Stage 1 – Capital Stress
I go out and meet with the prospective client in person to discuss their project. This involves putting on the suit and tie and reminding myself not to swear/fart in their presence. I have to listen to their well-intentioned ideas and then demonstrate to them that I can implement all of this for $XYZ.

Stage 2 – Capital Relief
They trust me enough to sign a contract that outlines what I will do for $XYZ. I now have some of the money and huge financial incentive not to screw up this contract. I take everything super-serious and everything is being done by the book.

Stage 3 – Computational Stress
I begin by researching and planning out exactly what I will have to do. This often involves follow up meetings with the client to keep them abreast of what I am doing and to learn more about the inner workings of their existing systems.

Stage 4 – A Religious Experience
What was once logically impossible is now clear to me and while the scope of the project is going from “huge” to “masochistic” I am more confident then ever in my ability to accomplish this. My software design is nothing less than Divine Inspiration and I will be showered with accolades once its completed.

This stage is also known as the climax stage.

Stage 5 – Sobering Moment
Somehow the logic of my designs are no longer working. All I need is to do a bit more learning and research and this will all fit back together again. Piece of cake!

Stage 6 – Nervous
Nothing in any of the documentation clearly states what I have to do from this point. I am at a huge loss now but there is still some technical documents from 1996 that I haven’t fully explored yet and those are clearly the key the issues my code is suffering from!

Stage 7 – Outright panic
The client is getting antsy since I haven’t sent them as many updates. I have googled documentation, guides, tutorials, examples and online bulletin boards going back to the 1970s and I can’t find any freaking thing about my specific code problem! I asked on stack exchange but all that resulted was a 1000+ comment flame war about everything that is not pertinent to my question. They are denying the genocides committed in the name of atheism and why I have yet to switch over to their platform, language, IDE, package system, editor, religion, nation, political affiliation and sexual orientation.

I am screwed, but this is not the lowest emotional stage yet. Keep reading.

Stage 8 – Anger
I have found a number of open source software projects on a combination of github, google code, sourceforge and message boards that appear to do what I wanted to do all along. Of course it is not as elegant or efficient as what I was going to do if the documentation had been written by someone with intelligence but that is not the point! I was to be the eddie-murphy-golden-child and now I must resort to stealing other people’s code to get the job done!

(Note: I obviously do attribute, I just play down the role of “third party code” in my software to the client as being some compatibility workarounds to make sure it runs on their machines that I’m not familiar with)

Stage 9 – Desperation
Turns out their code was even worse than I thought. I have had to do more to “improve” it to the point where it actually works. I might as well have just spent another few years getting a PhD researching it and come to the same conclusions myself. I am frantically trying to work out ad hoc ways of getting their stuff working with mine and the client’s so I can just ship this and call it a day!

Stage 10 – Crushing disappointment
Despite my heroic efforts to get what the client wanted on paper down and out they expected it to be a lot “better”. By “better” they mean rubbish of course and now I must stab at my soul by degrading MY software. They don’t care that it is exactly what they agreed to in the contract! They want it to be needlessly tied into social networking, have a flash intro (yes, I have corp financial clients that still ask for this in 2013) and be branded with their corp’s tacky visual design standards. What only needed to be POSIX in the contract must now work on windows 2000 server. I demand more money and they resist until I threaten to keep everything they gave me so far and withhold all further development.

Stage 11 – Sick
I am now ruining what was once beautiful work even if it was just some cobbled-together bits that I put together myself and found online. It was functional and looked good doing it. Nothing like it had ever existed before and I was proud of my work once and now I can’t sleep or eat because of it. What used to have clean minimalist design now looks like a website from the 90s. It only loads in IE6 and crashes their server frequently. I warn the client that this will likely lead to breaches of their server but they don’t want to pay any attention to that or more money to me to resolve these issues. They want to be rid of me and my techno-babble.

Stage 12 – Genuinely Depressed
The client is calling me every few minutes and demanding that I fix problems that they forced me to implement to the software. They refuse to pay and threaten to fight me online in social media. I am constantly being harassed and threatened at this stage.

This is the lowest emotional point in software development.

Stage 13 – Acceptance
Me and client meet once more to discuss the future and agree on a plan to provide long term support for the product at a certain annual rate. I am happy that I have some money and they seem to hate me less than they did a few weeks ago.

The entire process repeats from here.

I have added in a new page that has a link to a blocklist file that you can use with Transmission or a bunch of other p2p, bittorrent or firewall applications.

This blocklist is a massive merging of maybe two dozen other ones and currently sits at 232730 IP address rules according to transmission. It is in my own opinion, the best blocklist out there. It adds in more blocklists than anything else and avoids blocking proxies, tor and educational/school addresses along with avoiding a few harmless corporations that are known to be neutral with p2p activity.

You can find it here: http://www.iruberleet.org/blocklist

The actual file can be found here and you can use this URL as the auto-update URL for your application: http://www.iruberleet/files/ipfilter.p2p.gz

TorChat is one of those things that we all really love and need to put more effort into developing, maintaining and using.

TorChat is an instant messaging client that lets you also send files to others and it does all of this over the Tor network. The Tor network is an anonymous routing network that is very robust and heavily used by people from all over the world to bypass censorship and surveillance by either their ISP, employer, family, community or even government. This anonymity is achieved by routing your connections through other Tor users who have opted-in to operate a Tor network node.

Tor lets you access the internet through it’s network but it also allows you to connect to resources that are only available on it’s network. These things are called Hidden Services. Since they are only accessible to people who are connecting to the Tor network you will have a connection that is encrypted end to end and is still anonymous.

This makes TorChat the best anonymous and encrypted instant messaging client out there. Please understand that the Tor network was never meant to handle heavy loads such as file transfers or bittorrent and can be very slow at times.

Peity is a jQuery plugin that lets you convert an element’s contents into a mini pie graph, line graph or bar graph. This is done with an html <canvas> and does not generate an image.

If you ever wanted to just open up a text file that has no extension like:

• README
• INSTALL
• CHANGELOG
• Makefile
• Rakefile
• CapFile

This plugin will let you view them instantly.

A paint can heater is just a metal can, a roll of toilet paper inside and a bottle of isopropyl rubbing alcohol ready to soak the toilet paper roll. You then light it and it burns slowly so you can stay warm in an emergency, boil water and even cook food on top of it. The can does not need to specifically be a paint can, any can that you can fit a roll of toilet paper into should be fine.

To put out the flame you pop the paint can lid back on top of it and reuse it again in the future. Take caution as the can gets EXTREMELY hot.

Original page that I found with it: Survival Paint Can Heaters

This application will generate generic filler text for as many sentences and paragraphs you need. The resulting text looks something like this:

Eget. Dolor est cursus primis fames semper vestibulum. Nibh arcu, neque fusce, nam habitasse. Pulvinar. Elit fusce sodales mollis ve cras pede. Tellus odio dis viverra dis, mi ipsum. Arcu pulvinar class ad urna turpis rhoncus in, nunc. Magnis fusce arcu aenean porttitor mi, donec pellentesque accumsan velit sollicitudin, penatibus dictum ut diam. Ante litora hendrerit. Quam quis leo. Quam magna eu orci. Ante a elit risus. Viverra, nisl pulvinar ut, nisl inceptos. Pede sociis augue dictum malesuada. Placerat tempor quam erat mollis, litora ad. Montes ipsum blandit rutrum dolor primis fames enim scelerisque at, nostra ad augue. Etiam iaculis id, iaculis id, velit pharetra. Ve ornare. Dignissim massa ut fames ac mi erat odio fusce eros eu consectetuer commodo.

I’m sharing here a video of the Japanese variety show LINCOLN. It is a show with nothing but Japanese comedians on it. In this episode they are going to a spa resort town and are going to have a series of challenges. The losers are punished in the cold winter weather and the winners are rewarded with relaxing experiences in this resort town. Please enjoy.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Here is one of the mods for EU3 that I like the most. It adds in dozens of new countries… all of which are American natives :)

It is a largely missing piece to the great game of EU3. Using this mod in your game will populate the Americas with lots of historically accurate nations. Normally you just discover those regions, deal with the few active tribes there and suddenly colonize everything really quickly and have the culture and religion change .

This mod still leaves many coastlines colonizable (to get you a foothold on the continent) but the rest requires you to “deal” with the American natives like you would in any other part of the world now. They are real countries, you can perform diplomacy with them, wipe them out, ally with them, etc.

I wish to encourage the author of this mod (Guillaume HJ) to continue with their work. It has been a great resource for the community so thanks a lot! Original paradox forum thread: Click Here

After spending the last several months plotting it out (then finding out much of my plotting was inapplicable because someone at Paradox apparently accidentally hit the off switch on convenient map modding), here is the first version of the planned No Very Few Empty Provinces mod: Age of Discovery.

My vision with this mod, which I hope to find the time to fulfil, is a mod that focus on what was withotu a shadow of a doubt the most important part of the Europa Universalis era (no, not the framing of the cousin of the third wife of the second son of the stablehand of the steward to the favorite count of the uncle of the Holy Roman Emperor): the reality-defining shock that was Christian Europe’s encounter with the Rest of the World, and the Rest of the World’s encounter with Christian Europe.

The first and foremost part of doing this will, of course, be developing the Rest of the World, starting with the part the European most heavily interacted with (and in) during the EU era: the Americas (starting with the North because information is easier to come by there).

Even later, however, changes to Europe should remain fairly limited (there are none for now), focused mostly on making use of new Divine Wind features that Europe doesn’t yet use (such as factions), on introducing broad changes for the rest of the world that also affect Europe, or introducing change to Europe to affect how they interact with the Rest of the World.

An easy to make organic air freshener is a great idea for whenever you have people coming over to visit your house.

1. Gather up your fruit skins and peels that you would have otherwise discarded.
2. Place them into the oven at a low heat (200F/94C)
3. You will know when it is done by the strong but pleasant scent. Leave the heat on for as long as you like the scent to be at its strongest.