Month: December 2013

  • Baldur’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition: More Theory Crafting Class Combinations

    Having beaten Shadows of Amn again, I decided to just mess around with the party creation process and see what I could come up with considering all the new classes. The first thing I decided to try was taking a good aligned party again and toying with some statistics, gear and dual class possibilities. Here’s…

  • Lego: Determining Collectable/Valuable Sets

    I had been digging around my house while and managed to shore up various mint-in-box (MIB) Lego stuff I had from the mid to late 90’s. Some I knew would be worth something some day, which is why I picked them up long time ago. A friend of mine though had asked me how I…

  • Symfony 2: Annoying Issue with Data Transformers, DateTime, Timezones and PHP.ini

    I spent almost the entire day going through the low level code of Symfony 2 trying to determine a really obscure error with my code. The issue started from dealing with using a Time type for one of my columns and having the form validate it appropriately. Unfortunately, the error message that bubbled up did…

  • Baldur’s Gate 2: The Journey Continues (with the Enhanced Edition)

    I’m still slowly going through the various areas in Shadows of Amn and making mental notes of differences in the game as well as trying out a few new things that I missed with my previous runs (such as doing the full romance quest line with Jaheira). As I attempt to rush through several areas…

  • Baldur’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition (Mac version): Initial Impressions

    Since my gaming rig died and the time to fix it is an unknown quantity at this time, I decided to continue my distraction with Baldur’s Gate 2 by getting the Enhanced Edition for my Macbook Pro. I’m actually quite happy that they had a Mac version since I’m at the point in my life…

  • PHP: References, Scoping, Arrays and Function Design

    Surprisingly, a lot of PHP code that I see in the industry rarely makes use of the ideas of references. However, references are an exceptionally powerful tool in the programming world because it can mean the difference in terms of memory management and performance. Quite a few people might not grasp some of the basic…

  • Why You Should Never Buy from Alienware nor Dell

    In the past, I had some pretty terrible experiences with Dell computers. On two separate occasions, I lost my drives just close to when the warranties were up. Part of me does not believe this was a coincidence. Fortunately, laptop drives are pretty easy to replace so I didn’t bother trying to replace them through…

  • jQuery: Autocomplete Issue with Select

    I found an interesting undocumented consequence when you override the _renderItem function with one of your own. Most people might attempt to follow the format from the code example which shows a line that appends an “<a>” tag to the string (specifically as follows):

  • Baldur’s Gate 2: Best Route Quest Route?

    When you play Baldur’s Gate 2 a few times, you eventually learn what works for you in terms of the game progression. Shadows of Amn is pretty flexible in giving you a fairly non-linear setup so you’re essentially open to do the various quests in almost any order you want (outside of certain key story…

  • Baldur’s Gate 2: Perfect Combo Party? 3 Custom and 3 NPCs?

    Before getting into something I’ve started up recently, let me just rant about how my Alienware just bit the big one today. I am having a repair guy come down to replace the motherboard, which I think has been going after a while (I thought it was the video card or memory), so hopefully I…