Kontroversial Keith

Kontroversial Keith: Saying It and Meaning It.

  • World of Warcraft: Should Heroic Raids Even Exist (as We Know Them)?

    I enjoy the controversial discussions on whether or not LFR should exist. But the real question is whether Heroic Raids (or what will become known as Mythic Raids) really exist? Some numbers came out recently about the latest decline in World of Warcraft and I hope to analyze the cause behind what is another drop…

  • Twitch TV, Social Media and Stickiness

    Currently, I am working on a social media type of project and one of the things we constantly are discussing is the “stickiness” aspects of the way the application should work. For those who do not understand the concept of “stickiness,” it’s simply the idea of how users of an application consistently return and use…

  • Symfony 2: Why You Should Move Your Logic into a Service

    In typical MVC applications, people end up storing business logic into either the controller or the model layer. The problem in this approach is that in either case, you introduce code bloat and dependencies that should not really exist. Controllers, which are essentially the observer pattern, act as a traffic light, taking requests and directing…

  • Baldur’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition: Best Evil Party Combination?

    Right now, I’m deciding on giving a purely evil party a try. There’s a LOT of ramifications by choosing this path since the vast majority of this game is based around being a relatively good party. What I want to discuss here is the implications of choosing an evil party and how that can affect…

  • 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…