Umbral Echoes Blog

I run a roleplaying chat website that has a forum and a separate chat section. However, the forum is integrated into the main site, and the chat. I was recently looking at moving from phpBB to vBulletin as the forum software^[1], but needed to make sure that I could still plug the chat and the rest of the site into that easily. Apparently the vBulletin people are paranoid about giving out any code that is in any way related to vBulletin, even this sort of thing. So I did some digging, and found out how to do it.

Here's an example of how to do that. It really is pretty simple.

<?php
// This gets the vBulletin user login info
$curdir = getcwd();
chdir('/path/to/your/forums');  // Change to vBulletin directory
require_once('/path/to/your/forums/global.php');
chdir($curdir);  // Change back to previous directory

// This is the part that actually deals with users
if ($vbulletin->userinfo['userid'] == 0) {
  // User is not logged in; maybe show login form here
  echo "Not logged in.";
} else {
  // User is logged in
  echo "Welcome Back, <b>".$vbulletin->userinfo['username']."</b>";
  // See if user is in a certain user group
  if ($vbulletin->userinfo['usergroupid'] == '6' ) {
  // Maybe this is an admin usergroup, so show admin stuff here
  }
}
?>

So I hope someone else out there finds this useful. If you want to see what all data is contained in $vbulletin->userinfo, just do echo nl2br(print_r($vbulletin->userinfo, true)).

Caveat: I have yet to try this myself, so I'm not 100% sure it will work. But it seems to make sense, and is similar to integration of phpBB and SMF.

[1] Why move from phpBB to vBulletin, when vBulletin costs nearly $200? Overall vBulletin is just better, but here are a few more specific reasons, in order of importance:

• vBulletin supports Facebook Connect out of the box. That means users don't have to sign up for an account on the forum — they can just click the Facebook Connect button, click to verify, and then bam… they have an account and they're logged in.
• vBulletin has better anti-spam controls. My forum gets hit with more spam than regular posts. The best anti-spam measure is to require that new users pass a reCAPTCHA test. Modules that make phpBB do this are buggy at best. Granted, SMF (which is free) also has a module that does this pretty easily. It does not, as far as I can tell, currently have a working module for this. The best contender that I found costs $20, and seemed to have a broken implementation on their own site. Not very heartening.
• vBulletin has a better plugin system. It's nowhere near as awesome as that of WordPress, but still much better than the "send file to server via FTP, edit your existing files" method of phpBB. Granted, a lot of the vBulletin community still does modifications in the old hack-ish way. SMF has a similar system to vBulletin. So as you can see, if it weren't for the damn Facebook Connect thing, SMF would probably win out. It's possible that between now and when I get around to this, the SMF mod will be working though.
• vBulletin is neater. It's just got a lot more AJAX stuff, a WYSIWYG editor, and other little features that add up to making it a nicer overall experience.

This post is mostly to get some things off my chest about the situation with my father, and also to let everyone know what's happened and how things are going. More important points in bold, for those who just want the bullet points.

The History

My father is an alcoholic. Has been for most of his life. But the story starts even before that. His father was also an alcoholic. He would work long hours at BF Goodrich, come home, have dinner, then drink. Grandpa didn't drink to get drunk; he drank to pass out. My father has told stories like once when playing cards with grandpa when he was a kid, granpda just passed out in the middle of it.

Dad also became an alcoholic. I'm not sure when he started drinking, but I do know that it was before I was born. For years he controlled it pretty well, but then it seemed to get out of hand. His second wife divorced him because of it, but it didn't get really bad until grandpa died. Not long after that, dad spiraled downward pretty fast. So far that grandma and one of his sisters put him in the hospital and forced him to take Antabuse. My memory is honestly a bit hazy, but I recall him being in and out a few times before he decided he wanted to get better. For the next 10 years, he kept his sobriety.

Recent News

But for the past 6-7 years, my dad has again been losing the battle with alcohol. I think it started when I moved to Atlanta. Part of me can't help but feel at cause, but the rational side of me knows that it's not my responsibility to be around to keep dad sober. He had some ups and downs, at one point had 2 years sobriety, but then began the downward spiral again. His alcoholism is compounded by depression and anxiety issues, as well as sleeplessness (he uses the "I drink so I can sleep" excuse that grandpa did). He also got involved with crack-cocaine, which would be more worrying to me than the alcohol if the alcohol issue weren't life-threateningly bad. Dad's AA friend Jeff started getting in touch with me to let me know when things got bad.

A few weeks ago, things got really bad. Dad called into work for an entire week, and during that time pretty much subsisted on beer alone. If you've seen Leaving Las Vegas, it was a lot like that. Only in real life, it's a lot more messy. Jeff said that when he went in to check on my dad (I'd given him a key to dad's house some time ago), he found him unconscious naked on the couch, with beer cans covering the floor, and fecal matter all over the kitchen floor, living room, hallway, and bathroom.

It was never this bad. The next day Jeff roused my dad so that he could talk to me on the phone. Previous to this, dad had always said that he just wanted to be numb, but that he didn't want to die. This time he told me, "I just don't want to live any more."

The Saga

That was all it took. The next day I drove up to Louisville and took out a mental inquest warrant on my father. That is a warrant saying that he is a danger to himself or others due to a mental illness. Alcoholism is considered a "voluntary mental illness" so warrants are only issued in cases where people are suicidal, homicidal, etc.

The warrant was completed that night, and within 45 minutes the police were on my father's doorstep. My father's condition was so bad (a few of the cops uttered such phrases as "holy mother of god") that they called an ambulance for him, which took him to the ER in the hospital. After they got him in stable condition (which took about 24 hours), they moved him to the psychiatric ward. The psych ward upheld the mental inquest, and sent him along to a rehab facility.

It took dad almost 2 weeks to completely sober up and come out of the mental fog. The facility he was at is supposed to be one of the best in the region (dad mentioned people from a few states away being there), and his therapist/social worker Maria seemed to be very experienced and skilled with people in dad's situation (though they said he was among the worst that they had to deal with). She knew exactly the sorts of pitfalls that he would face after coming out of rehab, and wanted to prepare him for those.

I could probably write several thousand words about this, but to sum up, dad wants to get better. At least, he says he does, and I hope that's true. The doctor told him that he doesn't have another run like that in him — if he goes back to drinking, he will die. He's currently in a transitional living house, supervised 24/7 but the guys in the house go out to a few meetings a day and have other scheduled activities, so it's a little more freedom than the intensive inpatient ward. They're basically teaching dad how to live sober again. When alcoholics get to the point my father did, they forget what it is they love in life. Their life becomes a cycle of drink, sleep, work. So they are going to teach my dad how to break that cycle, and form new habits of living. Dad also volunteered to go on Antabuse, which I think is a great sign.

He's been keeping in touch with me every day. There were (and to some extent, still are) concerns about his work,but I think everything will be fine there. He has a medical doctor saying that he needs to be under this care, and his work has a strong union, so I doubt that anything bad will come of it. Then again, they did fire him for going into treatment a decade and a half ago due to some loophole they have where you can't get more than one instance of temporary disability for the same mental illness. But he fought the man, and actually won that one after an 8-year-long battle.

Things are looking up. Let's hope they stay that way. My friends have all been very supportive, and I am truly blessed to have the great people in my life that I do.

Idea for a next post: With my parents, how did I end up not completely screwed up? Or am I?

Recently AT&T was running a deal where their 6Mbps DSL service is $20 a month for an entire year, then $45/mo after that (they might still be running it). I was paying about $65/mo for cable modem service through Comcast, so even after buying the modem, this will save me about $500 the first year, and $240 every year thereafter. Slightly slower service, but really that’s a no-brainer for me.

The default modem that AT&T recommends is the Motorola 2210. According to all reviews I’ve read about this modem, it overheats and dies a little over a year after setup. So searching for alternatives, I found the Actiontec GT701D, which (as an added bonus) was also $30 cheaper. The only downside is that AT&T tech support can’t help much with the setup. I figure I’m handy with computers, so I’ll take the gamble on the cheaper and better modem.

Short story: everything worked out fine (eventually) and now I’m on my DSL connection.

The Actiontec didn’t initially connect up with the automagic detection, so I had to do a bit of snooping. It’s a very good thing that I still had my old ‘net connection running, to do some Google Fu. After a bit of searching I found the right settings. For anyone else out there in this situation, here’s what those settings are:

Username: attreg@att.net
Pass: attreg
VPI: 8 (this is for AL, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN; other states use 0 for this)
VCI: 35
DSL Mode Setting: ADSL2
ATM QoS class: UBR

Note that the username/password are only for initial setup. You have to go to the registration URL to set up your real username/password. But do note that the password you use for your modem is the alphanumeric string that gets automatically assigned to you, not the one that you type in yourself.

This post relates to Subversion, a version control system. This is used most commonly in programming to allow multiple programmers to work on the same set of files at the same time without stepping on each other’s toes. It also lets you “roll back” your code to any point in time, so if you screw something up, it’s ultra easy to go back to the point before that.

Some writers also use this sort of things to keep copies of their writing, and then if they change/remove something that they later decide they shouldn’t have, it’s easy to peek back at what it was like.

Anyway, sometimes when dealing with Subversion, you might get an error like this when trying to run svn update:

svn: Checksum mismatch for ‘/path/to/repository/.svn/text-base/some-file.php.svn-base’; expected: ‘e5b110ec4409891e81f38203d45e4f5d’, actual: ‘c84a851f87b9b62934b44adc457dcfd0′

There are two fixes for this.  The first is to just delete the directory containing the code where the checksum mismatch is (including the .svn directory below it), and run svn update again from one directory up. But if, like me, the checksum mismatch is in the base directory and it’s inconvenient to do that*, there is another solution. Basically you will check out a fresh copy of the affected directory, and copy over the SVN file with the checksum error.

1. Check out a new copy of the repository in some other directory. If the problem is in a subdirectory, you only have to check out that subdirectory.
2. Rename the file mentioned above (the one with the checksum error, /path/to/repository/.svn/text-base/some-file.php.svn-base in this example) to add -bak on the end of it.  It’s always good to have a backup.
3. Copy that file from the working copy you created in step 1 to your “real” repository location.
4. Run svn update to see if it works. If not, make sure that in step 3 you copied the file to the correct directory (it needs to go under the .svn/text-base/ directory).
5. Once that works, you can delete the other working copy you checked out, as well as the -bak file you created.

I’m putting this here in the hopes that Google will index this, and someone else with the same problem might find it useful.

* In my case, I have a lot of images and other things that need to be there, but that aren’t in the SVN repository, so just wiping it out and checking out a whole new working copy of the repository doesn’t really work.

A few weeks ago, I went to a MySQL training seminar focused on developing and tuning high-availability applications with MySQL, hosted by Percona and paid for by my work. It was an extremely informative seminar. We’ve hired the people at Percona before as our database ninjas, as I like to call them. They are not at all cheap to hire for consulting, but they are absolutely worth every penny. These guys live and breathe MySQL.

Anyway, I took away some good tidbits from the session, but more than that I gleaned some good general philosophies. For example, when diagnosing a problem first make sure it’s really a problem. If only a few users are experiencing it intermittently, then maybe it’s not worth 40 man-hours to investigate and fix. Another tips is: have good instrumentation. Don’t take educated guesses as to what might be slow — build in some metrics so that you can see exactly where a problem is.

A lot of this stuff is still sinking in, but I’ve already started putting some of it to use immediately. Good company investment, and a good personal investment too.

I got my iPhone 4 a day early (thanks to ordering it through the Apple website), and have taken some time to try out its features. I’m coming from a 3G though, not a 3GS, so this thing is probably more impressive to me than it would be to someone with the latter.  So, review below, with important parts in bold.

General Feel

This thing is way more responsive than the 3G. Then again, the iOS 4 did seem to speed up my 3G a bit too, but it was still fairly laggy for most things. The iPhone 4, however, feels just about as snappy as the iPad (which is to say very snappy).

The battery life seems good.  The first day I used it more than moderate but less than heavy/constant, for about 8 hours — recorded maybe 6 minutes worth of video, lots of app downloading and use, compressed a couple of videos and sent them to YouTube, etc. I also had WiFi and Bluetooth on. That used up about half the battery, which is nothing magical, but still pretty impressive. Second day, with a bit of talking, Bluetooth turned off most of the day, and medium to light usage, between 10am and 6pm the battery is at 70%. Not too shabby.

I didn’t think that I was going to even notice the snazzy “Retina” display that packs tons of pixels in tightly, but I actually do notice things being much more crisp.

Form Factor

I’m not in love with the design, but I don’t hate it either. It is rather annoying that accessories that I bought for my 3G (like case/protector, car dash mount, etc.) won’t work with the iPhone 4. It is thinner though, which is subtle but can still be noticed, and I like the design of the buttons — raised and separate.

The smudge-resistant glass actually works fairly well. Well enough that the smudges that do show up are subtle, and get cleaned off completely when I put the phone in my pocket and take it back out again.

Video/Photos

The camera does seem to take better low-light pictures from my preliminary tests, though nothing magical — you’re not going to get great low-light photos from any smartphone with current technology. That’s mitigated by the flash though; the LED flash does seem to help a lot. The general picture quality of the front-facing (main) camera is quite good. About as good as a point-and-shoot camera in fact. I took the picture on the left last night (click on it to see the full-sized version). It was enough of a close-up that I had to tap to focus.

Video quality is good, though holding the phone in your hand to take video isn’t the most natural thing in the world. It also disappointed me to discover that you can’t switch between the front and back cameras when recording video — it’s either one or the other.

There is also a built-in utility to upload to YouTube. On the downside, it downsamples to 320p, so no uploading hi-def videos directly to YouTube from your phone. On the plus side, that means it doesn’t take a year and a day to upload videos. I’d like the ability to control this.

The rear-facing camera seems pretty decent. Not as swank as the front-facing camera, but definitely good enough for basic self-photos. One thing that would have been nice is a fake flash for this. I bet someone will make an app for that — something that makes the screen mostly white but shows just enough of what the front camera is seeing so that you can tell what you’re taking a picture of.

iMovie

iMovie is pretty basic, but a cool toy. It allows you to do some very simple video editing like adding a single non-DRM song as background accompaniment to your video project, mesh multiple videos and/or photos together (with some basic transitions), add a Ken Burns effect to your photos, and add a title to your video.

Things that I think that I should be able to do in iMovie, but can’t:

• Set the volume level of the music clip.
• Set the music clip to start somewhere other than the beginning of the video.
• Make the music clip start somewhere other than the beginning of the song (so I can start playing at the good part of Final Countdown, for example).
• Crop the music clip, to make it stop playing when I want it to.
• Insert a title over a photo (it can only be added to a video clip as things stand).
• Add multiple music clips.
• Insert an image into the middle of a movie clip, so that the clip pauses to show the photo, then continues.

Here’s a link to a quick clip I tossed together of Link at White Wolf | CCP getting “iced” at work, video taken on iPhone 4 and edited with the iMovie app.

Miscellaneous

You lose reception if you hold the phone in your left hand. This is apparently a known issue, and Apple’s reaction has been less than reassuring. I’m not sure if this can be fixed (without a recall of some sort), and it’s pretty astounding that it got through Apple’s QA. I’ve heard that this issue is also fixed by using the bumpers that Apple sells, so I assume that when protective cases come out those will solve it too. So while it’s certainly a bad flaw, functionally it won’t affect most people. I’m assuming that most people will use a case anyway — otherwise the screen is at risk of breaking if you drop it.

The voice commands are new to me, since I didn’t have a 3GS. They seem to work fairly well — not much better or worse than your average voice command system.

Conclusion

The iPhone 4 is definitely a worthy upgrade from a 3G. If I had a 3GS… maybe not so much better that it’s worth another 2 year contract and $299. Probably not worth it, really. In fact, I’d probably have been better served to get the discounted 3GS, but I’m a technophile and have to have the latest and greatest. The camera quality is great, the phone itself is responsive, and though it’s definitely not the perfect phone, I am quite glad that I upgraded.

And the built-in photos app is just too cool.  Check out the demo here (Photos is the third one down, my favorite bit is about 2:40 in).

Really the big feature is the 3G connection though. I’ve found this useful enough for work that even if they hadn’t got me one, knowing what I know now I’d have bought one myself.

I’m deciding between the iPhone 4 and the HTC EVO.  I’ve wanted to try out an Android phone, but I’m really on the fence here. So I’m rounding up the benefits of each that are important to me (so I’m not including things like how the iPhone 4 supports wireless-N, or how the EVO has a 1.3mp front-facing camera as opposed to the 640×480 one on the iPhone 4, or how the iPhone 4 has a higher-resolution display).

iPhone

• Better battery life. The first iPhone and the 3G models had pretty crappy battery life, but this seems to get better with each iteration. All reports of the EVO say that its battery life is horrendous.
• I’m already used to the interface. This is a minor quibble, but I already know how things work on the iPhone.
• More refined user experience. Even with the modified version of Android that the EVO runs, the interface on the iPhone is more refined.
• I’m already with AT&T.  I’m really not a huge fan of them, but neither do I hate them. Familiar devil, I suppose.
• Better video chat.  The EVO has the front-facing camera, but the only real video chats supported are through Fring and Qik, and that doesn’t seem to work too well. Then again, realistically I’m not likely to use video chat a whole lot anyway.

HTC EVO

• Not a closed system. Anyone can make Android apps.
• Integrated kickstand.  Yes this is lame, but could definitely come in useful, especially with video chat.
• Better alert system.  It’s not limited to one alert message at a time like the iPhone. I suspect since this is a big flaw in the iPhone future updates might fix this though.
• About $20/mo cheaper. That’s almost $250 per year, $500 over the life of a 2-year contract.
• Tighter Google integration. You can actually have an app for Google Voice, and the built-in navigation system uses Google Street View, which is rather awesome.
• Supports Flash. This can be a big one for web browsing. Apple, get the fuck off your high horse; HTML 5 is not going to replace Flash.

One big features I didn’t include with the EVO is that it’s 4G.  Frankly, I don’t care.  3G is fast enough for everything I want to do with my phone — if I’m going to stream HD video, I’m going to do it on my iPad.  Plus from all accounts I’ve seen, using 4G sucks the battery life out of the camera like a nympho just out of solitary.

My friend Eddy Webb at White Wolf just got himself an EVO, and posted about it if you’re interested in reading his take.

So far I’m leaning toward the iPhone. I’ve got 3 days to decide.

Work got me an iPad 3G, since a lot of our customers are likely to use one, and it would behoove us to have some on-hand to look at issues ourselves. It arrived Tuesday, and I’ve been putting it through its paces since then. Short version is, the more I use it, the more I like it. I’m sort of on the fence right now as to whether I’d actually buy it if work didn’t get it for me, but currently leaning toward “no.”

The Good

• Interface – Nothing notably new here if you’re used to the iPhone/iPod Touch interface. Apple is really, really good at designing user interfaces. However, being on a bigger screen, all the apps feel like grown-up versions. The music player is more like the full iTunes, email is a lot more usable.
• Speed – It’s fast. Notably faster than my iPhone 3G. Very responsive; it loads up apps quickly, and there’s very little delay in rotating the screen when you change orientations.
• Music Player – Very close to the full iTunes experience, thanks to the extra room.
• Battery Life – This seems to be pretty darn good, though maybe I’m biased because the iPhone has such crappy battery live. More testing will be required, but after a couple of days of moderate use (I’d say maybe 5-6 hours total) it was down to about 60%.
• No Contract 3G Service – $30/mo for unlimited wireless Internet, $15/mo for 250 MB, and you can change that up or cancel it any time you want. Not exactly cheap, but not an arm and a leg either, and no contract.
• Speedy Push Notifications – Though sometimes it’s about even, my iPad usually gets push and email notifications notably faster than my iPhone. E.g. when I get a new email via Gmail, my iPad usually knows even before my desktop web browser does, and maybe 10-15 seconds before
• Full GPS – The 3G model has a full GPS chip. I’ve heard reviews that have said it seems to take a little longer to lock on than the iPhone 3GS, but that once it does it seems to hold the signal better. I’ve only used this a little, but it seems to work very well. I could definitely see using this as a replacement for a car stereo and GPS.

The Bad

Too much blank space between icons

Most of these things are really more “annoying” than bad. But I wanted to use the good, the bad, and the ugly as my headlines, so shut the frack up.

• Weight – Its heavier than I thought it would be. Wihch isn’t to say it’s a brick, but it’s definitely solid. I can see this causing a bit of arm fatigue if you’re trying to hold it up for more than a minute or two.
• Whitespace – One area where the interface doesn’t shine. The homescreen seems to have lots of empty space. The app icons should either be closer together, or larger, or some combination of the two. See picture.
• Fingerprints – Like the iPhone, this thing is bad at collecting fingerprints.
• Recharge Time – Probably due to having a bigger/better battery, the recharge time is a lot longre on this than I’d expected.

The Ugly

• Audiobook Transfer – This is really odd and unintuitive to someone who’s used an iPhone. Instead of transferring audiobooks with your normal audio files, you transfer them as you do eBooks. When I first tried transferring, I noticed that the audiobook playlist I had didn’t even show up as an option for syncing. I added a non-audiobook file to it and it showed up, but when I synced the playlist it only transferred that one music file, not the audiobooks. Only after some searching the web did I find that you have to use the Books tab from iTunes on your computer, scroll down, and select audiobooks there.
• Can’t Recharge From Computer – When I connect the iPad to my computer via USB, it lists “Not Charging.” Apparently you can only charge your iPad from either a wall outlet, or from a Mac. PC users are out of luck. This is a pretty bad issue.

I was supposed to be in… well, Paris right now. We had scheduled a work trip to London, Paris, Toulouse, and Madrid from the 15th through the 24th. However, the volcano gods of Iceland had different plans. By the way, have you seen some of these pictures? They’re surreal.

Because London was shut down, I had them reroute me to France, but the next available flight there wasn’t until the next day. So I got stuck in Chicago overnight, but that was actually sort of fun since I got to see a couple of friends that I’d not seen since GenCon, Alix and Mark, and got to meet both Alix’s husband John and her good friend Dave. Alix and John were nice enough to put me up for the night, and there was much drinking of beer and geeky revelry (my favorite kind!). I even helped Alix play Magic, which I haven’t touched in… man, probably about 8 years now.

Anyway, this might work out for the better anyway; we’re attempting to reschedule for June, so the weather will be much better. In the previous trip, half of it was screwed up due to mis-schedulings, and we can avoid that this time around. Also, my Hotwire-fu failed and we ended up getting a hotel in London that was a mile from the tube — definitely suboptimal. I’m not even sure if we’ll hit London the next time around, since that was a somewhat last-minute change to hit a wargaming convention anyway (which we learned was actually the next weekend). I hope we’ll be able hit it next time, and on a Saturday since there’s apparently some great goth club action in London on Saturday nights.

On the downside, American Airlines lost track of my luggage. There were some expensive articles of clothing in there, the total value of everything in the four-digit range. I can’t really blame them too much, since the cancelled European flights caused all sorts of chaos. On the upside, as of today they finally found the luggage and it’s on its way back to me.