zeeky

C and C++ introductory lecture rant

2011-11-16T14:20:00.001+01:00

Alright, as announced a small rant about the course I had.

These were two lectures as part of a larger course. One a small C introduction and a follow up for a small C++ introduction, 90 minutes each.
It was annoying for me to listen to it. If my brain had the capability of throwing up, it would have.

To start out, I'm (usually) not an elitist, though I am a standard fetishist. I'm okay with using system-libraries, but I try to keep that to a minimum if reasonable.
I'm not a fan of libraries that are not cross-platform either, but each to their own.

First up, they've announced the C introduction would use some C++ elements, so we should use the cpp extension and compile with g++ (they were also kinda mixing up gcc with g++ and saying that modern C compilers would gladly compile some C++ elements).
The reason for this turned out to be just the bool type (which would be available as _Bool (or typedef'd in stdbool.h) in c99), references (C++-style, not pointers - though they've of course been mentioned as well) and function overloading.
Completely unnecessary.

There were some errors concerning the the sizeof operator (called a function) applied to arrays. Arrays decaying to pointers are ugly, though it was never clearly mentioned.
I would have mentioned that there's some ugly stuff where arrays may decay into pointers, though would have advised to look on the internet for self study if there was further curiosity.

The lecturer did not seem to know much about this himself, so the questions asked by the audience were not answered satisfactorily.

So let's go on to the C++ introduction. There were mistakes concerning the OOP and it was apparent that they've bitten of a byte (ha-ha) more than they can chew. I did not understand why there's the need of introducing TMP or some new C++11 features.
Yes, they're very sweet, but for a 90 minute introduction they should have taken a bit more time on making a conscious choice about the subset to show, since this one was really lacking.
They've also showed the std::vector as an example of the usefulness of the STL (a very fitting example with a vector of vectors °_^).

I didn't listen to the lecture too well, so I don't have as much to tell about it.

I've also had an apparently decent introduction to assembly in this same course (spanned over a (much) longer time than 90 minutes, dunno how much though) - the only 'mistake' was using AT&T/GAS syntax (<- that's a link to a comparison table) instead of Intel (which I've learned a bit before - but that's just my opinion). The reason might be for using inline assembler in gcc, although I'm pretty sure you can toggle that behavior.

We've been instructed on how to use the FPU and SSE instructions, which I did not know how to do before, so I'm happy about it. I've also gotten some more practice using assembly; I'm happy with that too.

So let's move on with our continuing mission: To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Time, text-mode, cold, stuff

2011-11-16T13:38:00.001+01:00

This semester I've been kept quite busy. The courses are not harder than last year, but for some reason they seem to eat more time.
The Red Cross also had some chores in store for me.

I have not had much time to work on personal projects, though I've customized my start-up a little with a small script I am planning to extend a bit; right now it's asking me if it should start openbox and/or wicd (I've been recommended to use just wpa_supplicant instead; I'll take a look).
I've been working some more in text-mode. If you know of a good way to view PDF-files in the terminal, leave a comment; I'd appreciate it.
Right now, fbgs seems the only option. I'm looking at a pdf2html tool next; the text-browser of my choice is ELinks.

My preferred text-editor was nano, though I've learned to handle some basic Vim recently. I'm more accustomed to it already than when I tried to get into Emacs.

I've been sick two weeks ago and still had to do a long paramedical shift due to the little numbers of helping hands and then some volleyball matches, where I've heard some people had already jumped the boat so I didn't want to back out as well, the day after.
Since the temperatures outside have been dropping recently I felt very relieved after I got home, drank a hot tea and lied down in my bed.

The cold went mostly away during the week, I cough seldom and need to blow my nose a few times a day, but I'm feeling quite well again.

Next post - soon to come - is a small rant about a course I had.
Until then, keep yourselves out of trouble! Bye~

Archlinux

2011-10-01T17:57:00.001+02:00

My first experience with Archlinux is ... good. I have the feeling of having a bit more control over my system and I think the startup is a bit faster than my previous Fedora setup.

I knew I would only get a bare base-system after the install, but what I did not expect is that tools like sudo and locate are not part of it.

Pacman is awesome. It's incredibly fast; after using yum a real blessing ;D
It's also faster than apt-get/aptitude.

I already broke my WLAN once after updating Arch, because a bunch of WLAN modules were seemingly randomly blacklisted. Apart from that it's been running smoothly.

I now have Openbox as my WM and actually DE. I use tint2 for my task bar (it's pretty) and a handy, id tech-like drop-down terminal called guake.

I already blogged about my browser choice.

And I guess there's not really much else to say about it. The AUR is cool. The packages are bleeding edge. I love the rolling release. That is all.

A short, short time ago,

2011-09-24T00:34:00.002+02:00

at pretty much this exact same place (relative to the earth) I wrote a blogpost in which I promised a follow up.
Guess what.

I left off saying something about a Co-Op mod for Half-Life 2. So here's the story:

A friend of mine was looking for someone to play the Portal 2 Co-Op with. I still had Fedora at that time, planned to change to Arch, already got Portal 2, though unplayed.
So I thought I can install Windows and Arch, install Steam play Portal and then play the Co-Op with my friend and give the Windows-partition back to Arch afterwards.

So I did and in the process downloaded a couple of mods I wanted to re-play or look how far they've gotten.
Obsidian Conflict is one of them.

While playing it on a server a dev joined, who said that my name sounds familiar and he just implemented and tested my ironsight code.
I found that pretty cool and just asked if they're looking to fill a coder-position in their team, though I won't know how much time I can spend.
Guess what happened.

Thus I am keeping Windows around.

And I'll give a shout out to OccupationCS: Source. Note that the dependency on CS:S is planned to be removed soon.
It's a mod that adds realistic bullet simulation to a Source multiplayer setting. You can also choose different ammo, which results in different performance of course. It also added a more complex health-system.

While it generally aims for realism I don't think the fun gets left out. If you have a Source-game, check this mod out! I love it and the potential it has.

Right now you probably won't find any servers, but the bots are okay to play against until the official server is back up.

Okay. So far so good.
I think I'll do another small blogpost saying a few words about my experiences with Arch Linux so far.
Sayonara

A long, long time ago,

2011-09-21T13:37:00.003+02:00

at pretty much this exact same place (relative to the earth) I wrote a bunch of blogposts somewhat regularly.

I've already explained that I found less time to blog stuff and just didn't have much to blog about.

While I don't expect to be writing many blogposts now, I do have some stuff to write about and I just got motivated to make a post.

Fedora was replaced by Arch Linux.

Why? Because I wanted to learn a bit more about Linux and I did. No where near a Linux-guru - far from it - but I learned some interesting stuff.

I want to try LFS in a VM at some point.

I've gotten myself a Netbook. Also runs Arch Linux, of course.

I was looking for one with just a long battery lifetime and fairly cheap. Didn't care much about the other specs.

I've been using Midori instead of my usually used browser, Chromium, on there. But it had the tendency to hang and if I opened it myself and then would click on a link in my instant messenger, it'd complain about not being shutdown correctly and open a new window.

So now I'm also using Chromium on there.

I'm now (actually became about 8 months ago) treasurer of our local Red Cross club, woot. Actually it's not great, but I did get some interesting insights.

I'm gonna try it a bit longer to see if I'll stick with it. Right now I'm doubtful.

And I've became coder of the Obsidian Conflict mod, a Co-op mod for Half-life 2 (and its sequels).

Apart from the Singleplayer maps the mod also features many custom maps, some with a traditional FPS style (shoot all enemies, progress, repeat), some with an additional twist (e.g. for each kill you get money, so you can buy larger weapons or other utilities like turrets or mines to overcome the next, bigger wave of enemies) and some with a completely different gameplay.

I must say that I am lazy though. I hope that I can get my ass back up and get some things done.

Since Half-Life 2 is not a Linux native game, you might ask how that came to be. I will (hopefully) answer that in my next blogpost, which I hope to make this or next week.

I just don't wanna blow this one up too much.

So long.

Welp,

2011-06-12T17:07:00.000+02:00

More than a month, no blog post.

Not much to say, not much happened to me.

Almost all of my programming time was for university stuff, all the rest was code snippets on a programming forum.
I've been jogging more, but my legs don't seem to like it much and hurt sometimes - not like a muscle ache though, it's something different. I hope it'll go away if I do more stretching exercises.

I've been pondering to buy a Netbook with a long battery life, something like a Asus 1005P. I'll wait a little more though, since I don't actually have a need for it; it'd be nicer than my current laptop for the university though.

Don't expect another update soon. I don't suspect anything interesting, that I'd wanna tell the world, happening to me in a while.

University!

2011-05-06T14:33:00.000+02:00

Alright, so finally some time for a blog-post.

Yeah, I've been starting university and it has taken quite a lot of my time and attention.
I'm taking 4 classes, of which 3 are of the recommended plan. The forth one would come later, but a my tutor in the introduction week suggested that those, who already know some Java, could take a look at that course to loosed the time schedule at a later semester.
If I can't do it, I can still opt out and loose nothing, except maybe a the lecture time I could have been using differently.

I've also found two fellow students I share my schedule with, so we go to the same lectures, exercises and finish the group assignments.

Three of the four courses are mostly easy. Well, not as in nothing-to-do easy, but certainly doable. One I have some problem with, but that seems to be a common weak-spot for a lot of CS students here, so I don't make myself too much stress.
I still try to do many extra exercises for that course and reread parts of the script multiple times, although I usually don't understand more.

Anything else but university has pretty much some to a halt. Well, except for the important, voluntary work for the German Red Cross.
I'm also injured, so I can't do sports. Since it's my arm/shoulder I can still jog though.
Apart from the sport I don't mind it too much. It's not like my personal programming projects ever got far (though I'm looking to write a few lines at times for a program I'm missing from Ubuntu for Fedora); The courses are interesting and I'm still optimistic.

Chiptune!

2011-04-02T03:53:00.000+02:00

Chiptune music, 8-bit music, I like it.

My music library had a few 8-bit tracks from paniq, but no others. When I search for chiptunes I found MP3s or sites with missing download links.
I guess I never really searched well.

Recently I found a site which also offered some FLACs, though mostly modules.
But the songs were not of the particular fast-paced style I was looking for.
Since the site also had tracks by paniq I landed at bandcamp at some point, where I was lucky enough to find some bleeps and bloops I was looking for.
Namely bleeds and TreyFrey. I got the latter in exchange for a little coding-work, which was a very fitting event since I don't have a PayPal-account; So if you're reading this, thanks again!!

I also found this interesting album, the genre of which is psychedelic chipbreak. The other albums of the artist are in the same style.

On a site-note, as of yesterday I am also officially a student on the TU Darmstadt, majoring in Computer Science.
And as announced a few days ago I've also resurrected my twitter-account. Follow me if you care. If not, big whoop, wanna fight about it?

Ryan C. Gordon

2011-03-30T14:04:00.000+02:00

a.k.a icculus is a name that Linux gamers will probably know. He's been responsible in porting games such as Quake 3, the Unreal Tournament series, ... well, you can just read about him here.

The Czech website www.abclinuxu.cz made an interview with that guy recently, asking about his work porting software 'n stuff. Reading it gave me a little of my hope back I lost with the last post I made.
Luckily there's an English translation available:
http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/rozhovor-ryan-c.-gordon-icculus?page=1

I can't quite make out when that interview was held, but since the iPad is mentioned it can't be longer ago than a year.

On a side note, I'm thinking of reviving my dead twitter-account I never really used to follow a bunch of interesting channels (or however they're called in twitter).
Or perhaps a new one, if I can't remember my old twitter nick.

Carmack on Direct3D

2011-03-17T18:59:00.000+01:00

tl;dr:
Direct3D supposedly better than OpenGL
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2011/03/11/carmack-directx-better-opengl/1
Gallium3Ds D3D state tracker might make it easier to convince others to switch to my favorite platform: Linux

John Carmack is a very well known name in the gaming industry. He's co-funder of id Software, famous for the Quake and Doom series (where he was lead programmer), which is supported by the in-house produced id Tech engines, which themselves are also well known.

Carmack is also an advocate of free software. While not releasing it immediately (or before) the release of the software, after around 6 years passing he has taken care. Examples include the id Tech 3 engine and promises, that id Tech 4 will be open source somewhat soonish.
He also contributed to open source projects.

In the past, Carmack has complimented OpenGL as being superior to Direct3D, though the tides have turned.
I can't make a statement on my own, since I've only gotten my hands dirty with some basic OpenGL, but from what I hear and deducing via common sense it really seems that Direct3D and the related DirectX helper libraries have become the stronger competitor.
OpenGLs strong point is still that it's an open API, but if you look solely at the interface, Direct3D got ahead.

From what I gathered, OpenGL has been superior and faster, Direct3D had to catch up. When then OpenGL froze at 2.1, Direct3D could take a leap forward.
Major API changes, making the OpenGL interface easier, were promised for OpenGL 3, but after two years it turned out to be just another revision. The reason given was backwards compatibility and I believe this is what gave Direct3D another advantage.

Instead of leaving the backwards compatibility to using an old OpenGL version, the features were left and a deprication model was designed. Basically, the application will warn the developer of features that are getting removed and in the next revision they might not be present.
The though is very sensible of course, but IMO this is not a reason not to 'restart' OpenGL.

afaik Direct3D does not care that much about backwards compatibility. If you want to use old stuff, use an old version. Makes sense, really.
And now OpenGL is the one playing catch-up to Direct3D.

I wonder when the tides will turn again. I'm stubborn and will be staying on Linux. This will probably not make it easier to get a job when I finished university.
I'm not saying develop solely for Linux, I think the sensible route is to develop using open APIs and cross-platform code and libraries, only using platform-specific code where you need it or you gain reasonable benefits, while keeping code-switches (hidden behind a uniform interface) to target different platforms.

All the new AAA games (with exception of Rage if we're lucky) use Direct3D, which I believe is the main blocker for potential Linux portage.

Sure, the WinAPI is also a bigger deal, but apart from graphics, we've got left sound, input and filesystem I/O.
I don't think sound is a big deal, for the input you merely need to change to different functions to get the current key states and filesystem I/O also can't be that big of a deal. All if they were properly abstracted of course.

Of course the market is orientated to where they can get the most money out of, which Linux is certainly not.

The best I can do is try to promote Linux, but how do you convince the average Joe that free software is better than his software that 'just works'?
Saying you won't catch much viruses and your system won't get slower the longer you use it probably won't outweigh his software not running on Linux.
Wine is the best bet here, but it's certainly not an option for gamers. Gallium3Ds D3D state tracker might come in useful here. Let's hope they'll get somewhere!

Damn, that was a huge rant. I did not intend that. I actually just wanted to post that link: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2011/03/11/carmack-directx-better-opengl/1
Well, I added a tl;dr up there; if you read through till here, I hope you enjoyed it!

LLVM

2011-03-03T19:12:00.000+01:00

It's time to update my blog and LLVM is the only thing I can think of writing about.

The 'main'-project of LLVM is a compiler backend. It reads code in a special assembly language (LLVM assembly) and can turn that into bytecode or native code.
There's also a library that helps in writing that assembly-code, so you don't have to know the instructions yourself.

The assembly is rather high-level, so that LLVM can perform optimizations on that. If you let LLVM JIT-compile it can also do run-time optimizations.

LLVM is cross-platform and written in mostly standard C++, making it quite portable. This also means that LLVM bytecode applications can be run on multiple platforms without recompiling, like Java and C#.

Apparently the developers consist of Apple-people, or at least are sponsored by them.

Personally I don't like Apple with the restrictions they place on their hardware and APIs, but LLVM is a darn fine piece of work - well, it started as a college project, not related to Apple.

Anyways, this also means that the early builds are only available for the OS X system, but clang in C++03 mode (gccs C++0x mode is far more advanced) and LLVM Core works fine on a big variety of Unix-like systems.

I've began working a bit with LLVM, and this is what I have so far:
My work:

--input:
Int a = 42
Int aA/*comment*/==4/*heh*/2 //another comment
Int Nothin
--output:
Keyword: Int
Identifier: a
Operator: =
Literal: 42
ExpressionEnd: 

Keyword: Int
Identifier: aA
Operator: ==
Literal: 4
Literal: 2
ExpressionEnd: 

Keyword: Int
Identifier: Nothin
ExpressionEnd:

And the part where LLVM jumps in:

--input:
Int a = 4
Float f = 5.678
Int b = a
--output:
Compilation went fine.
; ModuleID = 'stdin'

define i32 @main() {
entry:
%b = alloca i32
%f = alloca float
%a = alloca i32
store i32 4, i32* %a
store float 0x4016B645A0000000, float* %f
store i32* %a, i32* %b
}

The language seen in the input is one I intend to invent. It's going to draw its main influences from C++ and I'll see where it goes from there.
I'll just improve my current code a bit and then move on to writing a documentation about the yet nameless language.

Reality TV

2011-02-16T20:32:00.000+01:00

I don't like reality TV. Well, there is indeed a certain fascination about it, which I don't deny, but I don't watch it because I think it's immoral.

What makes me blog about it is that my parents also seem to somewhat think it's immoral, but still watch it. If you have caring parents chances are good that you look up to them and are thankful for how they raised and guided you (and sometimes still do).
And seeing them in this superior role, but judging them wrong by your own values gives me a feeling I have yet to find a word for. I guess I'm disappointed, but at the same time think that I shouldn't be as that is ungrateful.

I read a few articles to further understand the psychology behind these shows. The two most interesting are http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/27917852/ns/today-entertainment/ and http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/phil/blphil_eth_realitytv.htm.

I think the strongest argument for watching these shows with your ethics in tact is that the people playing in there have consented to do so, as such they are of clean consciousness with themselves.
If we go down this route and you'd think it's right to degrade oneself for money, would it be right to offer money for someone to kill himself? While he himself would of course not be able to spend the money, maybe he's doing it for someone else.
Or perhaps offer money for someone to be tortured.

These are of course their free choices to do or not to do and I believe that one should support the choices of others as long as they don't cause other, non-consenting people harm, but the difference here is that these people would not do it without the money (or in reality TV perhaps also fame).
While it's not immoral (though maybe honorless) to perform the agreed-upon actions, it is immoral to make the offer to someone and of course to support the person offering it and promoting it.

And besides that, the people might not fully realize what they are signing for and I'm sure that the contracts state some negative effects for prematurely quitting plus the public showing that one was too weak to follow through.
And once you're out you're not done, since if the show was watched by many people, they will judge you based on what they saw.

Not much

2011-02-06T23:04:00.001+01:00

going on. I haven't really been coding anything. Started a C++ wrapper for SDL (1.3/hg), but I don't think I'll continue it.
Thought about making a terrain generator, but I kinda lack the motivation.

I've been following the events in Egypt the past week via the Al Jazeera English webstream. I'm really amazed, both by how long the people are holding on and how slowly the president reacts.

I've had a quite sudden and random urge to go jogging today. I took my MP3-Player along (there are actually just 3 MP3s on there, 2 remixes and one Song that was publicized as MP3 only; around 17GB of FLACs make up the actual music collection :)) and planned try jogging for 30 minutes. I really have no idea where my limit is, so I though that sounds appropriate.

Every Thursday I regularly ride my bike to a certain building where the DRK OV Dieburg (the local German Red Cross society) holds its weekly meetings. That takes me about 10 minutes and once, when I accidentally forgot my keys, already closed the door and nobody was home, I jogged there and it took about 30 minutes.
So, while jogging some way I thought about doing that again, taking a small pause and then jog back home. Perhaps I could do it again the following Thursday and right now I'll just test how well that plan would go.

So with a little detour I arrived there taking 25 minutes. At first I thought about jogging in circles or up and down for 5 more minutes, but I felt so good that I decided to jog right back home, without a pause on a different route.
That route still would not be the most efficient way home, but be a little shorter and since I was already going for a while I suspected that I've became slower and perhaps when arriving home I might have been jogging for 60 straight minutes (well, with minor interruptions which after I finished turned out to be one traffic light and three times nose wiping (I've been sick three weeks ago, now it's mostly gone; I also couldn't donate blood a few days ago for that reason :()).

Though as I was almost home my watch told me that I've been jogging for just 45 minutes. I thought, well I didn't do half the job, now I certainly won't do three quarters of it; I'm going to jog for a whole hour.
Now I did circles, each taking about two minutes. After the third I thought about quitting, but I pulled though. While I was in the second last round I even sped up and finally after the eighth round it was enough.

I guess I could have gone on some time longer, but you probably know how it is with those endurance exercises. At some point it's just enough and it slowly becomes boring.

The route I jogged was about 10.75km, that means my average speed was about 3m/s. I guess that's pretty okay.
Also, the music I've been listening to had mostly 145BPM (1x140, 1x146, 1x143 and 6x145 according to the album cover), which was very good in sync with my jogging. The album I've listened to was my recently acquired IM the Supervisor by my currently probably favorite band Infected Mushroom if anyone cares.

Making Emacs

2011-01-17T22:02:00.001+01:00

This is a post back from a few weeks ago when I still had Ubuntu. I didn't post it, because I've written it up offline and thus didn't put in links. I kinda forgot about it, and since recently my postrate has gone up and if I want to keep it there I have to post something, I'm putting in links and publish it.

==================

I got the Emacs package from my Ubuntu distribution; sadly after trying to start it a second time it crashed on startup with the error 'Arithmetic Error'.

I couldn't find out why it was crashing, nor fix it otherwise.

But I still wanted to look into Emacs, hearing everywhere about it. So I got the sourcecode of their Mercurial-repository and built it myself.

If you have built some libraries form source you might know the makefile stuff. Usually you just type './configure && make && sudo make install' and everything gets done.

I usually make a sub-directory called 'build', in which the configure-tool can copy all of its stuff in so I don't accidentally pollute any existing files and so I can easily clean up the build.

Then after it configured the stuff, I look at the output generated to find possible missing libraries. If there's anything critical missing the configure-tool will usually make that very clear and you don't have to search the log, but I search for optinal components that are not found and get them so I get all the features and miss none without knowing.

The output is usually like

checking whether stuff is declared... yes

checking something.h usability... yes

checking something.h presence... yes

checking for somethingelse.h... yes

checking whether gcc understands -Someflag... yes

checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E

checking for sometool... yes

checking for somelib... yes

Just way more stuff. And where it says no, it didn't find stuff and works around, via patches or preprocessor magic or some other tricks.

But Emacs has an awesome summary for the optional components at the end:

Configured for `x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu'.

Where should the build process find the source code? /usr/offload/emacscode/trunk

What operating system and machine description files should Emacs use?

`s/gnu-linux.h' and `m/amdx86-64.h'

What compiler should emacs be built with? gcc -g -O2

Should Emacs use the GNU version of malloc? yes

(Using Doug Lea's new malloc from the GNU C Library.)

Should Emacs use a relocating allocator for buffers? no

Should Emacs use mmap(2) for buffer allocation? no

What window system should Emacs use? x11

What toolkit should Emacs use? GTK

Where do we find X Windows header files? Standard dirs

Where do we find X Windows libraries? Standard dirs

Does Emacs use -lXaw3d? no

Does Emacs use -lXpm? yes

Does Emacs use -ljpeg? yes

Does Emacs use -ltiff? yes

Does Emacs use a gif library? yes -lgif

Does Emacs use -lpng? yes

Does Emacs use -lrsvg-2? yes

Does Emacs use imagemagick? no

Does Emacs use -lgpm? no

Does Emacs use -ldbus? yes

Does Emacs use -lgconf? no

Does Emacs use -lselinux? yes

Does Emacs use -lgnutls? yes

Does Emacs use -lxml2? yes

Does Emacs use -lfreetype? yes

Does Emacs use -lm17n-flt? no

Does Emacs use -lotf? yes

Does Emacs use -lxft? yes

Does Emacs use toolkit scroll bars? yes

I could easily see what I can additionally install (though I didn't find Xaw3d-dev, nor did it properly configure imagemagick, but the rest is all there :)).

And my self-built Emacs works fine, also starting it up after the first time ;D

I still need to figure some stuff out, but I can see why many people like it, though at the moment I am more efficient with simple tools like gedit I will try to get better with Emacs :D

Journalism: A Crime

2011-01-08T18:10:00.005+01:00

I don't think I have to write about the current events about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. You should at least have a rough idea about that ;)

You will also know that Julian Assange is called a terrorist and what not and, whether you approve or not, I will also not have to write about that.

Now, what's interesting is, that the feral court of the US has signed a subpoena request to reveal information about several persona related to WikiLeaks for ongoing criminal investigation.

You can find more detailed articles here and here.

I am usually not deep into politics, but I generally approve WikiLeaks and their actions. Since I am somewhat lazy in researching facts, I found this page to clear some common misconceptions about WikiLeaks for people who do not approve.

I - We - must really ask how it can be, that governments keep secrets and lie. Does this not sound an alarm in our heads? Fictional and non-fictional documents have shown the effects. History can easily repeat itself if people do not pay enough attention or do not act, fiction can just as easy become the reality at some point.

Just because we don't believe something will happen, doesn't make it not happen. One might say there's enough common sense in every person to prohibit going beyond certain limits; That we have not and will not loose our social values, such as freedom. And maybe we won't, but we will have to act that it will not.

People can be manipulated, as far as abandoning their original beliefs. If you don't believe me, read this. Just as students expect to be lead by their teachers, we expect to be lead by our selected politicians. And just as a teacher can command his students, politicians can publish new laws.

Of course this cannot happen within a few days, but a government would have much more resources and way more time.

And of course while the students don't have much control over their teacher, the common folks do have a certain influence on politics - if they are smart enough to act. And it's not so easy to be represented correctly if our representatives are lying to us.

To end this post, here's a related and amusing YouTube-clip.

Using Fedora

2011-01-07T13:05:00.005+01:00

After a few days over a week of using it, I solved some things.

The flashplayer ran shitty because I still had the software graphics drivers :P After I installed the proprietary drivers it worked fine. I'm waiting for nouveau to become stable though; I'll definitely use it when it runs somewhat fine.

I still sometimes have some problems with PulseAudio. After de-installing it, finding out that ESD is not in the repository and re-installing PA, it seems to run a bit better. The flashplayer doesn't spit out any sound when any other sound-program is running. I then have to close those, kill the flashplayer-instance and re-load the page.

And sometimes it seems to eat my sound-device and re-starting PA doesn't bring it back, no, I have to logout and log back in. Probably just some missing flags.. I should investigate the startup-script.

And the packages for Fedora are not named inconsistent, it's just that many libraries themselves have the lib-prefix in their name, while others do not. In Ubuntu those just got the lib prepended, but in Fedora it's just their name without any modifications.

And auto-completion also works on further entries, it just doesn't react on a single tab, but on double-tab. Not sure how I didn't notice that before :P

Though I still think yum is slower than apt-get.

So, all in all everything except PulseAudio runs fine. So far I'm happy to have a running system; I can't really say that I like Fedora or Ubuntu more. I guess they are both good OSs IMO.

Ubuntu has the advantage of optionally providing non-free stuff via the official repositories, while Fedoras software is newer and you can get the non-free stuff via 3rd party repositories at least :)

<insert obligatory new year's-post title here>

2011-01-01T01:00:00.026+01:00

Installing Fedora

2010-12-28T19:52:00.007+01:00

Well, I planned on having it installed on my system sponer, but it turns out backing up data (all in all around 50GB) takes quite some time. The external drive I'm using seems to write at only 4-6 MB/s...
In addition, the vfat filesystem apparently can't handle files of >=4.2GB; luckily I only have 4 of those (one 6.5GB and the others 8-9GB each), so I was zipping them to then split them into 4GB chunks (resulting in 8 pieces). While copying those, the transfer-rate was at only 3MB/s ^.°
That took like... 6h more than expected o.O

Then moved them on the external drive .... and finally! Let's install Fedora!

I liked Anaconda and at 2AM I got my first view of a new desktop:

After sleeping and setting stuff up, I broke Goggles Music Manager:

I got those -2 songs in the queue resolved, but it would only play one song and then stop.

So I installed Rhythmbox.

Oh, and I wanted to show my new, fancy, self-made wallpaper:

Now about Fedora so far:

yum seems a little slower in searching packages than apt-cache or aptitude, but just as imprecise. Another down is that the package-names are a little inconsistent. Bash-autocompletion for the packages also reacts slower and only works for the first package.

In Ubuntu all libraries were prefixed with lib, while in Fedora some are and some not.

I like yums output a little more than apt-gets though. Generally still a plus for Ubuntus apt-get, unless I somehow configured it wrongly.

Fedoras integration of LXDE works better out-of-the-box than the lubuntu-meta-package of Ubuntu.

Again, on the other hand I'm having some problems with the Flash plugin. It mostly, but not completely, works now; I have hope in the lightspark-project though.

Am I glad to have switched? Well, at least glad that I wiped my old system; If I am glad about the new one will show in time.

I feel a little better about Fedora, but probably just because I've set it up properly, unlike my previous system.

Happy Yule

2010-12-25T01:00:00.007+01:00

What the title said.
Do/Did you have a Christmas tree with a Heap of presents underneath?

Fedora, here I come!

2010-12-21T18:06:00.001+01:00

Yep, Fedora is the one I have chosen.

Lately I have found some packages to be a tiny bit dated. Well, mainly because I was looking for brand-new stuff that I pulled stuff from source repositories and compiled it myself.
Then I looked up a few distros on DistroWatch (a fine site if you want information on a bunch of different distros), and found Fedora to have the most recent versions available. Since it's also one of the most popular (at least according to DistroWatch) those releases seem to be stable enough.

I also had a closer look at aptosid (Debian Squeeze sid/unstable), but for some reason it doesn't get much attention from the security team (second paragraph on the sid/unstable-page), while - at least according to Wikipedia - Fedora has security at a high priority.

I have vacation until New Years, so I will use that time to scrap the data I need together, probably borrow the external harddrive from my sister to back up that data and install Fedora in place of my current Ubuntu.

I've been looking around for a new OS, because when I first set up this Linux it wasn't planned to stay very long. But like usual I got used to it and kept it like it is.
This resulted in a minor disaster within the filesystem and some stuff not being properly configured.

At first I thought of simply re-installing Ubuntu and this time also properly partition the drive, but while thinking ahead to that I was reminded of sidux (the former aptosid).
Fun Fact: Those libraries I was missing are also not present in my current distro anymore (well, the libraries are, but not the developer version).
The thing about these libraries is, that they are dated and were deprecated by a new branch (2.0). And keeping old stuff maintained beyond a certain point is unnecessary work.

This got me thinking of using aptosid, which in turn fired the oven to look beyond, my next target being Arch Linux.

Anyways, now that I'm going to settle with Fedora I'll be sure to post a screenshot of my finished Fedora-installation. I already made a new wallpaper, which replaced my current (well, now old) one and is going to replace the default Fedora one :3
I'm primarily interested how yum will do instead of apt-get. Though if for some reason I should like apt-get more, I can always use apt-rpm :)

Linux != Linux

2010-12-20T23:30:00.006+01:00

For those who are not C-savvy: != is the ≠ of (C-like) programming.

Well, clearly Linux == Linux (== is the = of (C-like) programming), but what I meant is that there are lots of different distributions (just look at this fine graph I found on the Wiki-page :3).

Or.. are they really that different?

Just a few moments ago I was researching in quite a bunch of distros; among others there were Arch Linux, Debian (Squeeze), Fedora, openSUSE, Slackware and Ubuntu (which I am using right now). Those are quite popular ones and that usually means it's proven itself and is well maintained.

What defines most of how an OS feels like is the way to configure stuff and the looks. The looks are quite uniform; GNOME is probably the most popular desktop environment, KDE being very wide-spread as well (and just as known).

Xfce for those who like a more minimalistic, but still feature-rich desktop and LXDE as a - as it seems not (yet?) - quite as popular environment and promising an even more efficient desktop than Xfce. It also seems to be more modular to me, due to an obvious component-based design.

It gets even more minimalistic with pure window managers, such as Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, ... and even more with tiling window managers.

I'm not sure how many people use compositing window managers, afaik those usually run as a back-end to some desktop environment (again, GNOME, KDE, ..).

I don't really know what's popular in those categories.

I prefer Openbox due to its (quite) minimalistic nature and compliance to the ICCCM and EWMH standards.

Furthermore I choose LXDE, because it offers all I need and still looks sleek. I find minimalistic GUIs to be appealing, it's not just because I want it memory-saving or something; though that is still a welcome effect.

Well, I didn't actually want to get so deep into explaining stuff, but now that it's already there...

Alright, so what's left is the configuration-part. Most (popular) Distros configure themselves upon installing and if you want to tweak something, there are mostly GUI tools.

I've come to like the terminal emulator to do stuff, because I don't have to search for programs in the menu (though stuff is usually easy to find, within a few keystrokes I can also do it in the terminal) and I don't have to wait for the window to pop up, find the button and so on.

This is really no major thing and if I hadn't a terminal I would have no problems doing it with the GUIs; I'm not an elitist here, I just got used to it.

I think most of the configuring part in Linux has roughly the same syntax. Some programs like to use XML though, which to edit in nano is not as convenient as using a simple GUI text editor.

As I've listed Arch Linux up there, it is said that in Arch you don't get as much GUI sugar. This is one of the reasons I was quite interested in it.

So, well, if configuration and the looks are almost the same in most of the popular Distributions, then what to decide on?

At first I just thought about staying with Ubuntu, but I did indeed find another aspect. And this I will discus in my soon to follow blogpost, as that one is getting large enough...

Finding Scheme

2010-12-12T01:10:00.004+01:00

Well, actually Finding a Scheme Compiler/Interpreter, but that way it matches better with the previous post :3

At first I thought of simply searching the Ubuntu-repository for 'scheme' and 'scm', however there were only programs with a slightly different name.

Then I searched for a reference-implementation, which there is none. Then I googled for 'most popular scheme interpreter' and found MIT/GNU Scheme.

I though, "Fuck Yeah! MIT and GNU, I can't go wrong!".

I then tried the repository again, to find out that for some reason it has been removed in the past. Without worries I went on and downloaded a source-packet specifically for x64 Linux and tried to compile that.

iirc it simply failed to compile.

So then I tried the portable C source-package and after a while it was finished. Trying to start it however downright crashed.

Trying to debug it, the debugger had no message except 'SEGMENTATION FAULT' and the stack-pointer being at 0x0000000000000000.

Lucky me I found Ypsilon, which had just one source-code for every supported platform, which compiled just fine and ran as well.

It also supports the newest language revision and claims to be well optimized, also for multi-processor systems.

So far I had no problems and did a few Project Euler exercises in Scheme to get me used to it, but of course it won't cut it, since mathematical problems only require a subset of the languages capabilities.

I guess I will just read on the ebook I have and let the university give me better problems to solve :P

Learning Scheme

2010-12-12T00:44:00.002+01:00

I decided to do something programming-related. I don't exactly remember where I left off on my experimental project, which I still plan to revisit, but soon I'll be going to a university.

I'll be attending the TU Darmstadt and I'll be majoring in Computer Science.

There, so I've heard, we'll be learning Java and Scheme. Now, Java I kinda know already, but Scheme not so much. I actually don't know any functional language.

If it wasn't for the CS courses there, I'd probably have chosen Common Lisp or Haskell. Possibly F#. The reason is that I've heard of those before, while I never before heard of Scheme.

People seem to be complaining about different operator notation (e.g. to add two numbers x and y you write (+ x y) in Scheme, while in for example C or Pascal it'd just be x + y).

However, doing it the 'Scheme-way' makes sense in the way that you call to other functions, which are not represented as simple symbols, the same way (e.g. (square-root x), while in C or Pascal that'd be square-root(x)).

And I heard people complaining about lots and lots of parenthesis.

At first I though you can probably get through with it if you indent the code properly, but there's really a shitton of parenthesis.

While I do wonder if this language has any value for bigger, serious projects, I can't compare it to any other functional language, since it is the only one I know so far. At least it make me think of different approaches to programming problems; the language is basically centered around using recursion.

I've read about 1/3 of the introduction I am using and so far had no problems understanding everything.

The next blog-post will be a follow-up. I could write it right now, but this would make this post larger and this way I can also claim to post a tad more frequently than I really am :3

Ankle Pain

2010-12-06T21:51:00.003+01:00

I've had some weird problems with my right ankle two months ago (I couldn't bend my foot in a certain way without pain), which seemed to have occurred randomly.

Sadly the soonest appointment to see the orthopedist was a month from that, and when that day came, that problem was almost, though not completely, inexistent.

During that time I didn't go to sport, with two exceptions before the appointment since my foot was doing quite good.

Well, the doctor couldn't find out what's wrong, prescribed me pads for my shoes though. Shortly after that I twisted my ankle in sport. Though the pain was quite serve at first, most of it went away in about a minute.

I told my superior and went to the hospital the following day.

The doctor ordered a X-ray and didn't see what's causing it to swell and slightly pain when putting weight on it.

She told me to stay home for a week, wear a splint, rest the foot and lay it high.

Funny that exactly by that time I got a cold, and quite a serve one, too.

It looks good now and my cold is mostly gone (just a little rest stuck in the nose), though my old woe on my right ankle came back.

Again I'll take a time out.

During that time I didn't do much. I mostly just watched some movies and surfed on the Internet. That idleness seems like it will continue quite a while more :(

I also saw Dollhouse, quite an interesting show, although it only lasted two seasons.

Building g++

2010-11-22T19:50:00.002+01:00

Trying to go down the clang-route failed. libc++ supposedly is not in a working state, at least for Linux.

So then I decided to build a trunk-version of g++ (well, gcc, g++ and libstdc++). Said, done. I also build it with LTO support.

The trunk of gcc is 1.3GB, the build-directory 1.9GB according to du.

Timing of the build (just the call to make, not including the call to configure and make install):

real 98m55.125s
user 101m28.610s
sys 5m39.180s

g++ -v output:

z33ky@mobileblahbuntu:~$ g++ -v
Using built-in specs.
COLLECT_GCC=g++
COLLECT_LTO_WRAPPER=/usr/local/libexec/gcc/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/4.6.0/lto-wrapper
Target: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
Configured with: ../configure --enable-gold=both --enable-languages=c,c++ --with-gold --enable-build-with-cxx --enable-lto --disable-multilib
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.6.0 20101120 (experimental) (GCC)

Attempting to build my current project failed after that, but the errors were quickly fixed.

Now I am re-writing a small part of the code making use of unrestricted unions, where I had a union of pointers before.

Yawn!! BORING!!

Building clang

2010-11-13T12:15:00.003+01:00

So, I decided to get libc++ and use it instead of libstdc++.

They're both implementations of the C++ Standard Library.

For those who don't program: A Library contains stuff a programmer can use, so he doesn't have to write it for himself. For example algorithms for sorting a list of numbers.

The Standard Library is special to other libraries, because it's part of the C++ language.

I ran into a problem with the C++0x's random number generator, producing numbers outside the range [0..1], although I told it so. Supposedly this is a known problem, but since I cannot use clang with libstdc++ C++0x-features, I decided to get libc++ and use it instead of libstdc++.

When I installed clang, it came without clang++ (which basically is clang, except it adds some flags to properly compile C++ code) for some reason, and I always had to explicitly state to link against the C++ Standard Library. Since libc++ didn't seem easily configurable I downloaded the llvm (required to compile clang) and clang source codes to compile them myself and finally obtain clang++.

So, first I used gcc to compile it, then I wanted to use clang to compile them.

The first problem was some bug in the configuration utility when using automatically selected optimization flags. I found out through trial and error.

Then when I tried to compile with clang, it complained about the code not being linkable.

After a bit of trial and error I found out it was the maximum optimization flag (-O4); using the one beloq (-O3) it worked.

A little research and I found out that -O4 enables something called 'link-time optimization' and while usually the linker is independent of compiler optimizations, this of course requires a compatible linker.

Note: when compiling code, one usually means compile and link. Compiling turns individual source-code files into files with in intermediate language. Linking takes all those files in the intermediate language and turns them into the binary.

I installed the linker supporting it, still no avail. I found out I have to build llvm with that specific feature enabled, which required me to have the source-code of the linker so that llvm can use its link-time optimization features. I couldn't find the headers after I installed the dev and source packages, so I proceeded to download the source off their CVS and compile it myself.

Compiling the binutils bugs at some places using clang, but I got 'em all resolved.

Mostly complaining about unused results (due to -Werror) I at first wanted to fix by voiding the expressions, but because it was getting tedious work I simply added -Wno-error=unused-value.

And where I am now is compiling the gold-module (which actually will enable the link-time optimization support), failing at some special function attribute.

gcc is the one established C and C++ compiler (maybe for some other languages, too, I dunno). For Windows, MSVC is also quite popular. Sadly, this results in code not properly compilable with other compilers - such as clang.

This isn't the first library I have problems with. I'll just use gcc, but it's still kind of funny since certain coders are often anal about standard compliance.

Time dissolving

2010-10-30T22:48:00.002+02:00

It really amazes me how little time I seem to spend on coding.

I remember times I almost daily made a blogpost about my progress, now a month won't do.

Well, I proceeded using OGRE, done some tutorials and looking to setup OgreBullet, which is an integration of the physics library Bullet in OGRE.

Apart from that there's not really much programming-related to write about.

I was encouraged by someone to blog my thoughts about time (in a philosophical/physical way). I'm not sure if my English background is well enough so that I can express these thoughts accurately and clearly enough.

Besides, it seems I have about 3 guys really following my blog, and 2 are probably real-life friends with whom I already have shared this theory.

I do get more views on my blog, but they seem to be the result of Google-searches since those are pretty focused on two old posts.

Stranded OGRE

2010-10-12T20:18:00.002+02:00

So uhh... funny title, huh? This blogpost will actually cover it, whether you believe it or not.

Well, I've had the sudden idea of downloading OGRE. I did and got a working Window with stuff rendered and input via OIS.

I've looked for alternatives, found G3D and IrrLicht. G3D was buggy and it doesn't really officially support Linux and about IrrLicht I just heard some bad things, I guess I'll still take a look though.

OGREs interface is a bit C-like. It seems they didn't take the 'academic' route, there's also stuff where I would have said, integers suffice, but strings are present.

That may be the reason why it's gotten released and is still maintained, as opposed to wrangling with having a pretty, academic interfaces.

For now I'm just playing around. I do have in mind, to maybe try on a project with this, but as the past has shown, that's not really reliable that it'll get released, much less finished.

If you know any good and similar libraries, let me know!

I have been looking for a survival-game running Linux-native. No hordes come and try to kill you, but rather find resources, build a tent, hunt animals, create campfile, stuff like that.

I found one game, something mars simulator or so. Not really what I was looking for though.

I know Stranded II for Windows. I really wanted to play it now, so I gave into my dislike for wine, downloaded and installed it through that wrapper.

Not that I think wine is bad software. It's really awesome what they did and still do. Really admirable. But this may be one of the reasons why Software doesn't get so much native Linux support.

On the other hand, it probably gets more users to use Linux and still run the Software they require.

Anyways, now I'm hooked to Stranded II. I'm really amazed how time flies by :(

I'll try to get unhooked and return to some coding. Hopefully using some bigger libraries as backend will help me not get distracted. I already caught myself thinking about wrappers for OGRE to make its interface more .. the style I want.

Stressed Coding

2010-09-25T20:49:00.004+02:00

I just looked for something to do and stuff had gedit open with a kd-tree class I wanna write and I just though "meh". I reminded that I wrote that while I was at the red cross (alternative service).

When I think back, it seems that I code the most effective while a little stressed, such as school time.

I often thought that I can use the holidays to write a fuckload of code, but that never went true. Much more the opposite: I was watching movies or cartoons or something and playing games the whole day.

Maybe I become lethargic when not really having an immediate obligation to do something.

Coding only seemed shit when I had to force myself to code because of having nothing better to do. It's much more fun when I want to kill time instead when I have to - like right now.

Coding is fun, but you do need to think straight, unlike when watching some movies and different from playing games. Well, I don't really play many demanding games. Demanding as in thinking strategically ahead like a good chess-player would. Not like needing good reactions and making tactically clever moves that must be made quickly.

A little stress is always encouraging if you know that it won't become a burden.

Some people stated that they publicly announced their projects to get feedback from others and to get pushed more into finishing and releasing it.

I am not sure if this is wise with my projects. I did it with ViruZ, but I simply do not have enough experience with real projects as opposed to simple proof-of-concepts.

ViruZ finally froze because I was being too general again. I should have continued with my path to keep it simple, even if that means a reduction in quality of implementation.

I am not sure why Solace died. It was not my fault, I was away while it died and contributed after I was back at home, finding that noone else has uploaded anything in quite some time.

I plan on re-coding ViruZ soonish. I need to properly setup DSSS to get SDL working. Then I will just use sprites (images) as opposed to using raw OpenGL and using programmatic approaches to draw stuff.

Currently I am just doing some experimental stuff.

I can safely tell about my approach to the Google AI Challenge. I downloaded the C++ starter-kit, didn't like it, rewrote it and hoped for the community to like and prefer it.

I released it on the forums but it seemed to slip by rather unnoticed, unlike another kit. I did extend functionality by now, but it seems useless to post.

That post got way larger than I expected. At least I could tie up some loose ends :)

Quickly the time is passing

2010-09-23T18:58:00.002+02:00

Well, it's really fucking rushing. I suspect that comes from the alternative service as opposed to school since this is the only thing that changed.

Since I don't really know what interesting stuff I could write about, I'll just do a quick wrap up of what I have to do for assisted transportation in the German Red Cross.

Mainly I just drive to the people that have difficulties getting to a hospital or something, pick them up, accompany them into the building and either wait till they're finished or if that time would be too long drive back to the district association to bring them home later.

For this we have either a stretcher trolley or a stair chair. Additionally we have means of transporting a wheelchair.

Some patients can walk short distances, those are of course the easiest, since you don't have to carry them out of their home and onto the car and so on. You can just let them get into the chair themselves and roll them around.

Otherwise we will have to get into their home, lift them into the stair chair and often carry them downstairs (and upstairs when returning). This can be rather difficult when the person to transport is rather well build (even the lesser good build will require some strength) and staircases seem to often be rather small as well.

Added fun when the person is demented and they grab the handrail out of fear of falling.

Since wheelchairs are not meant to be lifted (with a person still in them) we have a car with a hydraulic lift and one with a ramp.

We simply get them into the car like that and strap the wheelchair. Easy-peasy.

Stretcher trolleys are usually easy to transport. Just the act of getting the person on it can be difficult.

Transportation of this kind of personnel requires a special certificate, which we don't get anymore for doing alternative service as it was shortened to 9 month, and recently even down to 6.

Thus employed full-time drivers will do the actual driving while we just help with handling the patients.

We may, and usually do, empty runnings though (e.g. from the district association to the patients home and from there back to the association).

Additionally we help the janitor, e.g. collecting trash, doing yard work, washing cars 'n stuff.

We still sometimes get free-time up to a few hours. I bring along my laptop and my colleagues usually watch TV, one likes to take a nap sometimes and the other also reads a book from time to time.

needs moar post

2010-09-07T18:17:00.003+02:00

needs moar content

So yeah. I haven't forgotten to blog, I just didn't have anything worth blogging.

And I actually still don't have anything, but this life sign. So yeah...

Time really flies by.

Been playing some Doom 3. I like it. It's a decent shooter, the story isn't really deep, but the atmosphere around it is build up very well and with love for the detail! It's really a great piece of work.

And remember, it's the first game to use a completely dynamic lighting system in a 3D environment that doesn't suck (afaik), though compared to todays lighting in games, softshadows, penumbras and ambient occlusion are missing.

And I found a program similar enough to foobar2000 that runs natively on Linux: Goggles Music Manager. It's less fancy, but I don't care :) It's mainly running in the background anyways.

It actually does way less than foobar2000; for example it lacks a plugin-system and you can't rip CDs. But I've only been using a small subset of foobar2000s features, so it works for me (using abcde for ripping CDs).

Well, I've written down something, now onto clicking publish post...

Am I dreaming?

2010-08-26T19:31:00.005+02:00

This question I have asked myself recently while I was dreaming. Twice.

The former time was around three months back I think. I don't remember how the dream started out - I was at home and was discussing my new short hair with my parents (nothing bad, just something among the lines of how it's different) - but I had to go to school so sat on my bike and shortly after that I was asking myself that question, since some stuff was rather strange.

My answer was "Nah. If I'd be dreaming I'd know it".

The dream went a bit on and shortly before waking up someone was hurting me and I remember really feeling that pain. And after waking up I felt .. well, scared isn't the right word for it, but it comes close.

The more recent dream where I asked myself that question was just today. I only remember bits of it, for example some paramedics in red pants running through some glass doors. And being called to my alternative service job early, where I had to drive a bunch of paramedics somewhere, following a motorcade.

This cars breaks didn't really work and the opening on the drivers seat to the pedals was really small and hurting my legs.

Strange stuff.

I don't remember when exactly I asked myself that question, but yet again I believed it was the real thing, just to be corrected when my alarmclock rang.

I usually find dreams to be funny, even nightmares - since they are not real - but questioning this reality and concluding that it is not a dream .. well I don't think that's fun and again, scared is not really the word I am looking for, but I can't describe the feeling better. Maybe insecurity.

I have also been looking at a method for lucid dreaming. So far I have not been able to correctly apply it, though from time to time I shall try again.

Time spend .. not too well

2010-08-06T21:29:00.003+02:00

I'm unsure of what to write about. Still, here goes a new blogpost:

This weeks free time was mainly spend watching Star Trek or Bleach episodes.

I found Star Trek quite less amazing than I expected it to be. I watched through the original series and the animated series, as well as having seen the first, second and the newest Star Trek movies.

You know, with all the Trekkies and the stereotype of a geek liking Star Trek I just kinda expected it to be something special.

I guess it was back then, and today it's still okay, I don't think it's anything special anymore though. My personal opinion anyways.

Apart from that I also played some games, commented and fixed small stuff in my code for Solace.

My sleeping cycle has been shifted around quite a bit as well.

When I still had to attend to school I would go to bed around 0-1 (not being too tired) and stay up at around 6:30, now I get sleepy at around 23 (11PM) and stay up at 7 (for alternative service). I'll be damned!

My sense of time has gotten a little bit worse as well I think. And from time to time my sense of balance is reacting slow, like lagging a bit. No idea why that is happening - not really just in the morning, it seems to come and go randomly, lasting around half an hour.

This is all I have to say today.

GLaD to make a bunch of blogposts again :3

Public Transportations

2010-07-31T22:02:00.003+02:00

That is something that I rarely use. Not because I always take the car or never leave my home, but rather because every place I have to go is usually quite accessible with my bike. So I ride that.

For some places, though to none of those I (have to) go in regular intervals, I take the car instead if I don't find it easy enough to take the bike. Or sometimes when the weather is bad or I have to take along stuff that I couldn't safely transport with my bike, then I too resort to the car.

Also noteworthy is that I have no car of my own. I mean, I don't work yet (so financing it would be .. a little hard) and as said, so far I can go everywhere by bike. The car I take otherwise is one of my parents two cars.

This of course implies, that the car is free at this specific moments and that I am not away for too long.

This seminar I had was neither easily accessible by bike, nor could I take the car, so public means of transportation were called for.

As I said, I don't use them often. The internet supplied me with a quick search for when to take what train and where I have to change trains so that I can arrive in time.

Sadly I was dumb enough not to read too carefully, and upon the only change of trains I catched the wrong one. Without noticing.

Shortly before the final destination it was called out, that the train has to halt some stations before, because of some renovations and that instead a rail replacement service will be provided.

For simplicity I will call the final destination city FD (as in Final Destination), the one I got to with the train X and the one I had to get to D (as in Destination).

I got in that bus, which drove me to FD. This city however was not where I am supposed to be. I thought that the bus might have skipped my destination and looked for a train back to X, though I could not find one.

I phoned the organizer of the seminar, reporting that I will get there a bit later. The woman on the phone also told me, that I was in a rather small city and it would have been better if I'd have 'stranded' at some other city like X instead. She proposed taking a Taxi, though I wouldn't get that money back (since I am forced by law to take this seminar, I can recollect the money I needed for the travel).

I saw that the bus I came with was still there, so I asked the driver if he knew how I can get to D, though he didn't even know that city. The bus is circilng between those two destinations (FD and X) and I was like, hey, that woman said that I can get to D from X, so I took the bus back again, looked at the train plan and violá 10min. to go.

I waited 10 minutes, but there was just another train in the wrong direction. I looked at the plan again and found out, that this specific train only goes on weekends. Damn.

Though a little further was another going to D, also driving workdays.

So I waited again and finally arrived at D.

With a small detour I got where I was supposed to go, just in time for lunch. Since I reported that I would not arrive in time, there also weren't any hard feelings.

As I got there the second time (since I was able to go home on the weekend), the mistake became clear to me.

I looked on the Internet again to find out if I did something wrong and checked at that point where I had to change trains and, well, it turned out that I took one train too early.

This time I took the right one and arrived with no difficulties on time.

This experience made me much more confident with using public means of transportation.

At the first ride I felt kinda insecure and was worried that I'd take the right trains 'n stuff, but you can easily just check the plans - or if you really do get lost somewhere you just look how to get back to the next bigger station, since most likely you'll get a train to your desired destination there.

So what have I been up to?

2010-07-28T19:14:00.002+02:00

This post will briefly go over the productive stuff I have done while not posting in my blog.

I have been going a little bit further on my Linux-port of ViruZ (e.g. I now know where I left off, fixed some issues, but still have startup-bugs).

I took a new look at D, specifically version 2, which specifications now seem to be written down. I've written a hello-world program in D2. I'm looking into using a D-compatible version of OpenGL (I couldn't find no pretty API; I'll probably be using DerelictGL) and possibly port my C++ ViruZ to it for some unknown reason. Seriously though, yes it will further delay ViruZ, so I'm looking to get a working demo of it in C++ first and then port it. The demo will have less features than promised in some earlier blogpost.

And most of my time has gone into a virtual-filesystem using PhysicsFS and a fancy, threaded content-loader; threaded as in loading stuff in the background (unless specifically instructed otherwise) so you can have animated loading screens or possibly loader further content while the game is running. This and some more for Solace.

I must say that I do very much like it, though some parts have been almost driving me mad (damn templates :P). It also not as pretty as it could be, but it does its job well.

Solace is a project I recently joined. You can read some stuff about it here. You can also look for the devs in #solace-dev on freenode (IRC).

I've been using Doxygen to write a documentation from inside the code via especially formatted comments.

I don't like it too much, but it's probably the best way to approach it.

Traffic Jam

2010-07-23T17:01:00.002+02:00

You might notice a slight similarity in this and the previous' blogpost titles. That is because I wanted to merge those two at first, but - as you can very well see - I seperated them.

By Traffic Jam I do not mean the actual traffic jam, but much rather a musical event here in my home town.

This year was my first attendant there, and I have gone from it with mixed feelings.

I think most of it was rather enjoyable. The music was mostly fine to pretty good. I expected more metal than punk, but I was informed that this actually was the case the last time. It was contemplated that the event might have become more main-stream and thus less 'extreme' music was voted in.

Anyways, this was also my first time dancing proper pogo. I enjoyed it very much, and it was quite a bit more tiring than I thought. I'm looking forward and dancing it again.

This also brings me to my next point: I feel uncomfortable with 'normal', more traditional dances. One band, Russkaja, animated the people to do this kind of dance in one of their songs, while I prefered to - and also did - stand still. Two friends of mine tried to actively get me to dance, but I resisted.

Needless to say that I felt quite out of the picture.

Another negative point is the loss of time. I usually listen to music in the background, while doing something else. Other than that I use it to pass the time faster when waiting for something.

One might argue that two days - which were not even completly spend at that event - might not be much time and it is okay to enjoy oneself. Well, I did do so, but within two days much can be done. As the proverb has it "Live everyday like it is your last".

Not to say that I am a working machine. Frankly I am not. I would probably have spend quite a while playing Unreal or something if I wouldn't have attended to that event.

So in conclusion, parts were fun. It was defentially worth the experience.

I left a bit money there, but you have to give some to get some.

There were akward and unconfomiting moments, and some I enjoyed, though I am a bit hard for that on myself. In the end, the time lost will probably not matter - I don't even know if I might have spend the whole time being unproductive anyways.

I consider going again in two years - the periode from a year was increased to two years due to personal constraints of the organizers - if the lineup sounds right.

P.S.: As you could see, I had no internets there :-( Though I got back for the weekend :-)

Internet Jam

2010-07-17T11:24:00.004+02:00

My Internets has been quite unstable the last two weeks.

Here's a output I got from pinging Googles primary DNS Server, which I used to see if some site was down or if we were offline without having to check the router:

--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
12350 packets transmitted, 7864 received, +2340 errors, 36% packet loss, time 12383330ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 28.203/37.691/255.649/17.831 ms, pipe 3

The errors main occurred when we were restarting the router, which would often help to get some Internets for a small timespan.

Sometimes just a minute, sometimes a few hours.

It seemed to have gotten better the last few days.

We already sent a complaint to our provider, but so far they only replied with a bunch of questions, some of which the answers were actually contained in previous E-Mails, some questions where I wonder why they matter (e.g. what OS we are using) and some legit ones.

I'll be going on a seminar for two weeks starting Monday about the civilian service I am doing. Dunno if I get Internets there to write more posts.

The Most Remarkable Album On This Entire Planet

2010-07-14T22:47:00.003+02:00

It's actually to late to give a shout-out for it, since the donation-time has ended, though I was lucky enough to read about it and leave a small amount just before it ended. I am actually the last one who donated.

So anyways, that am I talking about? Well, The Most Remarkable Album On This Entire Planet. You can see my name at the bottom of this list here.

I've been enjoying paniqs music for a while now and I am confident that I will also like that album.

You can listen to a collection here, find (presumably) all of his work over here.

I also mentioned this guy in a blog post before.

Blog on fasting

2010-07-12T21:17:00.000+02:00

Well, since my transitioning to Linux I seem to have forgotten most about the Blog.

Additionally, at that time I was getting ready for my oral Abitur exams, then 1.5 weeks pause and then alternative service.

I'll presume that some of you are not too wandered with german laws, so here's a short version about mandantory military service.

Since 1956 (afaik) it is written in our basic laws, that each male must be mustered for military purpose. If you are fit enough, you have to do a certain time of service, I know it was 2 years once, right now it's 9 months and soon it'll probably get down to just 6 month.

Apart from getting discharged as unfit you can also get away from it if two of your brothers already participated, if you're married, there's also something when your education requires you to not do it at this moment and some more. But basically, most will get mustered.

Now since the government doesn't want to force you to disgregard your moral and ethic understanding, they allow you to write a conscientious objection. That will get send to some government institution, read and decided if it is coherent so they will either accept it or not.

If they do not, you can write up a second one and I think if they also decline this you will have to either obey or sue.

I'll not debate what I think of that right now.

My first write-up was declined, my second, which was written with the help of my father, writing stuff up about how my ancestors were involved in the second world war and how my moral and ethics about war were affected by this and then it got accepted.

So, if they will accept your conscientious objection you will have to perform civil service.

As I am already a member of the German Red Cross, I looked for a spot there and got into the assisted transport.

So that's where I'm at now, and this is finally a new blog-post.

More to come.

Meanwhile, at z33kys place

2010-05-21T01:02:00.010+02:00

Not much going on. Been enjoying some Nexuiz, done some work for a picture -> ASCII converter in C#.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^|%i//////)%viiiivi/////////////////)%%vvvvi//////////////vxvvvivi%%v/////|/^^^^^^^^^^^^^^;^=:::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^|%i//////)%vviiivi/////////////////)%%vvvvi//////////////vxvvvvvi%%v/////|/^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^=:::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^|%i//////|%vvvvvvi/////////////////)%%vvvvi//////////////ixvvvvvi%%v/////|/^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^=:::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^|%i//////|%vvvvvvi+////////////////)x%ivvvi/////////////+ixviiivv%%v/////|+;^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^=:::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^|%i+/////|%vvvvvvi/////////////////)xvivvvi/////////////+ixviiivvxllxll{{{l%v)/=;^^^^^^^^^^=:::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^|%i+////|)viiii)))|||//////////////i%vivivi//////////////ixvv%l*}*}*********}}**l)=^^^^^^;^=:::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^|%i//||||++++++////+|i)////////////ix%ivivi//////////////ixl*{x%%%%xl{{{l%i//}}x=;|+=^^^^;^=:::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^;|%i|)|++++++++//^+/////))/////////+ixvivvvi//////////////ix|;'":,::,:_``-';^^i)^:,,:;+^^^^^=:::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^|%v|+++++++++/^"'"",,^)//)|///////+ixvivvvi/////////////+i".... "^^=`.....";":::::::::=+^^^=:::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^))++++/|+===;::,,''^^,::^%%)///////i%vivivi/////////////+/i:::::;;:)=::::;^::::::::::::^+^^=:::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^)/+++++/=",=,:""'/;';:-..-+/|i/////+ixvvvvvi//////////|^::::;=::::::::,,,,::::::::::::::"^+^=:::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^|/+++++/="",;'`..-":"'":;;:':=|i////+ixvvvvvi/////////+:::::::^^;;;^^:::::::::::::::::::"::^+=:::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^|/+++++/|""'''""::"'"""'"':;:'':|i/+/+vxvvvvvi////////|,::::::==,,,,;;,,,,:::::::::::::::::::++:::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^+|++++++/;'''''''''''''''''";:'"':)i///vxvvvvvi////////|:""":::;^:":::::::::::::::::::::::::::,/:::::::::::::
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^)/+++++//"'''''''''''''''':;:"'"'"+v//+vxvvvvvi////////):"""::::,=,:""::::::::::::::::::::::::"=;::::::::::::
++=^^^^^^^^^^^^^^)/+++++/='"'''''''''''''",,"'''"'"/v///vxvvvvvi////////);""":":=,::::"":::::,;":::::::::::::::::/::::::::::::
^^=+=^^^^^^^^^^^;|/+++++)/"''''''''''''""::^^"''""=i)///%xvvvvvv////////)+:::"":=,":::;=,:":,^,"::::::::::::::::,;,;::::::::::
^^^;^/+===========|/+++/x{/''''''''''"+%{{{v^''";/i)////%lvvvvii//+++==^=/::"::::,;;;;,:,;;,,::::::::::::::::::;'.`;;^^;,,:;^;
;^;=/=^^^;;^^^^^^^^+|//++||^,"''"""'':+||/^"",=||+^^^=+|v)+=^^^;^^^^^^^^^^,:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::,;"`.-"` .`',+|=^;
^^++^^^======+++++++/||||||////=^,:"'"''"'=/|/=^^;^;^;=|^^^^^^^^^^^^===+:.',:::"::::::::::::::::::::::::::;,_..`'-...    `:^^^
^/+++++++//++//++++++++//////||||iv='''"";||//+++==^^^/====++++//////+".`'`.';,::::::"":::::::::::::::,,:_`.._'-...     ...-=/
|////++++++//++++++++////+/+++/|))/=":;=/+//+//////+/i/+++/++++////|,.....-_`.-",,:::::::::::::::,,,"'-...-__`             .`/
//++++++++++++++++++++++++++/|/=/ii)////+|)+====/||+)|+/+++++++++//' .."-...'_...`'",,:::::,::"'_-`....'''` .               .'
/+++++++++++++++++++++++++/|)///+|i)|===+|)|////++/vi+//++/++++++/_...`"......__`.`'_"^:'_'"`. ....-___"-`...... ....       ..
+++++++++++++++++///////=;,;,:"":;/+^+=+)/)||///||/||||||||/////|'...."``_'""""":,"`__:.....:``____``_""-````----`...    .  ..
++++++++++++++////+/;'__________________";=+//++++=++))//|||||||/,:''^^,,::::::::::::,:'''_'':'__'",'"'''-`.   ..`-_-.  .    .
++++++++++//////),__,,""":__________________:+)+=====+|///++/|/^:":^/++///+;:::::::"::":::::::::::::::::::::"-... ..`'`  .  .
+++++++++++///=,___;^---_":________'=+:::,;'__"++=====+)////|^_..._,;:",,:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::"":,:- .   .'-.. .._
++++++++++++//+,___:`....-:__"_____:_`....-,____/|//+//|)/+|,___'"-`,,::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::"":,-..  ..'`...`'
+++++++++++++//|^___''''''__":_____""`...-:"____';+++===+)||^,:;'...._,^;;::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::"::.     __..-'.
++++++++++++++/+//;'________;:""'____''""'_____:+|^;,;;=+||:::;- ......':,,,,:::::::"::::::::::::::::::::::::::"^` .  ._'.__..
++++++++++++++++////=:'____________________'";=/+:''''':)^:::^-  .... .  .`::,,,:,,::,,:::::::::::::::::::::::::;......"_'- ..
+++++++++++++++++//+/=::::::'_________'":;^++++;""'''"=/,:::;" .....      `'`"````....-_":,,:::::::::::::::::::;-.....:,-.....
++++++++++++++++++//+'""",)*+"'"^xi:"',/^^^^=;"'"'";+|^::::"^- ..    .    ..'`.      ... ..`-_'"::,,:::::::":;:-.-'_''-.     
++++++++++++++++++/|,,,|+=//xviiv//''__,;"'''''";=v)^::"::::^_.            `".                  . ..`--___'::_--__-`..   .   
+++++++++++++++++/||++/x***lxv%**{{v;__'^"'",=+++/^:::"""::":;-.          .`".                             ....  ....   ......
+++++++++++++++++)^;;;+^{{+;;;=^{***i;,^=;;^;^//=::::::::;::"/I+-...`......`".......                     .  ................ _
+++++++//++////++|=^^=+=*%^^=^+,{**l%/=;,,,,,,=|:^::=::::+,::v}1t*),:,'..._-_'..                       ... ....      .. ..._/1'
//////////|/=;,,,;=^^+=i)|^;;=^|v/^,,,,,,,,,,,=|:+::+:::^{{x{}**}??*?@@?%='`._'`...                 ..... ..-__.. ...`':^|}771:
                                                                                                                     -',=|ix|

You probably can't quite see it, but it's Peter Griffin trying to sell a Buttscratcher to Louis.

I hope I didn't break any HTML with this :D

Credits go to Chris220 for the application-base (though I also helped with that ;)).

http://anyhub.net/file/5asciiart.zip

You need Mono 2.4(.4?) or .NET 3(.5?) to run it (it's written in C#).

I just worked on one bug I found out while making this picture for quite exact 2h.

If anyone is interested in the path of development, here's the three threads of the Facepunch forum that essentially contain this information.

And since I have nothing else to tell you, enjoy a screenshot of my Lubuntu:

Meanwhile, at Valve

Lubuntu

2010-05-16T17:30:00.003+02:00

So, I finally got it. I used the Ubuntu DVD to install a minimal Ubuntu system, then installed OpenBox, though I couldn't be bothered to set it up, so I installed the lubuntu-meta package. It of course has additional pre-installed features, but it still doesn't run as expected.

The biggest problem being the function-keys not working (display-brightness, enabling/disabling WLAN, volume, ..).

Secondary the buggy flash-plugin. It doesn't seem to always correctly register the mouse-release event and tends to crash a lot. I hope the HTML5 canvas will replace much...

MonoDevelop runs fine on Linux, but I can't really be bothered writing the GUI in Gtk#. Gtk# is okay if you want a rich user interface and invest time in it, but I just want a quick and dirty GUI and that's just not possible with Gtk#.

Funny thing is, I found out that my Sudoku-program runs (almost) fine in Linux:

It's having minor cosmetic bugs (also causing Undo and Redo not to work properly) and Loading and Saving doesn't work, but I guess I could fix that.

But that is not helpful when it doesn't even start up on my mothers Macbook ._.

I'll try out how a 'normal' Xubuntu install works out for me concerning the function-keys.

It'd be sweet to have an Ubuntu running on my laptop, but not with that crippled functionality; the akku'd say good bye in 1h or something and it's kinda inconvenient to do it manually and script are also not the dog's bollocks.

Plans

2010-05-09T21:05:00.002+02:00

It felt like it is time for a new blogpost, but nothing particularly interesting happened, so I though I'd just write you my plans for the next few days or so.

As you might now, I wanna slap Lubuntu on my Laptop. The stable beta was released, but only the x86 version though I want my full x64 power. I commented on their release-post but it remained un-answered (apart from some anon who told me that the x86 version runs on x64 processors, which would not be correct for Intels IA64 btw).

chaotika suggested to download the Ubuntu DVD as you can apparently still install a minimal Ubuntu with it, so I did. Thus my plan is yet again to try out U-lite.

But before this, I wanna get my Sudoku-program in a running and playable state. It actually is, but Mono has not completely implemented System.Windows.Forms and my mother, for whom I am writing this, has a Macintosh with OSX.

Since I moved form MonoDevelop to SharpDevelop (which runs just fine btw) I discontinued using Gtk# in favor of System.Windows.Forms, since SharpDevelop has no built-in Gtk#-Designer and Glade decided not to run.

So yeah, C# is actually pretty sleek as I already stated. Here's a screenie of said Sudoku-program:

Currently I'm moving my logic-code to a library and then I'll make a GUI using Gtk# without a fancy designer. Not too much work in that small GUI anyways.

Current features include Saving and Loading, Undo and Redo, basic error-checking and of course laying in numbers. You can either use the radio-buttons below or use the number-keys. You can also place in numbers in bold or italic (e.g. for given numbers and guessed numbers).

Plans include localisation via text-files and possibly Sudoku-creation and Sudoku-solving (thus also just giving a hint ;)).

C#, MonoDevelop

2010-05-04T16:57:00.005+02:00

I wanted to get into C# for quite a while, so last week I installed MonoDevelop on the my schools computer to replace the Java (eww) IDE. After a short while of using it, I decided to install it on my temporary Windows-setup.

C# seems to be a real treat, but MonoDevelop runs like shit for me. I'm using v2.2.2, which is dubbed as 'stable', but for me it runs pretty unstable.

It seems to like to crash at random, sometimes after crashing it doesn't like to open certain files without further explanation than "Specified method is not supported", which I have no idea what this means relating to opening simple text-files.

It also seems to have a habit of corrupting my UI made with the Gtk# UI Designer.

Dunno how it runs for everyone else, but I'm staying away from MonoDevelop until they are releasing a new major revision.

I'll try out SharpDevelop, from which MonoDevelop forked, but they seem to have gone a little different ways, and hope that MonoDevelop runs fine for me on Lubuntu.

Laptop + Ubuntu + LXDE

2010-04-28T16:15:00.004+02:00

I decided to install a Linux on my Laptop. Well, I was certain of that before I bought it, but that's not the point.

So far, I'm most confident with Ubuntu and its deviates, since it's piss easy to set up and easy to maintain, plus you get quite recent software updates.

I was also giving Arch Linux, Gentoo and Fedora. I can't remeber why I decided against Fedora, but Archlinux and Gentoo take their work to be set up and Ubuntu runs fine enough.

Next point: LXDE

I want LXDE, because it seems logical to me that with a light weight desktop environment (and window manager) my battery will last a little longer. And I have more resources free for other programs.

I don't need my desktop to look fancy. Of course I use some eye candy, but LXDE doesn't look any worse than GNOME or Xfce IMO.

I found U-lite, which uses Openbox, a very light window manager. There's also Lubuntu, but as U-lite stated, they're more light that Lubuntu, though I guess when it becomes a stable release they will be maintained better, the two teams seem to communicate.

To install U-lite you need to install a base Ubuntu-system, so I downloaded the mini-ISO, put it on a USB-Stick and restarted.

First problem: It didn't seem to have been configured right, because it couldn't find the kernel image.

It was simply named linux, but when it started up it caused a kernel panic due to the root filesystem not being mountable. I found out that you need to set another initrd, which then brought me to the setup screen.

I was happy, thinking that now everything will be easy. WRONG:

No network devices found. I changed a setting in the BIOS to activate the WLAN upon booting (which it then did), but it still could not find a networking device. I googled to find out, that you need a special driver for my Atheros WLAN device.

I got an idea of simply connecting via cable. But yet again, it couldn't find a networking device. Again this was caused by the need for an additional driver. Neat! Fucking Great!

I could download the debian packages of the internet, but I'd have to manually resolve dependencies, besides I wasn't able to mount my NTFS drives, nor did I find my USB Stick in /dev (the latter probably due to my dumbness). It's also possible that the drivers need to run in ring 0 and thus I'd need to recompile the kernel and restart. Dunno if that's possible for an installer.

I now dropped U-lite, but I don't blame it.

I'll wait for the RC of Lubuntu, which they said will come out this month or early beginning of next. I hope that this installer will ship with appropriate drivers :S

P.S.: I don't do web-programming, still I know a little bit of HTML, so I took the liberty of fishing around in the HTML of the blog-posts, which are usually generated via an editor.

Like that I, for example, was able to post correctly formatted code, the media player two posts down (Der Moment) and the abbreviations IMO and RC in this post :3

Man, I suck :< (and the angle bracket of this smiley, because the editor does not correct them)

Samsung R580

2010-04-24T20:14:00.006+02:00

So, I got a laptop yesterday, the Samsung R580.

It's pretty sweet so far, except that the screen is a little too bright.

I was looking for a dual-core with >= 2GHz, a dedicated GeForce graphics card >= 8800GS and >= 3GB RAM. Then of course the longer the battery lasts, the better.

I wanted it for development, multi-core testing and some games among HL2 performance.

I didn't test it out yet, but the GeForce 330M I have in here seems to be quite powerful. The specs of this laptop btw. It's got a 330M really, not a 310M as the page stats. Dunno why it says so, maybe I have a different sub-model or something.

I only had a few minor disadvantages of the keyboard as of yet, which is getting the [Fn]-key instead of LControl, # instead of enter, the left-arrow instead of down and sometimes the NumBlock instead of backspace. But I guess that will become better if I keep using this keyboard.

The built-in numpad is pretty sweet, though I guess I could also have settled for a numpad via the [Fn]-key.

The laptop is also pretty light.

As I was told it has a battery-runtime of 4h, I guess the external graphics card is drawing quite a bit, since most laptops read to have a run-time of 3-4h if they possessed dedicated graphics hardware.

It's not too impressive, but it'll do.

I'm hoping to get either U-lite or Lubuntu, if U-lite proves too cocky to set up, on this thing.

Der Moment

2010-04-20T15:53:00.000+02:00

This is "Der Moment" by paniq. I found the lyrics to be very beautiful and worth translating and posting on my blog.

paniq composes electronic music, minimal techno and some hip-hop style songs, afaik all are licensed under the Creative Commons.

Download MP3
external Web Player (select "Der Moment")

All albums of his are available in FLAC, except those, whose originals were lost and only the Ogg Vorbis or MP3 versions are still existant.

The lyrics translated to English by myself:

The Moment

Maybe you are on a visit by a friend while listening to this song

even if you are alone, it does not make a difference

the moment you listen and simply let go

will become the moment you die and love yourself for it

Because isn't it like this: You can barely stand yourself

you anxiously walk through the world and feel queasy

when making a mistake you seldom laugh,

because you must take care of doing evenything right.

What you feel and what you think will never be understood by others

and you rarely can look into the eyes of someone else,

but when you don't know the pupils of your friends

why is it that you can still call them your friends?

When theres a person nearby, that one can call a friend,

why don't you now turn to him and take a look

and when you see your sorrow in his eyes,

then you realize, that you still look at yourself.

And maybe it's like that: You are all alone.

What's so good about being together?

If he is a a true friend and knows that you exist

doesn't that also mean, that he really cherishes you?

It's not about possession, about sex or power

and when you look away now, then you've pondered too much

and the moment you look there and simply let go

will become the moment you die and love yourself for it

Maybe you see even more things in the person next to you;

his roots are ancient, he's half god and half animal

and on his side he creates his own reality,

but on the other he will die without your affection.

Don't you know best, just from yourself, what every human needs

and what you give another person is what you also get back from him.

If you wish for someone to clean out your soul,

then it's just not important who will fulfill that wish.

The borders that you know are just an eyewash

live your life like it would end every minute

and give the person, who gladly looks you in the eye,

your hair, your hands, your mouth and your skin.

You take by giving and loose when you win,

but the fear you feel because you surpess your consciousness

closes all doorways to the light that shines within you.

You would kiss by now, if you'd just take heart.

The meaning of this kiss is of a magical character

when you feel the white charm again, then you're finally on the right track

because an answer to the question, why you exist, is really simple:

Because there's someone who loves you.

And with these words, this truth, this song will end

and even if you are now confused, it does not make a difference,

because the moment you believe and simply let go

will become the moment you die, so that love can live.

defective computer

2010-04-16T18:02:00.000+02:00

My computer, yet again, crapped out. This time it's my primary hard drive.

It kinda works fine, but after a few minutes it simply vanishes from Windows and that of course hangs the system. If I do a warm restart, even my BIOS will not see it, if I however do a cold restart it is detected again.

My Linux Desktop Manager is not functioning from the previous error I had, but through the terminal I could see that my HDD actually seems to work just fine.

I'm getting kinda worried that the chipset or something is not working properly, thus if I'd now buy a new HDD that something else might break.

So I decided to look around for a replacement. However I actually wanted to wait until GPGPUs are getting popular, so I am looking for laptops.

Nothing really fast, but capable for Games (Source-games in medium graphics quality, no AA) and good RAM, since IDEs tend to take a good share of that, plus around 500GB of disk space, since coding projects do occupy some space...

I actually planned to make a small post about a song with sweet lyrics (german) I found, but that'll just follow tomorrow or something.

P.S.: I will not get a macbook >:(

For one, I don't get around too well with the Desktop Enviroment (though you could probably change that) and the keyboard is just horrible IMO, ~~as well as~~ especially the (default) key layout.

iPhone OS 4 SDK

2010-04-09T17:36:00.004+02:00

Apple decided that you can only use OS specific features if you don't use any other API, as well as only in the languages they want and according to specific guidelines given by Apple.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/apples-iphone-lockdown-apps-must-be-written-in-one-of-three-la

WTF?

Luckily I don't want to develop for the iPhone. In fact, I don't even have an iPhone. Well, I don't own any product made by Apple.

I might get an Android at some point though. <3 Google :3

If you're a C++ programmer

2010-04-06T01:50:00.003+02:00

(professional or hobbyist) and already want to read pieces of the upcoming C++0x standard, you should probably read this.

It's about rvalue references, which are kinda confusing as was the open-std.org-introduction.

From the first look it looks fine and sweet, but - to quote from that site (first link) - "Everytime I think I have grasped rvalue references, they evade me again".

I thought maybe there were just over my head, but that tutorial is really easy to understand.

It might be easy to find it via Google, but you have to know that it's not over your head, though still a little freaky.

Be careful though. One cute bunny made out of chocolate ended up in my stomach whilst reading that article.

Happy Easter!

ViruZ Demo Progress-status

2010-04-02T03:25:00.008+02:00

So how far is the demo away?

I'm pushing myself to its release, and I've been doing that for 3 month now :P

The switch from cairo to OpenGL was the first obstacle, then finding a decent way to have the shader manage the positions of each virus for instancing, then implementing a geometry shader and now ditching the geometry shader again.

At this very moment I am implementing an easier way to deal with shaders and uploading values to it. That shouldn't take long, most stuff (about 60%) is done, took me around 3h (I was helping someone else and talking to someone else during that, so it took a little longer).

After that it shouldn't be hard to get my virus-shaders working again. Of course I cannot know if I run into any unexpected problems.

Then I will have to find the cause of the serum instantly infecting all viruses upon injection. I don't expect this to be hard to debug.

The switch to a lower OpenGL core version also should be quite fast. Just setting up a bunch of extensions.

The final step before the demo is a basic main-menu, maybe featuring a quality-setting and an animated background. Apart from that the main-menu needs to be able to start the game and exit the application. Getting from the game to the main-menu will probably be done via key-press.

I won't have to think about any trouble regarding the licensing for my code, since the only APIs I am using are OpenGL, OpenMP and the SC++L, all of which are released under a free, open and unenforcing license.

The demo will be source-less and released under some freeware-license.

That being said, I'm having a programmers block. That term kinda describes the inability to keep focus on coding. Dunno, been there since my shader started bitching and my computer broke down. Hopefully this holiday won't go to waste by playing a bunch of games.

--geometryShader;

2010-04-01T00:07:00.003+02:00

Well, to start this post I should say that the last few days I haven't been working on ViruZ.

My computer stopped working, when I was debugging it and I got some BSOD about some kernel error.

I restarted my computer and instead of showing that loading animation when Win7 starts up the display just stayed black.

I then tried out my Sidux LiveCD (Debian Sid/unstable), which also didn't work. So I installed Debian in some unpartitioned space I have left over for testing OSs.

The graphical install worked and after some minor internet problems I got it completely installed. But booting it didn't work: It showed all the normal console-stuff on startup and when it got to the line where it states that it's starting the desktop manager my display again stayed black.

I found out that the text-interface was working fine and found out that at least my data was undamaged.

At some point I also took out my graphicscard, cleaned it and put it back in, but the result didn't change. It also couldn't have been a temporary overheating, since after I slept and tried again it still didn't work.

So I got a replacement card from a friend, found out that it's AGP (I don't have a AGP slot :P), got another PCI one and it kinda worked. There were some display errors (kinda like a 16 colors-modus), but that was in Linux just as it was present in Windows.

I ordered a new card similar to my old one and half a day later, before going to bed, I tried the broken card again - only to find out that it was now working again.

I canceled the shipping of the new card and my computer runs again.

Now to the actual title of this blogpost: ViruZ will soon not feature a geometry-shader. The program I was using to find out how well the extensions are supported seems to malfunction. Geometry-shaders are supported for GeForce 8000-series or higher and ATi/AMD HD 2000 and higher, which is not acceptable.

Instancing and Geometry Shader

2010-03-23T18:16:00.004+01:00

ViruZ uses Instancing to draw its graphics.

Instancing is quite simple: You have one piece of geometry (e.g. a rectangle) and you wanna draw it multiple times.

Normally you'd just be like execute the draw-function n times, but Instancing moves this to the graphics-card, meaning that the CPU is free to do more stuff while the graphics card handles drawing the rectangle n times.

This worked quite out-of-the-box for me. Good stuff.

Here's a screenshot:

It has my circle-shader, lightly modified. You can see that the edge of the circles are blurred a bit too much; I've simply been guessing the value then, it's fixed now (at least for 1:1 ratio resolutions..).

I had to turn VSync off in my drivers to get the read FPS (the numbers in the console-window on the left). As you can see, the performance improved greatly (from ~100-120FPS to ~1900-2000FPS). I'm hoping this will make my game run smoother on older hardware.

There are not all 50 viruses visible, because the boundaries are now invalid (the canvas is now -/+1 to -/+1 instead of 0/0 to 800/600 :P).

You might have heard about geometry shaders. They take vertices (points, that define geometry) and may output more vertices in return.

Before that, I've been uploading a quad (rectangle) into the graphics-memory, had a static array of 50 positions (representing the origins of the viruses) and then used Instancing to draw that quad 50 times. The shader took care of translating that quad onto the right position.

Now, with a geometry shader, I'm not uploading any geometry into the graphics-memory, but instead have a dynamically sized array of 2D points (again representing the origins of the viruses) and using that information for Instancing to draw.. well points ^^

I could be satisfied with points for now, but I'm planning on implementing more viruses with different shapes at some point, thus only squares will not always be the best solution.

My geometry shader takes those points and creates 4 vertices for each point by simply translating it to the lower left, then upper left, then upper right and finally lower right, resulting in a square shape.

I had some trouble with this geometry shader, mainly because I've accentually been trying to compile my pixel shader as a geometry shader and it took quite a while to find out that the shader code was actually correct XD

And again a picture:

You can see that I've also implemented the outline of the virus.

It also seemed to slightly have improved my performance to ~2000-2050FPS.

I didn't have too much time, so I spend it on the stuff you can experiment with, instead of stopping in the process of cleaning up a few times.

So yeah, the same excuse goes for the blogpost-less week. Now I've left the written parts of my Abitur behind. Coulda done the math-test better; was spoilt by the really easy CS-test. That thing felt like a joke.

OpenGL 4.0

2010-03-11T18:08:00.003+01:00

Today, the specs of OpenGL 4.0 (and GLSL 4.00) were released. I didn't go through all changes yet (the OpenGL spec is almost 400 pages long! and the GLSL spec additional 100 pages), but what I've seen so far appeals.

Though I still have to learn how this weird packing data into one integer-thing works. I don't know what the name is, but HistoPyramids, which I investigated on a few days ago and didn't understand, seems to be a similar technique.

Well, so what made me make this post is the statement, that Khronos will add extensions to OpenGL 3(.3) to make as much of the OpenGL 4.0-features possible with older hardware.

So then I thought, what hardware actually supports OpenGL 3? And well, all ATi/AMD 2xxx or higher and the nVidia 8000-series or higher (didn't care about Intel and what not).

So I will look into the OpenGL 3-stuff I need/want to use and look if OpenGL 2 supports it through extensions and finally port ViruZ to use OpenGL 2 instead.

btw, the port from cairo to OpenGL is harder than thought. This time to actually finish coding the game, I took the idiom "Make a game, not an engine", thus the cairo-stuff is all over the place and not hidden behind some interface.

Well, my fault after all, since you should stick with your decision if you use that idiom.

OpenGL

2010-03-07T12:52:00.008+01:00

So I downloaded and compiled freeglut, a toolkit for OpenGL.

Then I downloaded GLEW, but it seemed somewhat resource-hungry for its use, because it keeps a complete list of function-pointers to the extensions.

Extensions for OpenGL are functions, which are not officially supported but help greatly with using newer stuff. There are common extensions, which have been approved the ARB, vendor-specific extensions and the ones that multiple vendors have agreed upon.

You can't call the functions like you are used to in a programming-language. You have to query for them in run-time and hope that they're available and supported by the hardware.

To write modern OpenGL 3.x code you need to use extensions.

So I've looked in the smooth_triangle-example of freeglut and ported that code to a very bad C++-version using fancy stuff like std::vectors and std::strings. I made the design so that I should be able to copy most of that code if I'm getting serious.

My and their way of getting extensions is not hidden and looks beautiful and requires more work to set up, but I prefer that solution.

Basically, I need to declare the function myself and then I have a init-function to initialize all functions.

After two stupid mistakes, that took a while to find and were easy and fast to fix after that, I had it running.

I played around with the Shader a little, changed the triangle into a quad and it looked quite pretty. So pretty, that I wanted a wallpaper-formated picture. So I removed the borders I had on the quad, enabled fullscreen-mode and took this:

And it started out with this:

What I've been doing to create this effect is calculating the light-intensity via the formula color.r * 0.3 + color.g * 0.59 + color.b * 0.11. I multiply by different numbers instead of just taking the average, because green looks brighter than red, which looks brighter than blue. The specific numbers seem to be common, you can simply google for them.

To create corners (sharpen the intensity-effect) I've before multiplied the color-value, which is in range [0..1], four-times with itself (that will darken dark colors more than bright ones).

To make this intensity-effect more visible, I multiplied with 8 and finally multiplied the intensity with the actual color-value.

Or in GLSL:

#version 140

smooth in vec4 fg_SmoothColor;
out vec4 fg_FragColor;

void main(void){
  float i = dot(pow(fg_smoothColor.rgb, vec3(4, 4, 4)), vec3(0.3, 0.59, 0.11)) * 8;
  fg_FragColor = vec4(i, i, i, 1) * fg_SmoothColor;
}

Here's a little less intense version. People with darker desktops (like me) will prefer it. If I darked it more, it doesn't look good anymore.
If anyone wants another resolution, just leave a comment. I can then let my computer calculate a perfectly scaled image, without quality loss :)

I also have a small bug, and that is I get a INVALID_OPERATION error in my exit-function, but I simply blame GLUT for that.

blupdate

2010-03-03T23:55:00.007+01:00

You know... like blog and update in one word.... whatever.

Again, I have nothing fancy to tell.

Wanted to work on my assembler-program since I actually wanted to have a working prototype by tomorrow and completely forgot about it, but instead I wasted have of my time playing Call of Duty 2.

I have the basic flesh of the assembler done, now I only need to implement the pseudo-Ops (probably the hardest :P) and decent file parsing. I don't think my current one works fine, even under the circumstances that I didn't spend enough time with it.

I also wanted to code a lock-free queue for ViruZ, so I can easily implement my different looping-method (one thread renders, others update), but I did something wrong and now it only draws one virus :P

A lock-free queue is basically a queue you can do stuffs on without having to wait for other operations to finish.

You need to wait for other operations to finish if you're working with threads sharing data, as the possibility exists that one thread might read some data while the other one is writing to it at the same time. And that can be catastrophic.

A queue is like a waiting-line you know in real-life. You can stack various stuff into it and the first thing that got in is the first thing that's going to get out. The last thing in will be the last thing out.

I have another algorithm for the lock-free queue in mind, though it's a bit more complex. Dunno if I will bother as I don't know if this even is a bottleneck in my code.

I've also read some stuff about shaders in OpenGL and I'm ready to give my first shader a try. I just need to find some time.

When I begin implementing OpenGL and using that as my rendering-backend things should get faster by themselves.

Oh, I also created the tag 'ViruZ' and added it to all my ViruZ-related posts.

The chaos in Mathcore

2010-02-27T17:19:00.002+01:00

This week went by fast and I can't think of anything meaningful to post, so I'll just add a few words to that post.

Mathcore has one major appeal, and this is the chaotic aspect. The rhythm changes unpredictably within one song and atonal sounds are used. These seemingly wrong sounds are what makes the music especially interesting.

What still makes it music is, that it doesn't do that every second. It's still sounding fine and has lyrics like you'd expect. And depending on the song, patters of this anomalies emerge.

The only bad thing about the chaotic aspect is, that you can't really headbang to it. It's also hard to dance to the music.

Ionenbombe and I were joking around and actually found something by inventing 'slizing'. You simply slide your feet around fast on a moderately slippery underground, not moving much out of your place and hold balance.

In addition, you can also wiggle around with your chest.

We found this rather exhausting, but still fun. Especially the chest-wiggling is harder on your muscles and you need to pay even more attention to not fall.

The word is a combination of 'dancing' and 'sliding'. To not confuse it with 'slicing', we replaced the 'c' with a 'z', which also makes the word sound better :P

Going back to the music-genre: The second aspect is, that it's hard. You know, fast drums, shouting, mainly growling and screams, this kinda stuff.

While I listen to a wide variety of genres, metal is one of my favorite. I don't know why I like it, maybe it's just its aggressive nature, but it somehow appeals to me.

Just as well I like slow and emotional songs though, but chaotic rhythms simply don't fit too well in there :P

3mm hair?

2010-02-24T09:25:00.003+01:00

I want to keep my hair shorter now, so I've been meeting up with a friend last sunday.
I've had 3mm before, so I thought I'll just get 3mm again. So we adjusted the razor to 3mm and shortly after beginning to go through my hair, he started laughing.
The thing is, that 3mm is really short. Like really short. About half the length that I had after going to the barber.
We tried to fix it, since 3mm over all would have looked a little too short. About 5mm seemed to be the length I've really gotten.

What I have now seems to be called a boxer-haircut. It's 3mm on the side and on the back, the rest is 5mm.
When my hair has grown a bit, I'll get my uniform cut again: 5mm all over.
Since he was next, he got the proper cut already.

We could have actually tried 6mm first and gone down till it's fine, but that's just not what you think about when you've said 3mm to the barber without knowing that you've gotten about 5mm.

VriuZ update 12

2010-02-18T13:29:00.008+01:00

I didn't do anything big, but I just thought that I'd let you know that this project is still going somewhere.

I was talking about moving shit around. Well, yesterday I brought it down from 80 errors and >4000 warnings while compiling to 0 errors and ~2000 warnings. The warnings are mostly caused by the standard library or the Windows API. Around 10 or something are by me, but they're harmless.

Parallel to this move I also added a rudimentary level-datatype. At the moment you can only specify the number of viruses and number of simultaneously injections, but of course it will become more useful later on.

Today I quickly added different sizes to my shared graphics.

The viruses get rendered only once for their healthy and sick-state, so you can simply copy the pixels instead of having to calculate them again.

Programmers will know what a map is, so yeah, I simply used a std::map<double, cairo_surface_t*[NUM_SHARED_GFX_STATES]> with double specifying the size and cairo_surface_t* is the image so to say.

Picture:

You can see 25 small viruses and 25 big ones, as well as two injections at a time. It's also visible, that the bigger viruses have a bigger contamination-radius.

Portable FLAC player

2010-02-14T15:30:00.002+01:00

I kinda forgot to mention FLAC in my MP3-bashing post. I did mention it, but on a personal computer (also most laptops) you should have more than enough space to store your music in a lossless format - such as FLAC. Trust me when I say that you will hear a difference if you listened to FLAC for a while.

WavPack is also a good lossless compression (opposed to FLAC it also support high-precision 32-bit en/decoding), but as a trade off it's slower and has less hardware-support.

I recently found out that iTunes supports neither Ogg Vorbis nor FLAC. I suggest looking for alternatives; you can also upload your music with other software.

I've also done some calculations. I tried to find out how much FLAC music you get for 1mb and in an average worst case you should get about 6.1 seconds for 1mb FLAC.

You can calculate with about 2GB if you have an older player and didn't wanna spend much money, for this you would get at least 3h and 23min of music. It's not much, but if you have a more modern one you can calculate with double, if not four times the storage - also keep in mind that this is the a pretty bad case.

I didn't test through every song, but calculated it for a few albums. My best were 10secs for 1mb. That'd be more than 5,5h on a 2GB device.

I think my average was about 8.75secs for 1mb, which would calculate to about 4h and 52min.

Well, it's kinda hard to predict how much you will be able to store into your device, because it will vary from music to music.

The worst value came from Hypnotize and the best from Converting Vegetarians CD2.

Now I'll be looking for a portable FLAC-capable player with 4GB or maybe even 8GB.

Note: If that's too little music for you, you can still use Ogg Vorbis over MP3, because you will get more music of the same quality and size. But you will have to rip the music from a lossless source, else you will get worse quality.

So.... Blogpost

2010-02-10T09:54:00.006+01:00

There's not much to tell. I've began making a post about The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, but I don't feel like finishing it atm.

Let's just say that it's a pretty interesting thing.

Next up, I've been listening to a bit Mathcore lately. It's Metalcore (extreme Metal) with complex rhythms. It sounds very interesting and I quite like it. Have an example (since I know that there's at least one reader, who cannot view this: youtube-link).

I did some shizzle on ViruZ, nothing fancy, still on prettying up the code by moving stuff to the playground. Just a few lines though.

I also began making an assembler and simulator (with debugger) for the Intel 8085 µP. It's kinda fun.

No Post Today

2010-01-25T17:15:00.004+01:00

My love has gone away ...

I was writing up a post today in school, because I was bored, but after writing a few sentences our schools' proxy server decided that I should have some 400s.

So this post is merely to inform you, that there won't be a decent post today, since I'm too pissed to write it up again.

Friday Night Madness

2010-01-23T12:09:00.005+01:00

as my friend Ionenbombe entitled our additional training on Friday night after Volleyball is over. Note the resemblance to Team Ryoukos Friday Night Madness, though we are far less awesome :P

Well, yesterday we had a good one in a long time. Before I had my torn ligaments, then a bunch of friends wanted to go grab something to eat after Volleyball training, or we trained, but it's been a long time since it was as good as this one.

(Personal) Highlights: I'm proud to have finally gotten a handstand with the support or a wall to lean on to work. I fought a little with Ionenbombe (really just a little bit, but better than nothing :D), we had music due to an misunderstanding and we were jogging for 15min. as the final point of training. Sure it's not much time, but it's been long since we last did that ;]

After I got home, I just needed something sweet and grabbed an ~~Apple~~ apple. After I had eaten it and worried about one of my computers hard drives (still have to run chkdsk on it - just to be sure) I was happy going to bed.

So next morning, after I've slept quite well, I was still a little tired, but somehow managed to drag by body under the shower.

When I got out of the bathroom and wanted to eat for breakfast, my mother reminded me that I wanted to help her get rid of some residual waste we had lying around in our basement about an hour ago. I totally forgot that, since she told me not too long before Volleyball training, where I simply did not keep it in mind.

Well, I dragged the stuff up into the car and we could at least get one load of to the waste disposal. I don't know the word for it, but it's a powerplant producing energy by burning garbage.

To not make this a mega-post I'll save some stuff up for later. Maybe tomorrow or something.

"So long, suckers!"(Prof. Farnsworth)

When Silence is

2010-01-18T21:17:00.004+01:00

...

... ...

BROKEN!

Well, I didn't post in a while, so here I am again. Still alive, still having internet and still blogging.

School went back on, and it seemed to hit my motivation hard. I didn't write a single line of code for any of my projects, though I wrote some to help others.

I mainly played games and watched some episodes of series I am following. Well, apart from school and some homework.

Not much to tell really.

A friend of mine showed me a nice band: Eyes Set to Kill. I like them very much, thanks!

They may look Emo, but their music is sweet.

I will yet again return to silence now. Live your lifes :)

Why MP3 is bad

2010-01-08T21:27:00.007+01:00

Everywhere I look, I see music encoded as either CD-DA or MP3.

So, what's wrong with MP3? I don't care about perfect quality and it has a small filesize, why shouldn't I use it?

It's completely legitimate to have a lossy compression for your audio-files, especially for portable devices. With high bitrates, though not many use them, you often cannot tell a difference from the original, unless you scan the audio-signals with a computer.

But you have to pay for every MP3 you listen to. Why? Many patents on the MP3 codes are held by certain companies. And because their format is tossed around a lot, they thought that they can earn money with that.

So the creator of his music has to pay them, if he sells his music in a MP3 format. Anyone making an application, which encodes or decodes MP3, has to pay for using these algorithms.

You might say "But my music player was free and I never payed anyone for converting my audio CD to MP3". Well, if that is so, then you are culpable. You might never pay anything, since it would cost more to sue everybody just to extract a few dollars from them, but this thought in a free country should not be ignored!

And for any MP3-music you buy, you'll pay them, because it does pay off to sue bigger companies.

Maybe you do not care? Well, by still using that proprietary format you are supporting it. And if it keeps getting support, then it cannot get better, and let me tell you, there are better solutions! Before I go to them, I still have another point to address:

Maybe you have heard of LAME. LAME is a MP3-encoder and you might know it's open source.

Well, this does not make anything better, really. By not shipping out compiled binaries they can narrowly escape the patent and legal issues, but anyone using LAME will have to pay again, open source doesn't really matter.

Now: Solutions.

There is indeed a lossy audio-format, which is completely free from any parent. It provides better quality and smaller filesize. You don't trust me? Hear for yourself!

Even better: It's public domain! You don't believe me? Read for yourself!

If you don't care about the legal crap or any free spirit-stuff, then just use it for smaller filesizes. You can't complain about that, can you?

Not all MP3-Players can play that format though. Well, there's probably no chance for you then. Consider getting one supporting Ogg Vorbis next time!

Since the iPod is quite popular, you cannot natively listen to Vorbis audio, but there is a solution for you: iPodLinux

Don't be scared away by 'Linux'. There's nothing to loose, You can easily install it, You can always go back and It's even completely legal. Just look here if your iPod is supported and then get started and install it!

ViruZ update 11

2010-01-06T20:04:00.004+01:00

Compared to the last few entries, this one is quite late.

Well, I was saying that I'll be working on the Source-projects and I did.

I'm not reporting about them, because the one mod is kinda a secret as of now (nothing special though, just didn't care about PR yet, nor we have a design document, meaning no feature freeze yet) and the other one... well the report would be like:

So I added this weapon and debugged it and played that game because it's so boring and then I ended up watching a few episodes of that series and finished coding so I can get to sleep.

But the title is Viruz update 11, because I actually have some words to say about the doings of that game.

I've been wanting to test it on an older computer, with the result of it not starting up. The problem is, that I require the SSE2 extension. I decided to use it, because cairo is using doubles for every numerical stuff and thus I am using doubles in my code.

Doubles are double-precision floating-point values, thus they occupy the double amount of space and SSE2 makes enough room for that.

I guess I'll also compile a SSE2-less version, so you guys with older hardware can still try to play it. I still don't know how much FPS those machines give though.

I will also now move all the game-logic out of the Window-class I made. That was planned from the start anyways, so I have then a part I call 'playground' and one 'HUD'.

Upon this step I also plan on speeding up the infection-algorithm by not looping through each virus for each sick virus, but rather register each virus upon getting sick as such in the Playground-class, then looping through once and checking if any healthy virus is inside of a contamination-circle.

I also need to make my mind up about how to design levels. I guess I'll be using JSON. It looks so much cleaner than XML and it's still an easy editable format. For parsing it I'll probably just use some pre-written software. There's no need to reinvent the wheel here!

ViruZ update 10

2010-01-03T02:16:00.005+01:00

We reached a number with two digits already! Not bad.

So, I've implemented functionality to the anti-serum. Viruses now can get sick, infect others and die.

Though I have to loop through all viruses to find, which ones to infect, the framerate is still good enough.

I'm not sure what more to say. Have a picture:

Three viruses are in a sick-state, three are sickening and two are dying. Six are already dead and 38 are alive and healthy.

There's a small animation for the sickening. You can see the contamination-radius expanding.

Upon dying, the virus with his contamination-radius gets smaller and is dead upon reaching singularity.

Here's a fun picture when I didn't have them die yet:

If you compare it to the other picture, you can also see that in this version the viruses have a bit more contrast than now.

The next step is changing the movement of the viruses. I want them to move straight lines in a random fashion. Right now, they have a set velocity and bounce off the sides. Well, except when they are sick, in which case they stand still :P

I will spend less time on ViruZ now. I need to get back to code some stuff in Source I promised I would. And I also like to get it out of my head.

And school is back on next week (well, in 8 days). I should begin to worry about my final exams...

ViruZ update 9

2010-01-01T19:14:00.005+01:00

I'm now using OpenMP (2.0, because MSVS did not update it) instead of Win32-Threads.

This way, I don't need to re-write my threaded-code for each platform, or disable it on specific ones.

It's supported on the platforms and compilers that matter to me, so it fits perfect.

I also optimized the threaded routine a bit, and I got an even better idea, which is quite simple:

One thread draws, the others update.

Since drawing must be synchronized, this should do a bit better than my current approach, but I have to think of a good solution of how to tell the draw-thread, what it can draw. Maybe a synchronized queue. I think my current approach would be better than this though. We'll see.

Because implementing parallel processing on loops with OpenMP is piss easy, I also added partial threading for my serum, with the result of the frame-drop being almost negligible now. Very nice! <3 OpenMP

And I fixed that bug, which caused the program to hang. After all, it was a memory-overflow. I'm not sure, why the program didn't crash or something... it was very little and I don't understand how that caused the program to not work anyways.

I used CreateRectRgnIndirect on a rect, and passed the result directly to InvalidateRgn. But you have to DeleteObject on the CreateRectRgnIndirect.. I didn't cache that into a variable, because it's still from my early code.

I've also done it in the loop, because I expected the region to be cleared after a call to UpdateWindow. Now I am also just using GetWindowRgn (still have to DeleteObject that though ;)).

I found that out by looking out for unusual processor usage. Since the memory-tab is right besides that, I noticed that it kept going up and stopped right when my application stopped drawing.

I tried out various things, until I just outputted a randomly chosen value each frame with the WinAPI and it still stopped.

I lookout out if I had pointers anywhere and at some point, CreateRectRgnIndirect caught my eye and BAM fixed.

I should also point out my thanks to schnitzl for that bug. Else it might have gone unnoticed for a long time. And more code means more to look after.

Mah hair

2010-01-01T17:20:00.004+01:00

it's there:

quite a lot!

Well, now it's not:

At last, as promised :)

Also, Happy New Year!

Sorry if you're going for another calender than me.

ViruZ update 8

2009-12-31T18:24:00.005+01:00

So, I guess another time was today. Because I fixed the huge FPS lag.

cairo_scale seems to be a slow operation (or at least drawing on it after such a transformation). I had a buffer with a single blue circle, then would loop over it a few times to draw it.

The circles would be small at first and become bigger till they reach a certain size.

I tried out some different stuff, and it proved to be the fastest way when I just re-draw the circle each time it gets bigger, instead of scaling a buffer.

The performance-hit is now about 5FPS per core (since that drawing is not threaded (yet?)).

Here's a screenshot of it:

There's a nasty bug atm, which leads the program to just stop rendering after a time. I'm pretty sure the time is bound to the FPS, so it stops after a certain amount of rendered frames.

At first I thought it would be a memory-overrun somewhere, but that looked fine in the performance-monitor. So I began checking the code and the drawing-functions are executed properly. Then I suspected that maybe my timer would reach its max and stop counting, but that would just lead to an overflow and cause weird moving-behavior for one frame. Plus, I calculated that it will have to run over 500 years before it overflows.

I tried commenting out the drawing of my serum and the viruses (as well the update-function-calls), but it still just freezes.

I'm very clueless, but search will go on.

This post is, compared to the other ViruZ updates, quite early. This is due to tomorrow being the year 2010. I'm going to a friends New Years party in about 10 minutes, so I was searching for something to do and remembered, that I will probably not be able to post an update within the next few hours and that it would kill most of the time I wanna kill.

So, here it is. yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay[/noemotion][/sarcasm]

ViruZ update 7

2009-12-30T17:45:00.014+01:00

I still tweaked the render-code a bit today. Well, for threaded drawing at least.

I have a loop, in which I update and then draw the viruses. The mutex is only required for drawing, that's why I didn't put both in one function.

I also can then update while the window should not be drawn (e.g. minimized Window).

So, before I was like

for each(virus) {
  virus.update(dt);
  obtainMutex();
  virus.draw();
  releaseMutex();
}

now it's alike

for each(virus) {
  virus.update(dt);
  while(!tryObtainingMutex()) {
    queue.push(virus);
    virus = next_virus;
    virus.update(dt);
  }
  queue.push(virus);
  //we have the mutex now
  for each(virus in queue)
    virus.draw();
  releaseMutex();
}
if(!queue.empty()) {
  obtainMutex();
  for each(virus in queue)
    virus.draw();
  releaseMutex();
}

It's much more code, but I still got 10-20 more FPS out of it on my dual-core.

I also cleaned the thread-class. I guess I'm gonna keep it.

I also implemented the serum. Well, partly. Mostly just the drawing- and animation-part.

Sadly the FPS get cut in half while drawing it D:

I guess I'm doing something wrong.. but I'll get behind that at another time.

ViruZ update 6

2009-12-30T03:58:00.003+01:00

I've been implementing a hacky way of clipping/masking stuff. I simply wanted to look at the FPS-change.

I've been writing some stuff for only drawing half the screen. Turns out that this as well does not affect the FPS much. I'm scrapping out half the frame and almost no change!

I guess I won't get much of a FPS boost for optimizing my drawing-routine. The most stuff seems to originate from the loops (stepping through each virus and calling its update- and draw-function) and from some other internal stuff, but not really drawing the vector graphics.

That's a bit disappointing, but at least I won't have to worry about that and can concentrate more about the actual game.

ViruZ update 5

2009-12-27T00:06:00.005+01:00

So, I added threading. The array is split into n parts, so that then n threads can get to work drawing. I'm using a CRITICAL_SECTION to keep cairo okay, since it does not support threads.

Well, since my viruses have a rather small logic (they bounce around), that didn't really pay off for the effort.

I have to make something more efficient, such as creating n rectangles or something and draw on them without the need of a CRITICAL_SECTION I guess, but drawing the viruses doesn't really seem to be the bottleneck.

Drawing them in one thread I get 150-200FPS, in two (I have a dual-core without Hyper-Threading) 170-240FPS and not drawing viruses at all (so just background & FPS-text) 240-430FPS.

The former two are again 100 viruses and I am still drawing the whole screen each frame.

The Thread-class I made is pretty hacky; I think I'm going to take it out again. I'll try how well it performs when I add this separate rectangle-thing and decide upon that. If I get a boost of about 100FPS or more I'll fix the class up, if not I'll remove that feature.

ViruZ update 4

2009-12-25T16:49:00.004+01:00

A major performance-improvement today. Turns out that double-buffering increased the performance!

My guess is, that this way the device context doesn't have to be updated at every call of the paint-function.

I also added simple movement (the circles are simply moving in one direction) and the speed I'm getting from this is about 180-280 FPS for still 100 viruses, represented by outlined and anti-aliased circles blah blah :D

Oh, and the FPS-text is also drawn :P

I'm also still always drawing the whole frame and only using one thread to draw.

I also fixed some small stuff in my message-pump, which caused some messages to be sent twice (tbh I'm not sure if that is still occouring..).

Screenshot:

note: that L on the FPS just indicates, that it is a double-precision float(ing-point number).

ViruZ update 3

2009-12-24T22:08:00.003+01:00

I moved the draw function into the entity today. I tried fiddling around with a way to effectively buffer the drawing, so it doesn't have to draw the circle again, but can just use that buffer on another position.

I don't think I got it right though. I'm not sure how cairo does things internally, but I'm just not sure.

Well, I tested the performance and I get about 50FPS with 100 outlined and anti-aliased circles, rendering on one core at 2.4Ghz; I'm still not sure how much my graphics-card is used with cairo, but I have a GeForce 9600GT.

This will probably become slower though, since there is no logic done atm, but that result shows me that it'll probably draw fast enough. 30FPS should still look fluent and maybe I can still optimize some stuff. I'm also not too sure that I'll need to draw 100 objects every frame (it's redrawing the whole scene atm).

Merry Christmas

2009-12-24T13:29:00.003+01:00

I'm not a Christian, I don't even believe in god for that matter, but I was raised and still live in a Christian society, so Merry Christmas everybody.

If you believe in a(nother) religion, then so shall your god ram his invincible fist through me, so that my lifeless body shall explode by the mere thought of your angry god and my soul shall burn in eternity.

Good day to you, Sir/Madam.

ViruZ update 2

2009-12-24T03:23:00.004+01:00

Okay, so now I finally fixed that window-closing. There was some weird stuff going on, because the event actually got rised and handled, but PostQuitMessage didn't seem to do its job.

So I am perkily pooping on this, which tells you to "not post the WM_QUIT message using PostMessage; [but to] use the PostQuitMessage function.". And then it works.

Yay :3

I also implemented double-buffering, using the cairo_push_group and cairo_pop_group_to_surface-functions. Well, it's not really double-buffering, since I'm not buffering the image and swap the fore- and back-buffer, but it gets rid of the flickering so it's good enough for me.

I stumbled upon them while looking for a way to copy surfaces.

I hope they cooperate with threads :S

I also started laying out a design for my virus-baseclass. I'm hoping to somehow cache the drawn circle, maybe even share that cache among equal looking viruses, and thus only having to copy the already drawn circle on the surface.

So my next step lies in putting some flesh (code) on the bones (class layout), making my draw-function loop through an array of viruses (later with threads) and use their draw-function.

After that, I will implement moving-logic to the viruses. Then the Anti-V. Then cleaning up a little and maybe I'm gonna upload a public executable.

Once I am taking care of installing GRUB to boot Ubuntu again, I'll also take care of the Linux-port. It'll be available for all Linux, which are running the X Window System and are compatible with cario. I guess.

ViruZ update 1

2009-12-22T23:38:00.010+01:00

Well, I don't know if I'm going to post frequently about it, but well.. yesterday I moved the stuff into my Window-class completely.

There is a more elegant solution to my messagepump-function, instead of using a fake singleton.

Of course, other people have had this problem, too. I googled and quickly found an article on GameDev about it. Using Set/GetWindowLong with GWL_USERDATA lets you store a pointer, which will be associated with a window. I'd explain it, but it's probably easier if you just read this. If you wanna use it, you'll have to modify it a bit. Check for GetWindowLong to return NULL, because the first message is not WM_NCCREATE, but WM_GETMINMAXINFO, which does not have the lpCreateParams.

I ran into some fun invalid pointers with this :)

I then fiddled around with getting my program to close when you hit alt+F4 or click the close-button. I also ran into some invalid pointers by destroying the window on WM_CLOSE, but still running the messagepump-loop.

Fixed that by not destroying the window and calling PostQuitMessage on WM_CLOSE and WM_DESTROY. I'm gonna make WM_DESTROY check, if WM_CLOSE got called before at some point.

That only half-way fixed the problem though. There are problems when the window is closed in specific points in code. WaitMessage waits for new events only, not unhanded ones. So if I call WaitMessage after the user has pressed the close-button it would not close. I actually have no idea where that event went though.. but it just seemed to disappear then.

I fixed that just a minute ago by putting my redraw-hack in a thread, rather than in the messagepump-loop.

[edit:

No, I didn't fix it. Strange stuff, it does not work at all. It only works after you've moved the window o_O

After you've done that, it works like it should]

The only problem left is slight flickering. I just have to double-buffer it by hand, then it won't flicker I bet :)

Screenshot:

note: that screenshot was shot yesterday

built cairo

2009-12-22T00:43:00.005+01:00

Wow, this seems to be my blog-month. Or maybe it's the holidays. Or my short hair. Or something else, that makes me more productive.

Note: the following-stuff is quite programming-related and might confuse you if you are not a programmer yourself

Whatever it is, I got cairo to compile and link, finally. Thanks to Stack Overflow I opened the MSYS-enviroment in the Microsoft Visual Studio Commandline Enviroment and thus got the UNIX-tools with the MSVC-tools.

Well, it wasn't as easy as just typing 'make' into it, I had to fiddle around with the makefiles, got some nasty errors, but now I've build all the required libs and cairo itself.

I was already thinking about just using pre-built libraries, but now I can sleep better :P

cairo doesn't have convenience-functions like SDL or OpenGL (though [{free, open}]GLUT) or something to open a window. I could use some GUI-library, but since I'll be using cairo to draw everything that seems to be a little bloat. I'll just have to write the platform-specific stuff for Windows and UNIX with XServer, maybe also MacOS stuff, myself.

As I can only boot Windows atm (install had overridden the boot-sector; didn't care to fix it yet) I started working on the Windows-port. I seem to have to use GDI for cairo, though I am wondering whether or not I am still getting the hardware-accelerated goodness.

I got a Window open pretty fast and used tutorial-code to draw on it, but I wanted debug-output. So I used AllocConsole, but std::cout can't print on that without rerouting.. and that code I saw for that seemed weird, so I wrote a small templated function to use WriteConsole(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE), ... instead.

Windows seems to think that my Application does not respond very well and draws that loading-cursor when you hover over it. I also can't click the close-button; probably the same reason. I'm not really sure how to fix it, but I'll care about that later.

I initially had problems redrawing the graphic, which is needed since the scene is going to have moving stuff. I was thinking that RedrawWindow(wnd, NULL, NULL, RDW_INTERNALPAINT) would work, but the message/event WM_PAINT didn't go through. I then tried obtaining the rect via GetBoundsRect(GetDC(wnd), &rect, 0), but it is empty. I simply hard-coded it to have the same height and width as the window itself, and using this I can redraw fine.

Of course I won't be drawing the whole window over and over again in the final version if it doesn't need to be.

Well, right now I am on packing the test-stuff I had into a Window-class. It seems like I can't get a std::tr1::function with __stdcall. Really sucks, because I need to call a member-function for the MessagePump and the Windows SDK uses the __stdcall calling convention.

I tried around with casts 'n stuff, but I can't seem to get it to work :'(

I'll fiddle around a bit more, and if it doesn't work I'll hack it by having a static function in the Window-class returning an instance of itself. Kinda like a singleton, only that Window is no singleton...

ViruZ - fifth rewrite

2009-12-20T14:15:00.005+01:00

Some of you might have heard ViruZ before, but I doubt you will remember it.

I posted about it when I still wrote in German.

So, it was a flash-game before. It's about viruses you have to kill with an antidote.

The viruses are represented with circles and you can inject the antidote with a mouse-click on the cursor-position. The viruses move around randomly.

On injecting the antidote, the viruses in a set area around that spot will be infected and become sick. Some may survive, some may die. Any viruses, that are near enough on sick viruses, will get sick themselves.

I had a flash-version going, then attempted to rewrite that with proper use of OOP, but I ran into some complications with my C++-way of thinking.

After that I attempted to rewrite it in C++ using Qt. I also had some problems due to being new to Qt, but now, on my forth rewrite, I got around them.

Sadly Qt seems to be too slow. It draws 50 viruses at around 3 FPS. I am using vector-graphics, but they should be hardware-accelerated and I'm using caching, so it's probably the loop. They are saved in a stack-allocated array, so it's probably just to big.

Well, Qt is meant to be used for GUIs, not really games.

I'd use threads to batch-process the movement and maybe try to coordinate batched drawing, but Qt seems to be limited in its threading-ability.

So I am looking into cairo atm. I've already managed getting zlib and libpng to build, but I'm kinda clueless about cairo. fmake doesn't seem to work, so I'll try downloading MSYS.

'Bout mah hair today

2009-12-17T14:32:00.004+01:00

Well, today things look a bit different.

If you were reading the post of yesterday, you will notice that I was emotionally touched by the events that went wrong. I gave it some thought yesterday evening and I dealt with it.

My mother should know after more than 19 years, that I am not that well with names. And if she doesn't care that I really take this to my heart and that I am disappointed in myself, well that's just not my concern. I did say sorry, I did explain myself and I did search for solutions, but frankly I do not have a time machine (yet!).

So, when I stood up this morning and looked this new face in the mirror, my first thought was about "Man, do I have big eye brows". Of course I also was reminded that I was going to the wrong barber shop and that I might not be able to sell my hair, though I have gone through some trouble to get to this point, but whatever.

It feels great having short hair, finally after having decided for this over a year ago.

Also, no pics yet. I only have the before-picture atm and I wanna post both at the same time.

You still have to wait. Or kill yourself and become a spiritual creature that can travel through the multiverse and the time. Have fun! and try not to make a mess :/

Mah hair

2009-12-16T16:58:00.009+01:00

is about 3mm long. And just an hour ago they were about 60cm long. Kind of a bit of a difference, huh?

I explained some stuff in my previous Mah hair-post, so I won't have you tell about that stuff. But I have something to say about my visit to the barber: My mother made an appointment by one in the city where we live.

My Ex-Girlfriend wanted to see me getting my hair cut off, so I met her a little sooner. We were driving with the bike to the barber, but as it will turn out, I simply did not remember the full description of the way when I saw a barbershop.

I am planning to sell my hair. That's not the reason why I cut it of, but it's a nice thing, since it's not costing me much if I do so. My mother already explained to the barber how they shall cur my hair so we can sell it, but since I got to the wrong place they did not do it like planned.

When I got home my mother was really mad at me. She's in doubt that I can sell it appropriately now and she doesn't want to go to that barbershop she made the appointment with, since that wrong I did makes her look bad to them. I tried to explain why it went wrong and that I am sorry for the way it turned out, but it is understandable that she still is mad.

I am really disappointed in myself for not realizing that I was inside the wrong shop. It all seemed so easy-going, but now everything just looks so... I don't know; I can't find the right words for it, at least something bad.

If I am still able to sell my hair, I will pass the money to my parents. I feel just wrong taking it now, even if it turns out alright. I know that I cannot right the wrongs I did today, never ever probably, but I will just have to live with that.

I actually thought that I will be happy looking in the mirror and seeing my short hair, but now all I will remember is the sorrow of this day.

Also, I will post pictures of me with and without my long hair soonish.

Jogging

2009-12-07T23:05:00.004+01:00

I've been jogging two weeks ago, the first time I did real sports after my ligaments had been torn. I really enjoyed sweating out of physical effort.

It's been for school sport, and I'm glad to say that my muscles didn't get too rusty within the 2.5month. I think I could have been jogging with the top, if I hadn't told my teacher why I prefer C# to Java. We had a little discussion about C# vs Java and my teacher was looking for the pupils on the back, so I would have had to put a lot of effort to reach the top ones. Besides, I tried not to get too far away from the group that I was already in, since we were quite spread out.

We were jogging about 50min. and a distance of about 7km, which calculates to an average speed of 2 1/3 m/s.

I also had hella aching muscles afterwards :P It kicked in about evening after I've been sitting on the computer for some while.

I think the lack of sport really demotivates me for some reason. I haven't been doing much work lately: haven't been learning for tests, not doing any homework (I usually at least try to remember what we did last lesson and if there is any homework we must do), barely been preparing the speeches I have to give, little coding, ...

One good thing I did was writing this up. And this is because its ticket is marked essential and I'm quite excited about the project CML. For one about the actual code that we'll have to write, the design concepts we have to think up as well as its application.

But CML is material for another blog-post...

So, getting back to sports, after I've been playing badminton last week in school, I've decided that my foot should be healed well enough to get started with volleyball again. Since on Friday last week we had a match or some tournament I didn't participate. I also don't go Tuesdays, because we have school sport on Wednesday and I've already been missing enough of that...

As such, I am looking forward to this Friday. Badly enough though that till then I will have conducted all my presentations. I think I still can prepare for a test we write this year though.

Stay safe folks!

Mah hair

2009-11-23T09:21:00.002+01:00

is about 60cm long.. and I was expecting it to be 3mm. Kind of a bit of a difference, huh?

Well, let's get back to the time when I decided to let my hair grow. It was some when in in the later half of high school. I was more or less excluded from my class mates and I guess I wanted to express being different by growing my hair. Surely I was also influenced by my sister, who was taking a step or two in the direction of goth-style.

About when my hair started touching my shoulders I thought about what to exactly do with my hair. Dreadlocks was the answer, but I dropped the idea because these are rather expensive. I left them long, because I got used to it.

It's worth mentioning that some when around this time I also started wearing exclusively black. And I also got used to this.

Anyways, around summer last year two of my friends, who also had long hair (though not as long as mine :D), cut theirs down. One also got 3mm or something, while the other kept some of his length.

I started asking myself if I might decide to do this as well and was positive about it, since I now was doing sports in my free time and the hair gets in the way sometimes - especially when I'm fighting with Ionenbombe. And I'd also be faster when showering. The only disadvantage that might exist is loosing style. Whatever ^^

I still kept it though for Carnival, since last year there was a street band I was head banging with a bunch of friends to, since their music was sweet and I planned doing so again. I was also looking into maybe singing for a metal-band a few friends of mine opened, but I didn't take the time to take singing lessons, so I dropped that.

While I was lucky enough to not get invited to go on the streets on Carnival I had decided to take acting class in school for theater. Everyone in the 12th grade has to do something for your yearly theater; despite acting there's stuff like stage building, costume & make-up, editorial staff, organisational staff and technic staff (caring about sounds, music, lights and camera).

I decided for acting, because I was hoping to work against my shyness a bit and because Ionenbombe was in acting class last year and recommended it.

I regret this decision though. We had a new teacher this year; the last year we were playing classical theater and she wanted to do a more modern styled theater. Well, I thought I could get through with just blind obeying, but it still was shit since we should be like open and develop own stuff 'n shit.

Well, because of choosing acting class I decided to let my long hair stay till the theater plays are all over. This was a well made decision, since I was chosen to be Poseidon, the greek god of the see and earth-shaker.

Anyways about three weeks ago the last theater play was held. I was content that acting was over and it was time to let my hair leave my head. I also heard from some friends, that I can get money for my long hair, since wigs can be made out of it. So I phoned an hair-studio, but just to receive a message that this year they won't have any free appointments :(

Well, I'll try asking if I may go to another barber, take the hair and bring it to them to buy it, since your conventional barber won't buy it :P

I hope this is working so I can finally can get rid of my long hair, a plan I had over 1.5 years ago :S

Paramedical course

2009-11-18T00:15:00.004+01:00

I went to a paramedical course for... well I have no idea what the US pendant is, but I'll get a batch with the Rod of Asclepius to put on my jacket soon (via Velcro, not by stitching :P).

I've spend 3 weekends for this, meaning 6 days from 8:30 to 17:00. These were the official times, so not taking stuff like staying up, getting there, overrun a bit (well, mostly it was just a bunch of minutes) and getting back home into account.

On the last day, there was a theoretical test and a practical test. Those who passed were to getting a certificate... every one but me got one ;_;

I did pass the tests, but someone screw up and forgot to bring my form or something. So I'll obtain it later via post.

I was actually planning on getting there by bike. The way's like 3km or something. But the first day I had to quit a bit earlier for theater play at school, so my mother drove me so I can get faster to my school. A comerade of the local red cross-union offered to take me with him in his car for the remaining 5 days. Of course I accepted.

The last day however I didn't drive back with him. They were searching for a guy who could be driving a vehicle of the red cross back where it belongs and still get home easily. As I have my driver license and live like 200m further, I reported in for that.

Now this vehicle was the widest, and possibly even the biggest one, I've ever driven. I was quite worried scratching parked cars or planted trees or hitting some contraflow, but everything worked fine. In hindsight is was a nice experience and quite fun.

And I also wanted to explain the Panzels-post. So when I finally got home on sunday, I thought "I gotta get out of these pants", because the red cross-pants I tend to build up their own high-humidity atmosphere. And for the lulz of corruption I thought "pantsls" (or something sounding alike). Then I thought that this sounded like "pencils" and somehow I got to the word "pretzels", which in combination with "pants" would actually result in "pantzels".

So, later this evening I was talking to a friend, who wanted me to test if his website works. I wanted to go to sleep, but I was friendly enough to wait to test it. I was bored and asked him what the result of "pants" + "pretzels" would be, the answer being pantzels of course. Before pointing out, that this sounds like pencils, I was thinking that "pencils" + "panzer" would also equal "pantzels", so I told him that and assured him, that the government was behind this.

Because I still had to wait, I decided to blog it.

Yeah, I get like this when I'm tired.

Panzels

2009-11-16T00:04:00.002+01:00

Pants + Pretzels = Panzels

Pencils + Panzers = Panzels

What the fuck ;_;

I'm tired, I'm going to sleep.

Busy weekend

2009-11-13T22:28:00.002+01:00

Time to make myself useful and write a post again.

Last weekend I had a full schedule:

Friday - School (morning to noon), paramedical service (noon to afternoon), school theater (afternoon to night), sleep (night to morning)

Saturday - paramedical education (morning to afternoon), school theater (afternoon to night), sleep (night to morning)

Sunday - paramedical education (morning to afternoon), paramedical service (afternoon to early night), some free-time, sleep (night to morning)

And well... then school again. I really was jumping from event to event without any free time but about one hour before going to bed to check my mails and replying to some forum posts.

Therefore I know that I spend my time well. Yay :]

Windows Speech Recognition

2009-10-18T15:05:00.006+02:00

I've been mainly enjoying Source-games now and returned to posting on the Steam forums. I have to say there were times when the Source Coding-section was far more active.

Anyways, I wanted to play a Multiplayer-game and gone through the settings to discover that my microphone is too quiet. I've searched for the settings in Window (well, and found them quickly) but stumbled upon the "Microsoft Speech Recognition", which I had to try out immediatly.

I probably wouldn't use it in my daily live, but I thought it might be fun.

The tutorial was very easy and promising, but after it was finished it was a hell working with it. When I gone through the tutorial you are supposed to say a bunch of things and it shows you how it should react then. I wanted to quit it half-way through as I thought that I'd know enough to navigate now, but then it said that the Speech Recognition will adapt the longer I work with it and it already is adapting as I train in this tutorial, so I continued since my spoken English is probably only half as good as my written one - which also is not perfect - as I train it less; I mean I write and read English all over the internet and usually play games & films in English, but I rarely have the opportunity to actually speak it.

Dictating works okay, until I wanted it to write C++, which it interpreted as "c plus plus" and I simply couldn't correct it. It also understood "eat it" when I said delete and when I said "select ..." it wrote the whole thing, instead of selecting all the words. It's probably there for selecting only one word - but why?

And it also had problems with my way of saying "Google" when I wanted to switch to Google Chrome - which I finally selected with my mouse and was quite unable to click any links!

I also wanted to say that I had the 3 posts "I'm back online" to "My right foot" prepared while I had no internets. There shouldn't be one mega-post again, so I separated them and to not make a 'virtual mega-post' I also waited 5 days between each post.

I actually had a forth post prepared for that, but I'm too lazy to plug the old drives back in and copy them (I have too little energy-cables on my PSU (=Power Supplying Unit) to power more than 2 :/).

Windurfs

2009-10-14T23:13:00.005+02:00

I'm back on Windows. I'm making this very post in Windows 7 on my current machine.

To not waste CDs (yes I know there are RWs.. still) I made up my mind about using a VM. So I booted up my Sidux Live-CD, installed virtualbox and mounted the Ubuntu-image as a CD-drive.

Screenshot:

Why? Because I can :P

And after booting up Ubuntu, updating and installing some essentials I installed Windows 7 through Virtualbox.

Screenshot:

Why? Because I f-ing can, that's why! :P

And you can do stuffs while it's loading :)

Well, now it's on updating, installing drivers, downloading Steam-games and getting back in touch with friends.

Also, 3 posts today.

New Linux

2009-10-14T14:06:00.004+02:00

Well so I decided to get Ubuntu.

The Frugalware-site is still down and although reading through the Arch Linux Beginners' Guide, from which I noticed that it's not really hard, as long as you can work through a cli, I decided to be lazy. Arch Linux takes a minimal approach and I think I can allow a few extra megabytes as opposed to some work.

I also said that I wanted to try and compile GLib myself. Well, there doesn't seem to be a official mirror of that library, nor its source-code.

Is it just some open specification with no available standard implementation?

Ubuntu should be a good trade between Debian stable and testing. I mean I've already used it and the only annoying thing was the loads of pre-installed applications. Although that was Kubuntu I don't think that Ubuntu is that different.

New harddrives + Sidux

2009-10-14T02:00:00.003+02:00

2x500GB shipped four days ago. And yesterday I build them into my system.

Before that I downloaded the newest Sidux-CD and burned it. After plugging them in, I installed it.

Sidux is a Linux-OS based on Debian Sid. It's basically just a Live CD version of it with some few additional features.

I was quite happy with it. Not much different from Debian Lenny for a normal user like me. Except I could already see that the software was more up-to-date :P

There's a downfall though: Old libraries don't seem to be supported. Well, Debian Sid warned that it is an unstable system, but I thought I'd be fine with it. I don't know if that is permament of or if simply still has to be ported. Two examples being Gtk1.2 and GLib1.2 (part of Gtk basically).

I noticed when I tried to compile some program using Gtk. Using apt-get I downloaded the version 2.0 to see few moments later that it needs version 1.2 and I was a bit surprised not seeing it in the package-list.

After a bit of googling I found out that it's simply not available for Debian Sid, testing or Sidux. I tried downloading the source and compiling it myself, but it depends on GLib1.2. I didn't try downloading and compiling that, but I guess it'll result in another bunch of errors. Maybe I'll try today after having gotten some sleep.

So well, it's either waiting for the support of these old libraries (unlikely), trying to compile it myself (I'll see about that.. and might still switch (see next point)) or getting another distro. As I havn't really done much yet I can still easily change.

I was thinking about some Ubuntu (either that or Xubuntu). Definetly not Debian stable again, as it's just not for people needing up-to-date software but rather for servers or administrators.

I've gone through the list of Debian derviates and found one interesting called Kanotix; but their last update was Janurary last year?!

I guess what I mainly liked about Debian is the Package-manager. Pac-man seems to do about the same job, so I looked up Arch Linux, but I heard from several sources that it's a distro for advanced Linux-users.

Then I found Frugalware. Their website seems down atm, but maybe they're updating their servers or something. I read about it in Wikipedia (here).

Well, so long. Also, I included quite some l inks in this post, LOL!

My right foot

2009-10-08T20:53:00.002+02:00

Last year - well about 14 or 15 month ago - I had ab accident with my left foot, which caused the ligament to be overbend.

This year I've got about the same thing on my right foot, only that they`re not just overbend, but torn.

That actually happened about 4 weeks ago and I forgot to blog about it (shitty network failing), but anyways, now you know.

I remember it hurting like a bitch and then sitting at the waiting room of the hospital for half an hour since all doctors were sleeping and they had to wake one up first to drive there.

After he looked at it, he wasn't quite sure what it is and gave me a bandage and crutches (lol, I just had to look up the word and the first thing that came into my mind was "crotches"), saying that I shall have a doctor looking at it again in two days.

So yeah, two days later, after shool, I visited a hospital again to let it being looked at. I waited for about half an hour - again :P - and the doctor said, that he'll need another X-ray (already gotten two 2 days ago, but he wanted another angle) as he's also not quite sure.

Waited a bit more, was x-rayed, waited some more, got the picture, waited a very long time (about 3h ffs) and the doctor couldn't tell by that, so he took the left foot, shoved the sole a bit forward, took the right foot, which popped a little at a point - hurt like hell for a second - and he said that my ligaments are torn.

But since my foot was swollen quite heavily I needed to wear a static bandage (I really have no idea how to call it) for a week and place my foot high when possible.

Well, now I have a splint in which I can walk. It was a real bitch getting up stairs without the help of my right foot (in school up to 3 etages at a time! 3.5 times a week! (this week 4 times :/)), but well, I made it. Getting down also wasn't too easy.

My left leg now probably has a better muscle than my right one :P Guess that'll get a bit more equal again at some point. You can't really see it anyways, but it bugs me to know it...

I can walk quite good now. Getting down stairs is still a litte weird, but that might just be that splint, which should prohibid me from moving the foot into certain angles anyways.

I'm looking forward to the 23th of this month, since the doctor said that I should be doing fine without that thing. Well, fine as in still not being able to do sports, but not too dangerous to tear them again relatively easy.

How do people come up

2009-10-03T18:42:00.001+02:00

with creative titles? Sometimes I just know one and use that, or I am simply stumped and write something stupid like just using it as the beginning of the first sentence.

Anyways, I've been watching the Matrix-trilogy while I had no internet. I had a few problems at first, since I could watch other DVDs, but not that movie. Turned out - using my fathers laptop - that movie-DVDs usually use an extra encryption called CSS.

Well, I downloaded the packed and then the problems were gone :D

I've noticed that I've gotten much more critical and demanding from movies.

While when watching them the first time I did spot a few weird things, but didn't care about that. But this time it just felt wrong; why didn't the machienes - as they knew that they'll wake up - put them in another Matrix in which they'd think to be in reality?

And another biggie: they can't reset the Matrix, lol.

Also, if the humans have enough energy to power Zion to have lights and warmth, to fly around with hovercrafts, power computers and these war machienery, why don't the machienes use it? And why don't they just built a floating powerstation to go above the artificial clouds?

But oh well, still a great idea and a neat-o movie.

And another thing I did to waste time while not having Internet is downloading the NCurses-library and a tutorial via my fathers laptop and working a little with it.

I planned on making a rogue-like at first, but I thought Tetris would be easier.

For some reason I don't quite remember I'm coding in standard C90 and so far only used one POSIX-function (nanosleep). Everything else is portable (I'm compiling with -pedandic-errors ffs - and -ansi for that matter (gcc)).

Well, the exception being NCurses ;)

And, well, I ran into a little design-issue concerning rotating pieces. At first I was having a 4x4 color-map inside a tetris-tile.

On creation it would simply take a 4x4-array of a form (I call them L, inverse L, T, S, Z, I and box), represented as 1s and 0s like

0, 1, 0, 0, /*I*/

0, 1, 0, 0,

0, 1, 0, 0

and multiply a random color with each element to store it in the tetris-tile color-array.

While rotating the I can be done with a bunch of xors and the T simply by moving each edge one further, the L and inverse L are more of a problem.

At first I even forgot about S and Z lol. Anyways, it was easy to add them, as - although being hacky to be quite efficient - it is modular.

It kinda bugged me that I'd need a variable indicating the rotation just for L, invL, S and Z and having dumb functions for them to rotate.

So then I though of another approach, which at least is the same for every piece (well... almost):

Having all formes in a const array, at first the non-rotating box, then the two-state I, S and Z and finally L, invL and T with 4 states.

A pointer to a function will take care of rotating correctly then.

Each tile has a color-variable and on rendering both, the color and the form, will be brought together.

My current solution is having a state variable and depending on that reading the array in another way, such as swapping the two indecies or reading from back to front and thus flipping the tile.

Not too sure it'll work correctly, because I didn't code the render-function yet, but I'll see.

If that doesn't work I'll use function-pointers so the tiles themselves decide how to render (these will be called on rendering, so that function renderes them, not the render-function itself).

...I'm not really too well educated about C concepts :S

Since I was working with bit-fields, which means that you decide how many bits to use per variable, it seems fitting to store two tiles in one struct to have 8 bits full.

That's pretty much perfect, since you have one tile you control and a preview to the next tile.

Hacky, therefore efficient. Not really proud about it being hacky, but at least it shows that I make up my mind :P

Also, inline-functions in headers are very wierd in C90 :S

I'm back online

2009-09-28T19:20:00.003+02:00

Yeah, I had no internet for two weeks :'(

Well, not completly true: I had my fathers laptop a few times to check my E-Mail and go on the facepunch-forums.

I wasn't on the Steam-forums since my Windows crashed down, but that will change soon[ish]:

I finally copied the stuff I wanna keep from my NTFS-partitions (Windows drives) together into one folder on my Linux-distro.

What brought me to that is some loneliness and looking through some old files, finding an old chatlog from when Snowball: Source was still in development. Good times. And it reminded me that I really should get my ass up about reinstalling Windows.

Now I'm just buying new hard-drives, probably 2x500GB, and then I'll wish for two more on Christmas to RAID them. I'll also take care of my Windows this time (like defragging & updates).

I also thought of maybe getting Windows 7, although some versions are a big piece of shit and pulling even more money out of the customers.

Why the heck do cheaper versions limit my RAM and supported number of CPUs??

This will probably fill the capabilities of my current case, so I'll throw out my current drives.

I thought about maybe updating my whole system in a year or a year and a half; since I also want a new case, new CPU (thus new motherboard and thus new RAM) and a new graphicscard, I'll keep the drives and try to sell the whole computer.

I havn't really looked around much, but the last time I read stuff about CPUs they were 4 cores max (in one home-computer CPU that is), and now Intel bloats out 8 in their Core i7s. That really knocked me of my feet.

I'm estimating that in a year the price will be low enough to be called cheap. Looking forward from jumping from 2 to 8 cores as programs get more and more threaded sub-programs and thus can use multiple cores.

Well then... now to finally sudo apt-get update & upgrade again...

Still Linux

2009-08-31T21:01:00.006+02:00

Yep, I haven't gotten around installing Windows as planned.

Thinking about going through all the folders to save stuff, then somehow still partition the drive nicely and having to wait for Windows to install to finally download all the drivers and set the system to a usable state. And then maintaining it >.<

Oh well, eventually I will be bored enough at some point to actually do it.

On the bright side, we now have double the internet-speed we were expecting. Today our phone-contract of the old company expired and I had to install a new box to get them working with the new contract - it was a pretty fast and easy process to set it all up :D

When it was installed I noticed that the connection-information showed that we have the full internet-speed we are paying for (said some stuff about that in my last post) and after testing it turned out to be true.

A week ago, school started again. This year I'll be heading towards my Abitur. I hope I don't screw this up, I kinda have a habit of not learning for tests :S

There are rare examples, such as history for which I sit down about an hour per day (with some minor distractions) - two days before the test.

But I surely will learn more for this! There's no way I could just pass it without doing (close to) anything.

That is about the post-size I am aiming for. I really should just make posts more frequently.

...although I don't get anything from making them. I hope someone finds them interesting :3

End of August already

2009-08-24T21:21:00.002+02:00

Well, at least it seems like I'm holding up to my previous 'standard' of at least one post per month.

So, if you read my last post you might think that I'm on Windows. But shortly after I got that working, some system-file was corrupted. Luckily there was some backup I could restore with the Recovery Console.

That file is somehow related to the drivers; I forgot its name. After reinstalling all the drivers I found the mouse still not working, which is weird since it is a standard-conform USB-mouse. I downloaded the driver from the Logitech-site using the Keyboard, installed them, but that didn't make it work. I found out that the USB-bus-drivers (lol, bus-bus; lol, bus-driver) were some standard drivers from Microsoft, so I changed each one manually to the Gigabyte one. Then I even gone through all the other drivers, to make sure all is set correctly, but still the mouse did not work.
My soundcard was not functioning as well.

Because it all worked well in Ubuntu I downloaded Debian, since my Ubuntu-CD didn't have the newest Ubuntu-version and that Distribution is based upon Debian, and installed it. Out came some kind of quite minimal Debian-installation, but I got my way around most 'problems'.

So right now I am using Debian 5.0 (codename Lenny) and as UI I have LXDE through SLiM.

I'm lacking some scripts to automate a bunch of stuff simply because I'm too lazy to look up how to make them - although I know it's easy as I've done it before - but wut evar ^^
I can't seem to get sourround-sound get to work and my libGL.so seems to not be a symbolic link everytime I restart the system, so if I'm developing some OpenGL-stuff I have to delete and create a symbolic link every time.

I also had a few problems with hibernation, but that work now as well.

I had plans to re-install Windows since quite a while now, but so far I was just too lazy, since I also have to backup my files. Not because I didn't partition right, but because it's heavily fragmentated (thanks Microsoft and NTFS).
It's quite a bummer, since I can't play my fancy games I was playing before, although having Wine. And I can't get through with the Sourcemod-coding to leave that code behind for a bit and develop something non-Source related.

While we're at Source, Dreamball is kinda dead. Danny wanted it out before his Collage starts, and me being on Linux couldn't develop any further, so he'll just take the stuff we have now and put it out there (not through Steam).
I might get back to that and update it a little and apply some fixes if something is not right.

And another thing on the coding-site: Qt. I've discovered it before, when looking for GUI-libraries. Back then I tried GTK+, gtkmm, FLTK2 and wxWidgets. I didn't like Qts licence, but it's under the LGPL now that Nokia purchased it.

I stumbled upon it when searching for hardware-accelerated vector-graphic libraries other than ShivaVG and AmanithVG (or however it's spelled; will correct & add links later). I found Cairo, which I heard of before, but read somewhere that it wasn't really good for games. It seems to be used in many GUIs having custom looks.
In a mailing list, someone was comparing that to Qts vector graphics. And at that point I thought I'll just try it out.

I downloaded the full SDK and was very suprised, because it has its own IDE.
Apart from that I grasped some stuff from the examples provided and thought of making a Viruz-version, since the Flash-version is dead and I wanted to port it to C++ at some point.
I don't have enough experience and knowledge about Qt though. That project will just have to wait.
I have a screen with a nice backhground, a black rectangle at the bottom for the HUD, which should have some information (currently FPS and amount of viruses), but the text-drawing acts wierd, and bouncing balls, being the viruses, so far. (Damn, what a sentence lol)

Well, that'll have to suffice for now. The post it big enough anyways... I really should start to break them down to individual posts, but I don't feel like simply doing that and posting 3 posts at the same time.
Live with it. Or not.

One nerd, one computer and "no bootable partition"

2009-07-19T17:53:00.008+02:00

If you don't like to read much, skip that block down there till the double-space and "tl;dr".

Well, I'm not sure what caused that, but I just stood up and the computer wouldn't boot. After two retries and the message "No bootable partition in table" I figured that it wouldn't fix itself.

I checked the cables to the hard-drives and the IDE configuration list when you start the computer and everything looked right, but it also wasn't some loose cable. That's when I started worrying about my data, especially about the Dreamball-code. Everything else would be a pity, but loosing that code would be really bad.

I dug up a Windows CD, put it in the drive, rebooted the computer to find out that this CD does not provide this option to re-copy the Windows core-files while keeping everything else, including the registry 'n stuff intact.

But I also didn't want to reinstall and setup the whole Windows, since I'm planning to do that once Dreamball is at VALVe for testing and we have faster internets (should be kinda soonish; more about that later).

After lunch I tried my luck on the Windows Recovery Console. I was happy that it recognized C:\Windows so far, but my code is on the second partition (I: for some reason).

Well, I logged into that and ran chkdsk with /P /R (find & repair invalid sectors). It took about 3.5h, by which time I took a shower and read a book about C++ for game programmers, which was kinda annoying because my chair (& table) is not comfortable for reading, leaving the bed in which it also gets uncomfortable after a time plus I already know about 70-80% of the stuff, and after that I just thought that I'd try to access the drive I, which I couldn't view the directories in because it was somehow broken.

SHIT!

So I wanted to run chkdsk on that drive, but it told me that this drive has one or more irreparable damages.

SHITSHITSHIT

Well, I tried booting windows again, but no luck on that.

By that time I was going to a friend for a movie night. After I came home I started the Recovery Console again and tried my luck with fixmbr and fixboot (note here that I have GRUB since I had been using Xubuntu (Linux) in the past) and then bootcfg, but bootcfg told me that it didn't have enough memory or something.

Rebooting still displayed the error. So I read till I got a bit sleepy and slept.

In the morning I read the book, hopelessly that I'd fix the problem.

After lunch I tidied my cupboard a bit and having found an Ubuntu 7.10 CD I decided to boot that up and listen to some music from my USB stick.

Well, maybe it'll boot normally this time, but nope, it didn't fix itself.

I tried the Recovery Console again, which took me a step further to GRUB, which told me it's having the error 15. I then booted up Linux so that I can look up what that means (was pretty useless) maybe I could even fix the problem or at least recover my data.

The Live-CD told me that it couldn't find a fitting driver & configuration for my display and thus is only available in low-graphics mode. I wanted to at least set a better fitting resolution (because 640x480 or whatever it was looks really shit on a 1680x1050 widescreen LCD), but the test crashed to the console.

Not having used Linux in quite a while I forgot how to open up the GUI again, but I remembered the X server. So I tried xinit and startx, but both told me that there is no confuguration file.

With the man-pages I found out where it should be (it wasn't there) and how to confgure a new one. I did that and was finally able to open a GUI with the command xdm, which I also found while reading the man-pages. But the screen was pretty much empty and as such useless.

In a rather short time I found the command gdm, which did the trick after some flickering. The same dialog as before popped up, so I just selected continue, which led me back the the console again.

SHIIIIT!

After some different display and driver settings, which all didn't work, I found a something at last to do what I want - some flag (I don't remember) in gdm did the trick.

Instead of listening to music I opened the partition manager to find that everything looked pretty much ok. I tried the file manager to mount the drives and at least could access I, but not C.

Well, the Dreamball-code is save.

I checked the man-pages for the mount-command and with help of the internets I figured out again how to use it.

So it told me that it couldn't mount it due to Windows being in hibernation mode. I tried the force-flag, but that didn't work. Then force and read-only, which did the trick. I could access all my data.

So I thought that it has to be fixable then. I just re-booted, but the same error came. Then Recovery Console again, where I used fixmbr and fixboot, but not bootcfg, which finally fixed the problem and here I am on my crappy Windows again. YAAAAAYY!!!!

Please note that I'm referring to my Windows, not to Windows in general, here. I have my reasons to like, but also very much hate Windows - please don't think I'm a bandwagon hater here though. But still, after just this little escapade I miss Linux a little.

I also remember tying the command ntfsfix in Linux, but that didn't help either.

tl;dr: Couldn't boot because of seemingly serious harddrive-error, I was worried about the data, the Windows CD couldn't help, booted Linux, which ran after some complications, fixed the error with no data-loss and I'm back online :)

I said earlier that I'll loose a few words about why I want to reinstall my computer and why I didn't do it now.

Well, my current setup was intended to run for only a month or two, until I can re-download all my old stuff when we get faster internets, which was kind of planned (we have a T1 atm). We didn't do much about that, so I ran my Windows along, downloading all the stuff time-by-time and it worked. Steadier slower, but it worked. Needless to say that I never defragmentated.

The real pain came when my graphiccard broke. I got a new one (nVidia GeForce 9600 GT), that old one didn't like shaders much anyways (as in running very slow) (an ATi X1900 XTX 512) and I'm pretty happy with it.

I didn't remove the ATi driver properly or something and because of that DirectX likes to complain with certain applications, sometimes causing Direct3D no stop functioning and me not being able to change the display-mode until a restart, which takes quite long for my PC, since I didn't take care of my Windows (which Linux does automatically, by the way! And yes I know that Linux is just a kernel and that there might be deviates not doing that, but that's not my point and it doesn't make it invalid).

So yeah, we've at least ordered faster internets. I was hoping for 1024/128 (down/up) kb/s, but the hardware connection (cable 'n shiz) doesn't support more than 384/48 kb/s. So we pay for a 768/96 kb/s (because 256/32 kb/s is too slow and that was the next one), get 384/48 kb/s(, which is still cheaper than right now because of reasons I find to be unneccesary to mention here) and when the cable connection shiz gets updated we'll have even faster internets

Better than out old one (a 128/16 kb/s) :)

I also bought 3 books, one on C++ programming specific for games (not a C++ starter-book..!), one about OpenGL (because lots of the internet tutorials use OpenGL 1.1 stuff with immediate mode, which is not really good in todays graphiccards) and one big (relative) about AI programming.

Yes I know A FRICKIN HUGE POST, but hey, it was a kind of long story :3

Apologies.

2009-06-11T20:12:00.007+02:00

I've tried my hands on VALVes achievements, since I have access to the SteamWorks SDK. I would like to explain the way I've gone so far without e-mailing VALVe, but I didn't write my name under a NDA for nothing.

Let's just say that I wrote some test-code I mostly copied, which didn't work, edited it, got it compiled but didn't work in-game, tried to fix it, still didn't work, added the achievement to Dreamball (not code), still didn't work, thought that I have the solution, crashed, fixed, didn't work although probably closer to the solution and that's where I'm at now. I'll e-mail VALVe I guess.

The new, upcoming C++0x-Standard for C++ (duh!) is looking fukkin sweet so far. For those who don't know, the x there is to be replaced with the year it's going to be released... and guess what number that will be...

You can easily google up the list of changes; I'm so damn amazed. I'll make use of it for sure! For one in a small game-engine I wanna write with a friend and for a math library I wanna write with two of my friends.

gcc is already implementing the changes and publishing them, as an "experimental C++0x mode".

I've also stubled upon D (again). This time I've taken a closer look. It's official website seems like it's trying to bash the hell out of C++. The examples are like

That's the C++-way: <code> It can't do this and that, it looks ugly, it's unefficient under these circumstances.

That's the D-way: <code> It's easy, but could be better. It works like <description>.

That's another D-way: <code> And it's darn good.

Maybe I'm just picking it up the wrong way, but it sounds really assy. The worst thing is, they're right though.

I'm a C++-programmer by heart, but D just looks really promising. It's like a modern C++ - the syntax is quite alike, because it's goal is making a better C++.

The only thing I'd be worried about are the libraries. There are tons for C/C++, but D? I've read something about limited support for C/C++ libraries though.

It's definetly something I should look into when I don't have big projects on my hand. Can't wait to test it :S

Updated design

2009-06-01T14:22:00.002+02:00

I updated the design a bit:

bigger post-span

slightly bigger post-font

new post-title color :D

And I want to take a bit more space for my posts themselves, meaning I won't only use single new lines, but also double new lines to format my text for easier readability.

And I also want to loose a small word on Google Wave. Plain awesome; can't wait. Another step in taking over the internets :) In Google I trust.

Sluggish me

2009-05-31T17:14:00.006+02:00

So I've been quite unproductive the last month. I just didn't have motivation to do anything.

I watched some series, played some small games (because bigger ones make my PC crash and I want >T1 internets before reinstalling my computer).

But between all that I sometimes tried to pull myself together to do some shit. Which worked for about 1h. But in this small timespans I began to port Dreamball to the Beta SDK released by VALVe, featuring a new code-base, which mainly features new additions and some fixes. Needless to say that these additions only bloat the Dreamball-code as I'll barely use them; but I'll worry about stripping it down later.

I was actually hoping, that this would fix my issue I had with the HUD (=Heads up display). I remember removing it by setting all so called HiddenBits, as we didn't need a health-meter or crosshair or whatever. But when I tried to add a HUD element it didn't work ofcourse. After I reverted the HiddenBits to show all elements, there was still no HUD. Completly nothing, no crosshair, not my own. And I couldn't find the reason.

While porting, I added some code to call some of VALVes player-functions, hoping this would fix the HUD in case they need to be called for it to work.

After I was finished merging all the code, I thought to myself that I could just use the newer version (2008, not 2010) of Visual Studio, the program I use to code, as some adaptions were made. Mostly an easy job. I wanted to make a function to save screenshots in the PNG-format at some point, which caused the linker to go crazy and I tried to fix it, but then, after some time, remembered that this code was WIP and didn't work at all. So I commented it out; I might get back on that somewhen, because Targas are just not up-to-date and jpeg useses visible compression.

The build crashed, and the output from the dlls with release-configuration were not enough to track down the error. So I had to compile dlls with the debug-configuration, which stuff more debugging info in the dlls for the cost of being bigger and slower. The newer version of VS (=Visual Studio) is however known to cause problems with the debug-configuration, so my linker complained a lot. Being kinda perfectios I wanted the build to finish with 0 warnings, as well as 0 errors. I spend quite some time with that, because I was watching some show while doing this, till I thought "It's just a debug-build. Two small warnings per dll don't do any harm."

I could then debug, fix the error and could play. To see that respawning was totally broken. The marble would disappaer, but re-appear when jumping, so the camera could follow a bit, but then disappear again after a short while, although the calculations were done, e.g. if it would disappear on top of the ledge and I'd wait a little to then jump, it would re-appear in the middle or some way down.

I didn't know what was going on and thought, maybe the client and the server don't work in harmony here and I created a small command to output the marbles current position on the server and the client, but there was only a minimal and expected difference.

I still don't quite know what caused this, but I fixed it by removing the calls to VALVes player class which I had forgotten about. It didn't fix the HUD by the way.

So my last thing to do then (today, about 4:30AM) was suddenly seeing that I didn't fucking set the size of my HUD-element. DAMN! But at least it works now :)

Besides that big, mean paragraph up there I've also got more down with assembly, realizing that it's actually dead boring to code stuff in it. It's good to know how it works, but that's all I need I guess.

I'm thinking about taking singing lessons, training my normal voice and also grunting. But it's not 100% certain that I will.

That's enough text for today. I wanna eat supper.

myAVR board MK1 LPT

2009-05-06T17:27:00.004+02:00

It's a microcontroller and I got one for computer science in school.

To be precise, we bought one of that for each one of our class.

Two days ago (Monday) we had our first lesson with that, and it was to simply test its functionality. We didn't test it completly though. But I know that all my ports (D, B, C), all LEDs, the buzzer and the two buttons work (and the processor, a Atmel Mega 8, works too of course).

The first program I made by myself is a ... err ... buzzer tone generator. It simply creates a static tone, getting quadratic lower on each pin down (6 pins all in all). The next addition are the two buttons to make even lower tones, so it's now 6*4 (=24) in total.

This is achieved by simply having a counter and putting its output to one of the ports. You have to know how numbers in the dual-number-system are working to understand that. Basically the first digit changes every clock, the second every two clocks, the third every fourth and so on.

The buttons simply add a predefined delay.

The bigger the pause between the signals, which are sent out to the port where you connect the buzzer to, the lower the tone will be.

I'd post my program here, but I doubt that anyone reading this blog would be interested in it or have any use for it.

Next I'm trying to make a little crappy game, where you have to press a button fast enough.

EDIT:

Done, took me about 2 damn hours! And it's crappy. But I learned something :)