Ken Newquist

DVD Rack: Buffy Season 4, Live Free or Diehard, Battlestar Galactica: Razor

by
The cast of Battlestar Galactica: Razor.

With November’s Herculean feat of creativity behind me, I’ve turned my tired eyes back to the DVD player and the stack of Netflix envelopes that piled up during my self-imposed exile to my third-floor office.

Included in this horde of discs was the first disc of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 4 (in which Buffy and the Scooby Gang go to college), the Bruce Willis action flick Live Free or Diehard (in which technophobe John MacClane must save the world from hackers) and the one shot episode Battlestar Galactica: Razor (which tells the story of the Battlestar Pegasus’s escape form the Cylon’s burtal assault on the 12 Colonies).

211 lbs: Back in the land of 200

by

It’s been a while since I posted a fitness update, so I thought I better fess up: I’ve been terrible about going to the gym. My summer routine of three-to-four days a week at the gym has slid to a dismal one-to-two days at the gym (and its usually 1 day rather than 2). This … Read more

Thermonuclear Status Report for 12/10

by

It’s been a quiet fall around Nuketown. I didn’t realize just how quiet until this morning, when I was surfing around the archives and saw just how many days I didn’t post in September, October, and November.  Granted, November was lost to writing the novel, but the earlier months weren’t all that much better. The … Read more

53,379 reasons to do NaNoWriMo

by

It’s done. After a month of writing 1,667 words almost every day (with a few days hitting 3,000 to 4,000 to make up for traveling, family engagements, and the occasional bout of exhaustion), I completed my novel. It’s 53,379 words, which is slightly over the 50,000-word goal set by the National Novel Writing Month organizers. … Read more

Geeks Can Run for Office … and Win!

by

Atlas Games President John Nephew’s been elected to city council in Maplewood, Minnesota. According to Gaming Report, his opposition tried to play the “games are evil” card, but clearly it didn’t work. I’m not saying I want to run for city council in Easton, I’m just saying I find it interesting that a gamer was … Read more

Radio Active 59: Novel Update, Seeds of Destruction, NanoMonkeys, Invincible Super Blog

by

On this edition of Nuketown Radio Active, I update folks on my quest to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, check out a new LEGO Chess set, debate what to call a hybrid unicorn/pegasus. In Netheads I talk about Chris’s Invincible Super Blog, a blog featuring capsule reviews of current and classic comic … Read more

Halo 2 Soundtrack, Vol. 2 Delivers the True Halo Experience

by
Master Chief holds two submachine guns as the world explodes in a orange-yellow haze around him.

When Halo 2 was released, it was accompanied by a soundtrack. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the soundtrack fans had been hoping for: instead of one featuring the music from the game, it instead pulled the old “music from and inspired by the game” trick. While a few game tracks could be found on it, including “Halo … Read more

Snoopy’s RSS Hell

by

I’ve been fighting the good fight against RSS bugs in Moodle 1.8.2. The problem isn’t actually with Moodle, but with Snoopy, the PHP class that emulates as a web browser and which Magpie RSS library uses to fetch the feeds.

It seems that the current version of Snoopy has some issues with redirected URLs. It has trouble following 302 Page Moved messages and has an annoying habit of putting the port number into redirected URLs. While it’s not technically wrong to do this, not every web server thinks that the urls foo.com and foo.com:80 are the same (strange but true).

Case in point: The Wall Street Journal. The following feeds involve redirects (apparently served through FeedBurner, so I’m betting any feed using FeedBurner would have the same issue):

http://online.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7011.xml
http://online.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7014.xml