Dawn of the Geeks

World Daily Press has been updated a bit. Previously the main page allowed you to browse through categories and see all the articles for the current day. There was a seperate archive page that allowed you to browse older articles but didn’t have categories. That seemed silly to me so I finally merged the two. The archive now handles everything. You can browse through the current day and previous days and view only the articles in certain categories. It’s also paginated so you don’t get overloaded with summaries on a single page.

It’s still horribly plain looking (see also: ugly) which may be fixed eventually.

Bunnies! finally has a new release. Since the last release bilinear filtering has been added which smooths over pixelated graphics, lighting effects have been improved and bump/depth mapping support has been added to wall textures.

Outside of rendering improvements Exits are now part of the game. Previously the user determined the level order. Now they only determine which level they want to start on. The map designer creates the exits which take the user to the next map.

One of the big issues with lighting was the shadows cast by walls. The lights would wrap around the walls in some cases. The fix was a change in algorithm. Now our friend the vector is used to check the dot product of the wall vector and the light vector. No more light wrap around. There was also an issue with the light intensity calculation which resulted in the colors of objects being distorted.

I think the next step is to add in a messaging system. There needs to be a console mode which will allow the user to enter in text messages and send them. The network protocol already exists. It’s just not yet used in the game. And then from there it’s time to have the server start passing messages between users.

And that of course is the beginning of actual multiplayer.

Circuit City had New Super Mario Bros on sale for $25 so I picked it up. It’s a mishmash of features from various Mario games and some new things. But at the core it’s a back to basics side scrolling goomba stomping good time.

Although I like Super Mario Galaxy I’m tired of complicated 3D games where much of the game is fighting the camera and awkward controls. I’d like to see a Wii version of NSMB with 3D graphics but the same 2D game play. Mostly because I prefer to play games on the TV rather than a hand held. In the mean time I spend my monies on Virtual Console games like Donkey Kong Country and the original SMB games. I have all of them and the Japanese version of SMB2. The Japanese version of SMB2 is just mean. By the second world there are already hidden blocks that you have to hit just right so you have enough room on the screen to go back and jump on top of it so you make it over the otherwise impassable pit.

Ever since 3D graphics started becomming the rage 2D side scrollers have tended to go away. And there’s really no reason for it. Take advantage of the increased GPU power to make better looking graphics but keep the controls simple. I don’t always want a challenge. Sometimes I just want some fun.

It may seem ridiculous but Midi Search already has over 76,000. My goal is to have 1 million unique midi files hosted. To upload your midi files FTP to alt.freeringtoneheaven.com and use the username “midi” and leave the password field blank. You cannot overwrite files that have already been uploaded nor can you delete them.

World Daily Press had a huge update. Previously you could only view news stories from the last 24 hours in various categories. Now there is an archive section which allows you to browse through every article ever shown on the site.

Bunnies! has been in development for a long time now. Well over a year. Possibly two or more. Eventually I want to make it multiplayer but that requires a change in how things work. Currently you advance to the next level as soon as everything is dead. That doesn’t leave much time for chit chat and exploration. So instead the ini file will contain your starting level but the exits in the level will determine which map you go to next.

This also means that a map no longer needs to contain any enemies which allows for interesting levels for players to just hang out in.

Hopefully this weekend I will have time to update the Bunnies! web-site to support this new feature. The other missing feature of the Bunnies! web-site is the ability to configure bump maps and depth maps for tiles. Lighting looks more impressive when you have those configured.

Cubia is a lightweight Wikipedia mirror that can run on older computers (less than 1Ghz) without any trouble. One of the issues that it has had for a long time is parsing the Wiki markup to look like Mediawiki (the software that runs Wikipedia). I was making use of a project that stalled years ago but seems to be the only project that can at least somewhat parse it. I looked for updated versions and it seems as though no one has created a full featured stand alone MediaWiki Parser. Most people apparently just run MediaWiki which is fine when you don’t have millions of articles or you have a very powerful server.

So, I finally decided to see if I could just use MediaWiki. Now obviously I can’t point it at Cubia’s database and just expect it to work. Cubia’s database is nothing like MediaWiki’s database. So the first thing I did was install MediaWiki with its own database. I quickly found that skinning wasn’t going to do it. I needed to pull Cubia’s data into MediaWiki to render while MediaWiki uses a bunch of convoluted code to render a page. Using MediaWiki directly would be a huge code rewrite hassle.

So I took a look at MediaWiki’s index.php file and found that I could cut out most of it. The only code needed is the initialization of MediaWiki. After that code is initialized I just pulled the data from Cubia and ran it though $wgOut->parse().

You do need to add


require_once( 'includes/GlobalFunctions.php' );
require_once( 'includes/Parser.php' );


You also have to get rid of the lines in Index.php that get the page title. That’s done either by setting a variable in the page that includes the mediawiki renderer or by setting the REQUEST value.

Before the Setup.php include in order for this to work. I renamed MediaWiki’s index.php to cubia.php and copied the mediawiki installation into Cubia. Now, when rendering an article I just include cubia.php and it creates a variable with the HTML version of the document.

More work needs to be done to clean up the cubia codebase but it functions rather well. Eventually I’d like to figure out the minimum code needed to use MediaWiki’s parser.

The Boston Herald is reporting that some MIT students are working on a $12 computer.

If you read the article you find that the $12 computer already exists in India but it’s using very old tech and is missing some important things that would make it easier for people who have them to learn skills such as programming.

A $12 computer of sorts - a cheap keyboard and Nintendo-like console - already exists in India, where people hook the devices to home TVs to run simple games and programs.

But Lomas, an American graduate student who stumbled across the computers in Bangalore while on an internship last summer, hit on the idea of upgrading the devices’ 1980s-era technology.

He and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology symposium hope to soup up the systems - which are based on old Apple II computers - with rudimentary Web access and more.

The goal is to upgrade the parts but keep the $12 price point. The biggest expense to any cheap computer system is the monitor. LCD screens are not cheap. By having an RCA or coax out they cut out the need to supply the monitor with the system. Any cheap TV will do.

One of the things lost on modern computers is the out of the box ability to program it. DOS and early versions of Windows came with QBASIC. Now you have to either purchase additional software or get an internet connection so you can download a free compiler.

The entry costs have gone up. There is also an artificial expectation of quality that has risen since the 80’s and 90’s. Text and 2D graphics don’t cut it anymore. Everyone wants to make 3D games which requires the ability to create 3D objects and animations. Or steal them. It’s very easy to be discouraged. People don’t realize that rendering graphics is the least of game programming or any programming for that matter. There is a lot to learn that is universal from graphically simple games.

The types of games that $12 computers are perfectly capable of running.

I drive a 2006 Mitsubishi Outlander which is the first automatic I’ve ever owned that had a manual override. I recently took it on a road trip up to Idaho.

Automatic is nice because you don’t have to do anything except push down the gas to go but when you’re going through mountains it becomes a problem. If you’re trying to go 60 miles an hour through the moutains the automatic will often drop down to 3rd gear causing the engine to spin up much too fast. With the manual override I can just move the shifter over and force the engine to stay in 3rd or 4th gear.

I found that cruise control works a little different in manual mode as well. When in automatic mode the engine shifts around to maintain the speed no matter what the conditions are. In manual mode if you’re in 4th gear going up hill the speed will drop and if it drops too much cruise control turns off. You then have to drop down to 3rd gear to maintain about 3000 rpm and keep your speed modest.

One of the issues with trying to save gas using cruise control is that when you go up hill the engine works harder using more gas when the correct thing to do is to maintain the same amount of gas and let the car slow down on the way up.

Cruise control in manual seems to work that way.

Of course we were hauling so much stuff that we still ended up with worse milage than I typically get driving to and from work on the freeway.

I was coming home from a long road trip to Idaho and in Vegas getting gas when some guy starts washing my windows. I told him “that’s not necessary, we’re leaving.” I refused to give him anything. My wife thought I should have given him a couple bucks. The reason I didn’t is simple; I didn’t ask him to wash anything. He volunteered. If he wants people to pay him for his efforts then he needs to get a sign that says “Get Your Windows Cleaned $2″ or something. Maybe it was the long road or the late hours but I was particularly cranky that night. I do not care to be extorted for money.

I’m really tired of people expecting money out of me. When we first moved into our house it was virtually non-stop. We had the same paper boy come by wanting us to subscribe at least a couple times. Every time I told him I wasn’t interested. I finally got rude and he hasn’t been back. Apparently for some people that’s what it takes. The reason we can afford a house is because we don’t just give money to everyone who asks.

My wife donates money to various charities and that I’m okay with. These are established organizations going about things the right way so I don’t mind giving them some money. What does bother me about them though is that once you give them money they start sending you expensive looking mailings. At that point we stop giving them money. Obviously they’re just wasting it. If they wanted more money they could have sent a cheap post card. I don’t need a bunch of mailing labels; I have a pen.

It’s the same schtick that the window guy pulled: give people something and then act like they owe you something.

Maybe I’m wierd but when people offer a gift of actual value in exchange for a donation I refuse to give them anything. I don’t mind getting some cheap sticker that I know only cost a few cents and advertises their charity. I do mind when I see what they’re giving out costs more than a buck and does nothing to advertise the charity. Most charities can do a lot with a dollar. I don’t need a cheap trinket bought with money that was donated for a good cause.

Maybe some people will only donate if you give them something of real value in return. And that’s sad really. The whole point of donating is to help out without demanding something for yourself.