Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

I received a bill for a credit card that I never use in the mail today. Oddly, there is a charge in the amount of $0.15 from a CENTR LIMITED located in Texas. From speaking with the credit card company this is an office supply store. Centr Limited’s phone number is no longer in service.

More information about the disconnected phone number can be found here.

Fortunately, the charge was easily disputed. Now, it’s time to cancel my unused credit card.

I spent a good part of my weekend moving websites to another web hosting company. As with using cheap shared hosting you get what you pay for. The speed was okay but more often that I’d like the server went offline for one reason or another. Perhaps, I was on a bad, malfunctioning server; I don’t know. For the forth or fifth time, the server took a nosedive. This time around the hard-drives went into “read-only” mode for several hours on Saturday morning forcing all websites on that server offline.

Since I sit near other web developers (exchange software engineers or internet application developers as seen fit) at work, it is easy to get a recommendation for alternative web hosting companies. The host that I migrated everything to uses a grid-server. People share resources, but instead of using one server this uses an array of servers. If one server goes down, it somehow uses another server that is online.

This costs about twice as much to use as my previous host, but this should be an improvement. If I don’t complain assume it is.

While awaiting the release of the Quest for Glory II VGA remake, I’d figure that play the original version^* of King’s Quest 1 for the PC.  There are two versions of King’s Quest 1 for the PC, and most nostalgic copies of King’s Quest floating out there on the internet are the later version released in 1987.  The copy that I played as a child was the first version released in 1984 as there are distinct differences them.

1984 version:

• Released on a bootable floppy disc.
• Played a trumpet sound at the title screen.
• Allowed switching to RGB CGA mode at the title screen.
• Played an annoying tune repeatedly throughout the beginning of the game.

1987 version:

• Released on a non-bootable floppy.
• Played Greensleeves at the title screen.
• Featured an in-game menu system by pressing ESC.

DOSBox is an application that will play ancient computer games on modern computers.  Specially for the 1984 version of King’s Quest 1, you’ll need to change the machine type to cga to render the graphics correctly.  This can be done by editing the DOSBox preferences file, changing machine=vga to machine=cga.

In DOSBOX, you can boot from a disc image by typing the following command:

boot location of image file

For me, I typed boot ~/Desktop/KQ1.IMG and the game loaded.

More notably there are a large number of bugs in the 1984 version.  One that I distinctly remember is a bug that allowed you to walk in any area of King Edward’s throne room.  You wanted to walk all over the king, on the walls, along the seats?  It could be done.  This is not present in the 1987 version as you can’t walk on the throne, are unable to crouch down, and have to be a certain distance away from the king before you can bow to him.

To reproduce this glitch present in the older 1984 version, follow these steps.

First, get behind the first step on the king’s thrown and walk towards the bottom of the screen.  This allows the character to climb onto the first step.  Press the left arrow key (4) and walk into King Edward.

Now, press the minus sign key (-) to crouch down.

Next, type bow king and press enter.

After your character bows and stand up, he’ll be pushed into the king, allowing you to walk all over the room.

Moving to the edges of the left and top parts of the screen, moves the character to the beginning of the game.

^*Note, the IBM PCjr version of King’s Quest 1 was released before the PC version but in the same year.

Shortly after posting my last entry, what I wanted happened:  searching for my name appeared as the first entry of the search results.  My name appears on this site twice, once on the header and one time on the sidebar.  Also, I’m sure that using my name as the URL of the site is the most effective choice in making it the top ranking term.

Later, I modified the page template to include my full name at the top of each posting, and shortly thereafter, my site disappeared off the face of the internet. After making that modification, my name appears six times on any given page, and that’s enough to cause this site to get yanked from the search results when looking for that term.

Well, I’ll fix that problem and see what happens.

In switching hosting providers, this website/blog/whatever you would like to call it displayed a single image with the phrase, “I’ll add something here eventually,” and the search engine almighty removed this page from the face of the Internet.  From what I can tell, I shut down the blog on 7/6/2008.  The web crawlers last access to this pages was on 6/10/2008 which seems correct since I haven’t updated anything since April.

Early Sunday morning on 8/3/2008 I googled my name and didn’t find what I was looking for.  So, I restored this site.  So, we’ll see how long it takes to become listed once again.

On a more useful note, there’s a Wordpress plugin called Google XML Sitemaps that generates a skeleton of your blog and more importantly, broadcast(s) your latest posting to search engines.  Once you installed the plugin, you’ll have to goto the Wordpress Dashboard Settings and select the XML-Sitemap link.  From there you can initiate the first build of your sitemap.

Once that’s done, you’ll get a success page stating you the major search engines out there have been notified.

The process creates a sitemap.xml file which resides on the root directory of your website.  For completeness, you can go into Google’s webmaster tools and also add the site map.

1. Sign into Google’s webmaster tools.
2. Choose your site from the dashboard.
3. Click on the sitemaps link on the left.
4. Click Add a Sitemap.
5. In the Choose Type drop-down select Add General Sitemap.
6. In the My sitemap URL is field type sitemap.xml
7. Click the Add General Sitemap button.