Living in central Florida I just love this time of year to be a kid again. The wife and I get all year pass holder tickets so its five weeks of weekends of Star Wars.
























Always have to add one of these limited edition coins for pass holders to my collection every year.

It's no secret that I'm more of a backend developer, but when I'm doing frontend development, I tend to get a little lazy and usually design in browser instead of designing the PSD first. Of course that means that what I had originally envisioned and the final product are two completely different designs, but hey, I'll do whatever works.

Anyway, what tools do you use to help you in frontend design? I find Colorzilla's gradient editor and their chrome addon to be extremely useful in generating gradients and as a general color picker. I'm honestly not quite sure what I'd do without it considering the fact that I'm not good at generating complex gradients in GIMP. I also use bg.siteorigin.com to generate generic patterns for backgrounds and simple tools such as http://border-radius.com/ for when I (shamefully) forget basic CSS.

What tools would you recommend?

So, I was experimenting around with our current default theme (Submatrix v.3) out of boredom earlier, and completely changed the color scheme as an experiment and uploaded it as "Submatrix Red" on the forums for beta purposes. I didn't change much besides the color scheme, but the results are pretty interesting. I personally prefer the new color scheme, and I so far have asked one member here who seems to pretty much agree so far. Now, we need your vote!

So, between Submatrix v.3 and Submatrix Red, which one do you prefer? (There is a mini theme switcher at the right side of the footer. ) Be sure to submit your vote in the poll!

Thanks,
-Darth

What religion do you identify with? Be sure to vote in the poll! (If your religion isn't identified above, let me know and I will add it to the poll. )

As always, be sure to be respectful of the beliefs of others. Religious debate is allowed, but attacking, demeaning, or otherwise insulting the beliefs of others is not permitted here.

So I've always been a huge fan of the Simcity franchise. Unfortunately, the new Simcity has apparently had a lot of older fans disappointed, and I haven't really had the money to shell out on it to give it a shot yet. (Some people really love it, but apparently that's mostly newer players of the franchise, and it isn't really anything like the older versions of the game.) Cities XL wasn't bad, but it's starting to become a bit outdated and due to some bugs, it never became as popular as games such as SC4 did.

It seems that some new indie gamers and programmers have been independently working on some new interesting projects in recent years. I doubt that an indie game would overnight become as advanced as Cities XL was, but hey, it's interesting seeing what people can come up with. In particular, Banished was recently released, which looks interesting. Although I haven't tried it myself yet, the reviews for it have been great so far. (The concept isn't quite the same as what you'd expect to see in a traditional simcity game. It's more of a survival kind of a game, but it's neat to see something unique. )

Project Avalon is also a browser based project that looks very interesting over at Simtropolis. I've been following the project since its earlier stages of development, and the developer is doing a fantastic job on it so far. With it being browser based, compatibility won't be as much of an issue either, although I imagine the graphical complexity will be a bit limited in the long run. Hey, it means that the simulation will end up being the focus, so I can't complain. I think it's a brilliant idea personally.

Anyway, what are your thoughts on the indie market for city simulation games? For the other fans of the Simcity franchise out there, what would you like to see happen in this particular corner of the gaming market?

Would you convert to another religion than your current one, and what would the reason be for you to decide to do this? Would you convert out of love (if you fell in love with someone of another religion)? For money? For the lulz?

If you are an atheist, would you give religion a chance for love, if your partner was a believer?

So I've had an idea that I've been slowly working on for several months now. A lot of people love Ajax Chat, but many webhost prohibit it from being installed because it is highly server intensive. (Makestation so happens to be hosted on a VPS, so we don't quite have that problem here, but many hosts don't exactly appreciate chat rooms. )

Anyway, ajax chat is much less server intensive with an ideal, non-apache configuration. I have recently purchased a new VPS to begin development on that front, and plan on using a LEMP based configuration instead of a typical LAMP based configuration. The server itself is already set up, so it's now a matter of a few last minute configuration changes, and then to modify ajax chat to run on a hosted environment.

As far as the progress, most of the work as far as actually parsing out a specific chat has already been completed. The chat installer has been modified to create a new set up tables for each chat, and a bootstrap loader to parse configuration differences is in place. What has been difficult is the URL rewrites. My hope is to avoid URLs such as http://somechathost1234.com/chat/?key=243 but to have a cleaner URL such as http://somechathost1234.com/makestation/chat, but my URL rewriting skills need some refreshing, evidently.

Anyway, I'll be sure to keep you guys updated. Anyone have any suggestions for what they would like to see, or for a domain name?

I have decided it's finally time for me to look into replacing my PC. (It's not even that old, around 4 1/2 years, but it's managed to fry two video cards and has had numerous hardware failures, and I need something more portable anyhow. )

Anyway, with my budget around $500, I know I won't get something amazing, but I'm on the search for good deals. Which brands are worth looking into? Which brands should I avoid at all costs?

I'm mostly looking into best buy at the moment. Tigerdirect/compUSA seem interesting as well, but it's a further drive and I don't want to have to wait for delivery.

I'm pretty well accustomed nowadays to always driving with the empty light on. I can usually get another 30-40 miles or so once it comes on, so I don't see it as really being an issue.

Do you usually fill your gas tank, or are you more like me and drive only on what you actually need to make it to your destination?

well me and my coding team have worked over some ideas / projects were gonna do to make us bigger and better, ill just list a few of them

* = Done

- Register and Login Feature
- Comment System*
- Live Chat Software
- Notepad (almost done)
- Web Browser <--- One of our dreams
- Java Game
- Web Based HTML Code Editor*
- Support Tickets System*

thats just a few, if you want to help us add me on skype - live:amazeht