iamcal.com

Lego GBC

Lego-releated post number 3 in a series. Making great ball contraptions is a pretty common Lego thing now, but this 17-module creation is a king among princes.

Gizmodo has some notes - this thing is amazing.

Searching for Crows

During this week’s Dakrmoon Faire, my new obssesion has been obtaining a rare Crow. Crows only appear as secondary spawns with the Darkmoon Glowfly. Darkmoon Island contains 12 spawn points for the glowfly, which I farmed in a sequence for a number of hours, in search of that elusive crow. During the roughly 300 pet battles it took, I found:

13 Rare Darkmoon Glowflies
3 Rare Sea Gulls
2 Rare Rats
1 Rare Roach
1 Rare Adder
8 Uncommon Crows

It’s not impossible, it just takes a long time. The Crow can only spawn as a secondary if the Glowfly if level 5 or above, but make sure you battle them all anyway - each spawn point can spawn a low or high level one.

200,000 piece Lego city

Lego post number 2, in a series. This amazing sci-fi city build in Lego is made of over 200,000 pieces and has an incredible amount of detail. I wish I had this many bricks to play with.

What happened to Lego

The first of a series of excellent Lego-related links - a study of the price of Lego bricks over time.

Doom 3 Source

This review of Doom 3's source release is full of tons of interesting stuff, even for non-graphics programmers. [via waferbaby]

Regexp Kung-fu

There are two answers guaranteed to show up on nearly every PHP question on Stack Overflow - use the mysqli/PDO extension instead of the deprecated mysql one (to avoid SQL injection), and that you can't parse HTML with regular expressions.

With that in mind, my favorite two answers:

How PDO is still vulnerable to SQL injection attacks by Anthony Ferrara
Parsing HTML with regular expressions by Tom Christiansen

Github March Wrapup

I've posted a bunch of projects to Github in the last few months and haven't linked to them anywhere, so here's a quick roundup of recently notable projects:

lib_timezones - A PHP and JS library to handle user-specified timezones properly, with reasonable client-side auto detection.
lib_classsify - A partial PHP port of Github's own linguist which can automatically detect the programming language, given a code fragment.
js-emoji - A JavaScript library to allow display of Emoji in then browser for OSs without native support (anything that's not OSX 10.8 or iOS 6)
lib_autolink - My old PHP URL-detection and linking library, updated to handle multiple protocols.
lib_solr_query - A PHP library to turn user-entered complex search queries into valid SOLR query syntax. Supports phrases, booleans, nesting, assertions and more.

Finally finished farming up the 4 new Zandalari pets from...

Finally finished farming up the 4 new Zandalari pets from Dinomancers on the Isle of Giants. After 263 kills, I got:

Although it’s supposed to be a lower drop rate, I got over 10 of Ancient Tome of Dinomancy before I stopped counting.

While the pets are BoP, you can use them and then cage them for selling on the AH.

Digi-Comp II

You can now get a wooden version of the original Digi-Comp II which can add, subtract, multiply and divide binary numbers using marbles. It's both educational and mezmorizing.

For under $300 it's pretty tempting.

SlowPal

SlowPal is one of that breed of product that does one thing well. It helps that PayPal's log are so infuriatingly slow to begin with.