Musings of an Engineer

Yes, yesterday was officially Pi day (3/14), but it’s 2 AM on the 15th, so technically its not Pi day anymore.

Yesterday a few notable things happened, Apple put their first full length movie on iTunes, Disney’s High School Musical (for $2.99), then took it down, then put it back up (for $9.99). I suppose they haven’t quite worked out all of the kinks in the movie system yet. I don’t know about you, but 10 dollars for a 400 x 250 pixel movie? Yikes… don’t think so.

More news today, and a FOTP:So, browsing digg.com and I noticed an article about a programming language called KPL, which stands for Kids Programming Language. This will allow even the most novice programmer be able to pick up an IDE and just start writing readable code that can do things such as manipulate sprites, and 3D applications in 100 lines or less! I’ve dev’ed in Java before, and this is an amazing feat. Currently KPL is only in version 1, and version 2 is only in alpha, but it is roughly 10 times faster for certain executions. This looks very promising for high schools in the future. The whole idea behind the project was to make programming an almost instantaneous gratifying experience, and I think that goal has been met.

“Hype is the awkward and desperate attempt to convince journalists that what you’ve made is worth the misery of having to review it.” -Federico Fellini

Well, two days ago, Apple had a press conference to show off the new products. Lots of hype was circling the convention, and Apple flew people in from many parts of the country just to see these ’new’ products. Images surfaced on the internet about 2 weeks ago that were supposedly leaked from the Apple factory showing a full sized iPod video. Later then, a video showing someone creating the ‘image’ with photography and Photoshop. However, there were discrepancies between the actual image and the image in the video, so this gave new hope to the image actually being a leak. Then the day before the Apple announcement, AOTS admitted to creating the video of the faked image, and I believe the original also… “Way too meta…”

I ran across this on a link from Entensity.net

Roses are red, Violets are blue, All of my base Are belong to you.

Now on to more pressing issues.

The H2GP project that I have been working on for 9 months should be finished here in the next few months, its just a matter of getting some time to work on it. Battlefield 2 is actually receiving more of my attention than Halo 2 is at the moment, so I might have to make some modifications to the H2GP program to allow it to be more ‘multi-game’ friendly.

Happy New Year. Hope everyone had a good holiday season.

Back to school again, time to reminisce with old friends and attempt to make some new ones. Maybe this semester will be less work… no probably not.

On to more important things. Battlefield 2. If you like FPS and you are one of the elite few that have PC capable of enough FLOPS to cure cancer, this is definitely the game for you. The graphics are ridiculously amazing and the gameplay is addictive. I honestly bought this game, and I don’t buy many games. If you have played any of the Battlefield Series games and liked them, and your PC is one heck of a workhorse, then pick up this game.

Recently I’ve rediscovered why I love video games so much, definitely kickin’ it back to the classics when you talk about Sonic and Mario. Halo 2 is a great game, but why play it when you could be experiencing the fast paced action and catchy tunes of Sonic the Hedgehog! Yes, it’s true, I do occasionally give up my Xbox controller to sit at my PC and emulate a system long past, but it’s still surprising how much fun these games actually are. Anyways, I posted some of screen shots from the master system, just to show off the gorgeous 16bit graphics of the early 90’s. (The game music really is catchy, it just gets stuck in your head.)

In my next update I will post some of the software that makes my life easier and also a bit fun! I’ll be doing this from time to time and hopefully others will benefit from this. Any-who, signing out from the mobile blog. -Tom

Today is my first real post, I think after I get some actual posts to the blog, I will delete the test posts, but for now they will stay.

I found a pretty intereting contraption online the other day, and decided to share it. It’s called the “Death Ray”. This giant thing was made with mirrors that are aligned to +-0.5 degrees! When it catches a glimpse of sun, it can melt just about anything they throw at it.

w00t! Mobile posting is amazing!

-Tom

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First Post, just to test…