Welcome to chucksteel.com. Here you'll find occasional updates on my programming projects and life in general. Posting is pretty sporadic, depending on my mood and if I remember. I have tried to setup come categories for those that might only be interested in certain parts of the Chuck Steel Experience, and you can view posts for those areas by clicking them in the menu to the left.
Enjoy your stay.
Flash Player Problems
Thu, 05/21/2009 - 15:13 — chuckWe recently created an image that ended up having a problem with Flash Player not working in Internet Explorer. It would only work for local users, domain users were out of luck. We worked on this problem for almost a full day until I finally threw Process Monitor (a free tool from Microsoft) at it. I found out that several registry keys had improper permissions:
Kinship Roster Drupal Module
Fri, 05/08/2009 - 09:44 — chuckI wrote a very simple Kinship Roster module for Drupal. It pulls data from data.lotro.com and displays a list of members in the Kinship. The table is sortable by Name, Class, Rank, Level and Race. Links go to the my.lotro.com website. I considered making a character viewer, but why should I duplicate all the effort that's been put into the my.lotro.com site by the fine folks at Turbine.
If you're interested in these sorts of things, you can check out the module in action over at www.fireandshadow.net, my Kin's website.
Stand Alone Kinship Roster
Thu, 04/30/2009 - 23:19 — chuckSpent some time this evening writing a stand along php script which will get your Kin's XML file and output a very simple roster. It supports the necessary data caching by storing the XML file locally and checking the timestamp to see it it is over 24 hours old. If over 24 hours, it will download the new version from data.lotro.com. The roster lists members, their rank, class, race and level and can be sorted by any of those columns. I'll clean it up and try to post it at as a download shortly.
LoTRO Kinship Statistics
Wed, 04/29/2009 - 20:11 — chuckAn API for accessing some data from the Lord of the Rings Online game was recently released at data.lotro.com. Right now you can access character and kinship data, which is a good start. For my first project I wrote a page which generates some pretty graphs based on the kinship data. The XML file includes all of the characters in the kin, along with their level, rank, class and race. I made graphs for each attribute using the Google Charts API, so I ended up learning two thing at the same time.
You can see the work here: http://www.chucksteel.com/projects/lotro/kinship_stats/index.php. If you aren't a player of the game, then you can select my Kinship, which is "Fire and Shadow" on the Nimrodel world.
Flexing my PHP and mySQL skills
Thu, 04/16/2009 - 10:12 — chuckI'm looking at re-creating our alumni database for the Zeta Sigma website, which is now running Drupal. I really like Drupal, since it makes it dead simple to create a content type and do some really cool things with them. The problem was going to be getting the data from our old database (which ran in a custom module that I wrote for PostNuke) into the new content type in Drupal.
I have created a monster
Thu, 03/19/2009 - 07:45 — chuckSo, I'm kind of big into arguing semantics and stuff like that. Really, I enjoy a good argument of proper phrasing and word choice. I know, I'm sad. More and more, though, I'm realizing that I have passed on my genes to another person and have created some kind of monster. Last night Jack had his thumb in his mouth and I told him that he shouldn't put his fingers in his mouth. He replied that it was a thumb and kept it in there.
This isn't the first time that I've said this, but I hate dealing with myself sometimes.
New Orleans Redux
Mon, 03/16/2009 - 08:33 — chuckI spent the past week in New Orleans on a service trip with a group from Dickinson called Serve The World. This was my fifth trip with STW and my fourth to the Gulf Coast region. It's amazing how much work still needs to be done in that area, despite what has already been done by so many volunteers.
Resizing Multiple Images on a Mac with OS 10.5
Mon, 03/16/2009 - 07:52 — chuckThe following procedure will change the original files. If you’d like to retain the larger originals, then make a copy of them first.
1. Check Preview preferences to make sure this will work properly
To do this, launch the Preview Application
Click on Preview, Preferences
Select the Images tab and select the option titled “Open groups of images in the same window”
2. Open the images that you’d like to resize
You’ll have to resize one folder at a time, but you can select all of the photos in a folder and open them at once
3. Select all of the images
Heading to New Orleans
Fri, 03/06/2009 - 15:51 — chuckIt's that time of year again. I'll soon leave work and head south to New Orleans for a week of Katrina relief work. I'll be trying to post regular updates on twitter. This year's trip includes about 30 folks, which will be the largest, as far as I remember.
Professors and Sustainability
Mon, 03/02/2009 - 16:56 — chuckThere's a big sustainability push on campus, which is great. There are stickers everyone reminding people to turn off lights, folks are asked to turn off computers at the end of the day, students are asked not to shower, stuff like that. As a computer guy that supports Faculty, I get to visit a lot of their offices, which gives me a good insight into how well they're going along with the whole sustainability thing. Today I found a great example.
