Posted on October 9th, 2009 in Projects, Web.
The VideoWrangler project is my work on the old VideoPress plugins by Charles Iliya Krempeaux as well as the vPIP plugin by Enric Teller in order to make the plugins compatible with the newest versions of WordPress and to reduce script size at plugin runtime.
The VideoWrangler plugins and complete documentation can be found on the VideoWrangler documentation page here.
The two blogs that I used as the basis for the plugin updates are http://www.ryanishungry.com and http://www.mikemoon.net. Their problem? When upgrading to the newest version of WordPress the plugins which drove their site quit working, yielded errors, or stopped the entire page from loading. Tracing through the plugin code I narrowed the problems down to two main sources: WordPress’ database structure had changed and the large amount of information contained on these blogs was exceeding the maximum allowed php script size on their servers.
With problems pinpointed, VideoPress was on its way to working once again within a few hours by updating references in the VideoPress code to entries in the WordPress database. The script size issue lead me back to vPIP to create a leaner function used to fetch chunks of data from the database. The original way VideoPress would gather vPIP data was for vPIP to supply VideoPress with a list of every single video entry that existed on the blog. While that works fine for small numbers, Ryanne and Mike’s blogs had years of back video catalog that made calling all of that data at once an enormous waste of space and resources. To scale back demand on the server I created a new function within vPIP that was only used to recall chunks of archive video data to be displayed on each archive page or to be displayed in the recent videos reel. This way the function would only return a set number of entries (which is specified in the plugin’s preference) as opposed to retrieving all of the site’s entries.
The updated version of the VideoPress project has been renamed as VideoWrangler to signal a fork from the original set of plugins and a change in project management. Updates to the VideoWrangler plugins will begin in November (time allowing) and will address the functionality requests from the video blogging community. The most up-to-date version of the plugins will always be available for download as a complete package or separately on the VideoWrangler documentation page.
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Posted on October 8th, 2009 in Gaming, Tech.
After moving in July and accidentally letting the Megalo 410 succumb to some collateral damage by leaving the monitor control board in place, I have the machine running again. The main monitor board on the bottom of the cabinet fell up into the cabinet while transporting it to the new apartment and broke off the potentiometers that control the vertical and horizontal size of the monitor. That’s all of the old news, now on to the new.
Last weekend a friend donated time to solder the new potentiometers to the monitor control board and with the new potentiometers in place I was ready to go home, unlock the machine, replace the board, and see if that had fixed the monitor issues. I wake up on Saturday to give the board a test, but can’t find the keys to the cabinet. I searched for hours everywhere in my apartment for the keys, but could not turn them up. The keys to the cabinet are always on my key ring in my pocket and I assume that the keys were dropped when either giving my car key to the dealer (back when my car broke down and was broken in to last month) or when putting the car key back on the ring after picking the car up from the dealer.
The locks on the Megalo 410 are simple cam-style locks so I picked up a couple of replacements at home depot and set to removing the old locks. I drilled out the bottom left lock since I can reach the other two locks on the cabinet from that central location and wouldn’t have to spend triple the time drilling through the locks one by one.
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| Old Sega lock for game panel |
New latch lock installed |
Now that the old locks were out it was time to get the new locks in place. To get the new cam locks to fit I had to use a Dremel equipped with the sanding tool to scale back a set of tabs in each lock hole which made the lock hole a little too small for the new locks to fit in. Once I shaved a little off of the tabs the new locks fit in and, while the cabinet was open, I replaced the main monitor board, rewired the controls for Player 1, and adjusted the screen. With Megalo completely working again I locked up the cabinet and left the keys in their respective locks. I don’t want to go through that ordeal again.
Fast forward from Saturday to Monday night. I picked up two white Hugo stools from Ikea for people to sit at while playing on the arcade machine. With the two stools at home to accompany the cab it was time to get rounds of Street Fighter III 3rd Strike in on it for the first time in three months.
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| The Megalo 410 complete with stools |
Special shouts out to
Chad who hooked me up with a solder on the board and to Daniel from work who was the first person to lose to me on the now working cab. Not only have I fixed this most recent problem with the Megalo 410, but I did a ton of electronics work on it from January to March of 2006. You can relive the entire work process through pictures in my
Candy Cab Restore set on Flickr.
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