Life According to Duck

2009 was an eventful year - so eventful, in fact, that I practically *forgot* I even had this blog.  I posted once in January, and that was that.

2010 *will* be an eventful year - I've bought a new home with my best friend, fallen in love with an amazing girl, grown my business by leaps and bounds, and have a whole series of new challenges ahead - and it only makes sense to reboot this blog and start documenting said adventures!

I'll likely create a new layout for this blog to mark the occasion, but that's certainly not a priority so don't get your hopes up.

And for everyone who's wondering - I haven't forgotten about CoHLCD, and I've finally located my backup of the last functional source code.  I *hope* to have a v2.0 release in the next month, though my current workload might cause problems there.

Filed Under: A Duck's Life, Site-related
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When writing up the Countdown Timer in Flash article yesterday, I stumbled across a need for a fairly simple plugin - one that would output the current Unix Timestamp into a Post's content. While I could use a plugin such as 'Exec-PHP' to accomplish this, that seemed to fall into the 'breaking eggs with a sledgehammer' brand of overkill.

As such, I whipped up a quick Wordpress plugin (as I often do for these tiny problems), and decided to make this one available to the public. So without further ado, I give you...

Duck's Timestamp Inserter! Ok, it could use a more creative title. Using some pretty simple markup, it allows me to insert the current timestamp, or offsets thereof, into my post content.

<!--ducktime--> becomes 1268313461, while <!--ducktime+5000--> becomes 1268318461 and <!--ducktime-1200--> becomes 1268312261. If you refresh the page, you'll see these all change.

UPDATE: This Plugin is now listed on the WordPress Plugin Repository! You can download Duck's Timestamp Inserter from there - and of course, Ratings are appreciated. I've released it under GPL3. If you find it useful, please consider Donating.

Filed Under: Duck's Plugins, Web Dev & Design, WordPress
Tags: epoch, PHP, plugin, timestamp, unix, WordPress
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Recently at work, I was asked to add a Countdown Timer to a few of our pages giving the time remaining until a Sale kicked in. While I could have whipped this up pretty quickly in Javascript, I decided to use the opportunity to expand my Flash knowledge a little.

One of my key considerations was using the Server's time, rather than the time of the User's system clock. This meant passing two Timestamps from PHP to Flash, which luckily is very easy to do. I'll walk you through the entire design process here. I'll be using Flash CS3, and ActionScript 2.0.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed Under: Flash & ActionScript, Web Dev & Design
Tags: actionscript, countdown, flash, timer, timestamp
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Well, my G15 Refinishing is now on hold indefinitely. Somehow, the Numpad Enter key, which was (along with every other key) soaking in a jar of water to release the paint thinner, turned into jelly and puffed up. The other keys, which all had the identical treatment, remain unaffected.

I'll probably look for a used/broken G15 or G11, and just swipe the keytops from it. However, this definitely pushed this to the end of the project list.

Sheeb's Tau Battlesuits are nearly completed, as is the Necron 'Hand of Despair' Terrain piece. I'll be making some related terrain pieces soon, and creating templates so others can make the same Hand.

I'm going to be out of town all weekend, so the list itself won't really get knocked down all that much for a while. Ah well, I deserve a *few* days off

Filed Under: A Duck's Life, The Great To-Do List, Warhammer 40K
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After soaking the Keys in Brake Fluid all night, and giving them a vigorous scrubbing this morning, maybe 30% of the paint has come loose - and that's being very generous. I'm back to looking for another method of paint stripping to get the Keys down to their transparent plastic bases.

On top of that, I had the brilliant idea of giving the main plastic pieces (which were spraypainted with Krylon Fusion yesterday) a quick Clear Coat. Bad idea. It caused a fair bit of the Krylon Fusion to bubble up, and now I have to strip the paint off these as well.

So basically, the only part that's gone right in this whole project has been replacing the Blue LEDs with Red Ones - assuming you don't count the small soldering iron burn I self-inflicted. Hopefully this project turns around soon!

Filed Under: A Duck's Life, The Great To-Do List
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