So, I guess this is my first post of 2007. The year so far has been a good one! I started my co-op position and its going quite well. The job can be fairly boring sometimes, however so far there have been quite a few challenges. I’m living with my cousin and his wife, and I am eternally grateful for them taking me in, room and board in the Cleveland area is way expensive! I usually am home on the weekends to see my family and catch up on the household chore-like things. It has been very cold lately, like single digits and below with the wind chill. Mark Nolan says “Arctic Air” from Canada has come down to visit… I don’t care much for Canada’s air.
I like to check in on my Linux box/Blog sometimes, I’m still surprised how well my site performs. I really hope over the next few years to learn more about PHP applications, and MySQL databases. Maybe I can write a WP Plugin or even help with development someday! My friend Ben is learning ASP .NET at work, and he is excited about that. We’re just a bunch of geeks!
I want to start my Photo365 project pretty soon, hopefully before 2008! I guess that will happen soon enough!
Stay tuned for more updates soon!
I found a funny blog article about programmers and programs being depicted in Hollywood Films. It’s pretty much true, I just wish movies didn’t depict computers in such a naive and complex way. Alwell…
10. Most code is not inherently cross platform
Remember in Independence Day when whatshisface-math-guy writes a virus that works on both his apple laptop AND an alien mothership? Bullshit!
If real life were like film I’d be able to port wordpress to my toaster using a cat5 cable and a bag of glitter.
What code DOESN’T do in real life (that it does in the movies)
I just really finished setting up the new server. This is a Intel Pentium 4, 512MB RAM, 40GB HDD running Apache2, PHP 5 and MySQL in Ubuntu. It was a challenge to set it up, just like the first time on the ol’ K6, but was certainly worth the time and effort. I always learn a lot when I spend some time with my servers. Anyways, I will post some more interesting content soon, but for now I am just troubleshoot/optimizing my server and doing homework… I think I might be having a little problem with gZip in Apache, so if you notice weird behavior like you have to load the page twice before it shows or anything like that, let me know. Now… if I could only get some more upstream bandwidth… Alwell. Peace out!
I’ve been pretty busy with programming projects for school lately, and I thought I would share them. They are nothing to fancy, just something to play with and look at. The first program is a CAD style program, it allows you to draw different specified objects, move them, change colors, etc… It was to practice GUI and Inheritance in Java. The second program is a simple OpenGL program that displays a textured rectangle on the screen and moves it around using a sine function. It will grow if you right-click it, and shrink if you left-click it.
The source is included with the OpenGL program, but if you are interested in the source for the CAD program, contact me. Both programs are pictured below, CAD program on the left, and OpenGL on the right. By the way, the quote in the title is from my professor that teaches both my programming classes. He’s an awesome teacher.
A couple weeks ago I got the opportunity (finally) to play the new Battlefield game’s demo, BF:2142. It is created with the same engine as its predecessor, and is an OK game. BF2 has, for some unknown reason, progressively run slower and slower on my computer. And I seem to not be alone by checking some of the Battlefield forums occasionally. 2142 also runs fairly slow on medium-low graphic settings… Needless to say, I am disappointed. Mostly, because the game runs like crap-o-la on my machine, and it probably shouldn’t.
Some have griped that 2142 is merely a large “mod” for BF2, which is I suppose, a valid argument. Hopefully some of the bugs from BF2 will be gone, but I would have really liked to see this game in a different light than what it has shown so far. I will have to say, I have no idea why a company would push a demo of a product the way they did. The two days that I got on to play the demo, the master server probably kicked me 8 times. Not to mention, 3 times it took over 5 minutes to login or time-out. If the demo is supposed to represent the final game, I sure as hell wouldn’t buy it, but Alex says that the game is better than how the demo played… Sometimes it feels like good games are just too few and far between.
So just browsing digg, and found an interesting article about a fellow Ubuntu user.
“After a rather fine night out on the town, I came home in a rather inebriated state. Put the live disc in, and recklessly choose to install Ubuntu, and did so by wiping the entire hard drive (previously XP). This sort of switch has sortof thrown me in at the deep end, but I have no regrets and has to be one of the best drunken decisions I have ever taken…”
Ubuntu: It’s so easy to install, you can do it when you’re three sheets to the wind. Just goes to show how easy the install for Ubuntu really is.
On a completely different note, there’s a browser based MMO, called Travian, that I’ve been playing, and its pretty dang cool. Maybe some of you remember playing “Kings of Chaos” and “Dark Throne”, well this game is similar, but it beats the pants off of both of them. It’s a good way to be able to passively game, while not spending more than an 15 minutes to an half-hour a day playing. Of course you could play it more, but there is only so much you can do at the “passive pace” the game plays at. If you do decide to play, I’m on Server 2 in the South-East area.
Last week I had a project to do for my Computer Graphics class. This project required me to generate an image using ray tracing with POV-Ray, and provide animation for it. It wasn’t very hard, and it is a really neat way do render some 3D graphics quite quickly, with fairly little code required. Some of the images generated by POV-Ray are really amazing.
More POV-Ray Renders:
So, sometimes websites are kinda frustrating… I suppose partially because I don’t completely understand php, html, javascript, AJAX, css, Linux apps, etc… But, I suppose learning can be fun, but it can also be demanding. Especially when you know what you want, but can’t figure out how to achieve it.
Anyways, a few changes to the site. Lightbox now works correctly, AJAXWP is no longer integrated, due to too many problems it was causing, but the pages will fade in if you have a Mozilla based browser.
Also, someone used the contact form, but due to the way it was setup on the server, Gmail put it into my spam folder, and it was deleted… So if whoever did try to contact me would submit again, that would be great.
And as always, if you notice something broken or looking odd, please contact me.
