Ken Newquist

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

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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

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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

Radio Active #58: Chess for Kids, Geek Dads, D&D 4E

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On this episode of Radio Active, I discuss my daughter StarGirl’s sudden desire to learn chess and my approach to teaching her, contemplate the impending arrival of National Novel Writing Month, check out the Geek Dad Podcast and Simian Farmer blog and offer some thoughts on the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Getting the Show … Read more

Spreadsheets with Open Office

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After a few days of working with Open Office’s word processor, it was time to turn to the spreadsheet. I don’t work with spreadsheets much at home, but I do have a few specialized uses for them. One of those is a campaign manager for my Mutants & Masterminds campaign – I use it to … Read more

The Great iMovie ’08 Crash Fiasco

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One of the reasons I bought my MacBook Pro was to get back to digitizing some home video and experimenting with video podcasts for Nuketown. Unfortunately, Apple’s iMovie ’08 video editing app isn’t cooperating. Every time I hook up my Canon ZR70 up to the MacBook Pro and try to import audio via iMovie ’08 … Read more

Early NeoOffice Foibles

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My first few days on NeoOffice haven’t turned up any major problems, but I have encountered a couple of foibles. Most of these are personal preferences, but I think most heavy Word users while find them to be similarly annoying Bullets: Word had me spoiled; simply typing an asterisk before a sentence and hitting return … Read more

Radio Active #57: NaNoWriMo, Kit Bag, Crisis on Finite Macs, Unquiet Desperation, Halo 3

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On this episode of Nuketown Radio Active, I become an uncle again, contemplate a Crisis on Finite Macs, geek out about Halo 3, look ahead to National Novel Writing Month, listen to the Unquiet Desperation podcast. I also check out the geeky Secret Agent internet radio station and consider the merits of a geek dad … Read more

NeoOffice: Stop the Productivity Mind Tricks

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Firing up NeoOffice and using it to write a few quick documents, the first thing I noticed was how slick and Aquafied it was — it feels like a Mac OS X native application, which is a major advantage over Open-Office-under-X11 approach that I took earlier. I also quickly began to assemble a list of … Read more