in almost 10 minutes flat, no problem. Arch installs, but I can’t for the life of me get X server working on there. Whenever I figure that out, I’ll post it here to help any other unlucky souls in the same predicament.

I’m also going to try and do some cooking/food blog posts on here or break away and start up my own foodie blog. I’ve been experimenting with some different pizza recipes, and have decided that New York style crust kicks Chicago crust’s ass. My last couple of deepdish crust recipes have come away being way too thick. Next time I’m going for a simple New York style thin crust with maybe some fresh mozzarella and marinara with basil. I’ve also learned how to make a kickass bulgogi recipe which I’m definitely going to put up on here with some pics. Tomorrow will be bacon-wrapped barbecue chicken with macaroni and cheese. Mmmmmmm!

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