GoneWacko’s Blog

LAN Party!

Even though for a few hours it looked like black ice was going to ruin all the fun, I still managed to get to my classmate’s house yesterday in order to have a small LAN party (which I spoke of a week ago or so)

So far it’s quite fun. Just hanging around, talking, playing a game, leeching, and watch a movie or two.

I was happy to conclude that Rob’s parents appear to be very kind and open-minded people with a good sense of humour, which is always a good thing. Plus Rob’s mom prepared a bloody good lasagna

As said, day one basically turned out to be boring until around 1:00 PM when we decided to get in the car. We originally planned driving to Silvolde - the town Rob lives in - at 12:00 AM, but the black ice hadn’t quite thawed yet by then. Then, when we arrived here, it took some time to get installed (having brought my PC and laptop + every peripheral device and cable apart from my switch), but that wasn’t a big deal. Rob cleaned up his computer-room just for the occasion. The room really lends itself to small-scale LAN parties. There are plenty of wallsockets along the… wall.
Just as I was putting the final touches on getting myself installed there, Rob’s friend Roel arrived with his laptop to join us.

Day one was especially fun in the evening, when we started to drink beer (Grolsch). We had mainly had energy drinks before then, so I had very little trouble staying awake all night (yay for having the exact same drink as red bull for only 25 eurocents per can :)). Around 6:00 AM Rob and Roel decided to get some sleep, but I thought I’d be able to stay awake with ease.
I did in fact stay awake, but I did somewhat regret my decision around 8:00 AM when I did get a bit tired.
At least I’ll sleep well tonight, which is a good thing because we have to be at school Friday morning for the introduction to our next semester and the first project it brings. Then when that’s over (around 10:35 AM), we’ll probably end up going to the swimming pool.

And then I’ll be on my school’s open day, also together with Rob, which is where my parents will pick me up again.

Programming some stuff

I played some Zuma Deluxe and Atlantis the other day. Zylom/PopCap games are great to play when you’re bored.
So anyway, being a programmer, I will usually wonder how they achieve certain features in games/applications (and usually I will succeed in thinking of a way).

So while playing Zuma I wondered how they defined levels. After getting bored of Zuma, I decided to try out an easy theory I had on how to make the Zuma levels.

I had made my first AWT/Swing+ application the day before, so I decided to try my theory in Java, so that I would learn more about java and especially writing GUI applications in the process of testing my theory. What was my theory, you ask? Well, just before I tell you, I’ll remind you that it’s a very very plain solution to the ‘problem’. My theory was that they just defined a lot of points (AKA combinations of X and Y coordinates) and the balls would basically move along the track that these points formed.

Click to Enlarge

In the end my test was quite successfull. Basically, you draw the track in the application using the mouse, and then you can play the ‘animation’ which simply means it loops through all the nodes and draws a circle around them. (Of course the example image contains very few nodes which are very spread out, to make it clearer)

Shortly before I finished my application I already knew what my second Zuma Theory was going to be: instead of having nodes every pixel or so, it could also be done with less nodes, and having the code that moves the balls make the balls move in a nice curve.

Anyhow, below are my observations:

• There does not appear to be a simple Image component in Swing. I had to rip one off an example in one of my schoolbooks, Objects First With Java - A practical introduction using BleuJ. Furthermore, there are draw methods for the shapes of all, err… shapes and sizes. However I couldn’t find any methods for drawing a single pixel. Furthermore furthermore, setting the context color to white and drawing a filled rectangle as large as the ImagePanel component, resulted in a the component being filled with black. Suffice to say, drawing stuff was the biggest challenge.
• Eclipse SDK really is a very good IDE. I mainly had experience with it’s code editor (which rocks), but while writing my little program I noticed some other nice features, features of which I had already figured that they’d exist, but not how easy they were to use. For example, to respond to the mouse movements and clicks, I implemented the MouseListener and MouseMotionListener interfaces. Instead of looking up which methods to implement, I could just add the interface to the ‘implements clause’ - as I’ve dubbed it - and then go to Source->Override/Implement Methods... There you can select which interfaces to implement. Not only this, but it apparently also detects which interfaces or even which individual methods of interfaces are not yet implemented, and automatically checks their checkboxes. Long story short, it takes exactly three clicks to implement an interface and all of it’s methods.
• I spent around 30 minutes looking at my code, trying to find out why my ImagePanel had disappeared even though I hadn’t edited any of the GUI code apart from adding another button.
  In the end the conclusion was that it is not wise to have a BorderLayout layout manager with some components in it and to add a label to the contentPane without specifying where in the BorderLayout it should appear. Apparently the default is BorderLayout.CENTER, which is where my ImagePanel was. In the process of adding the extra button, I also created a JPanel with a FlowLayout, and placed the buttons in said panel. In the refactoring process I also accidentally removed the BorderPanel.NORTH parameter from the label’s contentPane.Add(); call. Because the label was still being added to the BorderPanel however, it basically ‘overdrew’ the ImagePanel.
• Mistaking drawRectangle(int x, int y, int width, int height); for drawRectangle(int x1, int y1, int x2, int y2); is the recipe for an unexpected but cool and funny effect. When dragging the from the top-left to the bottom-right, for instance, you create a ‘tunnel’ of rectangles. This also took me some time to figure out. I blame Eclipse in this case. It’s Code Completion feature does not actually say width and height but it’ll instead name all the arguments arg0, arg1, arg2, etc… It doesn’t hurt to look at the Java API, even when you have code completion.

Now, I’m sure there are only a few people out there who read my blog and understood a word of what I just wrote, but I felt like blogging this. One of the reasons for it was that the Planet TT-Forums RSS feed is getting smaller and smaller because only 1 person blogged anything during the last 48 hours.

Plans for the coming week

So now I’ll have a holiday until next week’s friday, when my first project kicks off with a two hour long introduction.

As it looks at the moment I’ll be having a small LAN party on Wednesday-Thursday and then a birthday celebration on Friday, all at the same person’s house.

Then, on the Saturday after that, I’ll probably be helping at my College’s open day, telling people how luverly the school is and what I’ve made during my game course. And no it’s not sarcasm.

Until that time I’ll probably tweak my game so it’ll look cooler at the open day, and I’ll try to finish projects I still had to finish.

Semester’s End cont.

I can breathe easily again.
I got an email from my Database Application teacher that I passed the subject. Ding ding ding! 7,5 more credits for my foundation course.
Now all I’ll have to worry about is the possibility of having to come to an assignment for the subject ‘Game’ but that’s not really a problem.

Furthermore, my T-Shirt finally arrived today. Dutch ISP XS4ALL gave away 5000 T-Shirts to celebrate the fact that they finally won a legal battle against the church of scientology after 10 years. Yay for free T-Shirts!
A classmate of mine has also ordered one so we might end up wearing it on the same day for the sake of comedy and confusion. Furthermore it’ll show off our geekness like nothing else.

Semester’s End

Aaaand another semester comes to an end.

The last days of a semester are usually the busiest ones. It all starts with the deadline. You suddenly notice how your assignment is anything but finished and you have to hand it in in two days.

So far I’ve had two semesters (I’m in my first year) and in both cases I’ve worked the entire night on the day before the deadline. So I had 3,5 hours of sleep Thursday night morning.

But now everything’s been presented/handed in and I can relax.

If only that was true.
Because now there’s still a chance I have to come on an assessment, as I happen to have explained at last semester’s end.
If I indeed have to come to an assessment I’ll pretty much be screwed, I think, because I had quite a bit of trouble figuring out MS Access… What a crappy piece of software that is

What’s fun though is that next week I’ll only have to go to school on Tuesday - if I have to come to an assessment - and the week after that my new semester starts, but the first lesson is on Friday :O

So I technically have a 2 week holiday again now.

Night of Fire!

Some guy gave me this link on IRC the other day:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=426566504844044258

I quote the page:

This is a cover of the well-known eurobeat hit NIGHT OF FIRE, by the HINOI Team, and Korikki. Korikki is a wrestler guy. It’s… odd.

The girls are actually quite hot.
And then some other guy told me today that they’re all loli’s (AKA underage)

Bored

Right. It’s 3:23 AM, I’m the opposite of fast asleep and I’m bored.
I couldn’t sleep so I gave up and took my laptop.

But now I don’t know what to do!
I can’t play World of Warcraft because the servers are down for weekly maintainance. I tried to play a game of TTD but I failed at that too. And now I’m running out of options

Just thought I’d share it with you.

More Hacking

Did some more hacking around just now.

I pretty much finished the top navigational bar. As you can see it now has a ‘Home’ link before the ‘Blog’ one. In fact, you’ll probably have been greeted by the placeholder telling you to go here!
I’ve moved the blog to http://blog.gonewacko.com/, so be sure to update your bookmarks if you only want to check my blog.

The top ‘navbar’ as I’ve dubbed it, is actually generated by a tiny php script that gets all the links from a database. This way I don’t have to go through too much fuss if I want to add new pages (or sections, as I’ve started calling them, to distinguish them from wordpress ‘pages’).
I’m still thinking of a good way to make it highlight the ‘active’ page, but this is not really a high priority task.

So, what’s planned for the site?
Firstly, the ‘About Me’ page will probably be moved to it’s own section.
I will also make the suggested portfolio section, with a list of things I’ve made or worked on; Possibly with the option of click for more detailed information.
I also plan to perhaps do some longer rantings or columns, if you will, every now and then, when I have stuff to whine about or if I have things I want to give my opinion on. I’m not sure if I’ll actually do that, though, because I don’t know if I’d actually be good enough at writing anything worthwhile.

I’m still open for suggestions and feedback

Hacking around

So here I am, lying in bed with my laptop, being bored.

I decided to get started on hacking around in the blog’s theme so I could possibly turn it into my Website’s design as well.
I’m not 100% sure if this would be allowed under the terms of the GPL license, but I’m going to give it a go anyhow; I think I’ll try making my own design not too long afterwards in the first place.

As said, I started with some basic hacking around. I moved the list of Pages from the top navigational bar to the sidebar (notice how the link to the About Me page has moved to the sidebar).

I plan to use the navigational bar at the top of the page for the actual site navigation.
Further more I plan to fix some other nuisances while I am at it. For example, this theme does not list links in their own categories but instead just lists them all and places the ‘Blogroll’ header above the list; Even when there isn’t even a link category called Blogroll.

Oh, and I upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 again, just for the heck of it.
Turned off the WYSIWYG editor first thing. Annoying little bugger.

GoneWacko’s grand day out

Last saturday I went to family in the south of the Netherlands, in the city of Venlo, to celebrate new year’s eve.
I had taken my laptop along, because you never know when you might want to show the stuff you did for school or whatever. Plus I have VNC- and FTP-servers running on my PC, so I can do virtually anything from anywhere in the world.
Anyhow, on Sunday we headed back to Ede, which is where I live, in the middle of the Netherlands (the topographical center of the Netherlands lies within Ede’s municipality, I believe).

Today I take out my laptop because I had to check something for school and, wouldn’t you know it, I conclude that my power supply is still in Venlo…

Thinking of the various solutions to my problem, I find out that the quickest and above all cheapest way is to just go to Venlo by train and pick it up. (I can travel by train for free outside of the weekends because I’m a student)
It’s times like these when I’m happy that the Netherlands are so very tiny.
I got on a train in Ede at 4:45 PM. At 6:20 PM I was in the south of the Netherlands. This is quite a bit of time, but it’s mainly because:

• I had to transfer to a different train, which meant waiting for 30 minutes.
• I was in a train that stopped at every station along the tracks.

So anyways, one moment I’m in my hometown, the other moment I’m in the city my family lives in - family which I see maybe once or twice a year.
I had dinner over at their place, and then I went back home.

Usually when I go to family, it was planned quite a few weeks in advance. However, today, I just went without any planning or anything (after discussing it with my nephew, over MSN). That plus the fact that I had never travelled there by train before (as far as I can recall at least), made it an interesting experience.

Still, in total I did travel about 2×90 kilometers (back and forth, or actually forth and back). The trains went from Ede to Arnhem to Nijmegen to Venlo, which is an interesting route because the only traintrips I usually undertake are from Ede to Arnhem, where my school is.

Plans for the site

The About Me page was an interesting addition recently, and it has sparked my interest. I’m thinking about other things to add to the site, apart from the blog.

Not only am I wondering about the actual new content, I am also looking at various ways to ‘present’ the page.

I could choose for a similar solution as Sionide, in which case the website is completely ‘detached’ from the blog.
Or I could go for Owen’s solution, in which case the blog is somehow embedded into the page design.

Currently I’m leaning towards the latter solution. Although, funilly enough, I do like what Sionide’s done to his page. The colors are very neat. This is usually my biggest problem; Finding colors. (And then when I have some nice colors, I mess up the design anyhow)
I am already planning on hacking around a bit - or heavily, rather - in this blog’s theme so I might as well try to make it into my website’s theme.

Anyhow, I’m looking for suggestions and ideas concerning the various things I could add (I’ve got some ideas myself already) and how to implement it all. Give me your input!

Resolutions

Well, here’s my current list of new year’s resolutions.

• 1280 × 1024 and 1680 × 1050 (Ha. Ha.)
• Have my 18th birthday - in good health, too
• Get rich
• Try to finish stuff quicker

Quite an elaborate list, isn’t it?

The first two resolutions need no explaining; I want to live to see my 18th birthday (and, preferably, some 70-80 years after that) and I wouldn’t mind getting rich.

However, the third resolution I wish to elaborate on (briefly).
Currently I still have to finish a - quite simple - project for a friend/classmate of mine. I still have to convert an application into a webapplication.

I am a lazy bastard, however, and I have taken very long breaks from coding the thing.
Now I think I’m about 60% done with the actual code, after which I may or may not decide to polish it up and/or apply some more style to the thing.
I’ve decided to spend more time on this particular project and any projects that may follow, because I’d like to make a few bucks, and naturally I won’t get/don’t deserve a single penny if I slack.

Also there’s another reason to work on projects more, even though it may seem a little… paradoxical.
If I spend more time on projects, I’ll have more time to work on stuff I want to make for myself. This is of course strange because if I do not work on the projects, I’ll have even more time.
However, every time I feel like coding something, my conscience will tell me I still have other projects to work on.

On another note, I used the word ‘elaborate’ twice in this post, with two different meanings (or actually, I think the meanings are the similar)

Happy New Year!

I wish to wish you all a happy new year.
Have a good 2006

I’m not actually writing this at the moment, but I’ve written it in advance, so you’ll have to wait for any interesting stories about New Years Eve.

Woo!