Well I'm off to go pick mushrooms. I should be back around mid october or so depending on how the season goes. I have turned comment moderation on while i'm away to try and help keep the riff raff from spamming comments while i'm away.

I have added a few Ohsai updates and provided a second download this time with source code. Keep in mind that it is still in the prototyping stages but there is an example project with a few demos that will give you an idea of where the project is heading.

Oh and I'd just like to express just how much I hate Blizzard. "Just when I thought I was out. They ... pull ... me ... back ... in!" Sigh, I just spent a few hours today reading about the new World of Warcraft expansion called Cataclysm, and all of the various changes that will be taking place. I don't know what it is about that game but I compare it to being on crack. I hate even the thought of spending endless hours playing the game just to aquire items and gear etc, but at the same time I have this strong desire to play it.

The problem comes in when I start loosing the ability to manage my time properly between fighting the urge to play the game, and just trying to stay focused on other priorities. I have basically lost a year of work with my programming projects already because of two  previous six month subscriptions. And when I think about it in those terms I think about how much work I could have gotten done on those projects. No other game has even come close the the level of adddiction I have towards this game.

I am not sure what I am trying to say at this point other then before I heard about the new expansion I had 99% garenteed myself that i was never going to renew my subscription to that game. I have always felt a sense of deep loss that I am missing out when I don't have a subscription. Now after reading about the expansion I have almost convinced myself that I am 90% garenteed to renew my subscription in november. It's a vicous cycle.

Also just as a side note, I gotta mention just how blind I am to spotting spelling mistakes on my website. For the longest time there have been glaring and obvious spelling errors and for some reason I just can't seem to spot them. O.o

And OMG Comment spam! I don't even advertise this site and I am getting hit by spammers. I think I may need to leave comment moderation on when I come back. :(

First off this last two weeks have been a nightmare with trying to get my site up and running again. Not that it was broken per say but that godaddy my hosting provider does not employ very educated people. I have been having a constant back and fourth with them trying to find out why I am getting compiler errors with the extensions I wrote for blogengine, as godaddy claim to support asp.net 3.5 and my code was using C# 3.0 code syntax and Linq.

Needless to say I had written one final email completley documenting all that had happened and why I think it was not working and pointing out to godaddy support just how wrong and how much they really don't understand what the .net framework is what it is for and how it works on it's own, as well as how asp.net fits into it.

It became very clear to me early on that godaddy support does not employ actual programmers. Programmers that write actual code and who actually have written code for the software that godaddy even offers in there Web Hosting connection etc. Had they had these programmers on call or working as support techs the problem would have been isolated and resolved within hours. Lets just say that the email I wrote and was going to send gave an untimatum at the end of it that said they had 72hrs to figure it out or I would be canceling my account and finding another hosting provider.

Yeah, it had gotten that bad. :(

I was patient up until those final few days when I pretty much snapped over what I considered an easy fix. But to be fair I was in part to blame for my own lact of knoledge, and godaddy was equally to blame for not spotting the problem right away, being as simple as it was to fix. It was a bad situation all around and I am just glad it is over with and I just want to put the whole thing behind me.

Anyhoo! Lets git down to bizzniss. Awwww yeah!  There are two new blog engine extensions availible in the projects page. SilverlightExt, and cbxChangeLogger.

The SilverlightExt extension for BlogEngine allows you to embed [ SILVERLIGHT xap:filenamewithoutext width:640px height:480px ] tags in your pages and posts so that you don't have to deal with writing html <object markup. All you have to do is upload your silverlight *.xap file into the ClientBin folder in the root of your site and type "[ SILVERLIGHT xap:filenamewithoutext width:640px height:480px ]" without spaces after [ and before ].

The cbxChangeLogger is a extension for Blogengine that will track changes that are made on a blogengine site. It will track if you created, deleted, or updated posts and pages. When you want to clear the change log and embed the data in a page or post all you have to do is type [ CHANGELOG ]  ( without a space after [ and before ] ) and the tag will be replaced with the changes that were recored since the last time you specified the [ CHANGELOG ] tag in a page or post.

Also I have had a interest in kodu ever since I heard about it and thought it was awesome. After writing some preliminary AI code in a silverlight game I am working on I realized that I am going to need a better AI framework that I can build on top of rather then having to hobble together code for each project that needs some AI in it. So I started a new project called Ohsai. Ohsai is my attempt to create a AI framework that I can use across various platforms where .net is availible, Here is a screenshot of the class diagram for Ohsai as it stands right now View Screenshot

As you can see it is modled using similar concepts that kodu employs and with a little help from wikipedia to give me a starting place on how my interfaces and types should be structured. I already have a very simple prototype and test app up and running in XNA that uses GamePad <condition> -> <action> to move a actior around the screen. Even with this preliminary code I can see how much easier it is going to be having my own AI framework that I can build on top of. Also it may even allow me to use xml files to declare cirtian behaviors so I can use the XNA content pipeline to Content.Load<> from disk. Woot!

But that's pretty much sums up the last two weeks. I'll be heading up north to pick mushrooms around the 27 or 29 of august and probably won't be back until mid october or so. But I'll try to make another post before I leave.

Site was temporarilly down for about 30 hours. Nothing was broken I just left it as it was so that godaddy could take a look at if it was anything on there end. I wrote a new extension for BlogEngine that would allow me to embed [ SILVERLIGHT ] tags in pages or posts and have the tag replaced with a silverlight html "<object" markup.

But if you visited the site yesterday you would have seen the error page stating that there was a compile error on line two ala "using System.Linq;". This error had me scratching my head. I double checked the settings under godaddy hosting control panel and iis7 and asp.net 2.0/3.0/3.5 were set properly. One thing I did notice was that on the error page that the command line that was being called and invoking the C# compiler was not making any references to the System.Linq assemblies. Which would explain the compilation error. ASP.NET is the one that is invoking the call to the C# compiler and if goddady supported asp.net 3.5 as they claim I don't understand why my extension would not be compiling.

It sucks because I also got around to writing a second extension for BlogEngine that tracks changes I make to the site weather I create new content/delete content or just update content on the site it logs everything. Then every so often when I want to make a new blog entry all I have to do is type [ CHANGELOG ] and presto a nicley formated categorized and bulleted list get embeded into the post and the log file gets cleared out. I wrote this extension because sometimes I tweak the site here and there or add a little bit of new content and forget to mention it in a blog post. With this extension all that get handled for me automatically. 

Unfortunatley I cannot use this extension either because it heavilly uses linq as well. *Sigh*

Something else that has me concerned is that DomainPeople the company that I have registered my createdbyx.com domain name with is not letting me log into there site. So I tried there password recovery option and provided my domain name then clicked the "Get Password" button but it comes back as saying it can't find that domain.  O.o wtf? I have used DomainPeople as my registar for createdbyx.com for over 7 years how could they not have a record of my domain. Even the WhoIs records show that createdbyx.com is registered using DomainPeople. I submited a feedback form but am still waiting to hear back from them. Grrr

So all around these last few days have not been all that great.