There’s been a lot of writing to be had from these fingers this past week! I’m so happy with how things have been turning out and am happy to say that the second installment of Spiral Jackals should be ready in time for tomorrow. I’ve been revisiting my music library and have found many of my old sources of inspiration, and thought I’d share a few with you. So, without further ado, here are some music videos for songs that helped particularly well this week (some of it I never would have expected to draw inspiration from, either):

Covenant – We Want Revolution

Vangelis – Tears in Rain

Hybrid – Dreaming Your Dreams

VNV Nation – Testament

Benny Benassi – Love is Gonna Save Us

This is but a small sampling of what goes through my eardrums throughout a given day, and is definitely not an exhaustive list!

I think Blade Runner is calling my name again.

What music inspires you?

The first installment of my serialized novel is now available to read!

“Birthday”

74 Quick Sleep, 2087

There was no sense of time for them, other than the fact that Corina was born on the day of the incursion. Kenton smiled as he looked upon his youngest daughter, the youngest in their roving band of survivors. She was covered in dirt and debris, as was everybody else. Among the dirtiness, there were flowers woven throughout her long, strawberry-blonde curls that framed her freckled face. Flowers were rare to come by these days and had become a sort of symbol of freedom and innocence. Something everybody had lost when the monsters came. Happy birthday, little Princess, he thought and with a sigh, turned around and walked through the broken department store window and onto the strip of rubble that had once been a road.

Read more on Fictionaut: Spiral Jackal #1

Well, it has officially been 2012 for four days now. In that time I’ve managed to delete my website database while backing it up (hint: don’t do it while tired). If there is anything I learned in 2011, it is that you just need to take what comes at you and leave the experiences with the positives in mind. You know, learn from your mistakes and move on. So while it is certainly sad that I have lost a lot of data, I’m going to take this as a sort of “blessing in disguise” – a fresh start to this year and to my site.

This year will be a good one. I know this because I am going to make it better than last year, and while there’s a lot of amazing transformations that happened last year, I’m setting the bar higher for myself. This is the year for ambition and making large strides toward my overall life goals. This is the year of inspiration in art and faith.

Some highlights of 2011:

• Entered into a wonderful relationship with one of the most amazing ladies I’ve ever known
• Became an Ubuntu Member after a few years of feeling I wouldn’t make it
• Maintained and created new friendships
• Moved into an apartment with one of my best friends.
• Revived PaleHorse Gaming
• Did a lot of self-discovery
• Became better with audio software and creating music.
• Expelled from my mind into a note pad many a great idea for writing and gaming!
• Became a Game Master for a pen and paper roleplay game
• Started work on the Creative Commons Adaptive RolePlay System
• …and a ton more

Goodbye, 2011. Hello 2012! What did you accomplish in 2011 and what do you want to get done in this coming year?

I am moving scrib‘s bugs, blueprints, and the like over to the scrib Launchpad page. There has been a higher demand on our server resources and as such, I am offloading some projects and making better use of the tools we are given by other parties (such as Launchpad). With that said, there are going to be some other changes around here. Any help would be appreciated!

Speaking of help, the Whube Developers could use some help on some of their projects! There’s room for all kind of people, be it Python or PHP programmers, documentation writers, or graphic designers. The two main projects right now are Whubetrack, an “anything tracker” written in PHP, and Syn, a package management system for Linux, written in Python.

There’s also a really awesome group, the Synthetic Intellect Institute, which are working on some great artificial intelligence and natural language projects, and I’m sure they would love to have more help!

I can feel the beat of a drum in my chest
It beats, regulating the highway systems
That course through this vessel of life
If there is enough concentration, maybe
There will be felt the passage of
Platelettes through the tunnels and
Chambers, the feeling of oxygen passing
From carrier to host like a waltz
Where life cannot be but sacrosanct

I can feel the swirl of thoughts in my mind
It whispers, coalescing into dreams and ideas
That plant themselves firmly in this fertile brain
If there is enough tranquility, perhaps
There will be known a serenity of spirit
A resounding restfulness in the soul-home
From which will spill claravoyance
Within the murky waters of solicitude
Where Self distilled rises to surface

When you happen upon my thoughts
A profoundly crazy feeling bathes me in its waves
From the earliest days and still continuing
This emotion builds itself into an intense storm
So strong as to have me smitten in the single beat
Of my heart
When our eyes meet, my heart stirs out of its slumber
And with it a torrent of emotion threatens to emerge

I cannot help but admire your beauty
To fall delightfully victim to your radiant brown eyes
Oh, what captivating and alluring eyes!
Even the smallest of smiles, tugging upon your gentle lips
Stirs me into a blissfully enamored state

Your very presence evelopes me in an overwhelming joy
So much so it often spills past the brim of my lips
Into stuttered words in which I try to inadequately
Express what it is I am feeling

But the truth is

I know not of any combination of words that
Sufficiently and succinctly paint a portrait for you

Of what my heart and soul feel
When I am around you, when you’re in my thoughts

You drive me absolutely mad, in the most exquisite of ways.

The wind whispered through tree branches and the underbrush with little fanfare. Trees creaked and moaned in response, their branches rattling together like the bones of a reanimated skeleton’s hands. Leaves of all shapes and colors skittered across the ground as if they were trying to escape the grasp of a monster unseen.

Nearby, a small brook continued it’s low murmur, carrying the leaves away with it’s current, careful to not pull any under. Seedlings twirled around in the air, letting themselves be carried away by the hushing wind.

Above the trees, raindrops began their casual descent toward the ground, clinging to anything they landed upon. Determined to escape, the leaves continued their flight to the brook, no longer just skittering, but dancing and twirling about.

Seedlings, unable to dodge the impending onslaught of raindrops, continued on their course while water-bound leaves deposited themselves all along the edges of the brook on both sides. The wind howled and trees bent to sweep up the frantic leaves.

Raindrops began to thunder through the trees and onto the ground, impeding on the progress of the leaves. Many leaves were battered and stuck to the ground, and could only watch as the others passed them by.

The brook began to swell, becoming larger and larger, all the while capsizing the free floating leaves. It seemed hungry and yet the leaves that could, were still heading for it with a pace that only kept increasing. Some leaped over the brook and continued on while the rest were swallowed by the now monstrous river of water.

Moving rapidly now, the seedlings crashed into bushes and trees, then slid and tumbled across the ground.

Quicker than it came, the howling faded and everything became still. Everything was silent, except for the book, which continued to babble.

These should be no-brainers, but sometimes we developers overlook these ‘little’ things. While this concise little list is directed toward developers, it can be applied to just about anything, including our daily lives.

1. Whatever time frame you give for a project, add a few more days/hours to it. You will need it.
2. If it is broken, just fix it. “Making it better” and “fixing it” are two different things.
3. When you are not in a position to plan a project, make sure to track everything you do, whether it be in a project tracker or a spreadsheet. You’ll thank yourself later.
4. Make sure that parts of a project are ordered in a high-to-low priority list, or you may find yourself with Lots of Gadgets but no working application.
5. Identify your time wasters (you know, like Facebook) and limit your time utilizing these while working.
6. Be sure to get some rest and relaxation! A tired brain nets poor results.
7. Ask for advice and help when you need it. Don’t beat yourself up over something when you can get help.
8. Last but not least: if it is not broken, be suspicious.

Hope you have a great Monday!

We just recently posted the initial version of a plugin we are working on for the Vanilla 2 forum software. RoleBadges shows a list of badges based on the user’s roles in a forum post. As of right now, it does not tell you what roles the images represent. That is, however, going to be in the next update.

You can see it in action over at our Scoundrels Minecraft forum.

One of the things that is being done with our project, Scrib, is building it to use CouchDB as the back-end database. The data we’ll be storing is more suited to a ‘document-style’ database rather than relational, like MySQL (here’s some pros and cons of CouchDB vs. MySQL). One of the great bonuses is that it uses a RESTful HTTP-API, which means that all of the data is accessible via HTTP requests. It also uses JSON for data transfer and storage. This makes it relatively easy to create a web-interface as the data is in a format that is not defined (like XML) and can easily be parsed.

While Scrib is utilizing it through Python, the web interface is going to be built using a mixture of HTML, JavaScript, CSS and PHP.

Utilizing PHP on Couch

For this part of the project we are going to use PHP on Couch, a PHP wrapper class to make things easy.

Most of the time CouchDB is already installed inside Linux (Debian-based distros, at least). In Ubuntu you can install it via “sudo apt-get install couchdb” (those of you who are using MacOSX or Windows, you can find respective packages here and here.)

Here’s an example of how easy it is to use CouchDB inside PHP: