A Tune Up

After getting my car back recently, I've been having more issues with it. The engine hasn't been getting the greatest gas mileage, has been making a whistling noise whenever I depress the accelerator, so on and so forth. After a discussion with Zac, we decided it was time for me to start learning how to work on cars. This past weekend, I pulled my car into his garage and we (along with a few zBMW friends) set to fixing up my car.

Upon opening the hood, we found that there was no air filter, our first clue. As we investigated further, one of us accidentally leaned on the throttle body, which caused it to seperate slightly from the intake manifold, another clue. After about 6 hours of work and $140 worth of parts (and food), we had fixed up my poor E30. The throttle body had 4 lug nuts as opposed to the 1 it has entered the garage with. The air filter was attached and...filtering. The oil was changed (switched to using Valvoline Max Life Synthetic Blend...the car is a bit on the old side with upwards of 280,000 miles), and all of the spark plugs were replaced.

There's still more work to do on it, but it will all come in time. My baby is happy now that she knows I'll be taking care of her (and her gas mileage is back to 32mpg+). Here are a few pictures of the event, I'll keep posting updates whenever we have them.


Me setting up the work lights over the hood


Zac doing the cha-cha with my new wiper arms


Me playing with my new spark plugs


Zac checking for a jack point prior to changing the oil

- Andy

ZSF v1.3.3 Released

I've spent a bit of time with my beloved ZSF (Zibings Site Framework) tonight and released v1.3.3 of it 'to the masses'. You can check out the post on Super Tech Help for details on how to download it and some basic information on what ZSF is. I'll probably make a post at some point to go over what my goals are with the project, its pretty close to my heart. Here's a brief changelog for those interested:

• Imported entire tree into Subversion repository for versioned development


• Secured source.php for Windows machines (haven't tested on a *nix machine yet, will do for 1.4)


• Removed database 'script stoppers' so that script runs even if it can't connect to db


• Removed database error echo()'s so that error messages are all pretty in default template


• Modified and tested tpl_addVar() functions, tested OK but not sure if bug is fixed completely


• Changed config file to have proper default TPL_DIR (D:\webRoot\zibings\public_html\siteSys)


• Cleaned up a few files so they don't have blank tabs everywhere


• Modified database classes to work independantly of each other (new resource link on connect)


• Removed .tpl.cac files from cached directory (not necessary in repository)


• Removed install.sql file (outdated)

- Andy

Project Subversion: Completed

Its been an interesting journey to get here, but we finally have the kinks worked out and are developing with the aid of Subversion, a very fluffy open source version control system.

Why was this worth mentioning? Well, for those of you who'd been paying attention on Super Tech Help, this means that we are now officially developing ZSF v2.0. Exciting for us at least.. Stay tuned, we will now be resuming updates on ZibTech and Epoch!

- Andy

Time Apart

Its a scary title, but in reality is something that isn't even remotely scary. In recent months I've been constantly trying to find ways to help myself 'stay fresh' on my various programming projects. One of my biggest downfalls has always been overzealousness, meaning of course that when starting a project I put so much time and effort into it that I just can't bear working on it after a while and I fall behind schedule after dashing ahead.

I've slowly been developing a method of working on projects by taking advantage of the realization that when I don't allow myself to concentrate too much on a single project through the use of other smaller projects, I rarely burn out on any of the projects and have a much better chance at staying on schedule (and sometimes even beating my schedule). I've begun to call this the 'Time Apart' method, as you can guess from the title.

Each day I seem to find new ways to take this method a bit further. I've started using a time tracker on my computer to track how much time I'm spending on each of my projects. This in conjunction with Base Camp (which my good friend Cassie introduced me to) are helping me keep my project-schedule a little bit more organized. It works for me, and who knows it might even work for you. ;)

- Andy

Free Hugs?

I've been continuing on my personal mission to constantly broaden my horizons through reading and discovery, and today was perusing through random blogs on blogger (you can do the same using the 'Next Blog' link at the very top of my page). I came across a mostly quiet and short-spoken blog from a girl in Texas, but for some reason decided to look at it. There was a picture of a dog lying across two seperate parts of a lounge chair or couch of some kind, it just amused me for some reason.

After studying the picture for a little while, I scrolled down through the page and saw a post about something called 'Free Hugs'. I started the YouTube video and was soon smiling. I haven't had a particularly rough day, but it was nice to see something this heart warming. You can view the official site for what turned into a whole movement at www.freehugscampaign.org. Here's the video that I saw (which apparently won one of the YouTube Video of the Year awards!):

Motivation From Within

In the past few weeks I've had more than one person ask me how I "do it", meaning of course how I keep my attitude up and my energy up farther day in and day out. As to why they asked me, I may never know, but its not my turn to ask a question at this point. Instead, I've opted to put it down here so that I have a record of my ramblings to refer to should I ever be asked the question again. The easiest way to answer the question is to say that I get it all "From Within". Its rather vague on the surface, but here's the best I can do to explain...

When I say I pull my energy and what not "from within", I am literally revealing the entire process through which I find the limitless amounts of energy I appear to have on a daily basis. There's nothing special about it, I just notice myself getting angry or depressed and stop for a moment. I tell myself that I'm better than this, and that as a result I can do better than I'm doing.

From that point on its just a simple tug of war between my feeling of motivation to "do better" and whatever emotion it is I'm battling with at the moment. I don't know if this is unique, I don't know if its the most effective method either, but it works for me, which is the real point isn't it?

I apologize to anyone that might find this post to be very short, but then again I never did promise that it was an extraordinary thing which I did to motivate myself. Just remember though, the only reason this works for me, is because I found out that it works for me. I have no idea if it would work for anyone else, so this is not an advice column. Figure it out for yourself, and if this helps you in anyway, I'm glad.

- Andy

Hiccup!

Its been far too long since my last update, but we've just been -that- busy with everything at Zibings Incorporated! I've been flying around updating things with the release of our first beta for the Zibings Network, not to mention the server work we've been doing.

Server Migration
That of course calls into question the server migration that never happened. We ended up waiting for far too long to get the server from the new provider, so we cut our losses and put the money into upgrading our current server. As a result there wasn't any downtime, though we are planning on adding another server again in the near future, I'll of course keep you posted.

ZTC Site Beta
Then there was ZTC, which has been another source of my busy-ness as of late. The inventory system is going much faster than I thought it would and will be into the testing phase soon with staff members. After we work out some kinks, we'll be piecing together some of the configurators using the 'live' inventory, so we'll need you all to go build fake computers using the site. Again I'll keep you posted when there's more information regarding the site.

Zibings.com
Along with the release of the first beta for ZibNet, we are trying to fly through and do minor skin and security updates on all of our sites. The first one in line for this was www.zibings.com and it is well into its makeover, hoping to be finished with it completely before the new week begins on Monday.

Zibings Network
As I said earlier, we're all buzzing about our 'Beta 1' release of the Zibings Network. What is the Zibings Network? The basic idea is to create a network of services/sites that will work together with unified logins and profiles so that you can organize yourself, collaborate with others, socialize, etc without having to keep track of 30 different websites and their respective logins. We're excited about it obviously, and we already have both ZTC and Epoch working off of the unified login system. We're working on creating a few more ways to integrate with the system so that we can continue adding new sites without needing months of modification/development, but its a work in progress (and is a beta after all).

ZibNet IRC
I felt this update deserved its own section, though it really belongs underneath the above 'Zibings Network' section since that's what it is part of. We have put the finishing touches on our IRC network for now, and you are invited to come join, bring your friends and chat to your heart's content. The easiest way of connecting is to use our IRC Connection Form and join up using the web-applet. However, should you be one of those IRC experts, you can connect using your favorite client to:

Normal: irc.zibings.net:6667
SSL Enabled: irc.zibings.net:+6670

Epoch Gaming
Haven't gotten to do an update on this bugger for a while, but we are happy to announce the return of Chris Butcher to the development team for Epoch Gaming. He will be in charge of system development for the site. Chris is very dedicated to the completion and ultimate success of Epoch, so I'm very excited to see his contributions.

That's all I have for now, I had thought of another post I'd wanted to put up a while ago and just haven't had time to type up, so maybe tomorrow I'll throw that up. Thanks for reading!

- Andy