I created the site www.cncboards.net to allow CnC players to track their stats and match history, as well as view detailed ranked ladder info. This sort of code could be useful to other Command & Conquer fan sites, so I’ve decided to release some of it.

It’s really basic… as I didn’t include all of the database functionality that I also designed. Currently the library just includes a class that allows you to load player stats for any Red Alert 3, Command & Conquer 3, or Kane’s Wrath player.

Check out the cncstats PHP library.

I then eventually made a PHP and MySQL site, but again from scratch. I taught myself PHP and learned a lot about databases, but the site was basic, inflexible, and arduous to work on and update. The cooking metaphor? Making a cake from complete scratch, and doing a half-assed icing job. The most rewarding part was knowing you baked it yourself with your own recipe. It looks bad, but tastes pretty good. In the end your kitchen is a mess though, and you spent a lot of time working on it.

Finally, I gave up and installed Wordpress, an extremely popular CMS. I transferred over the majority of my blogs, but have yet to update it since. Extended metaphor aficionados could see this as making a boxed cake, and hiring a professional to do the icing job.

So I haven’t posted a blog in over a year, and I’m hoping to get back into it. Since I’ve installed Wordpress and seen how extremely flexible and easy to use it is, I have helped a few different friends set up their own websites, all powered by Wordpress. I don’t regret rolling my own site for so long, but the time has come to abandon the persuit for web development knowledge and jump on the all-in-one CMS bandwagon.

Hopefully soon, my blog will again but graced by the elegant unintelligible babble of my own obfuscated reflections on life. Something I’m sure that you, dear reader, are shitting yourself over in anticipation.

So I setup a new partition on my system drive… and away I went.

The Fonts Look Like Ass

The very first thing I noticed when my computer booted to the Linux Gnome desktop is that the fonts look like booboo. At first I wasn’t very concerned, because it wasn’t until Vista that TrueType (a subpixel font rendering engine from Microsoft) was enabled by default. But even after messing with the settings and trying Linux’s version of subpixel font rendering, the results were still less that pleasing. Horrible gamma correction, shitty hinting options… etc.

The most common advice when trying to find a solution was to download Microsoft’s fonts (especially the new Vista fonts). Kind of ironic, huh? Even then, the fonts still looked like vomit to me. And what was worse, the overall font sizes had to be larger to remain clear, when on Windows I could lower the size and still maintain legibility. Everything in Gnome had to be bigger… effectively reducing my screen real estate.

Free Software Blows

There are exceptions, of course. Firefox, for example… is a great browser. But there are NO true alternatives to the Microsoft Office Suite, the Adobe Creative Suite, or Microsoft Visual Studio.

The Gimp (the shitty GNU image editor/Photoshop replacement) is under featured, buggy, and slower than Photoshop. I tried to give this app a chance, but it’s pretty horrible. OpenOffice looks and feels like Office 95 or worse, and is less stable than Office 2007 SP1. It’s also slower to open, with a lot of rendering bugs from my existing documents.

And there is NOTHING comparable to the ease of use of Outlook 2007. I use it to seamlessly check my email from my UT account and my Gmail, as well as synchronize my calendar and contacts via Bluetooth with my phone, and keep up-to-date on my friends via their shared Outlook calendars. Nothing on Linux can do that… without a horribly complex and counter-intuitive process that half-assedly works half the time (25% efficiency?).

None of the billions of music apps that are out there even remotely compare to the stability, speed, and aesthetic appeal of Winamp or iTunes either… so hopefully you don’t like listening to music much.

Of course, there was nothing even remotely as powerful as the SONAR 8 + FL Studio 8 combo I have running under Vista. With Vista, my latencey for my outboard sound hardware was about 5.9ms, with Linux (and lmms), it was around 320ms.

And I don’t care what everyone else says, VIm is not a replacement for Visual Studio.

You can’t really blame them… of course a nerd-run project that is in perpetual beta is not going to hold a candle to the products of multi-billion dollar companies like Microsft, Apple, and Adobe… but the Linux fans need to stop acting like this isn’t the case.

Anyway…

Technically, Linux is a great operating system. This website is actually run on a Linux server and is extremely reliable… but I think that’s as far as it goes. Sure it’s fun to geek around with compiling all your own shit and what not, but most people (even most geeks) will just want an OS that works out of the box.

Linux is NOT a consumer-level desktop OS for a power user, home audio enthusiast, productivity geek, digital artists, film producer, songwriter/music producer, or most average people.

Maybe for old granny, who doesn’t need to do anything but check her email and look up cross-stitching patterns on the internet, Linux is good because you don’t have to buy the Microsoft products. But… what if she needs to print something? Good luck getting the drivers to work.

Or maybe old granny knows how to download custom drivers and compile them herself?

Even as much as hearing the shitty FM synth music on YouTube brings back memories… I also have played and beaten almost every Sonic game on the Genesis. When the time of the old 16-bit system came and went, I even downloaded an emulator on my PC and replayed most of the games (or at least my favorite parts). More recently, I played them on my phone with a Smartphone-based Genesis emulator. Interesting how it took dedicated hardware back in elementary school to do now what can be done in software real-time on my phone…

Anyway… I regressed into my childish pastimes of playing console video games and recently purchased a Nintendo DS. First of all… I was amazed at how advanced 7th generation handheld systems are; the DS can pump out 3D graphics comparable to the Nintendo 64 and comes with onboard Wi-Fi… both for ad-hoc gaming with a friend close by or over the Internet to play with people all over the world. Badass.

One of the games I bought was Sonic Adventure Rush… one of the most recent additions to the Sonic franchise. I had high hopes and high expectations; the format was similar to the Genesis games… run as fast-as-hell to the right of the screen, pickup rings, and don’t die.

I was happy to see that the new additions Sonic had seen since my first exposure to the series 10 years ago didn’t take away from the game and render it an unfamiliar generic platform game– it was the exact opposite actually. The new game on DS is faster and crazier than its little brother on Genesis… but it retains the same spirit.

There’s enough in common with the old game to make me feel like I’m back in the prepubescent and innocent years of elementary school… and that’s probably why I love playing it. It provides a small amount of escapism from the quickly-approaching “real life” that is less than a year away. I’m just glad that at 21 years old, jumping off of springs and collecting golden rings still has the ability to entertain me for a while.

Now if you will excuse me… I’m going to go play some Sonic on my DS.

My status? Well, with ¾ of a Red Bull making its way through my guts, I’m continuing to charge ahead into the uncharted territories of compiler code generation and processor pipelining simulation (2 of my 3 final projects). For the last few days, all I have been able to see has been a sea of C-code, expanding before me like a vast and endless ocean of line after line of absolutely unintelligible shit like:

int GetPointerSize (SYMBOL s)
{
   /*
   ** let's hope none of these are null...
   ** or we are completely FUCKED
   */
    return s->datatype->datatype->datatype->size;
}

It’s so hard to even care at this point… with the enticing allure of care-free summer days creeping into my mind, the last week of school seems to be waging a losing battle for my attention.

However, if given a small enough time frame, almost anything can have the appearance of being important. Right now, these projects are consuming my life, and are soon to be followed by four mind-blowingly difficult finals, but 5 years down the line… how much will all of this really matter?

Nevertheless, I’ve got shit to do.

And now that I’ve finished the Red Bull, it’s time to wrap up this post. If Red Bull really gave me wings, I’d fly away from my computer to an island where the only trees are things that grow out of the ground and the only risk for storage leaks comes from old rusty containers.

The thing is, it would overheat within minutes after turning it on, so I replaced the fan because it would never spin up.. and it worked! When I first got it from him, however, I was messing around with it and re-installing the OS, and the only way for me to get that to work without it turning off due to the processor overheating was with a very creative use of my floor fan.

Everything was significantly easier once the new fan arrived, obviously.

In a completely unrelated event, I randomly starting bleeding from my forearm the other day. I was talking to my roommate when I felt my arm was really wet, and when I looked down I saw that it was soaked in blood. I ran over to the bathroom and washed it off, while trying to find where it was all coming from.

There was no cut or gash or anything, just a small pin-prick sized hole from which blood was gushing out. And it wouldn’t stop for about thirty minutes. It wouldn’t bleed if I kept pressure on it, but even after leaving pressure on it for about five minutes, it would continue to bleed. A LOT. Eventually it stopped, and the only reason for it that my roommates and I could come up with was that a bee had stung me (we were around a lot of bees earlier… this isn’t entirely random), and the stinger had just come out, and that maybe it hit a large vein.

I am completely aware that that sounds extremely improbable, but there really aren’t any other good reasons as to why I would just start gushing blood out of my arm.

In parting I leave you with a YouTube video that’ll make you laugh, about buhLOOD! (it’s funny, not gross you wimps).

Put more than two engineers in the same room for a short amount of time, and without fail, the conversation will eventually turn into the classic engineering equivalent of a penis length contest.

By that I mean, the untold competition that is having the most amount of shit to do in the next week or so. Example:

“Dude, I’m so fucked. I have a lab on Tuesday and then a test and program on Wednesday.”

“Dude, whatever man. I have three tests on Monday, a lab due Wednesday that I haven’t started, a project due Thursday that my partner won’t do shit on, and then a homework assignment due Friday.”

“You guys have it easy. I broke both of my wrists and have to type with my  toes now, my computer crashed, my apartment burned down, and I have 4 tests next week and 3 programming assignments.”

Of course, at some point a business major might chime in about how he has “work” to do that is “hard”.

However, everyone will eventually stop laughing at him and continue with their discussion as normal.

Normally, I consider myself a good programmer, but sometimes I have to take shortcuts and cut corners.

Here is a snippet from one of my recent projects in my CS 375 Compilers class:

/* Increment the index and return the next entry
   we can use as a label. New entry should be
   validated as well and safe for whomever wants
   to peek at it. */

int GetNextLabel ()
{
   return 3;
}

The amount of code like this seems to be proportional to the margin of time between the due date and the time I actually finish the assignment.

This might seem pretty awful, and sometimes (usually) it is, but personally, I tend to completely zone out and focus only on the task at hand. Its easier for me to do things in large chunks of time and remain focused than it is to break it up over small periods. There happens to be a very serious downside though:

I turn into a computer zombie.

With hours straight of doing nothing but code/compile/debug/repeat, my brain seems to shutdown all other rudimentary functions. Basic conversation skills seem to escape me, and social interactions begin to approach the awkward stage.

It’s almost like the feeling of riding a roller coaster and getting off… after you get off, you still feels like your ass is flying around the track. Computer Zombie Mode is very similar… it takes a few moments to re-calibrate my reality. Example:

“I sure worked up an appetite writing all that code! Time to make a sandwich. Shit no bread! I better throw an exception! Time to write an error handler…”

Of course if I had be writing for one my C classes, I would make the sandwich anyway with invalid pointers to my bread slices on accident. My first bite would result in a mouthful of segfaults followed by me vomiting all over the place.

Luckily it doesn’t usually take long to get back to the real world. So barring a few semi-awkward initial conversations and distorted thought patterns, it’s a relatively painless process.

The situation: Both my roommate and I (running Windows Vista) want to play C&C3 online at the same time, both connected via wireless to the Linksys WRT54G router.

Normally, getting a game to work online involves opening a port, so the router can know to whom to direct network traffic. C&C: Generals was like this. No biggie! Open up two different ports: one pointing to me, and one pointing to him… and then change the setting in the game.

C&C3 posses a problem in that it requires a LARGE amount of ports open to work that you CANNOT change from within the game. You can set a single port to watch, but the game itself requires a large range to work.

The solution: Port triggering. Port triggering is like port forwarding that activates when a client starts talking to a specific port. This allows selective port forwarding as each client needs it and thus, we both have access to the full range of ports needed to run the game. The probability of collisions is low, given the large range. So the settings look like this:

• Set ports 2049 through 29910 to be triggering ports
• Set any port NOT in that range to be forwarded to a specific player on the network. Do this for all players.
• Then, in the Options->Network tab in the game, type in your port that you forwarded in the previous step.

And you’re done! If anybody else tries this, let me know, as I’m curious as to whether it really works… or it was just a fluke that it worked for us.

There is a known issue that if one of us hosts an online game, and the other joins AND somebody outside the network joins the game, both of our games (and the router!) crash when the game is loading. However, playing 1v1 online against my roommate works, and playing in different games online at the same times work, and hosting games works.