GoneWacko’s Blog

New website idea

A few days ago now, I couldn’t sleep (due to the consumption of copious amounts of Pepsi), so I just lay in bed reading some literature on C++ and thinking about random things. One of these random things was the following:

“Hmm, interesting how, as a programmer, I tend to look at most aspects in life from a very logical point of view” (Obligatory xkcd reference).

By this, I mean that I often find myself thinking in terms of computer logic when I think about how things work or happen. (This sounds so much geekier than it really is. I hope.)

As I continued to philosophize on the subject, I realized that it might perhaps make interesting subject matter for some blog posts or articles.
I then wondered if a domain name like lifeasaprogrammer.com, asaprogrammer.com, likeaprogrammer.com and/or ofaprogrammer.com would still be available. (This is when I realized I really should invest in a UMPC, because now I had to get out of bed and switch on my PC to check this…)

As it turns out, these domain names were indeed still up for grabs, so I very impulsively decided to order all those domain names plus their .net equivalents… They’re dirt cheap anyway

Right now the idea is to have a blog-like site on there, where I talk about all sorts of stuff that keeps me occupied as a programmer. What I’m writing on, which technologies I’m stoked about, that sort of stuff. But obviously I’ll also want to write about other aspects of life from the programmers point of view, because that’s what the site is called.

Especially the asaprogrammer and likeaprogrammer.com domain names are pretty sweet, because I can also make sections for things like tutorials (code.likeaprogrammer.com) and virtually anything else I can think of.

I also have a passion for such things as movies and games, so if I want, I can pretty easily create reviews.ofaprogrammer.com where I would review these things. The programmer aspect of it kind of gets lost there, though.

I still have a lot of pondering and designing to do though. What section do I want there? Will I use an existing CMS like WordPress or will I roll out my own using something like Django? What will my site look like?

In the end it very well may never really kick off. It all depends on whether I feel I can come up with something that is actually going to be worth reading. Because if the site would see as many visitors as this one does, then I really don’t think I should bother

Upgrade plans

Considering that my current machine is OVER 9000 over 1.5 years old already, it’s obvious that it’s in dire need of upgrading. That GeForce 8800 GTX just won’t do!

So I’ve been scheming about my upgrade plans for some time now, and today I decided to take a preliminary look at what it might cost to put my plans into fruition. I’m not entirely sure if I am going to go ahead with these upgrades; I have to take a look if there is no next generation hardware around the corner; If there is, I might actually show a bit of common sense and wait!

A few notes:

• The extra RAM would bring the total RAM to 4GB. Considering how cheap DDR2 RAM is these days, I might also get rid of my current RAM and buy 4GB of speedier memory; This mostly depends on what my motherboard will eat.
• My motherboard has surround sound audio support on board, but I’m considering the option of getting a sexy sound card. I’ve not really looked at what I’d want to buy, though.
• My XBOX 360 is broken, although I should be able to fix it. However, I always had the plan of buying a second XBOX 360, mostly because my original XBOX 360 is running hacked firmware, and I’m not going to risk going online with that one. Furthermore, my parents bought a 46″ Sony Bravia, which is Full HD, so it would be rather nice to have an XBOX with HDMI output so I can attach it to the TV.

With these notes in mind, there are some other items to shove onto the previous list.

Since the 122.20 Euro Creative SB X-FI Xtreme Gamer Fatality Professional is obviously far too cheap to be something I’d buy, I’m also listing a nice little Creative SB X-FI Elite Pro to consider as an alternative.

All in all, this is slightly more than I had originally anticipated, but it’s still well within the amount of money I expect to have earned/earn from my work placement. It’s also slightly ironic to realize that the dual core Geforce 9800 GTX actually costs a good 130 euros less than what I originally paid for my Geforce 8800 GTX! Surely that can’t be right?

Update just now found some information about the new ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 which is supposedly the fastest card available at this time.
I’m assuming nVidia will have something interesting around the corner, so at any rate I’m going to wait with the upgrade until I’ve looked into that matter with greater detail.

Early birthday present

Recently we were talking about teddy bears in #tycoon. It turned out quite many people in the channel actually still had teddy bears. I said I had never had one (which is true; Although I did have various plushies as a child) and that I didn’t understand why so many still had them as (relatively) adult people.

Spencer Bear.
Click for a bigger version.

I may also have said something about setting one on fire if I did still have a teddy bear…

As you may or may not know, I’m turning 20 years old on Friday the 20th of June.
Today someone rang the doorbell, and when I opened it it turned out to be the mail man with a package.

After opening it I found the object you see to the right (unless you’re reading this on planet.tt-forums.net in which case it’s somewhere above this text; Screw you!), together with the note you see below:

The card that came with it. Nice HTML escaping!

Thank you Tenebrae for your gift! And after noticing how incredibly soft it is, I promise not to set it on fire

Twitter

Sander (one of the Dutch guys I’m working with here in Finland) has lately been responsible for getting me to use all sorts of Web 2.0 things that I really shouldn’t be using.

He is not actively telling me to, but in a horrible case of I-want-what-my-peers-have marketing, I find myself signing up to such things as LinkedIn and Twitter.

In the case of the latter service, it has so far not really proven too useful for me, because the only person I follow/following me is Sander. Who I sit next to every day. For 8 hours. And live next door to.

So if anyone is using the aforementioned services, feel free to add me as a buddy or start following me or whatever the action of subscribing to my person is called.

In other news, I STILL don’t have internet at home, even though the two weeks that would be needed to get me connected ended on Tuesday.

Impossible

Jesus fucking Christ, I started playing Guitar Hero 3 on Hard difficulty today and things went okay-ish until I reached Aerosmith - Same Old Song and Dance and Dead Kennedys - Holiday in Cambodja. Not only am I not a particularly big fan of these songs, but they’re also fucking impossible to play. I’ve attempted to play the former song over 40 times now and I still can’t get past even 1/3rd of the song. It’s starting to get so frustration I felt a growing urge to smash the guitar into a wall, but I managed to refrain myself from doing so. There just isn’t anything as annoying as having to play a song you don’t like over and over and over again. It’s so bad that I’m even having trouble typing this because my fingers are so fucked up at the moment.

All of a sudden I see what Yahtzee meant with the steep learning curve. All was fine until I reached these songs after which things suddenly became impossible… Heck the game even gave me a 5G achievement for failing a certain number of times in a row

New laptop and Finland

Last week, my laptop mysteriously died on me. It seems to be under the impression that it’s powered on, even though it’s not (the LED is burning). It’s also acting as if it’s drawing power from a wall socket, even though it’s not (the LED is burning).

So after looking for a nice laptop to replace it with, my dad and I ordered it last Saturday and it arrived today. It’s an HP Pavilion dv9595ed (although these version numbers seem to vary in meaning per country). For info on what’s inside, check the specifications page (In Dutch, but you should be able to make sense of it anyway). You can also check out the product demo flash animation.

Apart from the 2 GHz Centrino Duo and the GeForce 8600M GS (shared memory ) I also quite like the

• Support for 802.11n, which is good because that’s what we’ve got at my home
• 320 GBs worth of hard drive space (5400 rpm)
• Integrated fingerprint reader

Yesterday I received confirmation from my school that I should be going to Finland for my work placement. Woo! There is no concrete assignment yet, but that’s being worked on. I’ll probably go to Finland somewhere around the 18th of February, for about 20 weeks. Exciting stuff!

A new direction

I’ve lately been thinking of going in a different direction with this blog.

Writing about what happens in my life is not really for me. Not necessarily because nothing ever happens, but just because I don’t really realize at the time that it makes for blogging material.
Instead, I think I’ll just blog about anything technology/computer related that I engage in, stumble upon, am excited about or feel like telling people about

While I realize that there’s bound to be a smaller audience for that than for the more generic topic that is my life, I’ve decided not to care for one very good reason:
Nobody actually reads my blog posts NOW, so I don’t have to worry about losing any readers ;). So if I’m going to write for no one but me, why not write about stuff that interests me?

Oh bugger

I recently received my salary for the very first time in my life, so I decided to treat myself to something nice.

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What I went with is a new mobile telephone. Not just any mobile telephone, but a 620 euro mobile telephone: An HTC TyTN II.
I read some good reviews about it so I had been wanting to buy it for some time now.

Of course, I don’t make 620 euros a month (It’s just a part-time job; I’m a full time student), but when combined with a 2-year 22,50 euros/month Vodaphone contract, together with a 9,50 euros/month Unlimited Internet BloX subscription, the phone was ‘only’ 270 euros. (Of course I’m also going to have to spend 32 euros a month for the next two years now :x)

So yeah, I’ll be enjoying my internet whilst on the road from now on, but I’ll also be enjoying the embedded GPS receiver and all the regular PDA-ness such as having a diary and being able to write e-mails.

Unfortunately I am known to be able to screw stuff up quite quickly. I bought the phone yesterday. Yesterday evening was when it went wrong: I ran the pre-installed Windows Live Messenger, and accidentally enabled the option where it syncs the phone’s contact list with the live account’s contact list.

This meant that I suddenly had all my Messenger contacts in my phone’s contact list, which was rather annoying because most of those contacts I don’t exactly call or e-mail (heck I rarely speak to most of them). So I tried disabling the option, only to find that the relevant checkbox was now grayed out (but checked). Silly as I am, I then started deleting all the useless contacts from my mobile phone’s contact list. Which of course meant that all those contacts also got deleted from my Live Messenger contacts.

This means that I now suddenly have some 60 contacts less than I used to. Luckily enough, all my old contacts are still in my ‘Allow to speak to me’ list, so I should be able to get most of them back.
Still, I wasn’t happy with Live Messenger digging itself into Windows Mobile like a friggin rootkit, so I did a hard reset and all was well.

A fun experiment

As any reader of this blog probably already knows: Yes, I’m still alive.
I’ve not blogged in a while because I just couldn’t be arsed, but today I come to you with a post about a little experiment I did.
The information below is rather geeky, perhaps, so if you’re not interested in geeky stuff, consider yourself warned and feel free not to read further

Since my last blog entry, I’ve been to Birmingham and Oxford, I’ve done more driving of cars, I’ve had LAN parties, I’ve been having a long holiday (which is unfortunately coming to an end sometime next week) and a bunch of other things. Today my parents left for Oxford to visit my sister. This means I’ve got the house to myself, which has opened up the opportunity (although really my parents wouldn’t have been in the way if I’d done it earlier).

Earlier today I was downstairs making a sandwich when, far off in the distance, I heard the sound my mIRC plays when someone says my name. This made me realize that it’d be nice if I could be notified of highlights even when I’m downstairs. Quickly a few ideas came up such as having a device which takes my PC’s sound output, broadcasts it wireless to a receiver, which then feeds the sound into the amplifier downstairs.

I don’t actually have such a device though, so I decided to try the next best thing. I looked if there were any loopback sound drivers for Windows that would allow me to take sound output and feed it back to the PC as sound input. After a bit of googling I stumbled across Virtual Audio Cable. This tool does what I want: it creates virtual sound devices which applications can send to and receive from.

Now all I needed to do was broadcast the input over the network to the PC downstairs, which is conveniently located 1 meter from the amplifier. This was easy, all I did was install Icecast and the Winamp Oddcast plugin, told Oddcast to read from the virtual input instead of Winamp’s output, and I was done.
I got the PC downstairs to connect to the Icecast server, hooked it up to the amp using a cable I happened to have in my possession already, and then I was able to enjoy sounds (and music) from my PC upstairs, downstairs!

Unfortunately the Virtual Audio Cable software does cause for a bit of lag (about one third of a second I gather), and of course Icecast streaming means the PC downstairs buffers the sound causing considerable lag.

So although it was a nice experiment, it’s not here to stay

Tomorrow I’m moving my PC downstairs to prepare for a LAN party later this week anyway, so then I can just connect my PC to the amplifier directly.

Yet another domain!

After gonewacko.com and gonewacko.net, I now also am the proud owner of gonewacko.nl!

.nl is the TLD for The Netherlands, if you didn’t know.

On another note, I know I’ve not blogged for Quite Some Time­™. I’d say “I’ll blog sometime soon”, but I’m not going to because for all I know I might be lying! I have no intention to stop blogging, but I don’t really have anything useful to say, either…

The joys of bleeding edge hard- and software

My timing with buying a new PC could have been somewhat better, I suppose.

Because the purchase of my new PC with bleeding edge hardware coincided with the purchase of a bleeding edge version of Windows, I’m asking for a lot of trouble. Most of the problems I’ve had are currently accredited to the rather bad nvidia driver.

A list of stuff that’s gone wrong since building my PC:

• Most computer games crash after a while. I’ve tried the following games: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Supreme Commander, C&C 3 Demo, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. Only GRAW worked without crashes, although I’ve not really stress tested it or anything. Furthermore it’s the least prone to crash because it was bundled with my graphics card. Other annoyances: C&C 3 won’t support Vista 64-bit, so I might end up not being able to play that game at all - unless I install a 32-bit version of Vista as well, which I’m hoping I can get for free through MA3D.com.
• Vista itself has the annoying tendecy to go BSOD on my ass. So far I’ve had a good (or is it bad?) number of BSODs - with different messages:
  • PAGE_FAULT_IN_UNPAGED_AREA - which could mean faulty RAM, if it wasn’t that 6 passes of memtest86+ didn’t result in a single error
  • Unrecoverable hardware error - which could mean anything, but I think/hope it’s nvidia’s fault.
  • System shut down to prevent damage - which could mean anything. I’ve even considered the hardware temperatures, but thanks to the fact that there are plenty of (good) fans in the case, speedfan shows the processor’s cores at around 22°C each, and the System at 45-50 °C.

  The main reason why I’m suspecting nvidia is because the errors only seem to come when I do something with the graphics card, such as playing games.

• One of the hard drives ended up being faulty. Luckily this was not fatal due to the lovely RAID10 setup meaning I could still boot my computer. The hard drive was quickly replaced by the store and now everything seems to be fine.
• Some other stuff such as ASUS software not being vista compatible yet in some/most cases

I’ve taken various steps to try and solve these problems. Firstly, I’m currently verify-and-repair-ing my RAID10 set. It’s currently at 50% and has fixed 37 errors. Secondly, I’ve taken care to look for drivers for pretty much every piece of hardware. I’ve installed some .INF files for Vista to supposedly communicate with my chipset more effectively.
And today some new nvidia beta drivers were released. The changelog doesn’t mention any of the errors I’ve experiened, but I’m going to give it a try anyhow.

Regardless of it crashing a lot, I’m playing Oblivion rather a lot. I had played for some time on my laptop, but the framerate was so tediously low that it wasn’t much fun. The fact that quicksaving is so easy and doesn’t pause the game certainly helps me cope with the frequent crashes. Unfortunately this all also means that I’ve not yet played supreme commander online with anyone yet - the constant crashes wouldn’t make it any fun.

Got Milk?

I did.

But then I accidentally threw it all over my laptop.

Fuck.
Stupid as I am, I actually turned it on again not too long afterwards, when I had let the milk seep out and cleaned the surface with toiletpaper.

I got nice flashy artifacts all over my monitor.
Then I quickly switched it off.

Safe to say I think I’m fucked now.
Also, the timing could hardly be worse: I just spent all of my savings meant for spending on computers on my new PC.
I’m only in luck that I now have a week long holiday and thus have time to sort things out if I have to.

Also, the hard drive - of which I have no backups - seems to have survived.

As the Dutch slogan goes: “Melk is goed voor elk”, which translates to as much as “Milk is good for everyone”.
I hereby beg to differ.

First driving lesson and Phase 3

My first driving lesson

was today. I was pretty nervous before the ride, I was somewhat nervous during the ride, and, ironically, I was pretty nervous again after the ride.

I personally was pretty negative about my driving in the sense that things went quite differently from how I expected them to go.
However, the instructor seemed pretty positive about my performance, especially because I had zilch previous experience.

Things to not do while driving:

• Put the brakepedal to the metal when the instructor says ‘brake very lightly’
• Look at your shiftstick when you’re shifting gears, resulting in you nearly driving into parked cars constantly
• Forget to considering anyone coming from your right

Amongst various other things.

It’s also quite embarrassing when you’re in the middle of a busy road and you don’t have any gear selected.
Furthermore, this was a potentially dangerous situation for *someone*:
A car is parked on the side of a busy road, with the driver standing on the road at the driver’s side of the car. A bus is parked at the bus stop on the other side of the road.
I try to overtake the parked car, nearly drive into him because I’m not used to the car’s dimensions, and then the bus starts driving away.
Safe to say it was a tight fit and the instructor had to help me steer that one. I think it had something to do with the fact that I had only been driving for 5 minutes at the time. I was happy I was even moving at all :O.

Phase 3 of operation “New Computer”

So I changed some minor stuff.
Basically I decided to hold off on two of the hard drives for now. The money I save by doing so I shall use for two important components for a good gaming machine, or in fact any PC:

• The power supply unit. I chose the Zalman ZM600-HP, mainly because it was the most popular item on tweakers.net for the ‘PSU’ category
• The operating system. I’ve decided to go with Windows Vista Ultimate, UK, 64-bit. The OEM version costs a mere *cough* 160 euros. I would actually have most of the stuff I’d need if I went with Vista Home Premium (who wouldn’t?), but I’ve been using vista ultimate on my laptop for quite a while now and I would probably get annoyed if anything I was used to was missing on my PC.

When I have money again, I’ll buy two more hard drives together with a proper RAID card, the on board RAID is sufficient (for now?), but a separate RAID card with separate RAM should in theory boost it all up a bit more.

Operation “New Computer”, Phase 2

So yeah, 1965 euros wasn’t expensive enough…

Major changes:

• Faster RAM (CL4 instead of CL5)
• Quad-core processor instead of dual-core
• More hard drives to allow for better RAID setup.
• Added a case to the equation

I like it, and I can afford it, if I also count the PSU, CPU Fan and possibly a new keyboard.

Also, yes I am crazy…

Operation “New Computer”, Phase 1

Recently I went ahead and used the Tweakers.net Pricewatch (which is a database of the hardware prices at many many Dutch/Belgian (web)stores) to compile a new computer. What I basically did was check to see how much money the system that was being recommended by the PC gaming magazine I read (PCGameplay) as a High-end gaming machine.

The price is around 2000 euros, which means I can just about afford it now!

Of course, one has to note that I might go with smaller-but-faster hard drives, because I already have 920 GB of storage on my linux machine anyway, and that it currently features 4 GB of RAM which is nice and certainly an end goal, but not something that I would want to buy right away. The 300+ euros I save by going with 2 GB of RAM for now could be used to buy a better processor (Quad core as I’m currently envisioning it), amongst other options.

I’m not too good with hardware to be honest, I can tell when something is good, but for example I don’t know much about the tradeoffs between two high end pieces of hardware.
Luckily I have friends who know more about it.

Of course this price does not include the PSU, case, DVD-ROM drive(s), etc. But that shouldn’t cost too much more.
I’m also still wanting a good sound card (as in 7.1 surround sound would be nice) and a new monitor, but there’s less of a priority on those. I just hope I can find a job as a programmer sometime in the not-to-far-away future so I can make some cash

Stuff.

‘Stuff.’, Probably the best title I ever thought of.

Well then, what’s been happening:

• I (barely) passed the first of two blocks of my current semester. The fact that I ended up having a crapload of work to do on the last day - due to my highly developed skill of postponing stuff - and finding out I didn’t make one of the assignments, didn’t help. After a so-called reparationassignment to fix my portfolio, I passed and now get to work on the project, where we’ll be making a game with 32 people.
• 
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  SecureW2 works with Windows Vista now, which means the wireless network at school will also work for me. Thus, I installed Vista again on my laptop to see how long I can bare with the annoying security warnings. I can certainly verify that it seems to be working :).

• I had some other stuff that I was going to talk about, but I forgot what it was, so I can’t talk about it. Bawwww.

And that was that. I’ll try to think of stuff to write about, soon.

Update: It just so happens that I managed to figure out how to disable what is apparently called UAC. No more stupid security warnings

Website form usability

For some weeks now I’ve been using Linux, exclusively. Everything works fine - Music, Movies, DVDs, Games (by using Cedega), etc. So there’s no reason for me to go back to Windows.

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I’m currently using the XFCE Desktop Manager because it’s somewhat GNOME-like without being bloated and made for complete noobs. I’m currently using a black colour theme (”XFCE Dusk”), just because I like it. Plus it looks good with my xterm colours (on display in the terminal at the top-right corner of the screenshot).

One thing that is somewhat annoying is that firefox also adopts these theme colours for its interface elements. I guess this can be solved by using a firefox theme, but I like the way it looks. The only annoyance about it is that form elements on websites also get the GTK theme’s look - black background, white text. This does not always (rarely, in fact) work out.

I’m suddenly finding out that a lot of webdesigners are doing a half-assed job at designing websites. Lately I’ve been focussing on usability of websites quite a bit, because two out of four people in RBTS are visually impaired, and thus we will be very good at making websites that are accessible.
Now, back to my rant. It seems that there are too many webdesigners out there that live by a rule of thumb: “If it looks good on my screen, it looks good everywhere“. Apparently the way to make a form element look good is to specify the background colour for it. I’ve come across many form elements where my white text looks hideous on the form element’s background. However, white backgrounds take the cake.

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Let’s look at Owen’s blog (sorry Owen ;)). When I want to comment on his blog, I have to fill in some information.
For some silly reason, the first input box is not themed. I remember that, on a default Windows XP theme, this looks okay. But in my case, it doesn’t fit in with the website’s style at all.
The worst are the other input boxes, however. These were given a white background colour, but the foreground colour was not specified. Why is this a problem? Because the theme’s default colours are used unless the stylesheet specifies a different color. In my case, this default colour is… White.
The screenshot (click the image so you know what I’m talking about) features a completely filled out form. You just can’t see it.
The only way to check what you typed was by selecting the text so it gets highlighted.

Because it’s impossible to get everyone on the planet to fix their stylesheets (although I think I will be sending e-mails to any large and/or well-known site because I think it’s just plain stupid) I guess I’ll try writing a chickenfoot (warning, looooong video (Google TechTalks, great stuff)) script that injects some better CSS for forms.

Probably not the most fascinating blog entry, but I felt like ranting about it. Although I’m not very good at doing so.

What happens when I’m bored

I end up making a javascript-powered sudoku thing.
Although it’s not quite done yet (it does not check if you’ve finished the puzzle yet, and some other minor tweaks are still missing), it’s starting to get better

Check it out here, but be warned: It’s a very easy puzzle, the script is not done yet and, last but definately not least: Internet Explorer sucks. Use it in firefox if you can (haven’t tried any other browsers than those two). It’ll work in IE, but if you fill in a number and then clear it, it’ll actually say ‘null’ instead of clearing the cell (’internally’ the cell is definately cleared though, so it’s no biggie).

It was interesting to make because I hadn’t used javascript in 7 years. Not to mention the fact that back then the best javascript I ever wrote was
.

Tortoise

Aren’t I just the best LOGO programmer ever?!

I remember LOGO from back when I was a very little boy. We had a program for it under DOS on an old olivetti computer (which predated me!). Back then I never got the hang of it though (I was rather young).

While I was checking out the KDE menu I suddenly noticed KTurtle and decided to give it a go

Arch

With the holiday reaching it’s point where I was getting bored, I decided to try something new.

After getting increasingly annoyed at Ubuntu and Gnome for making way too many assumptions about how I wanted things to work, I decided to go with a new distro (to me, at least). One that was not so focussed on usability that it became the opposite of usable.

After hearing about Arch Linux a few times on chat and on the Dutch news for nerds site I frequently visit (Tweakers) I decided to give it a try. I went ahead and downloaded the base package (which is really just a CD with the bare basics of the Linux OS and some stuff to make installing it easier), because I was up for a challenge. Then I backed up my ubuntu partition (just in case I’d completely fuck up with Arch, which I was expecting) and gave it a whirl.

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I now write to you from Arch linux, running KDE (and XFCE, although I’m actually liking KDE so far). Of course having an OS that does a lot less of it’s configuring for you (like Ubuntu does) also means that more things will not work straight away. But I’ve not had any major issues thus far. It took some time to get used to it all, but I’m starting to get the hang of it now :).

Another way to kill time is working for RBTS™. The website still needs a lot of work and we recently had some new ideas. We’re going for a ’semi-web-2.0′ approach, with AJAX in some places, but not overdoing it (because we want to stay accessible!). But think FAQ search boxes with auto-complete, news messages with comments that are loaded into the page using AJAX, etc.

Furthermore, I’m still rooting for a LANd-party at Rob’s house. Basically, it’s thought of as a LAN party in some tents on the field by his house. But that’ll depend on how much free time Rob’s got :).
LAN parties at Rob’s are great fun (even though we don’t game a lot, we still have fun just doing geeky things with computers) and this time around I might even go home with a free P2 400 MHz server to play around with :).

Schoolyear’s over

Well, that’s the end of the schoolyear coming up soon.
Yesterday (Friday, 9th of June) I handed in my last portfolios. Next Monday I’ll hear what’ll happen: Pass, Doubt or Fail.

In the case of doubt, the assessors are either uncertain whether the portfolio (and thus my knowledge of the subjects) is sufficient, or it if they’re uncertain which grade to give me. In such a case, I will have to come to assessments this Tuesday - which are sort of oral exams.

I’m not very certain about either subject, because they’re not my best subjects, but also because the teachers might be aiming too highly. Hence my expectance of two Doubts. Still, I’ve passed the year in none the less, so that’s nice.

Starting next year I’ll only have the subjects I chose. One subject per half year:

• Create a game
• Object Oriented Programming
• Create an information system (database related programming)

But first the assessments and then 8 (or more) weeks of vacation
Plenty of time to work on software and, most importantly, get the hosting company running properly. We went to the Chamber of Commerce the other day to get some information about starting a company. Got some interesting information about tax cuts and subsidies as well (two of the four of us are blind), so that’ll be great.

Looking for work

I have come to the conclusion that I need to stop being a lazy bum and start getting some work done. Not only because I got a 41 out of 100 for my last (diagnostic) test at school (boring subjects this semester…), but also because a bank balance of €2,20 does not get you very far in this world.

However, I do not really want to get a job at a manufacturing plant or something. Instead, I’ve been doing some looking around for people in need of a Java, PHP, Python, Delphi (heck, who knows?!), C (might need some brushing up on that one…) programmer.

Not had too much luck, I did see one or two adverts of companies looking for experienced and/or student-programmers. I may contact them tomorrow, see if they’re interested.

Also, two friends of mine are seriously considering to start their own hosting-and-webdesign business, and I might end up tagging along. I’ll probably not be a competitor of Owen’s Zernebok Hosting though - although you never know

All quiet on the GoneWacko front

Yes, I have once again not updated the blog in a while. This is because nothing worth mentioning happened to me. Still, I’ll just tell you what’s been going on.

I’ve just been going to school, doing business related work (merging two ICT businesses is boring) and learning about the various corporate bodies that are available in the Netherlands, which supposedly relates to ICT and Product Quality Assurance - Don’t ask me how.

Furthermore, my parents left for Portugal yesterday. They shall return next week, however, because they’re just on a holiday. Still, that means I’m home alone this week, which is nice because I can crank up the volume without disturbing anybody (unfortunately I’ve recently been feeling a little bored with my music, I should really get some new albums and/or discover some new bands/artists).

Also, just before my parents left, the car dealership called to tell us the new car was finished - we ordered a Volkswagen Touran which looks kind of ugly but also kind of neat. Furthermore, it’s still a brand new car with all kinds of features we have never had in our car before (our previous car didn’t even have air conditioning, for example), so that’s pretty exciting.

Also, recently I’ve been experimenting with Django, which is quite a nice Python web framework, not unlike Ruby on Rails, except for some features and that it’s in Python and thus is cool.
I’ve not really been able to think of anything to try Django with though, so if you’ve got any ideas for something that I ought to try writing, please do give them to me
(unfortunately Yoda - the server that hosts this website - does not have Django installed and it does not seem to be supporting it properly currently, so I don’t think I’ll be using it in a ‘production environment’ any time soon considering the fact that the only other server I have (access to) is a 233 MHz machine on a 8/1 Mbit/sec pipe…)

This semester

So I finished my schoolproject, got my 15 points (of the 60 required to finish my foundation course).
Now the fourth and last semester for this year has kicked off, and it partially bores me. This semester I’ve got two subjects: Network Administration - but so far it’s about the organisational difficulties of fusing two companies - and TAD, of which I do believe it means Technical Automation Development. Basically it’s a combination of Product Quality (Assurance) and Technical IT, where I have to program PLCs.
The latter subject is somewhat interesting, but it’s also a bit tedious because we’ve not got a lot of documentation.

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Haven’t really worked on my map renderer as of late, although I did improve some features shortly after posting my last entry.
The biggest improvement is that the renderer now correctly renders all walls and fences. Furthermore the tiberium is rendered semi-correctly: The more tiberium surrounds a tiberium tile, the higher it’s value. I’m probably not entirely using the correct algorithm, but it’s close enough.

And I’ve been doing some experimenting with various GUI libraries. I tried OcempGUI, a toolkit for creating GUIs ‘inside’ SDL surfaces. But I was not satisfied with the look of the widgets and some widgets I did want to use (TreeViews, ComboBoxes, …) are not in it. And I wasn’t in the mood to write those widgets myself and/or restyle the other widgets, so I decided to use GTK.
I’ll have to rewrite my rendering code so it’ll render to a GdkDrawable, but I think it’ll be worth the effort, somehow.

More on the map renderer

Because my ego is large, I wanted to tell you that my map renderer is getting better every minute

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As can be seen on the image to the left, buildings are now drawn, with remapped colors and everything
This was quite a milestone, because the used format is poorly documented. There are still a few bugs, such as SAM sites with a ‘bib’, which is the sand you see at the base of most of the buildings. Unfortunately this is mainly because it appears that structure/unit information is hardcoded and not stored in a rules.ini file as is the case with all the other C&C games to date. This makes it harder for me to implement these kinds of exceptions.
Furthermore, the program will now only render the actual level, without all the terrain that is outside of the level’s boundaries. Unless you tell it to render the entire 1536×1536 image, of course.
And as can be seen I’ve made a start with rendering tiberium, but because it uses formats which I have not yet fully implemented (SHP format40 and format20), it’s not being shown “to it’s full potential”, so to speak.

Yesterday I installed SVN on my server (if you can call it that), which makes managing the source code a lot easier