Weekly Update 7/6/07

LAN-O-THON v4.0
I haven't heard back from any more companies on sponsorships. I did follow up with a guy from thermaltake so hopefully I'll have banners up soon for them. I'll post another picture of my LAN Party surprise tomorrow.

The LAN Party Initiative
I'm going to get a Counter-Strike: Source and a Half-life2: Deathmatch server for our group soon. East coast Source servers are still backorder at gameservers.com. These server cost money to run so consider using these options to support it. To raise addtional funds I'm going to sell reserved slots for $3 dollars (good for a spot on each server) or add $3 dollars more and get some admin privileges such as setting the map rotation. Discuss this more over here

Inside LAN-O-THON
I bought a hard drive to setup freebsd on so this week I'll start working on my server guide.

MCD Portal (the CMS I'm writing)

The CMS I'm writing is coming right along. I got the display block system setup and now I'm starting work on the first module- Users which is probably the most critical as it controls user registration, login and who has access to what and I started laying out the database setup for it. The first subcomponent I'm have to tackle is the ACL (access control list). the ACL is the bit of code that detrimes whether not a user has permission to access a component and will allow me to grant indivual users the rights to somethings like add news articles but not others like delete those articles. I've never used such an advanced ACL setup like this but I'm using the ACL componet of the Zend Framework so going to be fairly easy I hope. My goal is to have a working site by the end of July. The next module is news and then search and then I would like to work on recreating all that ALP can do using my new cms.

Personal
My parents family room remodeling project is getting closer to being done. The walls were painted and the floor got tiled this week but we are still waiting on the trim, finish electrical and windows to replace the old ones. I can't wait to be done baby sitting this project so I can work on other things.

My dad took off work today so he could finally clean and prep the sailboat he bought used a few months ago. He's been so busy that we've haven't gone sailing on yet and it's just been sitting in storage so I'm glad the boat's getting one step closer to being sailable. The picture left is the only picture of the boat I have at the moment. Its from the sales listing so I have no idea who the guy on the boat is. I'll try and remember to take a new picture tomorrow.