Dawn of the Geeks

Why are you bashing Bush and Cheney? In Arizona Obama spent a couple minutes lamenting the fact that he’s related to Cheney. He also pointed out that neither Bush nor Chaney will be on the ballot in November.

Really, Obama, really?

As one event goer said “I wanted to know why I shouldn’t vote for McCain.” Maybe Obama was disappointed that he didn’t get to play in the “anybody but Bush” festivities in 2004 that cost Kerry the election. Despite the DNC making all the democratic votes in Florida and Michigan not count in the Primary, they still think it’s Republicans that are behind the critical Florida loss and “voter disenfranchisement.” I guess they don’t care if your vote doesn’t count as long as the DNC is behind it.

I think Obama needs to stop pandering to the idiots that can’t get over the 2000 and 2004 elections (maybe he’s one of them) and focus on why he is the best candidate for the job. Not why he’s so much better than people that aren’t even running. McCain is probably going to win the nomination and if Obama wants to get elected he needs to just STFU about Bush and focus on McCain. And, just in case, he might want to focus on Romney as well.

Oh, and gee I almost forgot the other person that Obama failed to address in his speech: Hillary Clinton. I guess he thinks he already beat her. Good luck with that strategy. Let’s waste time talking about people who aren’t running and just ignore your biggest rival who could very well beat you.

Obama for the fail.

Bunnies is currently being developed in Java but that might change. I put together a quick “Lesson 1″ for C# which just renders 320×240 pixels every second. My Dual Core 2.33Ghz system pumped out 170+ frames per second which works out to about 13.5 million pixels per second. Since I don’t have the Java SDK on this system I had to go by the Lesson 1 tutorial for Java posted in the Software Rendering section. At 1.7Ghz I was able to pump out about 4 million pixels per second. Scaled for processing speed it should perform at about 5.5 million pixels per second. So that makes C# about 2.4 times faster than Java.

I was digging around on-line for some tutorials on how to create a main loop in C#. Not a simple task. There’s the C# way to do it which is slow and there’s the “make it act like C++” way which is much better. Anyway, in the code I found there was a


System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(10);


Well, that limited the frame rate to about 64fps. It didn’t matter what resolution I was drawing pixels at. Changing it to


System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(0);


bumped the frame rate up to 172/173. “Sleep” in C++ and C# achieve the same thing, they allow the CPU to do a context switch so the CPU can process other things your computer may be doing. Giving it a number greater than 0 simply causes an artificial delay in your program which limits performance and doesn’t make your computer any more responsive while your program is running.

We’ll see how ambitious I am. My new server will be here later this week. So this weekend I’ll be putting that together and getting the latest Java version of Bunnies on-line along with the Bunnies server. Once that’s done I may call it a day with Java and switch to C# to enhance Bunnies even further.

As you may or may not know Michigan and Florida have no delegates for the Democratic party. Why? Because they moved their primaries up a bit. Was that in violation of some law? No. It was in violation of some arbitrary rule set in place by the DNC.

What’s really stupid is that in Florida, the Democrats were forced to move up the primary date because of the Republicans. So Florida Democrats are being punished apparently for not having a Democrat majority in the state government.

Only Hillary Clinton has left her name on the ballot in those two states. The other candidates faithfully removed their names from the ballot. Apparently following some arbitrary rules is more important than having voters have their voice heard.

The RNC isn’t much better. They cut half of the delegates from Michigan. Although Michigan sent all their delegates anyway. How many end up counting is up in the air. But at least the Republicans didn’t completely punish the voters. Their voice is still heard, it’s just dampened a little bit.

What’s really odd to me is that Democrats don’t seem to have a problem with this. There’s a controversy brewing, not about how the DNC has denied a voice to two states, but that Hillary Clinton wants to have their voice heard.

Because Obama is a tool that didn’t care what two states said Democrats are accusing Hillary of “cheating.” He could have stood up to the DNC and left his name on the ballot like Hillary did but he CHOSE not to. Hillary values votes over stupid party rules and wants the delegates she won in Michigan and the delegates she’ll win in Florida to count. I think they should.

I don’t call that cheating. I call that not being a fascist. Both parties need to stop this nonsense and set a date range that a primary/caucus can fall on. Iowa had the first caucus January 3rd. As such any state should be able to have their primary between January 3rd and some time in June. I believe Montana is the last state on June 3rd.

Mandating that states cannot move their primary date up is ridiculous. The problem is that party leaders value “strategy” over people’s right to vote to elect their leaders. Because Hillary had the best chance in Michigan and Florida those two states would boost her. The DNC wanted to contain that boost by forcing her to get those wins on Super Tuesday. By doing that her win would be too late to encourage voters in other states.

I hope she gets those delegates. Shame on the DNC for playing stupid games. Shame on Obama and Edwards for playing with them.

The One Missed Call Ringtone is now available at MIDI Search.

Bunnies now has sprite generating capabilities. Any source image can be run through a chroma key script to generate a mask from the green content of the image and a sprite image. One issue I found was that some dark yellow was removed. The quality of the sprite image really depends on the quality of the source image. The source image should have a bright green background without any green bleeding onto the actual sprite. Once the sprite is generated you can view the source image, mask and sprite to see how well it did and if it’s necessary to do any manual adjustments to the mask.

Black means the pixel will be rendered, white means the pixel will not be rendered. The generated sprite is the mask applied to the source image so you can see how it looks.

In the future the site will allow a user to generate animations from sprites. This will make it easier to create custom sprites for the game.

It’s a new tax year and you know what that means: tax deductible business expenses. Currently many web-sites I operate are running a Pentium III 933Mhz web server with a Pentium III 533Mhz database server. Together they make one moderately useful system. This week I will finally be putting together a Dual Core 1.6Ghz Pentium system which should be able to function as a Web and Database server. The CPU is upgradable as it’s an LGA 775 socket. The 933 Mhz system will probably be turned into a file server only. It already has all the SVN repositories for all the web-sites and other things. The 533 Mhz system will be turned off and put somewhere.

I have to pick up a new hard drive as well. The ones I’ve been using are taking a beating and one of them has failed a couple times. Because it’s a Seagate I was able to format the drive and get it working again but I think it’s time to start replacing drives with SATA drives. So, as they fail I’ll be swapping them out. Everything is backed up so data isn’t lost when a drive fails. It’s just an annoyance to have to shut down the web-server, format the drive and then copy all the files back.

Once the new server is up and running it’ll be time to start focusing on Bunnies again. The current server just simply can’t handle the site.

MIDI Search is a search based ringtone site. Unlike Free Ringtone Heaven which offers a directory based site, MIDI Search relies solely on searching to find what you’re looking for. Because there is no need to organize the files in any particular way the site had a lot more ringtones to offer. You can also upload your own collection of MIDI files (in a ZIP file or individually) or submit the URLs of web sites that have MIDI files. This makes it very easy to increase the size of the collection. Currently there are over 70,000 MIDI files on the site.

Search results are based on the name of the file and the text contents of the files which can include titles, authors, lyrics etc.

We purchased a Mac Mini a year or two ago. The Intel version with dual core. We bought the $800 version since we knew any major upgrades would be impossible so we got the best to start with. Well we noticed a significant slow down and poor performance. Rebooting would help somewhat but it would start crawling again. It had 512MB of RAM in it. We decided to put 1GB in it since I’ve had experience with systems with too little memory. We waited until now to do anything about it since the system wasn’t used that much and we just put up with it. We also didn’t really have the money to be spending on computer upgrades.

So we talk to an Apple rep on Apple.com and he gives us the specific memory we need. A 200 Pin 5300 speed DDR2 SO DIMM. He tells us we can buy a chip and then have it installed at an Apple store. So we look on NewEgg.com and see that a 1GB chip is around $25. So we call the Apple store to get an idea of how much it will cost to install it. The Mac Mini is not made for user upgrades. They tell us it will cost $150 and the installation is free. They refuse to install any memory but what they sell.

Excuse me? $150 dollars for a $25 dollar part and you’re telling me the installation is free? I don’t think so. So we went to Fry’s Electronics, got the part for around $25 and installed the chip ourselves. The Mac Mini now runs great. Like Vista, apparently Apple failed to include enough memory in it’s systems to run its latest OS. You need 1GB or your Mini is going to perform terribly. You can find how-to’s online to opening up the system. It basically just snaps together. A putty knife works well to pull the case apart. You just have to be careful.

But, since Apple tried to screw us over and intentionally made the Mini difficult to open, I’ll never be buying an Apple product again. Memory is the easiest part to upgrade on any PC. There’s no excuse for Apple making it difficult and then charging a 600% markup on a memory chip and then pretending that the installation is free. And then telling me that they couldn’t install a third party chip when the Apple.com rep said they could is just over the top.

What a bunch of idiots. I hope you like the money we gave you for the Mini, Apple because it’s the last penny you’ll see from us. We liked your product but we don’t like being ripped off. So we’ll take our business elsewhere in the future.

People are complaining that this stimulus package is stupid because people will just pay off their debts thereby not actually putting the money into the economy.

Well, let’s think about that for a minute. Say I have $1000 in credit card debt and am paying $50 a month to pay it off. It will take me 20+ months to pay off that debt depending on the interest rate. Now, the government hands me a check for $1000. The debt is paid off and now I have $50 a month that is freed up to be spent however I want. So now every month I have some money that I can inject into the economy.

So really, it doesn’t matter what you do with the check. If you pay off debts then you’re freeing up cash either immediately or sooner than it would have been. Even if you had $2000 in credit card debt you still significantly cut down the time it will take to pay it off.

Then there’s the other camp that wants to save the money. Which is also a good idea. If you invest the money you’re putting the money into the economy directly. If you put the money into a bank the money is invested by the bank right back into the economy and you get a percentage of profit.

So no matter what you do with the money, more money will actually make it into the economy and grow. The only way the money won’t make it into the economy is if you cash the check and stuff the money into your mattress. You can invest it, the bank can invest it, you can spend it or pay off debts and free up your own money.

I plan on spending some and paying off debts with most of it. Which again, frees up capital so I have extra money to spend, save or invest every month.

TopDuels.com used to have a lot of cool charts for duels.com but duels.com changed. It’s been several months and it doesn’t seem like the information I need is any closer to being available again. The domain has been paid for through 9/28/2008 so the domain will remain up until then. If I can’t get the site doing anything worthwhile by then I’m going to just let the domain expire. It was fun while it lasted.

Since Duels.com is currently incompatible with TopDuels.com I’ve switched gears a bit. The site is now iPrefer, a voting site. The current topic is the next US President. You are shown two candidates and you have to vote on the one you prefer. It could be two Democrats or two Republicans or one of each. You must vote on the two shown. Refreshing will result in the same two options showing up. With enough votes, the most prefered candidate will bubble up to the top.

If Duels.com ever grants access to the information I need then I’ll put it back to the real TopDuels. But for now, the duels that are to be had at TopDuels.com are preferences in various topics.