Author: Joe

Categories
Video Games

The Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass

LinebeckJust finished up the Phantom Hourglass for the DS. Is was a very good game, extremely innovative use of the stylus, dual screens and the microphone. The game is completely controlled with the stylus, which really worked well. Having to draw notes on the map at certain points was a really cool idea.

The art was similar to the cartoony style found in the Wind Waker. The art really worked well on the DS, some of the finest graphics I’ve seen on the DS. Excellent game, it’s clear why most sites chose it as 2007 handheld game of the year.

Categories
Movies

Rambo

RamboWas hanging out with the Shepherd this afternoon and while thinking of something to do, he remembered that he had some movie passes that were due to expire soon. It would be just wrong to let something free go unused. So the big decision of what film to witness was now upon us.

After seeing that Rambo was showing at 3:50, without a moments hesitation it was decided that the film Rambo would be seen on this day. I grew up admiring and hoping to grow up to be a one man killing machine like John Rambo since Rambo: First Blood 2 came out back in 1985 (hard to believe it was that long ago).

The movie wasn’t that bad. By no means was it a great film that I would recommend that you must see, but it wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be. Granted it was one of the most violent films I’d ever seen. I couldn’t begin to try to count how many deaths occurred in just an hour and a half, but for an action film it rarely got dull. My favorite scene of all was when he detonated the WWII English bomb with the claymore. It was Rambo carnage at it’s finest.

Categories
Development

Site Redesign

Decided to redesign the this site. I tend to lean towards dark colors with my personal stuff, but decided to try using some brighter colors for a change. So I picked some colors from a favorite t-shirt I used to wear back when I went to Belhaven. It’s still a work in progress, but I figured it was close enough to begin switching over.

I’m using the Zend Framework to interact with the YouTube Data API. It’s really awesome to work with if you’re a PHP developer and I’ve been relying on Zend a lot recently in many of the newer projects I’ve been working on. If you notice anything that seems broken or out of place please let me know as there’s still plenty of stuff I’ve got to finish up.

Categories
Adventure

Year of the Rat

Year of the RatYesterday was Chinese New Year, the year of the rat. To celebrate the new year I thought it’d be nice to dine on some Chinese food for lunch. Esteemed co-workers and lunch club members for life Sean and Jen were up for the adventure. We decided to embark to a new Chinese restaurant that just opened this week to celebrate.

My zodiac is the snake, Sean is the dog and Jen is the rat. So it’s her year. On this glorious day not only did we eat some fine food, but we found out a bit about the Chinese zodiac.

The food was pretty good, I’d go back there for lunch again. Sean was very impressed that they offered mango chicken. Amazingly the bill for all three of us was only $13.96! Truly amazing indeed! Happy Chinese New Year to you and especially to all the rats out there.

Categories
Development

Yahoo! Live API

Yahoo! Live just released an API. Yahoo! Live lets you create your own social broadcasting experience. Display, hack and mashup live video streams on your website or client application.

Looks like they offer both a REST and Javascript interface, so that should be pretty cool. It’s still an experimental release, but at quick glance seems very cool. Will be interesting to see some of the mashup possibilities using this new API.

Categories
Development

Paycheck Riddle

Today at work someone pointed out that since the month begins on a Friday this year and it’s a leap year, that this will be a rare February in which we will receive 3 paychecks in one month. The question that had us thinking was how rare this occurrence this actually is. 40 years? or perhaps every 28 years?

To attempt to solve this I figured I’d write a little script to run through the possibilities. Below is a quick script I threw together in PHP.

for ($i=1901; $i<2600; $i++) {
  if (date('L', mktime(0, 0, 0, 2, 1, $i))) {
    if (date('N', mktime(0, 0, 0, 2, 1, $i)) == 5) {
      echo $i . ' is a leap year  and the 1st of the month
             is a Friday.';
    }
  }
}

It's pretty basic. It loops through the years 1901 through 2600. Then checks the if the current year that the loop is on happens to be a leap year. If it in fact is then it checks if the first of the February of that year happens to fall on a Friday. Finally if all that criteria is met it prints that year out.

The answer is that it will occur every 28 years.