DmS Notes 'n Blurbs

MySpace

2008-12-01T23:37:00.000+01:00

Chhezzus what a messy site this myspace stuff is...
Spent an hour 2 day trying to find out how to get in as an artist ?

Found zip, nada nothingm and this shit should be easy? bollox!
/D

Personal review of www.PokerRoom.com

2007-08-03T10:44:00.000+02:00

Here I'll give you a small overview of what I believe places PokerRoom above other online poker sites today.

Every online poker site offer poker and free online poker both as cash games and tournaments. Naturally so does PokerRoom.

However, I believe that PokerRoom offers more than just online poker, one of the largest poker communities "Pokah" today resides in PokerRoom, there is a poker school with live calculated EV-Stats tables and much more.

But what really puts PokerRoom apart from other online poker sites is that they really work to be innovative! They where amongst the first to offer cross platform poker through their stylish Java based webclient.

Now PokerRoom is alone on the market with a concept called Team Play where you create a team and play in dedicated special Team Play Tournaments. Given some time this can be huge!

There is also true mobile poker where you play real online poker on your cell phone, the selection of opponents are the same as on the regular poker tables.

There is of course a lot of poker tournaments available, both scheduled and sit & go's.

The cash games is always available and caters to a wide selection of different tastes in limits, NL/FL/PL, Omaha, Stud and more.

A newsroom telling you what's new in poker and on PokerRoom.

A lot of challanges and poker bonus'es can be found, for example become a poker pro through Team PokerRoom.

PokerRoom also runs a poker blog holding poker movies as well as normal blogging material.

Basically, Yes I really like PokerRoom and I strongly suggest you give www.PokerRoom.com a good checkout to see what one of the premier online poker sites is really about.

/D

Viva Las Vegas... Or?

2006-02-23T22:42:00.000+01:00

Just back from 3 days in Vegas and I must say that basically all my thoughts on how wierd that place can be came true, and then some... This must be mans ultimate tribute to Mammon!

Gold coated hotels with 5000+ rooms, venetian canals indoor and more, much much more. If you can think of an extremly tasteless way to show that this is expensive and luxourious, multiply that with 50 and you are closing in on Vegas. How about a 60 feet high golden lion outside a hotel for example?

The city is centered on one thing, and one thing only. To separate the visitors from their money. And man, does the visitors comply...
I have never ever seen people who so willingly part with their cash without getting anything back in return. You don't even have to gamble to spread money around at an alarming rate.

Eat breakfast, step out of the hotel, buy a bottle of water, grab a cab and ride a mile and you are down $30 and that's the cheap part. Step into a cheesy bar, grab 2 beers and a cheesburger for lunch and that's another $25. Walk a bit more, pick up a souvernier t-shirt and a cap, $30 more. Some more water and a cab for another mile or two to the casino of your choice, another $20.
Now we're over $100 and you havn't even stepped into the casino...

The casinos are a chapter all by themselves.
Not only are they large, very very large, after a while you notice that there are no windows and no clocks. All to make the player forget that it's closing in to 3.00 in the morning and that you perhaps should sleep... Or that it's 10.00 in the morning and the free drink the waitress is offering might not be the perfect choice just before breakfast...

Then to play, take a seat at a lowlimit blackjack table where the minimum bet is $10, you are basically forced to toss in $100 to get enough chips for a couple of hands, then poof, it's gone. Same with the other tablegames, it's hard to find a table with lower bets than $10. What amazes me is the amount of ppl that play the $100 minimum tables... Now to me that is some serious money per bet... Not to mention the highlimit rooms where minimum $500 per bet is not uncommon.

Ok, let's step over to the poker then, all hotels I visited had a separated non smoking poker room which is nice, the rooms are not that large though maybe 10-15 tables and most of them are full. The limits on the tables differ during the night depending on what ppl are requesting.

According to those in our company that played a lot in different places both the buyins and the quality of the games differ quite a lot. In most hotels the lowest games you can find are $1 $2 or $2 $4 limit/nolimit games and a minimum buyin of $40, which seems quite ok until you take a look at the tables in play. By then it's clear that a buyin with anything less than $100 sets you severely shortstacked from start, and as any pokerplayer will tell you, that's not fun in ring games. Also, in these lowlimit games the house rake almost always ends up at 10% of the pot which is quite steep to put it mildly.

Tournaments then (which was what I planned on grabbing one or two of), what's the game there? In our hotel (the Flamingo) I couldn't find anything but one 60-70 seat morning tournament in the weekdays that fills up instantly. There was no sit and go's and basically nothing during the weekend. I guess the rake is too low for the house to bother with tourneys when they can have a lot of ppl playing ring games instead.

Finally, the slots, a wierd phenomena indeed, I just don't get the fun with it, not at all, no skill no nothing, just click 'n lose... The normal ones range from $0.01 to $5 per credit, most are $0.25. Then you have highlimit slots where you are talking about $20-50 per credit...
But the wierdest thing with slots must be the tournaments. Yup, specially prepared machines for speed, then you get points for your play and after a set time the points are counted and a winner is declared. Someone please explain this to me, I simply cannot see any sense in this at all. A competition based on random chance instead of some type of skill... Doh, not for me!

If you don't want to gamble, then what is there to do? Quite a lot actually. There are shows all over, from music & cabaret to stand up comedy to magic shows. The prices range from $50-100 up to $500 for the best seats in the high end shows so that will easily make up for a night in the casino.

Dining out is also an option, A nice steak and a decent bottle of wine (nothing spectacular though) in a decent restaurant will land somewhere around $100 to $150. An unusual experience is the rainforest garden at the MGM Grand, imagine eating inside a plastic rainforest with hippos & zebras staring down at you, robotic monkeys that hoot & thump the chest all through dinner, that is when the strobe lights doesn't simulate lightning and rain streams down behind your back... Food? Fair. Experience? Tacky to the extreme!

To sit down for some drinks varies a lot, in the Luxors pianobar in the casino a normal drink lands at around $10.50, not cheap but manageble. An interesting note was that I couldn't get a regular coffee there, but to my astonishment when I made a joke and asked for an irish coffe instead, it was perfectly ok, go figure... Note that I've never had irish coffe with green mint flavoured cream before, and I certainly will not again...

In a fancier place like the Bouchon in the venetian tower a shot of Remy Martin with ice and soda will set you back over $30, and that hurts if you like a couple of drinks before and after your meal...

Now I shouldn't complain too much, after all Vegas is an unique experience that I probably never will forget. During the three days I was there I got to see hotels that have no equals anywhere in the world, I got a rafting trip from Hoover dam over to Arizona. It was a great trip and really fun to see a place like Vegas!

:)
/Dan

PHP Conference 2005

2005-11-11T10:52:00.000+01:00

Just back from 2 days at the PHP Conference in Frankfurt.
This is the first event of this type I've been at and I must say that it was a bit odd :) Normally at the evenings of conferences ppl mingle in the bar, takes a couple of drinks and discuss the day.
Here the bar was filled with groups of developers hacking away at their notebooks...
Not sure how many ppl there was, I heard 3-400 but that sounded a bit high.

So how was it?
Pretty good, went to two seminars on PHP Performance and PHP 5 by Ilia Alshanetsky that was really good. He's not only extremely knowledgable on PHP, he's a good speaker as well. These two was the highlight for me.

I also went to How PHP Ticks with a speaker from EZ Publish, also a knowledgable guy but not really my topic.
Refactoring and State of the art development by Stefan Priebsch that covered PHPUnit tests, Phing and more was also interesting.

I went to a couple more as well that was fair to far from good though, sometime I whish that speakers would prepare just a little bit before holding a seminar...

One thing that surprised me was that while both Oracle and Zend was there as sponsors, only Oracle took the chance to speak. One would think that Zend as "the PHP company" would take the chance to demo their productline in a seminar, but nope. Just a small stand with some demo cd's and broshures...

Some pics:
The keynote:

This is just about what the exhibition was, a few more tables, but that's it.

And here's the hotel, from the entrance and upwards :)

Unfortunately the pictures from the bar of all the participants banging away on their computers turned out all too dark :(
One really fun thing was that a guy I know from www.ozoneasylum.com "Tyberius Prime" lives close to Frankfurt so he dropped by the hotel for a chat. Really nice guy.

Well, that's it for now, laters! /Dan

2005-08-18T21:56:00.000+02:00

Hey, this Linux stuff is pretty fun...
Since my last blurb I've managed to do quite a lot (in my no0b eyes anyways)

- Install AMP (Apache2, PHP, MySQL), Still some configs to go there before it all works as I want.
- Config the system so it auto mounts 2 windows partitions for shared files.
- Installed & set up Samba to share a folder for transfers over my local network.
- Installed Firefox plus flash plugins in FF and Moz.

Right now I'm installing Eclipse with WebTools and the PHP plugin for development.

Perhaps a walk in the park for you, but hey! I'm an old Dog and you all know how easy we are to get to sit down ;)

Anyways, back 2 work... I can see the eclipse updater is nearing the end...
/Laters D

2005-08-02T09:43:00.000+02:00

Debian installation.
Well, this has been an interesting experience to say the least.
I've learned tons and had fun and frustrating moments.

A Summary:
I used debianpure from http://www.debianpure.com/ which basically is a simplified way to get a "real" Debian install up and running with the normal packages (visual, audio, web, dev, office etc) that a normal user needs.

It starts out with basic setup and partitioning etc which was easy to understand, as you get to the apt-part of the install you stop the basic installation and reboot. As root you then run 1 of 4 different sh-scripts (gnome from cd, kde from cd, gnome from net, kde from net), these scripts retrieve the needed packages and installs them.

After another reboot you get to configure screen, sound etc which also worked just fine.

After that you are up and running! Nice package indeed.

Needless to say I've had some problems, but these where 95% me using a notoriously bad wireless card for Linux, had I used a std ethernet card I'm sure it would have been a breeze.

The last 5% of trouble was the fact that all paths in the sh-scripts has hardcoded paths starting with /media/cdrom/ As I had one dvd-drive and one cd-drive mine where labeled cdrom1 and cdrom2... Doh, none of the scripts worked.

Not knowing if/how you could rename these in bash I went to my trusted mac, copied all content from the CD, altered the scripts and burned a new .iso
After that it all worked.

For the wireless card (D-Link DWL-510 11Mbps PCI card), this is what I found out:
The ndiswrapper worked with the std windows dlink-drivers as described in the FAQ at debianpure, however the /etc/network/interfaces needed to have the correct "wireless_channel " and "wireless_mode managed" asides from what was specified in the faq at debianpure. I suspect, but not confirmed, that when I used ad-hoc for the mode it tried to connect to another of my machines up and running on the LAN.

At some points during the install in bash, the system will lag and not echo your input at the prompt, it comes back without you doing anything though.

There is one more snag, the card refuses to start on boot, it needs an su "ifup wlan0" after you've booted everything to kickstart it and to get an IP, omit this and it will not recieve an ip from the router... go figure... As for how stable it is, I don't know yet, I've used it for about 1 hour without problems so far.

At this point I havn't enabled WEP yet, I've heard that there might be problems with the 128 bit encryption and that you might need to set a lower level, havn't confirmed that yet though.

All in all, basically a nice way to get up with Debian 3.1 Sarge using kernel 2.6.8x.
If you unlike me have a clue when you start, you'll have an easy time with it.

Cheers/Dan

2005-08-01T22:35:00.000+02:00

Finally, I'm on Linux...
I just finished a debian 3.1 sarge install and after a sh*tload of trouble everything works, 99% of all trouble was about the wireless, I'll post more later but here's a pic.

Cheers /Dan

Church vs Science...

2005-07-28T09:30:00.000+02:00

This Open Letter to Kansas School District must be one of the more creative arguments posted so far in the US debate of teaching Intelligent Design vs Evolution theory in schools...

In short, if you replace the word god with another and take two unrelated (but true) statistics and put them together to prove a point you will get this...

It's absolutely breathtakingly funny while scary since it shows that people will grasp any arguments to prove a point they desperately need to be true...
Go read the Open Letter :)

/Dan

2005-07-27T14:38:00.000+02:00

After my site being down for a couple of weeks due to massive hardware failure it's fixed and up again. Unfortunately the ftp has changed in a way that doesn't allow my old blog here at blogger to publish to it... Sigh, so here we go, a new one at blogspot...

On another note, I'm into a new tutorial for www.gurusnetwork.com this will be a pattern based PHP/MySQL guestbook.
It will be available as Open Source as well when it's done :)
'til the next blurb... /Dan

2005-07-23T14:38:00.000+02:00

Finally the server is back up...
My friend Rob who is gratiously hosting www.dmsproject.com has totally rebuilt the server after some critical parts blew up and now it's up and running again :)
Super thanx!

So what's up now?
I'm just back from a 4 week vacation, it was superb!
Then as I got home my 80Gb hd blew up... it just clicks and cannot be found anymore :(
That's all the mails from 2001 and forward... Documents and more...
Luckily ALL my digital photos & webcode are safely stored on another computer...

Bummer, I'll tell you that!
Now I'm off to shop for 2 new big drives and a raid controller to mirror ALL data from now and onwards, never again will this happen to me! (I hope...)
'til the next time, Cheers
/Dan

2005-03-24T14:38:00.000+01:00

Finally, it's up :)
16'th march we released the project I've been managing for the last months, a complete rewrite of what's probably the biggest poker community around today. 100% OOP/PHP multi-tier architecture, a super sweet db-design that purrs like a cat with 100 selects/sec and 15-20 inserts/updates/deletes/sec...

It's the work of 3 ServerSide coders, 1 dba, a designer and a template maker and little 'ole me + some assorted help. 2,5 months designing & coding plus a lot of planning and here it is :
Pokah! PokerRoom.com
Whoo :)
/Dan

2005-03-03T14:38:00.000+01:00

AMP (Apache/MySQL/PHP) on USB.
I've been thinking of getting a small, working portable development enviroment up and running for a while now. Something that I could take with me and use on what ever PC I was at for the moment. What I didn't want to do was to install the whole package on a PC that wasn't mine so I started thinking of using an USB stick.

After reading a short tutorial over at firepages where he described getting PHP5, Apache and MySQL onto USB I got to work.

After a lot of hacking and cursing around problems with not using the drive letters in php.ini and httpd.conf I decided to try a ready made package:

I went with xampp lite, an appr 50Mb large package that can be found here:
http://www.apachefriends.org/download.php?xampplite-win32-1.4.12-pl1.exe

I unpacked the zip through the downloaded .exe into a folder on the desktop, copied the folder xampplite to the root of the USB, entered the folder and clicked xampp_start.exe

Whoops... a complete WAMP install on usb that works...
This install offers quite a lot, phpmyadmin for example so I uploaded my CMS-beta, loaded the db and started...
It works! Smarty and everyting :)

I'm using a 128 Mb USB 2 memory stick and that's probably minimum if it should be usable.

Now, what are you waiting for... Go try it :)
/Dan

2005-01-31T14:37:00.000+01:00

Hi there, long time no writing... Sorry...

Life good to ya? Mine is :)
Remember I told you I got a new job? Well not only that, I got a promotion as well! It took 4 months, heck I'm still on my 6 month trial period...

From regular programmer to doing oop system architecture for a complete rewrite of a section of the site, plus running a 6 person project as technical project manager.

4 weeks into that project and we are 85% ready and meeting deadlines, the manager steps up and says "I'd like you to work full time as technical project manager, how about it?"

Guess what, I said yes :)
Sometimes it pays off to take that extra step.

'til the next blurb/Dan

2004-12-04T14:37:00.000+01:00

So, I've been hysterically busy lately and not much news to note.
It's funny, once you've officially decided to leave freelancing and got yourself a steady job, the phone starts ringing...

In one month I've gotten 3 job offers and a series of requests for short small gigs... Go figure :) It's nice some ppl like what I have to offer though.

On that note I'll post a link to A very flexible all css layout that I've managed to get together. It works in IE 6, FF on PC and Safari on Mac. IE on Mac is a no go, Opera is so so but on the whole I like it, a lot.
Take a look, perhaps you might pick up something useful, who knows :)
Cheers/Dan

2004-10-29T14:37:00.000+02:00

How cool is this!
Not only did I recently manage to get a swedish client #1 on Google with his commercial webshop under the exact terms he wanted... :)

Now this...
The DAO VO Generator I built has really hit home with google...
It's not only featured at my main site, it's available as a utility at http://www.gurusnetwork.com/ as well, and look and behold.
Today 2004-10-29 it holds the 4 top spots in google when you search for 'dao vo generator'... Wow...
Google Search: dao vo generator
With that response I've bundled it and released it under LGPL.

You can find it here: http://www.dmsproject.com/test/dao_...o_generator.zip

It's been a good week so far :)
/Dan

2004-10-11T14:37:00.000+02:00

Just back from a poker tournament.
At my new job at http://www.ongame.com/ where we amongst other things develop & maintain http://www.pokerroom.com/ , one of the top 6 online poker sites in the world the management decided to kickstart the internal poker interest.

Said & done, they started "clash of the staff", an internal Texas Hold 'em poker 2 day tournament with a first prize that was pretty amazing...
An all paid ticket to Vegas for the WSOP 2005!
Almost forgot, it included the $10.000 buyin as well...

We were 93 entered with the buyin at $1.000, the first day was played online until 40 remained, the next set was live with dealers and everything.

After the first day I was in 9'th place with $3.450 in chips, unfortunately it all went downhill from there as we went live :(
I ended up somewhere around 30'th place after a serious streak of bad pocket cards, rotten flops, worse rivers and players that folded every time I had a hand worth playing... grrr!

On the other hand, in June I didn't know Texas Holdem from a burrito... so I guess I'll be back for the next one.

Yup, one more chance is coming up this spring :) The company is sending 2 of us to WSOP 2005 :)
How cool is it to work at a place where poker at work is encouraged :)

Cheers/Dan

2004-09-10T14:37:00.000+02:00

It's live!
Probably not a big thing for you, but it's sort of a biggie for me. The DAO VO Generator is finally alive and released for public use. Please pop over and give it a try, it now contains a mini tutorial, plus it ties in very well as the last step of three with the other two tutorials on PHP MySQL I've written for the gurusnetwork. The first one covered the creation of a miniature database driven site with an admin interface, this focused on procedural coding. The second one built on the first and converted the procedural code to OOP. This last one gives you the foundation to accomplish the same ting by using a basic design pattern. :) I'm pleased, will you be? Test it...
Main Page: Utilities: The Gurus Network

2004-09-05T14:36:00.000+02:00

So, I've gotten some help from a guy over at the gurusnetwork to work out some of the regexp problems I've had with the generator. Now it works a lot better, in specific, now it handles both `' and nothing around the table- and fieldnames in the sql statement.

DmS DAO & VO DB-access Generator: Utilities: The Gurus Network

2004-09-02T14:45:00.000+02:00

Wow!
This site searches the web for copies of the spage you enter the url for. I did a search on a tutorial I wrote and found it word by word in a forum...
Impressive to say the least, I'll play more with this to be sure.

For now, try it out yourself ;)

Copyscape - Website Plagiarism Search - Web Content Copyright Infringement Protection

Cheers/Dan

2004-08-28T14:44:00.000+02:00

Today I'm getting really close to the final release of a PHP Code generator.

The tool generates all code needed to connect to and work with a MySQL database. It does this from the actual sql script that generates the database.
This means that you can with two clicks generate a database in mysql and get all the OOP code you need to work with it. :)

Yup, OOP... The generated code is based on the DAO & VO/TO patterns. Enough said here, you can follow the release discussion here: Guru Gab - Not a tutorial, a brand new utility in that thread there are links to the actual tool as well.

Cheers/Dan

2004-08-24T14:36:00.000+02:00

Whoot!
I just got offered a steady job!
Yup, after 2.5 years of "non-chosen" self-employment & freelancing the place where I'm currently contracted said yes to my question if they would be interested of having me full time!

This means a steady paycheck, paid vacation and all the regular things, basically, i can now plan my life for me & the family again :)

As it's signed I'll post more deatils-
Laters/Dan

2004-08-23T14:33:00.000+02:00

So, I went and got myself a blog...
Yup, I thought I'd just as well might have a little place of my own to post general ramblings and other mumbojumbo that I's like to get off my chest.

I do have a regular website of course, www.dmsproject.com that is more geared towards my development of a CMS in PHP/MySql. That's also a place where I publish small toys that I make. The latest one is a code generator.

You probably know of OOP, Object Oriented Programming.
Well, I've gotten into that lately, and one thing I want to use basically all the time is a representation of the database as objects in my code. I want to use DAO or Data Access Objects.

I'm also lazy, so I don't want to be hacking the same code over and over again so I decided to create a little tool that creates the code for me.

Take a look here: http://www.dmsproject.com/test/dao_generator/ and give it a whirl, who knows, you just might like it ;)

Cheers/Dan