Luke Stebner

First Impressions - Dirt 3
Posted on 2011-12-25 13:00:00
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The Dirt series has become one of my favorite racing games. There is nowhere near enough good rally games, but Codemasters seems to constantly deliver. I bought Dirt 3 and F1 2011 when they were grouped in some crazy Steam deal awhile ago and held off playing it because I thought I would play more Dirt 2, but after trying F1 and being completely terrible at it, I decided to just give Dirt 3 a go and see what had been upgraded.

To me, Dirt 2 is the mediocre sequel that sequels often turn out to be, but I did not realize this until playing Dirt 3. I actually enjoyed most of the time I spent with Dirt 2, but the menu system was slow and painful and the races left a lot to be desired. Dirt 3 is much more streamlined and downright gorgeous. From the menus, to the cars to the environments, everything is polished and extremely detailed.

So far, I have enjoyed my time with Dirt 3 a lot. The tracks are fun and pretty varied. The 2nd game seemed like it had a lot more races, but honestly I did not want to do most of them, so I am fine with less - better quality - content.

I gotta say though, I love watching Ken Block do some Gymkhana, but I am not very interested in doing it myself. The fact that I can not avoid these challenges in Dirt 3 (and there seem to be a lot of them) is a big disappointment. I just want to rally! More rally!

Also, there are a lot of races that they put in the list that you have to buy separate. I have seen other games do this as well and it always bothers me. It makes me feel like they have this content already there, they are just making me spend more money to acquire it. Not to mention no prices show up, so I am not going to jump on a purchase without that.

All in all, Dirt 3 looks and feels incredible. I think the first game still stands as my favorite in the series as it was all about the rallying, and nothing else. The games have lost focus, but are delivering top notch quality at the same time so it is hard to complain much. Regardless, I wanted to post some screenshots because this game just looks so good.

Hope everyone had a Happy Holiday!
Lots of New Bearblog Goodies
Posted on 2011-12-17 01:00:00
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Today was a good day for better blog, it received a whole mess of much needed features! Some of them I had been working on and simply had not gotten pushed live yet for one reason or another, and some of them just got put in today. Either way, there are good things in these updates!
1. Caching Most notably is a sort of caching mechanism. You may be aware, Bearblog is already reading from flat files, so it is very quick to read in a posts content. However, in order to do listing pages, Bearblog needs to read in every post and be able to rearrange and sort through them. Especially for pagination, and later to come, category pages and tag relationships.
The way the caching works here is that a timer fires when the server is started and then on set intervals afterwards. This timeout will grab all posts from the filesystem and store them in a cache object. It will then update mappings it has of sorted posts data to their post index (an ID of sorts, but really just an array index).

Currently, the only mapping is by_uri and is used for getting a single without having to sort through every post until a match is found.
1. Pagination Listings are now paginated at every 10 posts and page links show up at the bottom. Pretty straightforward feature. The next update to come with this is a single post having links to the "next" and "previous" posts.
2. Conf.js There is a new file now that exists in ./app/ named conf.js. This file now stores data like sitename and baseurl, more stuff will probably get added to this over time, but the goal is here is to make updating to new versions of bearblog easy by pulling out your site specific data.
3. Meta Tags There was a bug (of sorts) in which all meta in a post file was being output in the HTML as meta tags. These tags are now limited to: keywords, description, robots and title. If more need to be added, it can/will be done. These were the important ones I thought of for now.
That is all I can remember for the major updates. Some really cool features in there and I personally think Bearblog is coming along quite nicely at this point. I promise there will be more comments to come down the road.

You can check out Bearblog on github for more info.
First Day With Vim
Posted on 2011-12-16 10:00:00
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Today was the first time I officially dedicated a whole day to coding in vim, more specifically macvim. I guess I can't really say why I decided today was the day to abandon my long relationship with textmate and I definitely wouldn't ever downtalk textmate. It is easily the best text editor I've ever used.

There's something different about vim though. It's designed to be streamlined and aerodynamic to the point that you can do anything with only a few simple keystrokes. I knew my way around textmate quite well, but just reading vim beginning lessons I can already see the power it brings to the table.

Now, I'm aware the world doesn't need anymore vim vs textmate arguments or touting about how great vim is, people have been using it for 30 years. However, I still wanted to take my moment to acknowledge my new found appreciation and look forward to my discoveries here!

And with that, good night!
B.o.B. EPIC Mixtape
Posted on 2011-12-13 16:00:00
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If you haven't listened to this mixtape yet, you're missing out! I can't stress it enough, I wasn't a big fan of The Adventures of Bobby Ray, it just didn't appeal to me. BoB's style was too all over the place for me, and the more R&B style parts I really disliked. He really stepped up his game for this mixtape though. If it's any indication of what else is to come for the future of BoB, then he can have my money now!

Give it a listen, you won't be disappointed!

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Next Bear Blog Updates
Posted on 2011-12-13 09:30:00
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Bearblog is getting some new features at the moment, one in particular I'm excited about is caching. It's not incredibly necessary since Bearblog uses flat files for posts, reading them is already fast. It's better for use when lists are to be compiled such as 'related by tag' or '10 newest posts'. Since everything needs to be pulled for these or calculated on some sort of internal job, I kind of...mixed the two.

I won't go into detail until I finish and prove it works, but this has also been the cause for the lack of posts recently as my codebase has not exactly been working. However, I wanted to talk about Dungeon Defenders so bad that I branched it and wrote up that post and this one.

Another big thing that will come with this cache object is pagination. I need to start breaking this down into pages for many different reasons, but that can't be done at the moment. However, nodejs-file-system's pesky callbacks for everything are making my life very difficult. I need to get them under control! Until then, Bearblog lives in it's current state.

If you haven't checked out Bearblog yet you can read the Bearblog introduction and check out the Bearblog Github Repo.
Knee Deep Defending Dungeons
Posted on 2011-12-12 11:15:00
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Just this weekend I dove into an indie game I bought awhile back called Dungeon Defenders. It had caught my eye during a Steam sale so I picked it up, but had never gotten around to playing it. Upon finally diving in, I find myself incredibly addicted.

In fact, I mean to write this post yesterday, but then thought I should play just a bit more. If I had in fact written this when I first was going to, I don't even think it would have been as positive as it's going to be. This game has really grown on me.

If you don't know, Dungeon Defenders is a tower defense type of game, but you are also in control of a hero. You can choose from 4 different base classes and customize various character stats along with armor and weapon stats. There is seriously customization everywhere. Needless to say, this is awesome.

Well, I just wanted to share that I'm loving this game and anyone who doesn't know of it should check it out. Also, I wanted to leave with a few images.
Bearblog Visual Updates
Posted on 2011-12-09 13:45:00
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Good news everyone! Christmas has come early! Jon Victorino has stepped in and cleaned up bearblog's look and feel. You're looking at it right now!

Feeling really slick now, it's time to start flushing out what bearblog is and make it a really solid platform. So expect plenty of further development on this in the near future and plenty of talk about it here.

If you don't know, bearblog is a minimalistic blogging platform written in nodejs. It's essentially a skeleton project to help you get a blog up and running with the least amount of effort possible. Posts are written in markdown and you have full control over layout, style and everything else. Please check it out over at the bearblog github home.
Now Listening - Lil Wayne The Dedication 2
Posted on 2011-12-09 11:20:00
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Not a new mixtape, but one I've never heard so giving it a go. Pretty solid so far, put it here for your enjoyment as well.

Download Mixtape | Free Mixtapes Powered by DatPiff.com
Bearblog Onto Flat Files
Posted on 2011-12-09 00:12:00
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Hey you! If you're reading this, you don't even know it yet, but you're reading a brand new version of the site and the infinitely awesome bearblog!

Too much excitement? Let me tone it down and explain myself. Bearblog is a minimalistic blogging engine that I'm working on in my free time because I think a dead simple blogging solution is yet to be found. There are great pieces of blogging software out there, but bearblog takes the simplest approach possible. Plus, it's built with nodejs.

Anyways, here's what's just happened that you didn't even know happened. Yesterday, bearblog was using a Mongo DB for storing blog posts, today, it is using flat files. Why the change? Well, I do have good reason for it and I plan on elaborating more in a future post, but let me give some bullet points. 1. It's incredibly fast to read from a file system 2. There is only 1 type of data on this site, blog posts. A whole database is overkill 3. Using markdown, we get nice syntax highlighting already built into many text editors 4. Using git, we get file revision and backups automatically on posts 5. We don't have to write an admin system to create/edit posts 6. We can edit from anywhere via SSH or FTP easily

Ok, I think that's enough reasoning for now. I want to talk about that more coming up in the near future. I also want to address there are clear upsides to using a database solution vs this, but I still think this method suites the simplistic blogging engine that bearblog is better than using a DB. Upon releasing this as an actual usable software to the world, I will leave the old mongo based branch in there to be used.

That is all for now, I am excited to have this new version up and running. I'm also looking forward to more stable code so I can update more frequently and work on making this not so hideous to look at it.

In time...all in good time.
Little Skyrim Progress
Posted on 2011-12-06 08:11:42
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Little Skyrim progress tonight. Lost some motivation in a room full of necromancers blasting me with fireballs and when I finally got through it I was left confused as can be anyways. It was the end of the A Night To Remember quest where you relive a drunken night.

It was actually a quite fun quest. You are challenged to some drinks at a bar in Whiterun and after three you black out and awake in some strange place. People are yelling at you for the mess you caused and you then go down the path of fixing the disasters you created during your drunken night while gathering pieces of information about what happened. I won't spoil the ending for you, but I will recommend if you're playing Skyrim to hunt down this quest!

In other news, Alice: Madness Returns has been really fun. It has surprised me with how well designed it is. I'm reminded of playing a good Prince of Persia or even God of War style game. It's not quite as hardcore as either of those, but you can tell some care still went into it.

Speaking of care, is everyone getting on board with path? If not, you should check it out on your mobile device ASAP. It's an incredibly beautiful and intuitive app for your social network focused lives.

Well, I just checked and the DNS still hasn't crossed over so I'm just going to cross my fingers and call it a night. If it doesn't work out this first time, it just means these posts go live late rather than sooner...oh well.

Night.