Roy Tang
Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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  1. Valkyria Chronicles

    Finally finished Valkyria Chronicles last Saturday, clocking in at around 25 hours. Quick Review:

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  2. Using Django Pingback

    I actually had some trouble using django-pingback on my custom blog engine; the django-pingback documentation is mostly fine, but there were some caveats that I had to discover myself through a bit of debugging:

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  3. COM Surrogate Has Stopped Working Error in Vista

    For the past few months, I've been encountering the COM Surrogate Has Stopped Working Error in Windows Vista, as described here. Unfortunately, most of the recommended fixes on this page didn't work for me. (I had neither DivX nor Nero installed, etc.) Eventually, I had to download InstalledCodec and use trial and error disabling of all the codecs in my system to trace the problem. I narrowed it down to the Xvid Codec and ended up having to disable it.


  4. Gaming in 2009

    I wanted to make a calendar of game release dates in 2009 (so I won't forget), but apparently details are sparse. The only games that I'm remotely interested in that already have release dates are:

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  5. Speed Reading
    I came across a website that provided an online Speed Reading Test. Most people I know generally know me to be a fast reader so I decided to take the test. My results: 472 words per minute screen reading, at 82% comprehension, which the website says classifies me as a "good reader". Apparently the best readers can read at 700wpm at 85% comprehension, sounds tough =/ Try the quiz and post your results here.
    Blogged with the Flock Browser

    Tags:

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  6. Syntax Highlighting using Pygments

    My current blog app supports syntax highlighting in the blog posts, something I cribbed off Djangosnippet #119

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  7. PTQ Kyoto 2

    The last limited tournament of the season, it was last week, December 20 at Robinson's Galleria. The format was Shards of Alara sealed deck. For once, I opened a pretty good pool. Unfortunately, I failed to make the follow through. Decklist and (short) tournament report follows.

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  8. Colophon 2008

    Frontend: All page templates are valid (X)HTML. However, I choose not to claim valid XHTML (and no doc type declaration) since I can't guarantee that blog posts I write are compliant! The site uses standard CSS and uses the Blueprint CSS Framework for the grid layout of the page. The site design is entirely original (if not simple and bland - I'm not very good with website design yet!). The site has minor usage of JQuery Javascript library in some parts.

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  9. roytang.net site update
    Previously I hosted two separate Wordpress blogs on roytang.net, the old one I've had since forever, and a separate one that discussed only magic related articles. It was a bit bothersome to have two Wordpress installs though. Now that I've migrated to a Django backend, I decided to merge the blogs back into one. The blog now has the following sections/categories:
    • Magic the Gathering - for posts related to MTG
    • Software Development - for posts related to Software Development (hopefully I can write more about this topic)
    • Gaming - originally I didn't have this category, but looking at previous contents of the blog and my delicious links, this is one of the things I write about the most, so I made it a separate category
    • Weblog - everything else I can think of
    Each category has a separate RSS feed you can subscribe to - so that if you're only interested in MTG posts you can subscribe to the MTG category feed, etc. There's also a master feed that syndicates all the posts in all categories, available at the top of the page.
    Blogged with the Flock Browser

    Tags:

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  10. Transition to 2009

    Well, it's a bit early. But if you're reading this then I've successfully migrated the roytang.net website to a new host. See you after the jump!

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