This is a more personal blog, loading it up with game reviews of the games I’m playing.  Currently I’m just trying to get it filled up, but will eventually be putting up posts in which it will update every week on Sunday with a new game review.  I’m also updating it periodically with other tidbits as well.  If you’re into that kind of thing, go ahead and check it out.

One of my more important updates is that I will finally have the resources (both time and money) to finally make my more dominant sites what I’ve been dreaming for them.

The domains getting moved to my vps: sxnill, draketech, wearecityfeature.

Domains for sale: left4dead3forums.com, and possibly dracondigital.com.

More updates coming in the future.

With this in mind, however, I went through and read about 2-3 dozen wiki pages updating myself on the MK mythology (source).  It was a hobby of mine as a child when the original games were coming out to database characters, back stories, moves, fatalities, game features, etcetera much like the above Wiki has.  I used to have an entire notebook filled with data, and I think I had more fun with that than playing the game itself.

I suppose that I’m rambling on a little bit here about my over-fascination with this gaming universe, but figured I would share.  It’s obviously pretty useless at this point to share some of my old data considering there are already Wiki’s set up that would quash my own, so I’ll just close this simple blog posting by by disclosing my favorites within the MK universe.

Favorite Game – MKII closely tailed by MK:Deception.  I love MKII and could play it for hours.  It introduced many of my favorite characters such as Baraka and Kung Lao as well as my favorite fatalities such as Jax’s Torso Rip and Scorpion’s Slice’n'Dice.  Deception is a close second, as mentioned, because of the storyline.  Shujinko is one of my favorite characters as well, because in my eyes he’s a blank slate, and the Japanese translation to ‘Protagonist’ makes the awesome factor increase tenfold.

Favorite Character – Shang Tsung (UMK3).  It might be a little cliche, but considering the fact his own moveset is fantastic, as well as the ability to transform and take over anyone else’s (which is a rather large list if you are playing UMK3 or MK:T), what’s not to love?  His fatalities are also some of the best in the game.

Favorite Move – Johnny Cage’s Groin Punch.  I don’t think any explanation is needed here.

Favorite Fatality – Sonya (MK1) Kiss of Death.  It’s a classic.

I’m going to close this for now, but when the time comes to get the new Mortal Kombat game, I will update you all with the amazing x-ray moves and possibly even add a little strategy.

Until next time.

Welcome to the 1st installment of Diving into Development. This is a free online ebook or workshop written by Joshua Drake in an effort to teach those who are willing how to be a multifaceted web developer. As this is an individual project, it will take me a long time to reach completion, but I hope everyone will follow along and learn something. In this series, I will be jumping back and forth between languages (have no fear, I will remain highly organized with this) in an effort to demonstrate the best tools for the job in my opinion. Throughout this project, I will be supplying sample code to copy / paste, downloadable snippets, as well as demonstrations.

These articles will all be accessible to The Admin Zone community, my personal tutorial / resource site Drake Technologies, as well as Good-Tutorials.com and possibly others. If anyone has any questions, feel free to leave a comment. This is considered a ‘workshop’, so I’m expecting comments, concerns, questions, everything.

This particular article will serve as a crash course, teaching you how to install the software you will need to start with. With all of these articles, it is assumed that you have a basic knowledge of HTML, as these concepts will be very lightly demonstrated throughout. Within this article, expect to learn the following items right off the bat:

• Installing PHP / MySQL for testing purposes
• Inserting PHP snippets into HTML code
• Displaying text using PHP
• Commenting
• Basic Predefined functions
• Variables
• Concatenation
• Constants
• Operators
• Precedence
• Conditionals
• Loops
• and more…

This will be the easiest tutorial of the PHP part of the series. Just remember, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me. If anyone has any corrections or disputes with the information, feel free to comment as well. Now let’s get started!

Setting Up Your Environment

Apache / MySQL / PHP Setup

Some PHP books or guides will go over setting up a complete LAMP/WAMP setup, but I feel if you want a complete test environment this approach is not only unnecessary, but a waste of time when you are trying to learn. Not that it isn’t something you shouldn’t be concerned with once you are up to speed and creating advanced programs and need to fully test system functionality and resource usage, but for now, and for the scope of this guide, it is unwarranted. For this guide, I will recommend you setup XAMPP.

To setup an installation of XAMPP, you should head to their website and download the latest copy. Then, as an administrator, run the installer as shown in figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 – Running the installer

As the installer loads, the very first thing it will ask you is where you would like to install it. For the purpose of this tutorial, we have selected the root of your hard drive, or for Windows users (this tutorial is being written using my server, with Windows Server 2003 Enterprise as the operating system) the root would equate as C:\. Refer to figure 1.2 for details.

Figure 1.2 – Setting the installation directory

Now that that’s taken care of, go ahead and click install. After the installer has installed all of the necessary files, it will bring up a DOS style prompt asking a few questions. I recommend selecting ‘y’ to allow desktop shortcuts (for ease of access to the XAMPP Control Panel), ‘y’ to locate the XAMPP paths correctly, and ‘n’ to not make portable drives. The last option is entirely up to you, but for the scope of this guide it’s not necessary. Refer to figure 1.3 to see what I’m talking about.

Figure 1.3 – Configuring XAMPP post-install

Once this is taken care of, the DOS style screen should change to a more advanced menu. Simply select ’1′ to start the XAMPP Control Panel, then ‘x’ to exit. An example is in figure 1.4.

Figure 1.4 – Starting the xCP

Now that the control panel is up, click on the check boxes located next to ‘Svc’ alongside Apache and MySQL to run both of these as background services and click ‘OK’ to confirm. Next, start both of these services by clicking the ‘Start’ button. Refer to figures 1.5 and 1.6 to see what you’re looking for.

Figure 1.5 – Creating Services

Figure 1.6 – Starting services

As long as everything went as planned, you should be able to load up your favorite browser and load http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 and get XAMPP’s default start page as referenced in figure 1.7. Now, it’s a good idea to go to C:\xampp and create a shortcut of the ‘htdocs’ folder to your desktop for reference. This folder is the root to your private webserver and any folder you create will create a folder on your server. For example, if you create htdocs/test, and you load up http://localhost/test, it will direct you to any content in that folder.

Figure 1.7 – The finished product

WYSIWYG Editors

PHP can be written in any text editor, but it is imperative that the editor uses raw text (meaning no MSWord, etcetera). The editor I use on a day-to-day basis is Dreamweaver, but as many of you know it’s an Adobe product and it isn’t free, or cheap. For those simply learning, it’s much easier if you don’t already have it lying around (I was discounted through a student program many moons ago), use something open source (or free) such as Notepad++. It’s contextual, much like Dreamweaver, and does the trick. Just as a quick note, while Notepad++ is contextual, it isn’t considered a WYSIWYG editor, considering you still have to format your own code by hand.

Setting up this program is so easy in fact, that I only have one image (not that XAMPP was that much more difficult). Simply download the file from the website, and run the installer. After using the default settings, run your new application. The only thing you have to setup that isn’t in the defaults is go to Language, highlight P, then select PHP as shown in the image.

Figure 1.8 – Setting up Notepad++

While this lesson hasn’t really given you any information on how to code…well…anything, it is designed simply to get the software for the rest of the series into your skill set. After you have everything installed, go ahead and play around with it and get acquainted. Make a few sample pages or your own website using these programs using HTML.

As mentioned, feel free to leave comments with any questions, and I’ll get back to them as soon as possible. I’m going to begin preparing for the first real PHP lesson, “Creating Your First Page”, an introduction to the PHP tags, comments, and echo / print statements.

Until next time.

While it’s been a while since I’ve updated over here at Drake Technologies with any articles, it’s also showing apparent (perhaps even more so) over at The Admin Zone.  As promised, my next article will be part of a large series, instructing new and experienced users alike on how to not only write simply web pages using the dynamic side of PHP, but also how to write fully functional programs, capable of doing whatever you, as the creator, set your mind to.

I’ll let everyone know now, I’m far from an expert at programming, although I have been doing it for quite some time.  While Drake Technologies and my other sites in the past have either ran on software that I’ve personally written or have modifications that I’ve personally customized, none of which are now to show any concrete examples of what I’m capable of.  However, you should be able to see from the examples, as well as the downloadable samples I’ll be providing and hopefully this will be an enjoyable and educational experience for all.

As titled, this is an introduction to the series I will be writing.  I should have my first full article up within a week or two depending on my work schedule.  Unlike my previous articles, these will be fully published around the internet as a free resource, and I’m hoping to get a pretty good amount of exposure from them to both my own websites as well as The Admin Zone, where I place most of my content.  Also, I feel it’s important that I note how I will be structuring these articles.  I will be starting from the beginning, from installing a test server using XAMPP and noting how to install a simple WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor such as Notepad++ to get started.  Once we are ready, each article will include several lessons explaining in as natural a way as possible what the syntax means, as well as what it does or can do, and a project to end each article putting the lessons into effect to help with retention.  Also, comments will be freely accepted, and will be checked and replied to as soon as possible.

Until then, keep looking around, subscribe to this blog, do whatever you need to do.  It’s sure to be a lot of fun.

Joshua Drake

When the site comes back up, however, we will be running on vBulletin 4.1.2, with a lot more changes coming in the near future.

We apologize for any inconvenience, and until next time!

DraconDigital.com is a personal showcase, which permits members to upload their music, videos, artwork, photography, pretty much any kind of digital form of expression you can think of (and if you can think of one we didn’t, feel free to suggest it and we’ll make it happen). Blogs, galleries, forums, live chat, private chat, community based currency based on sharing your own items, you name it we got it. The best part, is that you can purchase advertising with the website based currency! There are so many features here right at launch, that it would take me all day to list them off here. You’re just going to have to go and check it out yourself!

On the other hand, those few hours have been…interesting.  The game is set up directly after the events of the DAO:A campaign, so the overall environment was amazing.  A few old favorites were in the game, such as Flemeth and Anders, and I really can’t wait to find more.  The graphics have been tweaked a great deal, and unfortunately that is probably one of the downsides.  I’m gaming on a 32 inch CRT style television, and I can’t read hardly any of the text, meaning if you aren’t playing on a large HD TV, don’t expect to get the full experience from the game.  There are a few things that help, such as the contextual clues when performing dialog between two characters indicating whether or not the option is good, evil, or witty.  Once I get the opportunity to get a larger TV, hopefully my experience will be better.  I’m sure it would look better on my laptop too in terms of UI.

I suppose I’ll update more once I’ve gotten a little further.  Until next time!