MtG (Magic the Gathering) Comeback!

Posted by mkhairul - December 31, 2007 at 01:12:52 pm - No Comments

Categories: blog

I went for a friendly match of magic the gathering at my friend’s place (I managed to brake a chair by leaning heavily on it). It’s been a while since the last time I stopped. I first played in 1995 and start with 4th Edition and Fallen Empires. I stopped playing around 2000. Its been 7 years.

So I went there and played a few rounds using his theme mono decks which I dont like. I lost in every single round (there’s a round where I nearly win (using Molimo’s Might – green aggro) but he disabled my creature).

So anyway, that sucks considering I’ve played with MUCH MORE powerful decks. I decided to buy some cards of my own and build my own deck. Bought 3 Time Spiral Tournament Decks and 15 Booster Packs (10 x 10th Edition, 5 Future Sight).

I created a Black/Blue Control-Combo deck and a Red/Green Aggro deck. Still a lot of white cards available. Haven’t decided what to build, yet.

So anyway, I’m looking for any place to hang out and play MtG. If anyone knows any place, I’d appreciate it.

AND if anyone is in Damansara area (near Kota Damansara), feel free to email me.
 

Edit: Corrected some typos :\

 

High-scale MySQL database

Posted by mkhairul - December 31, 2007 at 01:12:08 pm - No Comments

Categories: blog

Instead of changing DBMS (MySQL to MS SQL or Oracle, etc), step back and look. Youtube is using MySQL, it is absurd to say it doesn’t scale compared to [insert some DBMS here]. Listen to Paul Tuckfield regarding Scaling MySQL at YouTube.

There’s also a site about High Scalability for building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.
 

A Photographer’s Site

Posted by mkhairul - December 28, 2007 at 10:12:07 am - 1 Comment

Categories: Development, design

Finished up creating a site for a photographer. Minimalistic.

Icewind Dale 2 (IWD2) transparency problem on new cards (nvidia 8600 GT)

Posted by mkhairul - December 26, 2007 at 05:12:03 pm - 3 Comments

Categories: Troubleshoot

I’m one of those people who loves gameplay more than the latest hip games. I haven’t had the chance to finish IWD2 in Heart of Fury mode yet. I continued my last saved game at the yuan-ti caves. With 3GB of RAM, nice graphics card, I thought it will run smoothly. When the game finished loading, something is amiss, the loot’s background is black, fog of war doesn’t render properly. WTH?

I tried testing the graphic options software transparency, translucent, etc. Nothing works. I googled several keywords and the one that points me to the light is "nvidia iwd2 transparency". Leads me to spellhold studios forum, IE games and NVidia Series 8 video cards.

Now I can continue my journey to fight Isair and Madae.

Edit: Apparently enabling software transparency slows the game quite dramatically to a point that I felt frustrated in giving commands to my characters. I only enabled Software Mirror Blt of all of the Blt and set the color depth to 16. The game works out fine.

Silhouette

Posted by mkhairul - December 26, 2007 at 11:12:16 am - 1 Comment

Categories: Graphics

I tried to do some silhouette in photoshop guided by this tutorial from photoshoplab and this is the result. 

It was hard tuning the effects. Or maybe I’m not used to it. Anyway, more practice needed.

jDorama (Tiger & Dragon) and patterns of web design (wiki)

Posted by mkhairul - December 19, 2007 at 01:12:50 pm - No Comments

Categories: blog, design, pattern

I didn’t get much sleep today. I stayed up, finishing Tiger & Dragon jdrama (or jdorama). I admire this drama. The quality is superb. I certainlly wish our local would do something like this and instead of Rakugo, focuses on Wayang Kulit or something interesting and cultural. I learned a lot from Tiger & Dragon about japanese culture especially Rakugo.

Tiger, tiger, jirettaiga!

So anyway, since our server is down the whole day which means no mails and no issue tracking and I can’t get a hold of them (busy line), I’ll be updating our internal wiki, about reusable components and patterns. I start with the simple stuffs like Contact Forms and along the way put in whatever pops in my mind like ACL, user posts (news, articles, events, announcements, etc).

While I was wiki-ing away, I found a book (Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design) that looks kinda interesting. Downloaded a sample chapter, read through it, and it was good.

Planned to order the book at the local MPH.

Here’s an example of the form that I did.

Simple Cascading Dropdown List (AJAX)..

Posted by mkhairul - December 16, 2007 at 11:12:27 pm - 2 Comments

Categories: AJAX, Development

At first I was thinking of doing a tutorial, 30 minutes later, I decided to just post this thing as it is. This is a cascading dropdown ajax list example that I made for a friend. Basically, it is:

• Two lists (country and state)

• Selecting a country will prompt the state list to retrieve the state list for the selected country.

I’m using jQuery in this example (included in the download). Also some SQL dump files included for Country and State. There’s only states for Malaysia. I used an example form from Wufoo. I’m a big fan of the look n’ feel of their form. I started refer to it as a guideline for my work.

As you can see, it is very simple. I did this for a portal and its not just country and state, there’s districts and much more. I also added a blockUI plugin for jQuery for the user to easily add states in some other form.

Here is the example. Enjoy!

Oh, and don’t forget to change the username and password for the database connection.

GIS noob.. convert Degrees Minutes Seconds to Decimal for Google Maps

Posted by mkhairul - December 15, 2007 at 12:12:49 am - 2 Comments

Categories: Development, GIS, blog

I started doing some stuffs on google maps for a an upcoming portal and received a list of items with GPS coordinates with it. I really don’t understand much about this coordinate and just use it as it is and inserted the data removing the spaces between the numbers and use it with Google Maps. The marker went straigh out of the map, above the north pole into the unknown.

As it turns out the GPS coordinate that I used is in Degrees Minutes Seconds format. I’d have to convert it to decimal format which google uses. You can type in the google search field the DMS format and it works but the API only accepts decimal format.

To convert it use this:

DDMMSS = DD + MM/60 + SS/60/60

for example: 101 15 201.01
list ( $dd, $mm, $ss ) = split(‘ ‘, $gps_lat);
$gps_lat_dec = $dd + ( $mm / 60 ) + ( $ss / 60 / 60 ); 

vCalendar in Thunderbird

Posted by mkhairul - December 13, 2007 at 11:12:09 am - No Comments

Categories: Tips

Sometimes I get these vCalendar thing which I don’t care much about and most of the time I ignore as it turns out as some weird message to me. I’m using Thunderbird btw.

But today, I got an email about staff meeting and staff review which is important and I can’t just ignore (ignore at my own peril!). I remembered about Sunbird which is still slow in development and I’ve read somewhere about sunbird and thunderbird integration thing going on. Googled around and found Lightning!, thunderbird calendar extension, reads the vcalendar email flawlessly with calendar interface and stuffs.  Just the thing I’m looking for.

Icons in CSS, padding doesn’t work in IE6 if there is no content..

Posted by mkhairul - December 13, 2007 at 11:12:20 am - No Comments

Categories: blog

Quite some time since the last post.

I started using Blueprint on Mosques.com.my, it works quite well, not too many IE6 hacks required. Changed most icons from png to gif (used it in css). I know there’s a hack, but its too much of a hassle. So I changed the backgrounds and stuffs.


.edit{
background: url(page_edit.gif) left no-repeat;
padding: 5px 0 5px 17px;}


Quite simple and to use it just put in <a href="#" class="edit">&nbsp;</a>, the space thing (&nbsp;) is required to display the image properly in IE6 or else it wont appear. Woot!

The result.

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