Mihail Szabolcs

Private Schools and Education

2011-10-24T00:00:00+02:00

I wanted to write about this for a while but never really get around to; it's more like a mash-up of thoughts and ideas so do not expect anything coherent or heaven forbid something that will stand in a court room.

The idea of private schools and words like selling something worthwhile like Education frighten me, for good reasons, I can actually back this up as you'll notice below.

How on Earth did we get to this? Is this what our forefathers fought for? Of course not, this is the result of grandiose capitalist ideas and perceptions about the world.

We are going to save the World, yada, yada, yada. There will be no poor, etc.

Or even better ...

Private schools will raise up the bar when it comes to education.

... going as far as (searching for the needle in the sac!) ...

Our current public school system is not working and it fails to fulfill the needs of our students.

I'm pretty sure you heard at least some of these in some shape or form maybe even phrased in a different manner in order to appear less intrusive to the untrained eye or ear.

Criticizing the public school system or state school system you name it, is the elemental mistake and surprisingly this is the first argument that comes up regardless of the country in question.

How pathetic is that? It's so pathetic that it's not even funny.

I'm not bashing capitalism, nor competition. Competition is awesome and it's necessary in order to keep things on the right track, BUT not when it comes to EDUCATION.

Education is and must be totally independent and universal without limits imposed by the state, boards of trustees and other virgin wankers who have pedophile tendencies when looking at 4th graders.

In today's modern society private schools are like corporations and actually can be profitable.

Neat isn't it? They have to pay all those hard working (cough, cough) teachers right? Hell no!

Knowledge and education by definition are core values and the base foundation stones of any civilization, it's our duty as human beings to keep it that way, to keep it free and accessible to anyone, regardless of nationality, race and social or financial condition.

Putting a price on education by creating private schools and selling books at ultra high prices is the number one fundamental mistake which does nothing else but widens the social rift at the expense of being profitable tarnishing the true secular values.

How perverted this is, think about for a second. Nowadays, teachers are complaining all the time about not earning enough, schools don't have the necessary resources for normal operation and the list can go on.

Any teacher who ever dares to raise even just the idea of getting paid or money doesn't deserve to be called anything else but a complete and total BASTARD and has no place in a classroom with absolutely no exceptions.

If you don't do it for the students, if you don't give out your heart and soul for the students then ultimately you cannot and have no rights to teach the students.

But what does it mean to teach somebody? Teaching is more than just memorizing like a robot and then spitting it out quickly with no feelings to a group of untrained individuals and hoping that they might learn or retain something from all that.

That's not teaching, even monkeys do a far better job than that.

Teaching is all about hinting and guiding, you are not creating clones or instances of your very self, but rather projecting yourself into those individuals who chosen you as their teacher, directly, indirectly or even by pure chance because they just want to experience something new and unknown.

You cannot teach somebody unless you can teach yourself, unless you know how to learn.

Did it ever cross your mind that young folks finish up their studies and after 16 years of education realize that they know absolutely nothing, but they got their pride by graduating from some super-duper-school and that's where their solace comes from; it will definitely look good in their CV, plus their mom can tell the whole neighborhood about it. How idyllic isn't it?

Hell, they don't even know how to learn after all those years; I see this all the time and it's such a shame.

Private schools are supposed to have a better staff and implicitly better students, right? Let me break the news for you, THEY DON'T.

Who are we to decide who deserves this or that and who is eligible or not? Some students (coming from families with considerably wealth) of these private schools take this for granted, for them it's like they had to go there by definition, while for others (coming from the middle-class or below) it's a privilege and it's very likely that they can afford it only via student aid and scholarships; just to be there, just because some cock sucker asshole said that super-duper-school is so professional and it's better than XYZ, it's the path to instant enlightenment and you'll walk out as a pure genius after graduation.

At what cost? What's the catch? All you have to do is to pay for all the services just like in the strip club around the next corner so you can get a lap dance by some fucking tired and worn out Eastern European immigrant whore at 6 AM.

Since when did education become a service? It's almost like a BUZZ word nowadays, I wouldn't be surprised if we'd start hearing education as a service in a month or two.

We'll sell our mothers and sisters for education.

We don't need to reinvent education to suit the so called emerging modern world or to make it fit into some idealistic capitalist story, all we have to do is to embrace it, protect it and recognize it as one of the most precious gems of mankind.

The long term solution is creating a unified system (or network if you please) and most definitely not spawning even more private schools.

Why women should not work?

2011-09-15T00:00:00+02:00

Right, you read it just right, in my humble opinion women should not work. Why is that?

I always had this idea or at least as long as I know myself.

Let's set something straight before we jump into this. "... the should not work" premise doesn't imply the fact that the place of women is in the kitchen. Hell no! Nobody ever said that.

The reason why I'm saying this is quite simple, women should focus on the things that are important to them, the things that make them happy and feel good about themselves, the things they are excited and passionate about, if for some reason or another work as in official settings happens to be this thing and they want to work, that's just awesome, but if not then they JUST DO NOT HAVE TO.

MEN's primary purposes are to provide women with the (at the very least!) following:

security
shelter
bread on the table (read food)

Whenever I bring this up in social circles, I get mixed reactions, but surprisingly everybody seems to be opposed or rather scared which is very weird.

All I'm saying is ... my girlfriend or possible wife will never have to work if she doesn't want to. Simple as that, nothing fancy, yet it clearly shows how sick our society has become after all these years of so called enlightenment.

As a result, some of the not so polite reactions sound like ...

What the fuck? You can't let women do what they want ...

... the somewhat polite ones sound like ...

How lucky she is!

The simple fact of not having to work has nothing to do with human rights or taking away rights from women, obviously these misconceptions have been coined by the feminist fundamentalists and burned into the modern women's brain.

I'm not going to tackle the idea of earning money here, I briefly did that in my long Marriage and Productivity post.

On a different note, like I said before I had this idea since forever and then by accident I stumbled across an interview, Jennifer Byrne interviewing my Hero Christopher Hitchens.

Guess what? I was amazed by the fact that Christopher shared the very same views. Pure coincidence you may say.

Don't be so bold! This is just another example of the fact that WE anti-theists, we don't need/have to go to Church every Sunday morning in order to reassure and validate ourselves about our values and morals.

We don't even need to know or meet each other in order to be driven by the same forces towards the very same goals.

Again, the questions about morality and religion deserve several posts on their own, but as a rule of thumb I would like to stay away from getting into these for a while. In the meantime feel free to checkout Christopher's existing material concerning this subject.

This post wasn't really about convincing people, nor to bring considerable evidence which could sustain my claims, but a rather clichesque raw dump of thoughts which happened to keep my mind busy for years.

Marriage and productivity

2011-09-07T00:00:00+02:00

We often hear people saying things like ...

You'll see what I mean when you are married.

Personally, I don't buy this piece of shit and I consider it a rather childish way to deal with adulthood, or the inability to deal with it at all which in my opinion it makes things even worse!

They make it sound like we are all doomed to this, we shouldn't try to resist because all resistance is futile; or like this is something we didn't chose, yet we have to learn to live with it forever.

These people have no idea about what it means to HAVE FUN, by FUN I do not mean smoking weed or getting drunk on a Friday night "because you deserve it" ...

Before

Before we jump into any hazardous conclusions let's look at these folks way before they made contact with the so called female companion.

When I get home, I don't have time or the will to do anything else.

I tell you what that anything else means; it means exactly that, yup it means nothing, it means wasting your evening, wait... wasting every single evening and weekend by doing absolutely nothing!

The vacation was too short, I'd like to go back, I want more ...

Seriously? You cannot be for real ...

I don't like my job, I'm just doing it because I couldn't find anything better.

Why I can't have a bigger salary? Company XYZ gives XYZ amount of money for far less work ...

I find doing nothing incredibly difficult, but maybe that's just me ...

After

At this point the female companion made her appearance and suddenly things become a lot more simple; there's no need to find various arguments and reasons, everything can be summed up in one sentence.

I would really love to do XYZ, but I have a wife you know? ...

Can this get any more pathetic than this? I'd say it can't, this is the end of line.

The female companion is doing the exact same thing and she's in the exact same state of denial, totally disconnected from reality.

There are millions of couples like this in the world. I blame the society for this phenomena.

Perhaps they do not understand the meaning of the word productivity, or perhaps which is more likely do not want to, mostly because it would shake their lives built on lies and fake commodities.

Us, the others, all we can do is to try to give them slight hints over and over again in different forms hoping that one day they might get the idea.

While productivity is not directly linked to morals and ethics, it is influenced by them in subtle ways which can be unwillingly neglected by the unsuspecting public.

My personal life is governed by these simple rules:

Living a good and productive life ...

... doesn't involve money, material things or ~~religion~~
... means following your passion and doing the things you are truly passionate about, life is way too short for not being yourself and not having fun
... is all about working hard and achieving your dreams at all cost, one just cannot afford wasting his/her life by living someone else's life and copying/chasing someone else's dreams

Discussing these things and making certain individuals understand them is incredibly hard, at least here in Romania, I'd imagine it's pretty much the same in other countries.

People tend to get stuck on the doesn't involve money ... part, this is the only part they are truly interested in and willing to get into arguments with you because to them this is equal to being homeless or even worse being a complete loser.

More often than not the following question comes up as the result of some sort of auto-defense mechanism.

How can you live your life without money?

... and shortly after ...

It's just not possible. You have to make money.

They are so obsessed with the very idea of making money that they forgot what it means earning money, there's a significant difference between the two.

When you follow your passion and do the things you are passionate about, the importance of money fades away and suddenly it becomes less important. Why? You are earning it while having FUN and that is when you are truly productive, enjoying a good life.

Reality

Returning to marriage and productivity, surprise, surprise, I have to disappoint you ... A healthy couple having a healthy marriage (healthy meaning = NOT dude + female companion doing it for the sake of doing it, everybody does it anyway, so why not? just like a couple of chimpanzees in the ZOO) will be at least twice as productive and spend twice as much time together than it normally would while being single.

How this can be? Are they on medication? Is this some new E.T technology?

No you fool, it just means a better use of time and more careful planning. If you think that this cannot be scaled any further, you are wrong, marriage is just the tipping point.

Only after new bundles arrive the couple will reach its maximum (relative!) productivity in terms of time usage and general planning.

What is the logical explanation behind this sudden boost of productivity?

A single productive person has a TODO list filled with various projects, in this context the word project is being used in a more broader sense which includes all sorts of activities, official and personal.

(I'm not going to tackle the importance of having a TODO list because that subject deserves a full post on its own.)

The personal ones may or may not be prioritized, some of them can be discarded, etc. In order words it's not end of the world if they are not completed on time, etc.

After the marriage two new groups emerge:

common projects
projects important to the significant other

The existence of these groups results in a re-organization of the TODO list. As you might have guessed already, they go straight to the top of the list.

As a secondary result, the couple will be able to do MORE in LESS time.

Wait, weren't they productive already?

It's human nature to stretch the time available to suit projects and not the other way around, which explains why adding two new groups produces a productivity boost, despite the increase in the number of active projects.

There's no "I" in the team, but there are three "U"s in shUt the fUck Up.

Explain this to the next dude who'll try to sell you the "You'll see ..." crap.

Good luck and have a good night!

Commentless Blog

2011-08-18T00:00:00+02:00

I promised to write more about this, so here we are. Why I decided to get rid of the comments altogether? Make no mistake this isn't some infamous Justin Bieber fan blog or something along those lines, yet a couple of my ... How should I put it ... Ah, controversial posts caused quite a lot of buzz mostly coming from trolls and wannabe fan boys.

The value of these kind of conversations is just low to non-existent and it raises the very elemental question, does it worth having comments at all?

Dude where are my comments?

It's not that bad, people can still get in touch with me via Twitter or the good old e-mail; sure there are other mediums to consider like Hacker News, Reddit or even Facebook when it comes to sharing a new post and get in exchange more or less instant feedback.

The benefits of a commentless blog are numerous, but the most important thing is that you'll start writing down what you feel and the way you feel, without looking at things from the commenters perspective and trying to figure out how to please them so they'll all clap and applaud you like you were some Stalinist masochistic tyrant.

On the other hand, because the instant comment, comment, troll, troll, comment, comment approach won't work, the possible readers and/or commenters will have to think more before hitting random keys and masturbate on your page in a quite obscene manner. We are mammals for a reason, aren't we?

Secondary Benefits?

There's more to this right? One could perceive it as educating your readers which is not far from the naked truth and in my opinion it is a perfectly logical and valid argument.

Some indirect benefits of this commentless paradigm would be:

if they approach you via Twitter, their rant will be limited to a paultry 140 characters; which can be quite daunting if you are a troll and might just give up altogether
if they approach you via e-mail, you can privately go back and forth and depending on the nature of the conversation, occasionally you might even find yourself having fun

Closing

Again, I can't stress this enough, this is nothing like the maintain appearances at all cost communist type of rationale, all it means is that you'll focus on what matters; the content makes the blog and not vice-versa.

Google Plus

Just as a side note, I want to mention that Google Plus is an excellent content centric system, on G+ content does matter and that's what it makes all the difference, that's why people enjoy posting semi-post like content. (i.e Linus Torvalds, Eric. S. Raymond)

Think about it for a split second, what do you enjoy more?

Twenty semi-naked-drunken-escapade-florida-state-university-whoring-out-last-night photos on your wall (feed) or a well written piece of text (e.g: random thoughts, points of interest) between 200 and 400 characters?

I'll let you reflect on it and answer the question for yourself; as for me, I'm pretty sure you know the answer already and it needs no further tackling in any direction whatsoever.

Hiatus

2011-08-14T00:00:00+02:00

For the outsider it might appear that I kind of abandoned or rather neglected this blog, but this is far from reality.

I did a bunch of awesome stuff in the past couple of months and certainly have a bunch of interesting topics that I'm going tackle during the next few weeks in order to get back on track and clear my records.

Here's a small run-down of some side-projects I've been hacking on during all these months when I didn't feel like working on Lera3D.

Olde New

Also, as you may noticed (if you are not reading this from an RSS reader), I switched over to a more compact, minimalistic and content centric layout.

This also means that I'll be able to focus on what matters the most the content.

I got rid of the archive and tag pages as they had low traffic which just didn't justify having them at all. Who the hell is going to browse your posts by tags nowadays?

The comments are also gone (bye, bye little Troll creatures) so you'll be forced to think twice before your dirty little fingers hit the keyboard.

Much nicer and richer syntax highlighting:

def HelloWorld():
    print('Hello World')

class HelloWorld
{
    public:
        HelloWorld(void) {}
}

Or just pre:

$ whoami

Much nicer quotes:

Now, if Lahaina Divers just realized that they should tell people from Northern Europe to show up at 7:30 (instead of 7AM for the tardy people who don't have that Germanic "Ve vill be on time" mentality), and if the pull requests I got had been a bit higher quality, it would all have been perfect.

(Linus Torvalds on G+)

Notices:

This is a Hello World notice! Beware of the Hello World notices.

Warnings:

This is a Hello World warning! Beware of the Hello World warning.

Info(s):

This is a Hello World info! Beware of the Hello World info.

Tables:

Apples	Oranges
egg	chicken
banana	cucumber
blonde	brunette

Lists and page breaks:

one
two
three

one
two
three

Images:

Auto links:

http://proudify.me

All these in plain Markdown with some extensions. Isn't it beautiful? Lets you focus on the precious content.

I'm going to discuss the idea of a blog without comments in a dedicated post and a few slightly more philosophical topics soonish, so stay tuned.

Getting more done

2011-01-31T00:00:00+02:00

I'm a total efficiency freak, always looking and exploring ways of getting out the most of my personal time.

Also, I happen to have the bad habit of working on at least 2-3 personal projects simultaneously at any given time and toying with a lot more ideas which have been partially/fully abandoned or just placed in the back-burner until further directions.

Considering that I have a "full-time" job, my time is rather limited and my activities resume to hacking a few hours (sporadically) after work during work days (Monday-Friday) and extended hacking sessions during the weekends (namely Saturday-Sunday).

Project Queue

Ancestria

Ancestria: Winter Special is a mini-game we built in Flash using the open source Flex SDK, will hit the web with full source code very soon. Stay tuned.

It's a match at least three or more of the same color game with a twist.

Language: Action Script

On the other hand there is Ancestria: Flux (a.k.a Episode One) action-adventure for the PC (Linux, Windows) and Mac, which is still in a quite early stage, on-going art-production (Melissa) and technology (me) .

Language: portable ANSI C/C++ (mainly Lua for scripting, but not limited to)

Lera3D

Portable cross-platform game engine and framework, this is directly related to the stuff above because it will provide the necessary game technology to power the game.

Language: portable ANSI C/C++ (mainly Lua for scripting, but not limited to)

Asseteer

Light-weight portable cross-platform version control in the cloud tuned for "game assets", combining the best of both worlds distributed and centralized providing command line and GUI tools, built with non-techie users in mind complementing award winning solutions like Git or SVN without locking your data. (data liberation is important!)

The meaning of "game assets" include raw files (PSD, MAX, etc) as well data in comestible format by your game technology, imported models, material files, scripts, etc.

Motto: The place of your source code is in Git and your "game asset's" in Asseteer.

Language: Python

Buildinator

Light-weight portable cross-platform continuous integration server with web interface, build queues and triggers (i.e commit), multiple build targets and a lot more.

Language: Python

Demos, Prototypes

Various other non-mission critical experiments/demos/prototypes which aid in a way or another the projects listed above.

Language: Various

Plan

My plan starting today is to work 1-2h every day (in the evenings) with no exceptions or excuses, on a different project, so my schedule looks something like this:

Monday - Demos, Prototypes, Research, Blog Update (post or cosmetics)
Tuesday - Ancestria (Mini Game, 70% ready)
Wednesday - Ancestria (PC, Mac) (work-in-progress, art production, when its done)
Thursday - Lera3D (work-in-progress, low-level core & graphics engine layer 1, when its done)
Friday - Asseteer (initial discovery phase 5%)
Saturday - Buildinator (initial discovery phase 5%)
Sunday - Nothing (relaxing, etc) or Random (Monday-Saturday)

Starting Mondays with something light-weight and totally unrelated, Tuesday-Thursday continuing with the important "main" projects (especially Lera3D, my baby), then Friday-Saturday Asseteer and Buildinator, Sunday is either "do nothing" or just hack on a random item from a previous day of a the week.

Most probably I will shuffle these from time-to-time just for fun :D

Closing

You may disagree with me when it comes to this one, but in my opinion working on multiple projects simultaneously can be beneficial for a number of reasons.

You don't get fed up with doing the same thing all the time.
You have the chance to tackle totally un-related stuff compared to what you worked on yesterday and this can be helpful if you are stuck with something, it happens all the time when it seems like you are in some sort of a dead-lock; by working on something else you might have a good idea (Evrika moment) or find a solution for your initial issue, or just how to make certain improvements.
You can look at things from a different (rather un-biased) perspective.
You can always do something "small and fun" which can give you a considerable "ego-boost".

I'll keep you guys posted with how this works out on the long run, it looks like fun :)

Christmas Special Update

2010-12-24T00:00:00+02:00

WARNING: this post is going to be a rather long and boring one so you might consider skipping it altogether, just to save both of us from any headaches that might pop-up along the journey into the deep fires of Mount Doom; arggh sorry that was for another post called ... Lord of ... arrggh forgot the name.

This is more like a resolution type of thing (if you will), because I don't think that I'll write another blog post by the end of this year (or maybe yes ... who knows?), plus it will shed some light on some more obscure things I didn't mention or discussed about (publicly!) earlier.

Everything you read about here might be subject to change, so don't take it as written in stone, be sure to keep that in mind.

Lera3D

Loyal subscribers of this blog maybe have noticed that, occasionally I might mention Lera3D, the cross platform 3D game engine and framework I'm hacking together for a number of years now. Iteration after iteration, this year I arrived to the point where I'm happy with the architecture in overall (not 100% yet) so a lot of good stuff are ahead for 2011, stay tuned!

All I can say for now is that it will be dual licensed, GPLv3 and indie friendly commercial, (under 1000$, full game engine and tool source code, initially Linux, Mac OSX and Windows with more platforms coming later), all further information will be given on a need-to-know basis when the time comes.

Also registered lera3d.org and leradoc.org, will host all the related material including documentation; both redirect to leragames.com at this point.

People ask me all the time about the infamous origins of the L.e.r.a (3D) acronym, so let me break the news for you Lera is Entertainment Right Ahead; if you are a slightly more Romantic soul, lets take a different route V.a.L.E.R.i.A; it's totally up to you, how you dare to decipher the deep secrets of this quite playful piece of word geekery.

Lera Games

I came up with the name Lera Games last year and registered the domain leragames.com at about the same time in order to use it as an umbrella name to release Lera3D with the tools when the time comes. (no ETA!)

Initially, I made a long list and considered a few non-Lera alternatives, but I (and others, a respected closed circle of trustees like Panda the great) liked Lera Games the most; there you go!

As of now Lera Games is a core team of two, Melissa Davidson and Mihail Szabolcs (me!) but we are looking into expanding the team over the course of next year, slowly but surely with at least one or two additional artists and hopefully begin outsourcing some of the Audio production from this early stage for the first episode of our Ancestria franchise and flagship title called Ancestria: Flux (Episode 1) .

We are not rolling full time yet, Melissa is (also) working as a freelancer and I have a full-time day job, but hopefully this will change soon. shrugs

The dinosaurette in the room, Melissa ...

Earlier this year, at the beginning of the beautiful month of August, I was still looking for an artist, but more like a partner in crime to begin the production of the game idea I had, which would be built along side with game engine showcasing key features and visual richness.

After emailing >100 various artists, looking through their portfolios, asking them for hourly rates, etc, etc; Melissa popped up out of the blue and suddenly became the perfect candidate (from day one!).

It's very hard to find somebody who truly enjoys their work, and it's passionate about every single thing related to it; nowadays the world is full of fake punk asses who work just for the money, just because their parents, friends or whoever said that the certain profession is well paid and they should do it anyway, even if they do not see the sense of it, not even a tiny bit.

They work 8h straight without giving a fuck, break things, do a shitty job and go home leaving behind broken, unfinished or just plain bad quality things.

Most certainly I wasn't looking for any of those, and I can wholeheartedly say that I would recommend Melissa to anybody at any given time, without even thinking about it, just because I know that she does a great job plus she's open minded and a top-notch learner.

Ancestria

By the end of August, after lengthy discussion threads, we have sealed the deal and started forging the yet unnamed game which later became known as Ancestria .

I'm not going to reveal much (for now!), but Ancestria is an action-adventure, with the action taking place in an unique steampunk world.

Once more, I registered bravely ancestriagame.com as a dedicated all-in-one-place for all things Ancestria.

We didn't bother with tons of advertising, marketing and PR at this point but we'll pick up speed later as we shoot to have a playable demo ready for IGF. cough, cough!

(We are just the 666th of the indies who will do the same next year, and most probably we'll miss it, but it's good to keep it in mind, as a productivity booster if nothing else)

Ancestria [Christmas] Special

What's the deal with this one? Well well, along the way sometime by the end of October we decided that maybe we should shoot for a 2D (possibly Flash) game and have it ready before Christmas, hence the name Ancestria Christmas Special; using some existing and well defined elements from our main Ancestria game design document; like our heroines Vera and Maria. (guys sssh ... no worries, we got a heroe as well!)

As I'm fluent in a dozen of languages and coding game technology myself, I'm always more than eager to try out other people's tools, and it was no different this time with Love2D and Flixel.

Now with the 2D game, I had an excuse to mess around with them, and ultimately create something awesome, while Melissa started working on the necessary artwork, plus I was going on vacation for the whole month of December. (perfect timing, I'd say!)

Love2D

So, started building a rough prototype of the game with Lua, it's always 10x faster to prototype in it, than any other language, except maybe JavaScript (they are kind of on par in my agenda).

I found Love2D to have a quite clean and well documented API, very very generic and it doesn't get in your way much; this was a pleasant experiment and experience.

Sometime in mid-November, I realized that there is no time to build up the whole game in Love2D and then port it over to Flixel (or FlashPunk) .

FlashPunk & Flixel

This wasn't a pons asinorum type of thing, because like I said above, I'm fluent in JavaScript, but I find some of the limitations and type-safety in AS3 quite annoying and last but not least insulting. I do understand that it's a lot more easier to create well optimized code from the compiler's point of view this way, but it becomes pain in the ass for the developer.

But, enough of that, I didn't like FlashPunk (way too heavy for my puritan taste), but I really liked the minimalistic approach of Flixel so went with it, so far so good even though Flixel is aimed towards "platformers", so I had to kind of reinvent the wheel; it well worth the effort.

Flixel is definitely defacto for platformers, enough said! Go, find out who is Adam Atomic now?

Deadline?

We kind of missed the deadline, December 24th, we'll finish the game, I just wasn't that productive as I thought I would be, being on vacation has tons of distractions, there are guests all the time, etc, etc. I still stand up tall behind my belief about having an office, otherwise you'll never get stuff done, even if it's just for the weekends.

People might disagree with me about this one, there are people who can work just as fine in a home environment; I'm just picking on you because I like you!

In overall, doing this small scale 2D project proven to be very very useful for both of us, validating ourselves as a team; it's useless to put talented people together in the same room, but who cannot work with each other for whatever reasons, then try managing them; that's worse than herding cats believe me.

It's not that bad, all the artwork is done, so hopefully the game will be out as well in a week or two with full GPLed source code, so watch out for it, and it will also be available in the Chrome Web Store.

The Chrome Web Store can offer a huge exposure for your Web 2.0 product (not just games), compared to the infamous portals . (the wise indies have their games in there already)

Indiega.me

There's never a time for me to be focused only on a single project; My attention span is huge and it involves at least 3 side projects, which I like to call my dirty little pleasures, if I may be so bold; these projects can vary from reverse engineering (in order to satisfy my strong taste for patterns) to plugins for various software and everything in-between.

By now you are probably wondering, why on Earth I'm telling you all this when the subtitle was Indiega.me ?

Twinkle, twinkle little star ..., ah wait this was for another post, damn copy-paste ... bleah!

In one of my inspired moments, while searching for yet not taken domain names involving the words indie and game, it struck me out of nowhere and to my surprise it wasn't registered, so I took it without looking back.

The next logical question is what I'm going to use it for? All I can tell you now is that it will be a small web product, obviously indie game related and open source, but again more on this in 2011. chuckle

Linux as a primary game development platform

You are like oh my god already, which is fine! I discussed this subject briefly before, but I'm going to dive into it again, touching a couple of different issues.

If you tell somebody that you are building a cross platform game engine from scratch their first reaction is like are you out of your mind?, there are a lot of good ones out there and besides that you are going to build it on your own? you should be make games instead ...

My first reaction to these is something like i beg your pardon, but show me one of those super awesome cross platform open source game engine which have been used in more than 1-2 (successful, very very important aspect we should not lose sight of) commercial titles.

You can mention Ogre ( Runic Games and their Torchlight ) if you are brave enough and pretty much that's about it, but still won't answer my question.

First of all there are no real open source game engines, but graphics engines at most, which is a huge difference.

Don't get me wrong, I perfectly understand the following things:

You are building games and not game engines and tools.
You don't care about the underlying technology and the adverse affects of viral dependencies. (i.e proprietary crapware like XNA)
You don't mind paying expensive licenses for technology without the full source code.
You don't mind to be limited to or be at the discretion of a certain tool like Unity, Shiva, UDK without the possibility to break through or study the inner workings. (in other words you don't care about your freedom)
You don't care about Linux or Mac OSX, who cares? Wind0ze rul3z!
You don't have the necessary resources to roll your own technology (we both know that this is damn lame excuse)

The things mentioned above are true for most of the indie game developer community, the so called professional developers don't have much to say because their hands are tied by managers and publishers; which again is a very very lame excuse.

The major bottleneck of the existing open source engines is their very own license. All of them are distributed under liberal BSD or MIT like licenses and this is their nemesis.

I also understand that the developers don't want to generate any revenue, which is quite nice of them, but a BSD like license won't make any difference, it will make things even worse.

No sane company or even independent professionals, (unless it's a hobby project which won't have significant impact anyway; Runic Games is brave and quite bold exception) will invest time and money adding features, fixing bugs, etc. with a BSD like license.

Why? The reason is a very obvious one, if company X can take it and make their own closed source fork (pointing at Apple, gotcha!), it just doesn't worth it for company Y to invest significant amount of resources and help company X indirectly.

A true game engine is almost like a mini operating system, with the kernel or core managing and providing access to hundreds of little components.

If the Linux Kernel wasn't under a GPL license, Linux would be nowhere near where is today with major companies contributing thousands of patches each month, you can take that for granted.

Another systemic problem is that there are no companies backing up commercially these infamous engines, limiting their area of exposure and credibility by orders of magnitude.

Don't get me started when it comes to the architecture of these systems; put 10 senior software engineers in a room and tell them to create the perfect architecture, what you'll get? you'll get a huge MESS like Ogre or Irrlicht.

At most 1-2 people can create the core architecture and then have a larger group, preferably early adopters test the feel of the API, by providing input on how tie up the loose ends, how to make it more accessible, more friendly and provide non-mission critical patches. Any major changes/features, (i.e rewriting an existing sub-system) should be discussed with the core team beforehand in order to avoid duplication of effort, frustration (i.e the patch is not accepted) and other issues that may arise.

Also, in order to maintain the quality upstream, you cannot just let any code get into your master branch. (TrollTech) Qt's way of accepting contributions works great IMHO, and it's ideal for large scale projects.

There are indies who roll their own well written and totally reusable (between projects) closed source custom technology like Frictional Games (they just [earlier this year] open sourced their previous generation of the technology HPL1), or like the now defunct Radon Labs and their Nebula Device engine, which is clearly the best (speaking of internals and architecture, maybe a little bit overengineered, sorry Floh) and only (open?!) game engine out there with several commercial titles (with limited success) under its belt.

Never wondered why Nebula Device never took off? It had a very very liberal license Do whatever you want with it, but give us credit and it still didn't make a damn difference; early adopters, solid documentation, a streamlined patch/fix submission process are a few of the key elements to run a successful large scale open source project like a game engine; true free software licenses will help to gain credibility and stability, by assuring your potential customers that the product will stay and it's just as rock solid as any other commercial alternative and even more, they have full control over every tiny aspect, there are no hidden API calls, fees, or whatever marketing mockery you can think of.

Inadvertently, Linux suffers from the lack of commercial quality open source game engines, games are pushing Windows, if there were no games people would just go and better use OS X for their office and photo/video editing needs like most people already do.

The chicken-egg problem persists and haunts Linux even now, when the %1 Linux users is just a Myth of the past, Microsoft losing their share of the pie on the Desktop every minute, obviously there is a long way to the top, but we are getting there with emerging markets like Net-books dominated by various Linux distributions.

Fair play and competition is good, healthy, that is what makes the world spinning around.

I have the feeling that in the game industry, when I say game industry, I think about EA, UbiSoft and other big shots, the perception of Linux being a tiny platforms persists still, I'm saying that after finding out that Epic games is dropping the idea of having Unreal Tournament on Linux for good, and others just refuse to release Linux ports, when you pay $60 for a triple A game, it would be nice if you could play it under Linux, without Wine and other hacks .

In closing ...

Together with Melissa, we'll do the right things, not the wrong things beautifully.

Oh well, I'm looking forward to a great 2011, Lera Games will kick some serious ass, most things work out when you expect them less to quote a wise and intelligent man called Me.

Damn, spent my whole day refining and tweaking this post, it should be ready to go by now ...

Feel free to comment if you got anything interesting to say, otherwise please remember, there is no I in a team, but there are three Us in shut the fuck up ...

There are at least a zillion of other things I missed and would like to write about, but I'll write a book one day ... entitled Piercing the heart in 10 words and it will include it all ...

Until next year, as server said ... Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone.

(ppsstt ... yes! Trolls included! but don't tell to anyone!)

END OF LINE

The Java Trap

2010-11-07T00:00:00+02:00

The empire strikes back or the return of the Jedi?

After my controversial CrapDroid post, it's time for me to strike back with another hot topic, namely the Java or C# trap for that matter.

The JVM and the .NET CLR are birds of the same feather and they kind of flock together; like it or not.

Most of the time when RMS makes his position clear concerning issues like this very early, everybody is like:

"Arrgh, ignore that old man ..."

"Did he take his medication first?"

Who cares? or perhaps who should care?

Companies should care more about this than the average Joe who might use Eclipse as his IDE and OpenOffice to write his love letters.

But you, the corporate guy, the enterprise engineer you build your shit on the top of it and then find yourself in some delicate position when Oracle or Microsoft tighten the strings.

There are two possible outcomes:

Refuse to pay and waste tons of resources on rebuilding everything from scratch, which you could have done from the very beginning avoiding the whole thing.

Continue to pay lots of money for stuff you are forced to use because you and your business depends on it, be it good or bad, like it or not.

Either way, the result is the same, you lose, you waste your company's resources on CrapWare.

Next time your consultant, advisor or CTO stands up and proclaims:

We'll use Java/C#! It's kick ass.

Back-hand him and make sure he doesn't need to walk in the office the next day.

The average Joe will just find an alternative and move on, he got nothing to lose.

The root of all evil

Every bad habit or thing can be traced back to the elemental evil which caused it in the first place, but more often than not we lose sight of this.

In this case my biggest question is why do they teach any of these at school?

Schools shouldn't teach students proprietary languages more than they provide them with free packs of cigarettes.

If they want to teach students OOP without worrying about "low-level" stuff like "memory management" they could pick a scripting language like Python or PHP and don't damage their brains with proprietary crap. It's worse than crack!

Lessons learned?

In fact, I'm quite happy about Oracle busting Google's ass, but only because of CrapDroid.

Don't get me wrong Google makes some great web products but they should GTFO of this mobile business, it just doesn't suit them.

Hopefully this will be a good lesson and make you corporate guys think twice before you fire up your CrapBeans or CrapStudio in order to build the NEXT BIG THING, because you might wake up in a morning and realize that you don't OWN it anymore.

This is not about competition we just don't need this Java and C# crap. We don't need free implementations or tiers, they just have to go down the toilet once for all.

Why duplicate effort by building these free runtime environments ? We don't need them, there are far more important parts of the Linux user-land which need lots of love.

Defenders of the faith

Java/C# guys, please for the sake of humanity do me a favor and if your comment is anything like these, PLEASE don't post it and move along.

"What do you know about Enterprise Level applications written in Java?"

"Java is rock solid, yada yada yada ..."

"How QT is different from Java?"

I'm not interested in listening to your abominations. Thanks.

References

For your reading pleasure, make sure to read these before you start trolling around in the comments.

Second thoughts?

Obfuscated JavaScript is another story, we'll discuss it next time with CopperLicht on the radar. Stay tuned.

End of Line

Sintel

2010-10-30T00:00:00+02:00

What is Sintel?

Sintel (Durian) is another Blender open movie project, just like Big Buck Bunny or Elephants Dream .

To find out more about this project be sure to check out sintel.org .

DVDs

I pre-ordered my DVDs like a year ago, and I was very excited when they arrived yesterday. Yay!

The image quality is not so good, but I'm sure that you got the idea :D

End of Line

CrapDroid

2010-10-23T00:00:00+02:00

Where Google Went Wrong?

The most important issue is their very own fork of the Linux kernel which no longer can be merged with the upstream kernel. You can read more about this right here.

The second thing is that if you take a look at Android, you will realize pretty quickly that it's not that open after all or as advertised, because of the GPLv2 kernel there's nothing we can do about this; all those smart-phones running modified (binary and proprietary) versions of Android, most of the time won't let you, or be able to run your own version. Again, more about this over here.

Third, the language of choice Java. While Java is a nice language, it's not really known for his speed and low memory requirements which are key elements for a low-power-consumption device like a smart-phone. Of course when Google realized this poor decision, tried to supplement it with the NDK, which is nothing more but a good joke.

It's unacceptable to use a 1Ghz CPU just to be able to run the operating system smoothly because 80% of the CPU time is eaten up by the garbage collector. Obviously this is a major benefit for the Hardware Vendors.

Fragmentation is the result of competition, the market will settle down to a couple of major vendors over the years, that's what happened in the PC scene as well, so anybody who argues against Android by mentioning the fragmentation issue has no idea about what he is talking about.

Where Nokia & Intel Went Right?

Why reinvent the wheel and create a brand new distribution or operating system, when you can cherry-pick the components out there and build something awesome; this is the joy of FLOSS.

Nokia

How could one possibly go wrong with a combination of the Linux kernel, Debian and Gnome resulting in Maemo ?

Intel

Just like Nokia, a winner combination of the the Linux kernel, and Gnome resulting in Moblin .

God said let there be MeeGo ...

Android fan-boys I'm sorry to disappoint you, but the joint efforts of Intel and Nokia created a far better platform, a true platform based on FLOSS for both smart-phones and net-books known as MeeGo.

Microsoft? Windows 7 Phone Edition?

Not responding.

Apple? iPhone?

iWhore? iFloor? Anyone?

End of Line

App whore?!

2010-10-04T00:00:00+02:00

App Whore? Ahhh, sorry I meant App Store, just in case you didn't notice they are very very trendy these days.

You almost cannot call yourself a respectable company down the valley if you haven't got your very own App Store.

Look around ... Apple, Intel, Microsoft ... and now Canonical got one, right into their "Ubuntu Software Center"; this wasn't a totally unexpected move from them, considering that they built the whole Software Center in the first place.

Linux, sadly still faces the chicken<->egg problem when it comes to the Desktop.

The server side of things is doing great, just look at Red Hat and you can tell right away; of course now with the CLOUD, the DESKTOP could be just replaced by your web browser as web apps start to resemble and replace desktop apps.

I don't have anything special against Canonical and their will to bring in an App Store for Commercial Applications, but they should at least reconsider this move; why? for a shitload of reasons.

Linux and free software are about the freedom of choice, and Linux itself really needs an App Store on its own where you could get and install free and commercial software for your favorite Linux distribution and not locked in to one distribution.

This doesn't mean that they have to drop their own repositories or package formats, or have some unified interface.

My point is to have one atomic App Store where developers can submit their software (free or commercial) and they would get packaged for all major distributions out there; the most dauting task for all those devs who are porting their games to Linux is to provide packages, but everybody could just benefit from this in general, even those who know-how-to package their software.

This would be governed by a board of people just like every other major free software project, e.g: Gnome, combined with a transparent and streamlined submission process (no discrimination, but preventing shitty apps to get in) .

The end-user would just bring down the App Store application from their favorite distribution's repository and have access to well packaged high quality software.

Commercial software and especially games would benefit from a platform like this the most, considering that Steam is not going to have a Linux version anytime soon, which could solve and unify partially the commercial game distribution .

Many times (most notably during the Humble Indie Bundle!) it has been shown that Linux users are more willing to pay for quality games than the other platforms. (namely MacOSX and Windows)

The conclusion is that an App Store is needed in the Linux ecosystem, but not one tied (and maintained by) to a specific distribution, not even a major one like Ubuntu.

I truly believe, that (indie) games can make Linux mature and increase its adoption on the DESKTOP; but more on this later ...

Without games, Windows would be a boring platform used by accountants who need M$ Excel, just because they never heard of Open Office or don't care enough to consider an alternative or don't care about their freedom nor privacy ;)

End of Line

WRTC ...

2010-08-14T00:00:00+02:00

QuakeCon 2010

Just about two days ago at QuakeCon 2010, John announced the release of the integral source code of Wolfenstein: Return to Castle and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory both using modified versions of idTech3 (Quake3).

This is another significant contribution to the open source community, even though some of us were expecting idTech4 (Doom3).

Build, Build, Build

I quickly grabbed the source code of the SP version (Return to Castle) and compiled it without any problems in less than a minute on my Linux Box.

I don't own the original Return to Castle game so I searched for the demo version and copied the PAK file containing the game data.

Everything worked fine, except the sound which can be fixed easily:

su
echo "wolfsp.x86 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss

I'm curious to see how the community will start cleaning up the code base just like it did with the good old idTech3. ( ioquake )

End of Line

Reloaded a.k.a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

2010-06-05T00:00:00+02:00

End of Line

Happy Birthday

2010-05-23T00:00:00+02:00

First of all Happy Birthday (++) to my special, unique and very lovely fiancee Valeria. :D

The soundtrack is Flying on the Wings of Steam by Chris Vrenna. (For obvious reasons, I cannot redistribute it).

LD Prototype

LD Prototype is a (portable) mini framework I wrote for Ludum Dare 17, but I didn't manage to finish the intended game, mostly because I spent all my time writing the 'framework' from scratch. Waiting for Ludum Dare 18 :P ...

Don't expect too much, but it's definitely OK for small prototypes. It has all the basic stuff like wrappers for texture, shader and geometry handling, abstract renderer, simple math classes, etc.

It has a couple of design flaws, but hey this is most definitely not production quality code by no means :)

Look into my garden

Valeria's birthday was approaching, so I decided to play around with some Bezier curves and code this small demo before releasing the framework to the general public.

I like to give credit where credit is due, my primary source of inspiration was the Sunflower demo; I re-used/borrowed a couple of textures from there.

(Horrible sync and camera handling, you won't believe it until you see it for yourself :P)

The whole source code is on GitHub and can be reached by clicking right here .

PS: Steampunk piece of shit :P

OK, OK ... I'm off now ... you know ... sleep is a very very good substitute for Coke. sigh

End of Line

The Humble Indie Bundle

2010-05-04T00:00:00+02:00

I purchased World of Goo before, but this was something I just couldn't refuse so I spent 10$ on it. I know it's not much, but hey it's more than nothing.

In one hour (after I purchased) the 'Real Time Statistics' showing the total number of raised funds bumped from $10,000 to more than $26,000.

Go and grab your bundle today .

End of Line

RakeBuild a.k.a Rake for CPP

2010-04-18T00:00:00+02:00

Build System Wanted

There was a little project named Lera3D and it was looking for a good cross-platform build system. Ha!

Yeah, Lera3D currently uses Scons which is Python based. I was quite happy with it, but it feels heavy and complicated, I like Python but Scons feels over-engineered; even a simple thing like adding an additional 'include' path can't be done in a reasonably intuitive way. I don't want to open a war between the Pythonist and Rubyst camps, these are my own personal thoughts, don't take them as granted.

LemonTea as well as my other QT based projects use QMake; is much better design wise, but it's QT centric which makes it feel awkward when used to build Non-QT projects.

At some point I considered migrating Lera3D to QMake, but changed my mind ... and opted for Rake. I'm most definitely not a Ruby fan boy and I'm not becoming one, but Ruby feels natural ... (this is purely a matter of personal taste / choice)

Don't get me started when it comes to CMake et al.

Going Rake

Rake is surprisingly well documented, there are hundreds of Ruby addicts and despite the rumors saying that it's not easy to handle sub-modules, I find it quite intuitive . There is no need for writing additional wrappers or abstraction layers on the top of it, nor very complicated 'Rakefile' scripts, everything can be kept simple and efficient (most of the time).

With Rake you have 100% control over the build process plus all the benefits offered by Ruby; one can do pre-processing, generate files, archive files, get revision numbers from Git, etc, etc. the possibilities are virtually endless.

Birth of RakeBuild

It took me a day and a half to build this 'Rakefile' which is somewhat similar to QMake and Scons but uses YAML configuration files instead of individual Rake scripts for every sub-module.

RakeBuild is tailored towards building modular C/C++ projects in an effective and simple manner.

Consider the following directory structure:

Project
src
- plugin1
  - file.cpp
  - plugin1.yaml (optional)
  - plugin1-debug.yaml (optional)
- plugin2
  - file.cpp
  - plugin2.yaml (optional)
  - plugin2-debug.yaml (optional)
- application
  - main.cpp
  - application.yaml (optional)
  - application-debug.yaml (optional)
build
- release
  - plugin1
  - plugin2
  - application
- debug
  - plugin1
  - plugin2
  - application
Rakefile
Makefile (calls rake commands)
Project.yaml (optional)

Each sub-directory of src contains a module with source code and an appropriate RakeBuild project file. Sub-directories which doesn't contain a RakeBuild project will be skipped.

RakeBuild supports two build targets Release and Debug.

Release => [module-dir-name].yaml
Debug => [module-dir-name]-debug.yaml

Each RakeBuild project contains key=>value pairs (in valid YAML format) which is merged with the default global project configuration for every module.

If there is [project-dir-name].yaml file in the root of the project where the Rakefile is, then it will be picked up and all key=>values will be merged into the default global project configuration.

This is useful because the whole build process can be configured from here, without ever changing the Rakefile itself.

A basic executable can be compiled just by placing an empty RakeBuild project file in the module directory as the default settings are for executable targets.

The 'build' directory structure (which is a mirror of the source directory structure) is created automatically so you don't have to worry about it.

There's also automatic dependency linking which can be turned off if needed, but it comes handy when you have to link to modules with an executable module.

For this scenario the RakeBuild project file for the executable would be something like this:

name: hello_world
type: app
deps: [lib1, lib2]

The deps is an array of module directory names from within the top level src directory; with automatic dependency linking those two libraries will be automatically linked without specifying extra flags for the linker manually.

Getting Started with RakeBuild

You can get a better understanding about how this works by looking at the source code or checking out the provided sample projects.

The whole RakeBuild work-flow is in my head, but it's rather cumbersome to write it down, I think that it's easier to understand by looking at the provided samples.

Documentation is good, but self-explaining code is even better. evil grin

I find it quite intuitive and perfect for my purposes but as always, everybody has different needs so your mileage may vary.

Contributions, input (constructive!), ideas, etc. are more than welcome. The source code can be found on GitHub right here .

I'm looking forward to get some feedback, especially from Rubyst camp, because I'm pretty sure that some of the stuff can be done in a lot more elegant or simpler way .

With a simple Makefile like below, RakeBuild can be used with QT Creator or other IDEs which have support for importing existing Makefile based projects.

all: rake release: rake release debug: rake debug clean: rake clean distclean: rake clobber realclean: distclean

.PHONY: all release debug clean distclean realclean

What's missing

What I consider that it's missing at this point is a configure stage which can check for 'external' dependencies and do a complete report if something isn't the way it was originally expected.

Two Column Layout

I added another flag to my Jekyll layouts, this makes it possible to 'toggle' the two column fluid layout for certain posts.

Neat isn't it??!

If you still didn't migrate to Jekyll then you should definitely give it a try, because once you try it (I guarantee) you never go back and find solutions like WordPress cluttered, heavy-weight or altogether ... lets say it .. unnecessary. (less is more, most of the time)

Alas, users with browsers without support for this multi-column CSS3 feature (as of now), will render the posts using the standard one column fluid layout.

End of Line

Mini3D is dead

2010-04-14T00:00:00+02:00

Here we are, 3 days after the launch and people are trolling here and there.

I offered the community a truly 'free' alternative to crapware which forces you to buy "commercial" licenses in order to see the complete non-obfucated source code and stuff like that; this was the primary reason why I released it under a really permissive BSD license.

It seems that people just don't need an alternative, they can do something better on their own, so I decided to take off the source from the internetz and let it rust in a dark corner of my HDD.

To all the trolls (not to be mistaken with the guys from Trolltech) out there, FUCK YOU TOO!

I made it public, I take it away! I'm your GOD!

End of Line

Mini3D, next steps ...

2010-04-13T00:00:00+02:00

Next Steps

I didn't really test Mini3D on Minefield (Firefox) or Safari and it seems that there are some 'recursion' problems caused by my way of doing class inheritance on these two, so I'll fix this issue later on this week.

On the other hand I saw this dirty little game and I do believe that a clone like this would be perfect to showcase some interesting features:

Eventually we can take it to a new level by adding multiplayer via WebSockets, randomly generated levels, or other 'procedurally' generated content.

Thoughts ...

I just launched it barely two days ago and people already showed interest which is rewarding considering that at this point is the result of two weekends of work ...

Also, I wanna checkout the WebGL implementation in Chromium and eventually fix or contribute things ... we'll see ...

End of Line

WebGL is trendy ...

2010-04-11T00:00:00+02:00

Mini3D

I'm a hardcore C/C++ programmer, but when I do 'web' my all time favorite is JavaScript; however I tend to take JavaScript to the extreme by doing OOP, this confuses 99% of the 'web' dudes who have no idea about optimizations or just pretty much copied JavaScript from DHTML.com all their lives without ever knowing what's going on.

Soooooooo, drum rolls ... I'm here to announce Mini3D a small 3D engine written in pure JavaScript, built on the top of WebGL which uses the canvas element and it's part of the HTML5 standard.

Rant Begin

I should have rather spent time working on Lera3D instead, but after seeing the Quake2 port to WebGL and being pissed off by CopperLicht which is basically a subset of the crappy irrLicht ported to JavaScript and WebGL, I decided to build a 100% free alternative myself.

Rant End

Mini3D itself is fairly simple, yet written in a very elegant manner without any 3rd party libraries; it's quite light-weight. It has a modular design, so it's relatively easy to stick in a new module which can make use of other existing modules.

To run this piece of shit you will need an unstable build of Chrome, Safari or Firefox. I'd recommend Chrome, because it seems to be ahead of the time and the WebGL implementation is quite solid (at least so it seems under Linux).

Development

The development of Mini3D took barely two weekends so don't expect too much, but it's quite usable already and abstracts most of the required functionalities well enough; the primary reason was to simplify things and provide boilerplate code so the programmer can focus on the 'demo' or 'game' itself rather than writing miles of code every single time ...

The 'low' level part is ready (more or less), now higher level stuff can be built on the top of it.

This is a very very early version, but this time I stick to 'Release early, release often'.

Demos

Click on the images above to start the demos. You will need a WebGL enabled browser in order to watch them; for more information about how to get a WebGL enabled browser please consult the following documentation .

Source Code

The source is on GitHub, and can be found right here .

Feel free to fork it, hack it and submit a pull request. Your contributions are more than welcome.

Be sure to checkout the documentation as well.

End of Line

Indie Game Dev Rant

2010-04-06T00:00:00+02:00

Last week I stumbled across an interesting blog post about deciding to port an engine to Linux.

The reason??!!

As you can see in World of Goo, created by 2D Boy, they had about 17% of their sales on the Linux platform. It looks like a lot of open source gamers are just waiting for some stuff to play on the penguin!

Well, gentlemen, you don't have be a super genius to realize that as an indie game developer you just cannot afford locking yourself to a single operating system.

It's OK if you develop PS or Wii games only, but when it comes to the PC, Linux and MacOSX are to be considered because their user base is growing every single day.

Linux users are more likely to pay and buy a quality game ... why ?! because there aren't many good games in the Linux ecosystem, believe it or not that's a solid reason.

Indies tend to have the misconception that it's not possible to release a game on these three operating systems without any upfront costs ... this is factually false, because it's perfectly possible and totally feasable, BUT ... (there's always a BUT) you just have to choose and use portable libraries from the very beginning.

Fortunately, there is an open source alternative to pretty much every "sub-system" a (game) engine needs.

Renderer => OpenGL
Sound => SDL_mixer, OpenAL + Ogg
Image => SDL_image, DevIL
Input & Window Management => SDL, Allegro, GLUT, SFML

Or Why not just use QT for everything (perfectly possible now with Phonon for Audio) ??!

These are all well proven and mature libraries; you might have to write more code or wrappers around them, but the outcome will be complete and total win.

I will write a book focusing on Open Source Indie Game Development in the near future ...

End of Line

Masturbation with CSS3

2010-04-06T00:00:00+02:00

When I switched over to Jekyll, I knew that it's the right thing to do, I also knew that I will change the layout, colors, etc a lot more often than I did with my WordPress theme(s) .

I spent a couple of hours today tweaking the layout and overall look of this blog. Regular visitors will notice the changes immediately.

added some text-shadow
transition effects to the menu (plus various other tweaks)
moved the search box at to the top right corner above the menu, plus added the "awesome" search button
fixed the header so it stays on the top when scrolling (up or down).
changed the spacing of the content area (bigger margins, smaller paddings)
the home page can show multiple posts from the same day (when appropriate)
various other small tweaks / fixes (i.e message for IE users)

I also pushed out of a small ruby script which can generate the necessary CSS files with different colors.

Currently available color themes:

Green
Red (current)
Orange
Gray

End of Line

Lera3D Released

2010-03-31T00:00:00+02:00

Taaanaaaaa ... Lera3D has been released !!!

The source code is on GitHub as usual right here .

Until next time, as server said ...

End of Line

Lera3D Architecture

2010-03-28T00:00:00+02:00

It's kind of late, but I'm going to post this anyway. Yawn .

(click for a bigger version :P)

I've been always talking about Lera3D up and Lera3D down, but never posted anything tangible, so here we are rocking around the clock.

As you can see, everything is a plug-in, including the core itself; this allows 100% control and full customization of every aspect of the engine, the end-user can swap any plug-in by buying an alternate or just writing his / her own. (assuming that all plug-ins are well written and the exposed interfaces are flexible enough to make different implementations possible).

Lemon Tea has its place as well in the big picture ... can you find it? even though he's not using Lera3D as of now, it has a completely different small built-in engine, but this will change as it matures (hopefully!?!) .

I will write more about this tomorrow; by splitting up the core and explaining a couple of the existing features, plus giving a long awaited update on the progress with Lemon Tea.

Until tomorrow (ah shit it's tomorrow already ... grrr), as server said ...

(yawn)

End of Line

Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 1

2010-03-27T00:00:00+02:00

10.04 is rock solid! The first TRULY rock solid release since 7.04.

There's only a small glitch related to the proprietary ATI driver; if you install the latest official one straight from the AMD/ATI driver site, you will get a blank screen on boot, this is because the kernel module doesn't really like the new X shipped with this release.

Fortunately, there is an unreleased fglrx in the official Ubuntu repositories which works great, except that after installing it gnome-power-manager seems to ignore the brightness value and resets it to 100%, at least on this ASUS K50AB series laptop.

To overcome this brightness issue, I wrote a small script which I execute to reduce the brightness (0..15).

(this will get fixed eventually before the release)

#!/bin/bash
echo 8 > /proc/acpi/video/VGA1/LCDD/brightness

Ah, I almost forgot, it's easy to move the buttons to the right corner in metacity.

Here is how to do it:

Launch gconf-editor by pressing Alt-F2 then typing gconf-editor.
Navigate to /app/metacity/general and change the value of button_layout to :minimize,maximize,close .

In less than 5 hours, I have my whole system right back with all the necessary packages (i did a clean-install) installed. Huzzah!!!

End of Line

Instant Coffee

2010-03-20T00:00:00+02:00

Idea

The idea behind Instant Coffee was born yesterday when I was looking for some awesome editor with What You See Is What You Get capabilities and built-in support for Markdown .

Coffee, Coffee, Coffee

I took John Fraser's Showdown which is a Javascript port of Markdown, built a desktop app which loads it into a QWebView and adds some basic operations like open, save, export as html, etc.

Since I switched to a Jekyll generated blog, I write all my posts in Markdown , but I wanted instant visual feedback to see how my text looks like as I'm typing ... here we are.

This is a prototype, but it's perfectly enough for my basic editing needs, feel free to fork it, hack it, then submit a pull request; any contribution is more than welcome!

The source code can be found on GitHub as usual right here .

Instant Coffee is another prime example, just like SexyGrep of converting a web app into a desktop app using QT and WebKit, we really don't need Adobe Air and other proprietary bullshit.

End of Line

QML and other random stuff

2010-03-14T00:00:00+02:00

QML

I'm using the bleeding edge versions of both QT and QT Creator straight from the Git(orious) repositories; doing so has a couple of benefits, but also drawbacks mostly because some of this bleeding edge stuff may break :)

How do I test / use all these?

It's quite simple, I have my /opt mounted on a 10GB partition and I install qt and qt creator there via 'make install' then just make sure that all the utilities (i.e qmake) are in my path (all the libs in LD_LIBRARY_PATH), so basically I can even have multiple versions installed without breaking the "stable" versions residing in /usr or /usr/local .

I also discovered this awesome 'Boxes' demo, I have no idea how long this have been part of the demos, but it's really awesome.

Sooooo drum rolls finally I was able to get my hands on QML and test it without way any headache as it has landed into the 4.7 branch.

With this at my fingertips I was also able to compile QT Creator with the QML related plug-ins enabled. yaaaayyy!!?!

Here is a short video demoing the 'SameGame' example (part of the declarative samples); it was played and recorded using the official QML viewer bundled with QT.

Total and complete AWESOMENESS!!!

Time?

I'm not going to write about wasting time, but basically I spent my time playing around with the 0.A.D code base [more on this later] updating and recompiling QT and its friends, plus took a few decisions regarding Lera3D's engine architecture .

The weekend is not over yet, so there's a lot more to do! Go, go, power ranger!

0.A.D code base

[ this should be a completely separate post, but I'm just being lazy ]

0.A.D is developed by Wildfire games and recently (a year ago or so) have been open sourced. I blogged about this last year when I just compiled and pretty much forgot about it.

Yesterday I said, lets look at the source code again. I'm interested mostly in the rendering part, including the different rendering paths (fixed or shader), etc.

( a couple of fresh screens )

The actual code base is quite messy and not everything is clearly separated or grouped together where necessary.

c0d3rguy@Seth:/opt/0ad/source/maths$ ls -l
total 160
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  6315 2010-03-13 16:59 Bound.cpp     # point of interest
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  2717 2010-03-13 16:59 Bound.h       # point of interest
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  7913 2010-03-13 16:59 Brush.cpp
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  2521 2010-03-13 16:59 Brush.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  1422 2010-03-13 16:59 Fixed.cpp
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  4436 2010-03-13 16:59 Fixed.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  2782 2010-03-13 16:59 FixedVector2D.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  4054 2010-03-13 16:59 FixedVector3D.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  1685 2010-03-13 16:59 MathUtil.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy 14111 2010-03-13 16:59 Matrix3D.cpp
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  5286 2010-03-13 16:59 Matrix3D.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  6385 2010-03-13 16:59 MD5.cpp
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  1239 2010-03-13 16:59 MD5.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  4265 2010-03-13 16:59 Noise.cpp
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  1643 2010-03-13 16:59 Noise.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  7260 2010-03-13 16:59 NUSpline.cpp
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  2560 2010-03-13 16:59 NUSpline.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  3152 2010-03-13 16:59 Plane.cpp     # point of interest
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  2015 2010-03-13 16:59 Plane.h       # point of interest
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  7352 2010-03-13 16:59 Quaternion.cpp
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  2291 2010-03-13 16:59 Quaternion.h
drwxr-xr-x 3 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  4096 2010-03-13 16:59 scripting
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  1434 2010-03-13 16:59 Sqrt.cpp
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy   919 2010-03-13 16:59 Sqrt.h
drwxr-xr-x 3 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  4096 2010-03-13 18:27 tests
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  2518 2010-03-13 16:59 Vector2D.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  3247 2010-03-13 16:59 Vector3D.cpp
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  2457 2010-03-13 16:59 Vector3D.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 c0d3rguy c0d3rguy  3131 2010-03-13 16:59 Vector4D.h

Soo, the "maths", in addition to the usual VectorND and Matrix classes the Plane and Bound can be a valuable source of inspiration especially the Ray Intersection (& Bounding Box) stuff which is useful for picking . This is definitely the first place to look when investigating a renderer.

Lets digg further ... source/lib/ contains some of the low-level including some OpenGL related stuff.

Points of interest in source/lib/:

ogl.h (basic util stuff like "ogl_HaveExtension", etc)
ogl.cpp
glext_funcs.h (>OpenGL 1.1 i.e glActiveTexture and other ARB stuff)

source/ps/ contains more low-level stuff, some of these should be in source/lib/ like CStr or the FileSystem, and Vector2D should be most definitely inside "Maths".

IMHO, most of this directory should be merged with source/graphics/.

source/graphics/ contains higher-level Game related stuff which basically sits on the top of source/renderer so maybe it would be a good idea to merge all these into the renderer . [The frustum. and camera. code is definitely interesting.]

In source/renderer the render paths are OK, they are well separated but I feel like it has been over engineered, it's clearly visible that all these parts have been hacked together in order to create something which works rather than designing it carefully .

An example of this hacky design from source/renderer/Renderer.cpp:

bool CRenderer::IsTextureTransparent(CTexture* texture)
{
    if (!texture) return false;
    Handle h=texture->GetHandle();
    size_t flags = 0;   // assume no alpha on failure
    (void)ogl_tex_get_format(h, &flags, 0);
    return (flags & TEX_ALPHA) != 0;
}

This should have been part of the actual CTexture class (maybe as a static member) and not the CRenderer class; it's easy to see that the guys behind 0.A.D are primarily Windows developers, the code tells it all.

There are huge dependencies like Boost or Xerces, personally I would get rid of these, especially Boost which is a TRUE monster.

Oh well, this is not a complete code base analysis or anything, just a few very personal thoughts, don't pay attention if you don't want to.

[ Hear me NOW, believe me later. ]

Maybe, I will contribute to 0.A.D, who knows ... :) Lady who? BUG!!!

Until next time as server said ...

End of Line

Lemon Tea Update

2010-03-12T00:00:00+02:00

Update

It was about time for a status update regarding Lemon Tea. I'm trying to keep it simple and not over engineer it, because this is mainly a prototype and later is to be decided if it is worth continuing and transforming it into a full blown World Editor for Lera3D.

Highlights:

QDockWidgets
Scene Editor (started)
Property Editor (started, via the QT add-on)
Console Log (captures all qDebug())
lots of work on the internals (i.e asset load/save to XML)

Rant

I'm going to blend this with the update just not to make another totally separate post. (I'm lazy sigh)

This morning I noticed Syntensity's author's new post on the development blog about re-licensing Syntensity under a more permissive BSD like license.

I'm interested in this matter because I'm about to release Lemon Tea and then Lera3D sometime in the near future and choosing a good license is vital, because it can affect the adoption; a non-favorable license might totally reduce the interest.

I'm kind of falling for GPLv3 even if that's going to lead to a huge fragmentation, but at least it guarantees that nobody will just take a fork and turn it into closed source; on the other hand this would make it impossible to use it in any kind of commercial application, but this can be solved if the commercial licenses are negotiated on a case-to-case basis, so Indies could get a license for a much lower price than a full blown game studio with 30 full-time employees.

Just like good old Richard Stallman said, those who promote Open Source and Free Software they do not promote it with the freedom as the reason why.

I uploaded two episodes from the Go Open source campaign on Vimeo (feat. Richard Stallman) .

[ the correct thumbnails will appear in a day or two ]

End of Line

QT's File Engine

2010-03-07T00:00:00+02:00

QT's QAbstractFileEngine isn't a very well documented subject, nor there are any good examples on how to make good use of it.

It makes sense using it when the application needs a virtual filesytem for reading files directly from a ZIP or just restrict access to a certain directory.

Lets say that you have a scriptable game and you don't want to allow access outside of the "data" folder which holds all the necessary data, with QAbstractFileEngine this can be resolved in a transparent way as shown in the code snippet below.

...

//! File System Class
class FileSystem : public QFSFileEngine
{
    public:
        //! Constructor
        FileSystem(const QString &pFileName);
        //! Destructor
        virtual ~FileSystem();
};
//! File System Handler
class FileSystemHandler : public QAbstractFileEngineHandler
{
    public:
        //! Constructor
        QAbstractFileEngine *create(const QString &pFileName) const;
};
...
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    FileSystemHandler lFileSystemHandler;
    QFile lFile("scripts/test.js");
    if(lFile.open(QFile::ReadOnly | QFile::Text))
    {
        ...
    }
    return 0;
}

In our FileSystem class we preprend our base path to the fileName, i.e "./data/" so QFile, QDir, QFileInfo all work the exact same way they did before registering our file engine handler just the paths get altered in the background.

The latest registered handler takes precedence over existing handlers.

We could also do another nifty thing and register a handler which would respond to "fs://myfile.txt".

QFile lFile("fs://myfile.txt");

QT's internal resource system is implemented this way, so that's a good place to study especially if you want to implement a ZIP based virtual filesystem.

Tea, Tea, Tea, Lemon Tea

2010-03-04T00:00:00+02:00

She said: but it makes sense actually; like to make lemon tea you need to know something but it doesn't take a lot of knowledge.

A few days ago I announced Lemon Tea (formerly known as Prototype3D) which is meant to provide a complete development environment for rapid prototyping games (or even non-interactive demos) .

I would like to make a few additions/corrections to that announcement; first of all the license will be just GPLv3 (commercial licenses can be negotiated for a couple of $$$, but let's just stay with the good old GPLv3), this covers the tool code NOT the actual user created content which can be licensed as the user sees fit.

Lera3D (un-released, hidden in the dark forests of Git) is meant to be a fully portable next generation 3D engine geared towards Linux; if you take a look in the Linux ecosystem you will notice quite quickly that all the 3D (graphics or game) engines out there are either outdated or doesn't provide "World Editor" so to speak which increases the learning curve and stops the mainstream from adopting it.

IMHO, Ogre is the only one which has some chance to survive especially after being adopted by the Torchlight developers (who built their own tool set around it) and now it got a really really permissive MIT license. (the license itself won't make a huge difference anyway)

Why is this? Realistically you build the engine itself (the next big thing), but then you realize that a couple of new features just landed in (the scene) or new techniques and you need to upgrade the engine in order to support these features, so basically the engine never matures and there will be no "World Editor", or just the author(s) have no interest in developing something like this.

I've been developing the concept and architecture of Lera3D since early 2005, since then its architecture went through a few major overhauls; it felt like that it will never be ready ... but now the core architecture is pretty close to be finished and I got an idea! sparkle, sparkle !??!

What it would happen if I temporarily stop working on it and start working on the opposite side? I said, let's build the whole Editor first with a very very basic rendering path which later on can be swapped with Lera3D's highly efficient and optimized rendering paths (this also applies to a few other sub-systems which may find their ways in Lemon Tea).

A crank is someone with a new idea ... until it caches on ...

Even though there is no source code in the wild yet, I would like to publish the planned or expected feature set to land in Lemon Tea.

This is all subject to change, but you can't change the plan unless you have the plan.

There are no sprints or specific release dates which is normal considering that it's a personal project and I'm not working on it full time. (at least not at the moment)

I promise regular updates (builds?!) regarding the development and update this list accordingly. I guess these should be done in the next couple of months, let's say August, early September. (we'll see how this goes in practice ... zzzaayycckksss!)

End of Line

Linux and Games

2010-02-28T00:00:00+02:00

Business?!

I downloaded the brand new issue of Full Circle Magazine today and I imediatelly noticed that another user associated his / her story in getting into the Linux world with Games.

This isn't the first nor the last user who would try out Linux in order to play games .

In my vision the technology powering the games should be free and provided at absolutely no cost whatsovever (of course one can charge for support which is normal), and this is what I'm going to promote with my two projects Lera3D and LemonTea.

Sell the games built on the technology BUT with one condition and that's very very important: ALLOW USERS TO SHARE THAT COPY (with the source code) FREELY with their friends, neighboors, etc.

OK OK, I hear the crowd already ... money, money, so let me elaborate this a little bit:

Joe buys game XYZ for let's say 10$ . He gets the full source code of the game licensed under a specific license (GPLv3 is favored, BSD, whatever) and the Game Assets (textures, models, etc) released under a Creative Commons License (again this is up to the developer).

Joe tells Jessica that he just bought a cool game and gives her a copy.

Jessica really enjoys the game and decides that it would be a perfect gift for Susanne and buys a nice boxed copy. While she could also just "share" the game, a game in a box looks a lot more better, especially as a birthday present.

Susanne likes the game as well and installs it on every PC in her house.

In this scenario the developer earned around 25$ (because a boxed copy costs slightly more), there are 3 users already who will also promote the game directly or indirectly which will result in sales; some will just buy it to have it even if they have finished the game already and there is no piracy involved; EVERYBODY can try the full game, it doesn't have to play a crappy demo which might contain the best moments of the game while the rest is just a piece of shit.

The users promote the software, that works better than any other promotion channel. They also got the full source code which means that they can modify the game as they see fit, nobody will come to take them to court and charge them; users can even start and sell their modified copy with their OWN ASSETS.

The importance of GPL in a business like this is very very obvious, it just won't allow anybody to close your source code . Assets are the most important part of any game and the Creative Commons License comes to solve this issue.

Distribution Channel

Another thing which we really really miss in the Linux community is the lack of a proper distribution channel (like Steam) geared towards games; a huge database of games where users can easily buy / download copies of their favorite games without any hassle.

Most of the time, especially when a game is in a very very early stage the developers won't provide packages for the major distros or for Windows, which in my opinion LIMITS the number of users; those who are not tech-savy won't be able to compile the game (they will try though).

When I was ranting to the Frogatto developers about the lack of distribution specific packages (more than a year ago), their reasoning was:

don't have the necessary resources to do it
don't care about the users at that early stage

I said, uhmm ... oookaaay.

They still (as of NOW) don't provide clear instructions for Linux users on how to run the game (nor packages), while there are pre-built packages for Windows and Mac. Linux users are expected to just checkout the game from the SVN repo and deal with it on their own ... ignorance is bliss .

This is where a proper distribution channel could come in the scene to build and maintain packages for games which the developer don't really care about.

End of Line

Prototype3D announcement

2010-02-21T00:00:00+02:00

WTF?

Prototype3D is a real time shader editor and demo tool all in one. Why another shader editor / designer?

There aren't any good shader editors under Linux or MacOSX for that matter, besides that I really wanted to do this for a long long time.

Prototype3D is NOT using my cross-platform 3D engine and framework codename Lera3D, although they have some traits in common when it comes to the back-end rendering architecture.

Technology

I'm using QT for absolutely everything, from Math to Scripting and Audio. No additional third party libraries have been or will be used.

QT's Math classes are quite nice, the Trolls did a nice job in that area.

Licensing

Hmm ... this is the most interesting part ... as always. Sooo ... I will dual license it, GPLv3 and BSD.

How does it looks like?

Here it is an early screenshot.

Everything is subject to change in a way or another, but as of now this is how is it looks like.

What's next? When it will be released?

I will post more details later on as I make progress (feature set, how to contribute, etc).

There is no specific release date at the moment; the first version is expected to be released during the next few weeks (2-3!).

Yay!

Move, Move

2010-02-17T00:00:00+02:00

Successfully moved to Heroku. End of Line.

Lots of interesting stuff is on the way! Stay tuned!

Blogging with Jekyll

2010-02-15T00:00:00+02:00

My 'editor' trio:

VIM
Gedit
QtCreator

Here is my .vimrc for those who might want to take a look.

set nowrap
set complete-=i
set wildmenu
set fileformats=unix,mac,dos
set nocp
set keymodel=startsel
set laststatus=2
set novisualbell
set number
set report=0
set lazyredraw
set listchars=tab:\|\ ,trail:.,extends:>,precedes:<,eol:$ 
set autoindent
set cindent
set noexpandtab
set smartindent
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set softtabstop=4
set smarttab
set showmatch
set nohlsearch
set incsearch
set nocompatible
set backspace=indent,eol,start
set diffopt+=iwhite
set hidden
set nostartofline
set shortmess=as
set showcmd
set ttyfast
set mouse=a

colorscheme zenburn
filetype plugin on
filetype plugin indent on
filetype on
syntax on

" Word Completion
function! Tab_Or_Complete()
    if col('.')>1 && strpart( getline('.'), col('.')-2, 3 ) =~ '^w'
        return "&lt;C-N>"
    else
        return "&lt;Tab>"
    endif
endfunction
inoremap <Tab> <C-R>=Tab_Or_Complete()<CR>
set dictionary="/usr/share/dict/words"
" Default Markdown Blog Post Template (to be used with Jekyll)
autocmd BufNewFile *.markdown silent! 0r $HOME/.vim/templates/markdown.vim

I would like to highlight two things:

Word Completion
Default Markdown Blog Post Template

I don't think that the Word Completion feature needs any further explanations, but for the Markdown Blog Post template it worth mentioning that whenever I create somefile.markdown it will automatically get filled with the contents of the template file residing in ~/.vim/templates/markdown.vim .

New Life, New Blog, New ...

2010-02-14T00:00:00+02:00

Reasons, Questions and Answers

If you are a regular visitor here then you imediatelly noticed the changes. Brand new layout and no more WordPress. sigh??!! . What does this mean?

Q. Do I really need a shared hosting plan?

A. No, I don't, because I'm using only a fraction of the provided services which means that I'm wasting money on stuff I don't really make use of. Bad bad!

Q. Why I didn't go with GitHub Pages?

A. First of all I'm using my own fork of Jekyll, with enhanced tag support and a few other small convenience changes, on the other hand I want to have at least a minimal server side control for dynamic pages, otherwise GitHub pages would be the perfect solution for blogging with Jekyll; I will re-evaluate this once I get my 7$ GitHub subscription.

Q. Why I didn't go with SliceHost?

A. I bought a 256MB slice (which I recently canceled, 20$ / month), setup a Git remote repo with a hook to re-generate the static html via Jekyll and served the pages via Nginx. This worked very very well, but I realized that I don't need full VPS just to host this simple blog and possibly a Trac (Edgewall) instance.

Q. Why I didn't go with Posterous, Thumblr or some other blogging platform?

A. I want full control over my text (I did that before) plus I want it versioned using Git and hosted GitHub. Even though Posterous and Thumlr can be fully customized, they are still not there for me.

Q. Heroku? Why?

A. I'm most definitely not a big Ruby fan, BUT the free plan on Heroku really did catch my attention! They have a read-only file-system, so I can generate my static pages locally with my own Jekyll fork, commit and push them to Heroku, plus push the raw source material to GitHub for easier access to the masses.

(Dr.) Jekyll

Jekyll is an awesome piece of software written in Ruby, unfortunately I had to hack it a little bit in order to enable generating nice Tag Clouds and Tag Pages. You can check out the Archives page to see what I mean. You can find my Jekyll fork right here .

Like I said, I also had to modify the WordPress importer in order to fetch tags and fix the image paths so I could just move out my "uploads" directory into Jekyll's "images" directory.

I'm still learning Markdown as of typing up these words in VI.

Heroku, Text and Images

Heroku limits the "Slug Size" to 20MB, which is HUGE if you want to server static HTML or other dynamically generated stuff, but it's barely enough if you are planning to use images, they even recommend to go for Amazon S3 if you want to store media files.

I rarely write up posts which contain images so I moved them into my DropBox, roughly 49MB (after the import from WordPress); with this my slug size is around 380KB including 130 blog posts, the archives, rss feeds and about pages. Maybe in 20 years I will fill up the 20MB. ha! :)

I'm using Sinatra to serve off the static HTML and stuff.

The great thing about Sinatra is that I can easily silenty re-route my old URLs in the format /year/month/day/title to /year/month/day/title.html as you can see above.

Heroku is definitely a game changer compared to other platforms like Google's App Engine, primarily because of the tight integration with Git making development and deployment piece of cake.

In less then 5 minutes I had my very first "Hello World" app up and running.

End?!

I'm very pleased with this setup, from now on I will blog a lot more, so stay tuned! (amazing stuff will follow). Be sure to checkout my GitHub repos to get the latest code for all the stuff I've been discussing about here .

SexyGrep

2010-01-23T00:00:00+02:00

SexyGrep is another experimental prototype project thrown together in a few hours. I really wanted to do this for a long long time now, so here I am!

The whole point of the project is to embed WebKit into a C++ application, expose some system functionalities to it, so they can be accessed via JavaScript and build the whole app using the well known and proven trio HTML+CSS+JavaScript.

What's better for a setup like this than QT? nothing!

Right now it works under NIX only, but it shouldn't be hard to make it work under Windows as well; also this can be used as a 'base framework' to build other apps using this mindset. Who the hell needs Adobe Air? Most definitely not me! sigh*

The source code can be found on GitHub as usual right here .

Until next time, as server said END OF LINE.

Rant #N

2010-01-17T00:00:00+02:00

I'm really really irritated and frustrated by Ubuntu's road map; the last release I could call solid is 7.04, now that was A REALLY REALLY solid release from head to toes; all the upcoming releases were getting worse and worse which is unacceptable; don't get me started with 9.10 when it comes to upgrading an existing 9.04 system ... TOTAL MESS, and most of the time you end up with a completely fucked up system.

Now to Debian or not to Debian? switch to Debian 'stable' or Not? ... well, gentlemen, Debian 5.0 is very very outdated and Debian 'Sid' is just as worse as Ubuntu but at least it's labeled and marketed as 'unstable' ; the rest of Debian based distros are a sort of mess.

A viable solution to all this mess would be to switch to the good old Fedora which is up to date and it doesn't seem to break UNLESS ... drum rolls ... unless you install the proprietary ATI driver from AMD ... and BOOOM! totally fucked up X, black screen, END OF LINE.

Personally I have no idea what the Fedora developers could have been thinking ... we are in fucking 2010, even LINUX people got some serious hardware in their machines ... but no, they are all for their crappy open source Radeon driver ... what the fuck? I'm all for open source and free software, but no community in this world will be able to make better drivers for a VIDEO CARD but the manufacturer itself. END OF STORY.

As a developer I'm always seeking for the best distribution to develop on (especially 3D stuff whatever that means), the open source Radeon driver is fine with people who are willing to use Open Office, develop any non-multimedia thingies (hard to believe these days) or corporate customers, but it definitely won't suit the needs of a home-user or a more extravagant developer (but ... at least you have the freedom of choice).

I hear you saying, OPEN SOURCE THE HARDWARE ... you must be fucking kidding (closed source hardware and software are a necessity for COMPETITION, no competition = no market), who the fuck cares if the kernel modules are 'closed source' but WORK GREAT and deliver awesome performance ... just think about it ... what keeps Windows alive? well I can think of two things, the first is MS Office and the other ... I hear you ... I hear you ... VIDEO GAMES .

I also realize that Fedora is a 'generic distro' it doesn't focus on any particular area, but that shouldn't stop people from using their hardware if they want to and fully benefit of all the capabilities supported by the hardware; this is not the incompetence of AMD, this is the incompetence of Red Hat, who couldn't care less and synchronize a little bit ... just a little ... I'm sure AMD wouldn't say NO.

Ok Ok ... I'm calming down ... cross platform gaming is starting to 'rise' which is a good sign (big thanks to all our fellow Indie game developers),but don't think about this as 'all games will be free and open sourced' take it instead as you can enjoy and play all these games using a completely free software ecosystem ... you don't need to buy Windows licenses, pay for upgrades, etc just buy quality games and play them ... yeaahh ... if you look around you will see that the actual 'small' Linux gamer camp is willing to pay for quality games which run natively under Linux ... almost no piracy involved.

I don't know about Nvidia's proprietary driver and Fedora, but I guess that it's pretty much the same story (although people have tendencies to support Nvidia or even Intel more than AMD and ATI; what a shame when they are supporting FOSS); I'm telling you both that Nvidia's and ATI's closed source proprietary drivers work great and deliver good performance on Debian based distributions.

Personally, I want to develop on the platform and not spend nights making simple things work, which are meant to work out of the BOX, or work with other distributions, this is not all about the kernel, it's about the software surrounding (and its developers) the kernel ... anyways ...

So, right now I'm back to 9.10 (as Mint 8 'Helena') and waiting for Fedora 13 or the new Debian . fingers crossed

Good night!

DLSB

2010-01-07T00:00:00+02:00

According to the programmer personality test my programmer personality type is DLSB, which is about right because I'm a hardcore c/c++ and optimization freak; I do "web" stuff just for fun :)

You're a Doer. You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better.After all, time is money.

You like coding at a Low level. You're from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don't mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.

You work best in a Solo situation. The best way to program is by yourself. There's no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a liBeral programmer. Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

FOSS yada yada ...

2010-01-02T00:00:00+02:00

-><-

It's not my style to blog yada-yada; I try to focus on the technical side of things, but lately I've been thinking about what it takes to bootstrap a small start-up governed by 'The Hacking Business Model' crafted together by our fellows Zak Greant and Michael Widenius .

Personally, I think that dual-licensing is very important, especially for a 3D Game Engine & Framework; instead of LGPL I will go with EPL. The next question which comes up is why? Well, while EPL guarantees that derived works must be contributed back to the community, it does allow completely separate modules to be licensed under another license, even a proprietary one; the primary benefit of this is that some 3rd party might not want to open source their plugin, with EPL they can do that without any problems.

The biggest question is that with a license like EPL, when the alternate commercial license will make sense, if ever? Lets take this step by step; first of all most of the time for any serious project based on a game engine, the programmers will have to touch the engine itself or at least some module of it; it's just impossible to make an engine to suit everyones needs, so if they modify it, but don't want to contribute back their changes to the community (let's say that they re-wrote major parts of some of the existing renderers -- this would be classified as a derivate work), or they just want professional prioritized support (they always have the community as a support free of charge) it's feasible for them to pay a license or just support fee.

-><-

We'll see how it goes after I release the first community version of Lera3D ; to be able to form a community around it is the most important step, without a developer community an open source project means NOTHING. The bazaar model works so much better than the cathedral model, this have been proven many many times already. I'm not planning to make the alternate commercial license available until the first stable version 1.0 ; obviously to be the next big thing it means mature code, and crafting mature code takes some time, even with a fully open development model. I know that there is a motto which says "release early, release often", but I'm not releasing any source code until Lera3D reaches beta, it just wouldn't make sense releasing any code earlier, mostly because I want to implement all my ideas first (or stuff I miss in other engines, etc), be them good or bad, they are mine! Wow, this post got really really long ... lots of blah, blah ... just another late night post ... Good Night!

Cast yerr vote for Marina Orlova

2009-12-29T00:00:00+02:00

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/12/sexy-geeks-2009

Alma by Rodrigo Blaas

2009-12-25T00:00:00+02:00

Alma from Rodrigo Blaas on Vimeo.

Triple Ezariks

2009-12-23T00:00:00+02:00

Triple Ezariks once again!!!

Just Cause 2 - Vechicular Stunts Dev Diary HD

2009-12-07T00:00:00+02:00

Video Games | Just Cause 2 | Vehicular Stunts Developer Diary HD

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Tripple X

2009-11-21T00:00:00+02:00

(Source: THEM THANS)

Gedit To QtCreator Style Scheme Converter

2009-11-19T00:00:00+02:00

I forged a little script in Python to convert Gedit color schemes into color schemes commestible by QtCreator. The source code can be found on GitHub as usual right here .

Any contributions, comments, etc are welcome, especially because this is very very basic, but it's more than enough for my rather primitive taste :)

Enjoy and Happy Hacking!

Poor Man's setup ...

2009-10-24T00:00:00+02:00

Alas, last week my precious Toshiba "war-machine" died, apparently it wasn't the charger (since then I verified it, it provices 19v), neither the battery because the battery was still lasting up to 2 hours.

I'm hoping that it's just some internal soldering problem at the DC's input, and that I won't have to replace the whole motherboard, because in that case I will rather buy another brand new laptop :)

So, until I get that fixed (hopefully ... fingers crossed) I put my Wibrain to work ( my EEE PC would be way to slow for compiling ) .

It works quite well with my 17' widescreen monitor ... so here is my setup ...

Not bad huh? I would say, not bad at all! :))

(G)UI experiments ...

2009-09-20T00:00:00+02:00

I should really work only on Lera3D these days, but the guys from Wolfire Games are freaking me out with their really nice WebKit based UI in Overgrowth .

They are using the "Awesonium" library, which I find quite bloathed ... ok ok ... this started from a concret realisation of "I can do this ..."

A web based UI with JavaScript+CSS and all the goodies supported by WebKit itself is nirvana for any UI designer; it just brings the whole thing to a new level.

What's better for prototyping than QT? NOTHING! I already had some base foundation code laying around from my other prototype projects (Slider3D, Prototype2D) so I started tackling around, NOT THE EASY way, BUT THE HARD WAY.

Instead of just cheating and positioning the widget on the top of my custom 3D canvas, I make a snapshot of the content and transform it into an OpenGL Texture, which then I draw on a quad. (this means that any shape can be textured with it)

Now here is an early screenshot demoing this:

On the left side it's the actual HTML + CSS, displayed in OpenGL ortho (2D) mode on the right side, drawn on the top of the actual 3D scene with blending.

The most important thing left to be done is INPUT, which I will implement most probably during next week or so, then I'll release the source code under BSD license as usual ...

Please don't ask who's the blondie, it just won't get you anywhere :)

Stay tuned :D

LeraGames.com

2009-09-09T00:00:00+02:00

First 'baby' steps ...

WTF???!!!

2009-09-01T00:00:00+02:00

3D SlideShow -- Part Deux

2009-08-15T00:00:00+02:00

Here is a major update for the 3D SlideShow prototype thingy I released last weekend ( see my previous post on how to obtain the source code ).

I added a nice configuration dialog, and replaced the --monitor X command line argument with --config which forces the dialog to appear even when "Don't show this again" is checked.

Note: 'Dive into sub-directories' has no effect as of now :P'

3D Slideshow

2009-08-09T00:00:00+02:00

Here is another quick prototype using QT+OpenGL.

The source code is hosted at GitHub as usual ... right here .

Features (as of now):

scans the current directory for photos (png & jpg)
resizes photos internally before converting them to textures to either 512x512 or 1024x0124; so it should work fine with most video cards.
keeps the original aspect ratio of the photos
tries to activate and use 4x multi-sampling (anti-aliasing) if possible
multi-monitor support (by passing in the command line arguments --monitor X ; where X is the desired monitor to use)
simple floor reflection using the Stencil Buffer (it may not work with not T&L cards)
scrolling left/right by using the arrow keys
automatic slide show mode can be switched on / off by pressing 'space' (switches every 3 seconds; two way)
displays file names under the current photo

It should work fine on most systems (even with those crappy integrated Intel graphic cards). Enjoy :)

(PS: I'm really going to back to Lera3D now ...)

Super Baozi vs Sushi Man

2009-07-30T00:00:00+02:00

Javascript classes ...

2009-07-22T00:00:00+02:00

The one thing I love about YUI is the nice "extend" function which makes everything sooooo much more beautiful and gives almost that nice C++ 'like' object oriented feeling.

Now, YUI is quite heavy, even with all the compression, etc. so I came up with a very light-weight extend implementation.

It's nothing new (or extremely brilliant), except that it works just like the "extend" from YUI; the source code can be found right here .

Public domain, enjoy :)

Prototype2D -- Release v0.1

2009-07-19T00:00:00+02:00

Officially released! LOL

The GIT repository with the source code can be found right here (GitHub).

Wildfire Games -- 0 A.D

2009-07-17T00:00:00+02:00

0 A.D was released under the LGPL license some time ago, and it's definitely the BEST "Open Source" RTS available (both technically and visually).

Build instructions can be found right here .

I built it (under Linux) without any headaches in 20 minutes or so on my Core Duo @ 1,8ghz (2mb L2 cache) ... (totally impressed ... lol).

Now here are some screenies ...

Enjoy :)

Dino And The Aliens ...

2009-07-13T00:00:00+02:00

Initially I wanted to write up and article series about reverse engineering Dino And the Aliens by NevoSoft, but I kinda lost interest after I reversed the PAK file format. (I may return later and continue the work here ... who knows .. reversing the custom model format, etc ... lol)

To make the long story short, the files inside the Package File are encrypted with their filenames, so now I'm releasing the source code to manipulate (extract, replace, create, etc) these PAK files.

With this it is possible to create new levels because the level files are in plain text format and it's not that hard to figure out what character translates to what just by looking at the other levels.

I reversed the demo version, but I don't think that there are any differences, so the code should work pretty much fine with the full version as well.

If you like the game please BUY it . (IMHO, the best INDIE game ever! -- works under Wine as well :))

Dino and Aliens Mean aliens land on Dino's peaceful planet intent on blowing it up with lasers and explosives. Help Dino deploy his magic powers to battle the aliens and reclaim his carefree world in this whimsical fantasy game! "

The source code is located in here ; it's pure ANSI C and will compile pretty much anywhere with a decent ANSI C standard compliant C compiler like GCC.

There is no ready made executable, so please don't ask.

Prototype2D -- Teaser 2

2009-07-05T00:00:00+02:00

Another teaser featuring my small 2d engine, this time with some pretty "royalty free" graphics from Lost Garden.

I'll work on it for a few more days (roughly 1-2h a day) then release it as-is, so stay tuned :)

It's about time to get back to Lera3D after this little side project (it was fun indefinitely); actually with a few, very very good ideas which happened to struck me in the meantime ... :D :D :D

I'm still working "hard" on the actual core of Lera3D, trying hard to not overengineer anything, but I just want it to be rock solid :)

EPIC FAIL

2009-06-26T00:00:00+02:00

Today, I stumbled across this blog TheUnixGeek and discovered the following:

EPIC FAIL!!!! (Fellow programmers (but not only) will know what I'm talking about cough, cough)

IMHO, one shouldn't publish stuff on the internet unless he really has something to say, and HE IS ABSOLUTELY sure that he fully understands the given TOPIC.

It's always wise to evaluate your skills before getting into something, because it's totally useless wasting your time trying to 'build' something; you know from the very begining that you just can't.

Just my two eurocents ... apples and oranges ... LOL

Prototype2D teaser ...

2009-06-22T00:00:00+02:00

This is a little side project to get my attention away from Lera3D, but also a proof of concept for building an small 2d engine using QT + OpenGL, BOX2D for Physics and irrKLang for the Sound.

Features:

Base Actor class with support for tile based animation and multiple layers with z ordering (done)
Texture Manager (all textures reference counted) (done)
World Manager ( manages all actors, offers factory methods for easy actor creation, etc ) (done)
Sound System via irrKLang ( to be done )
Box2D integrate physics with the Base Actor and World classes (work in progress)
other misc. features (blending, etc) (partially done)

So far it's around 4 days of work, I really hope to finish it this weekend, then push it out into an repo over Gitorious or Github with a basic platformer demo game or something.

So here is a little teaser:

Hitler was a vegetarian.

2009-06-18T00:00:00+02:00

... don't be like Hitler. SuperMeatBoy.com">

SuperMeatBoy.com

Murmurs of Facebook

2009-06-15T00:00:00+02:00

QtCreator - Murmurs of the Code

2009-06-07T00:00:00+02:00

QtCreator has a quite strict coding style, but there is one important thing I would like to highlight. The pollution of the header files is minimal ... and when I'm say pollution I'm referring to the inclusion of other header files.

If you look at a regular header file from the code base, you will notice stuff like this:

namespace Core
{
    class someclass;
    namespace Internal
    {
        class anotherclass;
    }
}

namespace
{
    bool debug = false;
}
class MyClass : public Core::Internal::anotherclass
{
    ...
}

Instead of doing something like this:

#include <Core/Internal>

using namespace Core::Internal;
bool debug = false;
class MyClass : public anotherclass
{
    ...
}

Why is the 1st approach important, clean and a lot more self explaining?

Now think about that you will include the file containing MyClass in some other file, this will lead to the inclusion of <Core/Internal> and even worse the whole Core::Internal name-space, which can lead to variable collisions and tons of other frustrations.

With the first approach, everything is fully incapsulated, and there are virtually no side effects thus leading to a way much cleaner design with almost no extra work.

The anonymous name-space does pretty much the same thing (it's more like the good old "static") .

Personally I think that this is a very very good practice, regardless of the actual size of the code base.

QtCreator Twitter Plugin

2009-06-06T00:00:00+02:00

I pushed out an Twitter status updater plugin for QtCreator today, you can select some text in the editor then press Alt+C followed by Alt+U, and there you go :)

It is available in my forked repository:

UPDATE: Sep 18, 2009 -- I REMOVED THE FORKED REPO, THE SOURCE CODE IS AVAILABLE ON REQUEST!

Qt Creator - best thing since sliced bread

2009-05-31T00:00:00+02:00

Today, I started again my never ending race for the perfect cross platform IDE (duhh, instead of working on Lera :P), and stumbled across Qt Creator. I was quite sceptical while waiting for the "binary" version to install, but once it was installed BOOOOOOMMM!!!!

QtCreator is fully modular, everything is a plugin and it has an pleasant and very very clean interface, besides that its speed is comparable to a naked GEdit with a few plugins ( this is what I was using until now ).

Then I did a simple project and included (without generating any tag database etc ), some files form Lera3D and the code completion worked out of the box (CodeLite is close to this, but I hate the Scintilla editor component).

After this, it was clear ... I WANT THE SOURCE code ... haha, so I headed over Gitorious and "forked" (cloned) the repository in order to make my own changes and eventually submit them to the "official" master branch.

The first thing I added is a persistent settings dialog for the "Generic Project" wizard, in order to allow to follow symbolic links when creating a new project.

I like to keep my "framework" separately from the actual projects using the "framework", this way when something changes in the framework I don't need to bother updating the various copies, this is where Symbolic Links come into the scene.

Another thing I would like to add (in the near future) is the ability to "add directories" to a project instead of just manually selecting files.

Here is my "cloned" repository, where I will push all my changes.

UPDATE: Sept 17, 2009 -- REMOVED THE FORK!

The original "master" branch is here:

http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-creator/qt-creator

Oh, and I "ported" over the "Desert" color scheme from Gedit, and set the default font to Droid Sans Mono ( but you already noticed that from the screenshot ) :P

From now on Qt Creator is definitely my IDE of choice, even though I don't have any QT based projects at the moment.

It can work with Scons as well, all we need is a simple "wrapper" makefile like this:

all:
scons -Q -j3 nocolors=1
clean:
scons -c nocolors=1
distclean: clean
realclean: clean

.PHONY: all clean distclean realclean

(Qt Creator seems to be the only viable enemy to Visual Studio at the time being)

Update: Nov 17, 2009

Desert Theme Port

Oblivion Theme Port

Game Developer Magazine

2009-05-09T00:00:00+02:00

Game Developer Magazine, is just purely awesome, the quality of the content is just breath taking, worth every single cent, so yesterday for just 19.95$, I subscribed ( 6 months ) and got my "bonus issues" :)

I'll definitely be a regular subscriber after the current one is over.

PS: Already started devorating the issues from April :))

C++ like format for std::string ...

2009-05-02T00:00:00+02:00

Now, the 'quite heavy' BOOST libs have some nice format(), and also MFC has it, but not the poor STL string container.

I came up with a very nice and compact way to do this, and thought that I should share it.

So, here we are, let's see the code ...

#include <cstdarg>

... the format ...

#define BUFF_SIZE 4096
string format( const string &msg, ... )
{
    va_list ap;
    char text[BUFF_SIZE] = {0,};
    va_start(ap, msg);
        vsnprintf(text, BUFF_SIZE, msg.c_str(), ap);
    va_end(ap);
    return string( text );
}

BUFF_SIZE as 4096 should be enough, in most cases, but of course it can be tweaked as necessary, the rest is just the normal way to play with functions which have variable number of arguments.

vsnprintf have been used in order to avoid buffer overflows and the like.

cout<<format(string("%s hello") + string("world %d"),"this is",13)<<endl;

From the one liner above it is clearly visible, the cleanness and elegance of this approach.

Neat isn't it?

PS: I like the new Syntax Highlighter plug-in :P

Panda Neck Pillow

2009-04-29T00:00:00+02:00

Pittsburgh Penguins Game

2009-04-29T00:00:00+02:00

double ezariks??!! ... where is the third ... ???

OpenSolaris -- Part X

2009-04-12T00:00:00+02:00

I have OpenSolaris 2008.11 installed on an external HDD, and boot it up from time to time, when there is some time to loose.

Today, I went over to NVIDIA Developers area and grabbed the Solaris version of the Cg Toolkit, which is a nice Solaris package, installs and works flawlessly under OpenSolaris, except the example programs won't compile because of the evil GLUT.

I tried to compile GLUT 3.7, but after 2 hours of pain I gave up, and installed the freeglut which is available in the Blastwave repo. In the next few lines I will illustrate how to get one of the samples compiling and working with freeglut without much pain.

The best way to go is to copy the examples directory into your home directory or desktop for convenience. I will modify the examples/OpenGL/basic/26_toon_shadding sample program.

First we need to edt 26_toon_shading.c in order to change the "GL/GLUT.h" include to "GL/freeglut.h", and after this modifying the Makefile.

First of all I added :

CFLAGS += -I"/opt/csw/include"

This is required because the Freeglut package will install there, and modified CLINKFLAGS by appending -L/opt/csw/lib so it looks like this:

CLINKFLAGS += -L/usr/X11R6/lib64 -L/usr/X11R6/lib -L/opt/csw/lib

After this, a regular 'make' will do the job, but when running the executable there will be an error saying that the freeglut shared object cannot be found. This is fixed by prepending the /opt/csw/lib to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable with the following shell command:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/csw/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

... there you go :D up and running.

Personally, I think that it's an good idea installing all the 3rd party stuff inside the /opt dir instead of /usr or /usr/local, which seems to be a common practice in the existing Linux communities, of course this is more or less a matter of tastes.

"Gustibus non, disputatum est."

PS: can't wait for the native Skype port, especially for OpenSolaris :D

C++ like 'string' transform ...

2009-04-05T00:00:00+02:00

All we need is a naked class with the () operator overloaded to execute and wrap the "real" tolower.

struct toLower
{
    int operator()(int ch)
    {
        return tolower(ch);
    };
};

With this our transform will resume to this beautiful and elegant line ...

transform( s.begin(), s.end(), s.begin(), toLower() );

... instead of the very 'C like' looking (even if we used C++ like casting):

transform( s.begin(), s.end(), s.begin(), (int(*)(int))tolower );

Pretty, pretty :D

Python and Co.

2009-03-15T00:00:00+02:00

Last night, I started playing a little bit with embedding python + exposing classes via Boost::Python, because I wanna integrate this kind of functionalities in my 3D engine.

Since my system is fully modular, and each sub-system lives in its own shared object ( or dynamic linking library under win32 ), it turned out quite easy to make those python modules as well.

(I use Gists @ GistHub to post the source code instead of having it in the post itself, since it's easier to manage over time)

Here is some boilerplate code for a sample sub-subsystem header and implementation:

It is clearly visibile that it is a singleton class, hence the getInstance static method. I've also chosen to use the "py" prefix for the actual module name.

Now this can be compiled to a nice shared object or dynamic linking library and used right away.

g++ LeraSystem.cpp -shared -o pyLeraSystem.so -I/usr/include/python2.6 -lboost_python

I provide compile commands for Linux + GCC only, since it is my primary development platform, but this is very similar under Windows, there you one would get two files like pyLeraSystem.dll + pyLeraSystem.lib .

Again some boilerplate code and the expected output produced by it here ( cmd -- python pyLeraTest.py ):

Produced Output:

hello world
Instance check ...
<pyLeraSystem.leraSystem object at 0xb7cb7534>
<pyLeraSystem.leraSystem object at 0xb7cb7534>
<pyLeraSystem.leraSystem object at 0xb7cb7534>
hello world

Yayy! With this the singleton thingy was working, but wasn't the end of the journey :) Why? The answer is quite simple, I had to embed the python interpreter in order to take full advantage of this.

I already had my sub-system as an shared object (even before exposing anything to python), so I just had to link it to interpreter stub to make the full magic happen between C++ & Python working with truly the same instance of a sub-system.

A hack needs to be done here by doing an symbolic link from pyLeraSystem.so to libLeraSystem.so which can be achieved with the following command (assuming that the files are in the current working directory):

ln -s pyLeraSystem.so libLeraSystem.so

( this is not necessary under Windows, because there the .lib file is used to link against an dynamic linking library )

... to compile the embedded python interpreter ...

g++ LeraPythonEmbed.cpp -I/usr/include/python2.6 -L. -lpython2.6 -lm -lLeraSystem -o leraTestEmbed

To make it run one more hack is necessary, and that is adjusting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include the current working directory with a command like:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=.:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

( this is again not necessary under Windows )

Also the python script needs to be adjusted a little:

Now running ./leraTestEmbed produces the following output:

this message was set from C++ and printed by Python
this message was set from Python and printed by C++

With this I reached my final goal, python and c++ fully interacting, using the same singleton sub-system class at runtime.

The approach of using modules instead of exposing classes, etc. directly from the embed interpreter adds a great deal of flexibility, and makes exposing existing plugins to python using Boost::Python piece of cake.

In the real life scenario ( my 3d engine and framework ) the actual sub-subsystems are not linked against the stub, they are dynamically loaded, and instantiated once in their full lifetime, but this is pretty much the same story.

Uffff, 548 words at the moment of typing this ... duhhh, I really need to get a life :))

Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 Alpha 4

2009-02-15T00:00:00+02:00

I did a clean-up on my system and decided to wipe out everything and do a clean install, but instead of the stable 8.10, I installed Jaunty 9.04 alpha 4.

At first this didn't seemed to be a very wise decision, but later on it turned out quite the opposite.

There are issues with Video + Sound out of the box @ the moment. The sound can be easily fixed by re-compiling alsa, as usual, but with the video part largely depends on X11 and the proprietary NVIDIA drivers.

nvidia-settings doesn't seem to be working properly, it's something with the metamodes, of course I had my old xorg.conf, so my dual monitor setup works 98% great, the remaining 2% will be fixed with further updates ... I hope!

The sound quality is a whole lot better, I wouldn't be wrong if I would say that it was taken to a completely new dimension, so thumbs up for this.

The horizontal "volume slider" is quite sexy as well, in the Gnome version bundled with this release.

If you have lots of music like I do in the MP3 format, it's worth installing the "Fluendo" mp3 decoder GStreamer plugin, to get the most out of sound quality.

For the first time since the very first Ubuntu release, I didn't had to remove the "network manager" in order to make my wireless work flawlessly with WPA2-TKIP.

Anyway I'm most impressed by the improved 'font rendering', it's getting quite close to the smoothed and antialised font look popular and well know from MacOSX. Good job here ;)

Font : Droid Sans Mono

GEdit Theme: Django

There is a lot of buzz about the blazing fast boot time, but yeah, with ext4 partitions it's about 10-14 seconds on my modest system ( dual core @ 1,8ghz, 2GB ram, and 120gb 5400 rpm hdd ) .

In overall 9.04 alpha 4 is looking rock solid and a lot more responsive, it's really really fast.

I also installed the themes, etc. from "Ubuntu Satanic Edition" for Intrepid, so here is a screenshot :)

To be continued ...

Mystic Mine Demo

2009-02-03T00:00:00+02:00

Mystic Mine finally arrived .... hooorraaaay!

Get the demo here .

Basic Terrain

2009-01-06T00:00:00+02:00

Here is a very 1st version of my 'terrain engine' which is part of Lera3D Game engine and Framework, thrown together in a few minutes.

Sorry for the flickering video, but , I'll have to find a better recorder than "Record My Desktop".

Scons output colorizer

2008-12-15T00:00:00+02:00

I put together a nice little project for customizing and colorizing SCons's output.

It can be found right here .

Hot Babe

2008-11-30T00:00:00+02:00

What's Hot-Babe?
Hot-babe is a small graphical utility which displays the system activity in a very special way. When the CPU is idle, it displays a dressed girl, and when the activity goes up, as the temperature increases, the girl begins to undress, to finish totally naked when the system activity reaches 100%. Of course, if you can be shocked by nudity, don't use it!

Screenshot with 0% CPU utilization :

Screenshot with 100% CPU utilization (NSFW) :

( while compiling Blender with 4 jobs "scons -j4" )

Get it here .

Pretty cool, but it's gets boring after a while, even though it's a cool way to spice up your desktop.

Enjoy :)

vte_terminal_set_alternate_screen_scroll

2008-11-01T00:00:00+02:00

I upgraded to Intrepid last night, and it broke my gnome-terminal. So after some digging, etc. here is what I did to make it work:

wget http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/vte/0.17/vte-0.17.4.tar.gz tar xzvf vte-0.17.4.tar.gz cd vte-0.17.4 wget http://patches.ubuntu.com/v/vte/extracted/93_add_alt_screen_scroll_toggle.patch patch -p1 < 93_add_alt_screen_scroll_toggle.patch

./configure make make install

... and BOOM, now it should work since the method is there :)

Enjoy :)

UPDATE: 2/26/2009

The latest available version of the VTE library should be downloaded instead of the old 0.17.4 from here .

Autumn ...

2008-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

Errrmm ... nothing serious ... this is the result of some late night hacking with some coke, using an early version of my 3D engine codename 'Lera3D' :)

Bitjam Music Diskz

2008-10-12T00:00:00+02:00

Music Diskz are core part of the 'demo scene'. Here are two .... ermmm actually three of my new favorites :D

Bitjam Vol. 1.1

This is quite a big download, 657229824 bytes = 626.8 mega bytes. Grab it here .

( the 3D cover preview was made with the DVD-Cover python script for GIMP )

Bitjam RMX 001

No strings attached, this one is still big ... around 137 mega bytes. Grab it here .

Jailhouse Voices

( don't forget about the F9 - F10 trick during the "intro" if you wanna extract all the tracks )

Again, no strings attached, ufff ... a bit smaller ... around 74 mega bytes. Grab it here .

Enjoy indefinitely :)

Frogatto

2008-10-07T00:00:00+02:00

"Frogatto is an old-style platform game, starring an anthropomorphic frog!"

Linux is officially not supported, but it works perfectly with some slight modifications of the "Makefile".

I checked out the latest version from the SVN, and modified the make file so it looks like this:

svn checkout http://frogatto.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ frogatto
cd frogatto
vim Makefile

objects = background.o character.o character_type.o color_utils.o custom_object.o custom_object_functions.o custom_object_type.o draw_number.o draw_scene.o draw_tile.o editor.o entity.o filesystem.o fluid.o font.o formula.o formula_function.o formula_tokenizer.o frame.o geometry.o item.o item_type.o joystick.o key.o level.o level_logic.o level_object.o load_level.o main.o message_dialog.o preferences.o preprocessor.o prop.o raster.o sound.o string_utils.o surface_cache.o surface_formula.o surface.o texture.o tile_map.o variant.o wml_node.o wml_parser.o wml_utils.o wml_writer.o formula_test_objects = filesystem.o formula_function.o formula_tokenizer.o string_utils.o variant.o wml_node.o wml_parser.o wml_utils.o wml_writer.o

%.o : src/%.cpp g++ -g -O2 -I/usr/local/include/boost-1_34 -I/usr/include/SDL -I/usr/X11R6/include -D_GNU_SOURCE=1 -D_REENTRANT -Wnon-virtual-dtor -Wreturn-type -fthreadsafe-statics -c $<

game: $(objects) g++ -g -O2 -L/usr/lib -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11 -D_GNU_SOURCE=1 -D_REENTRANT -Wnon-virtual-dtor -Wreturn-type -L/usr/lib -lSDLmain -lSDL -lGL -lGLU -lSDL_image -lSDL_ttf -lSDL_mixer -lboost_regex -lboost_thread-mt -fthreadsafe-statics *.o -o game

formula_test: $(formula_test_objects) g++ -O2 -g -I/usr/include/SDL -D_GNU_SOURCE=1 -D_REENTRANT -DUNIT_TEST_FORMULA -Wnon-virtual-dtor -Wreturn-type -L/usr/lib -lSDL -lGL -lGLU -lSDL_image -lSDL_ttf -lSDL_mixer -lboost_regex src/formula.cpp $(formula_test_objects) -o test

clean: rm *.o game

:wq

Of course you will need SDL, SDL_Image, SDL_ttf, SDL_mixer and Boost Regexp and Thread in order to successfully compile it, since there is no configure script at the moment.

Basically all I did is removing the '-framework' paramters and modifying the SDL include and lib paths.

make
./game

Enjoy!

Sphere Cubes

2008-10-02T00:00:00+02:00

The "Holograms" demo group released a demo named "Temptation" at SceneCon 2008, in which there was an very very nice looking yet simple effect.

Here you can see this "Sphere Cubes" effect using my 3D engine, codenamed 'Lera3D'.

( the guys left in the code for this, so I just made it more object oriented and C++ like, the heritage of Delphi (Object Pascal) is clearly visible in their code -- I'm saying this being an Delphi developer myself too for a long time )

I'm also planning to take this further, by making the whole effect to "pulse" on music, and adding a few post processing effects like motion and radial blur, just to name a few, eventually making a basic music player out of it.

Since "Lera3D" is not open source yet, I'm providing the source code only for the "client". You can see the source code by clicking here .

Epiphany + WebKit = meh{}

2008-09-22T00:00:00+02:00

I'm one of those who are waiting for the Linux version of Chrome. I downloaded Chrome and even compiled and ran the executable which tests the sub-systems, amazing! lol

Today, I grabbed Epiphany and Webkit trying to see if I can get something similar to Chrome ... lol well, they both compiled, etc, but it's not really stable. Maybe because of the nightly build of WebKit, or maybe because Epiphany's Webkit support is still experimental.

Compiling WebKit took around 30 minutes on my Dual Core @ 1.8ghz ... what a monster!!!

In overall, it's really fast and the rendering is good as far as WebKit can go with the rendering, the fonts are a bit crappy though, with both the FreeType and Pango backend.

I think that I'll give it another try later on ... lol until then viva Firefox 3.0, and waiting for Chrome :D

Happy Compiling! :)

The Free Software Song

2008-09-13T00:00:00+02:00

Just for those who never got a chance / patience to listen to it :)) :P

The Song

The Lyrics

Join us now and share the software; You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free. x2

Hoarders can get piles of money, That is true, hackers, that is true. But they cannot help their neighbors; That's not good, hackers, that's not good.

When we have enough free software At our call, hackers, at our call, We'll kick out those dirty licenses Ever more, hackers, ever more.

Join us now and share the software; You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free. x2

More info at Wikipedia.org :)

CodeLite

2008-09-10T00:00:00+02:00

Today I found CodeLite, which seems to be a nice IDE. I compiled the latest version from the SVN, but haven't tested it yet. I'll write more about it later ...

You can get it here .

Games @ Scene Parties

2008-09-07T00:00:00+02:00

Today, I've taken a look at the 'Games' on Pouet.net and made a selection of the ones I liked.

Here they are, in no particular order ... yeah, my arse! I won't post any links only "production name" + "team name", you can find them at Pouet.net :P

Please note that I'm running them under Linux using Wine, just in case you didn't noticed :)

I will also include a small analysis on the technologies I believe they are using. Reverse engineering is one of my older hobbies ... lol

London Game by Team Fragment

This is a lovely GTA 3 clone. It's one of the most impressive game demos I've seen @ a Scene Party ... correct me, if I'm wrong :)

Game Engine: in-house game engine ( proof GSystem.dll ) . A closer exanimation of the DLL Imports revealed that it's using Direct Input (DINPUT8) for input, and OpenGL (also GLU32 is imported) for rendering.

Sound System: FMod ( proof fmodex.dll )

Physics: NVidia PhysX ( proof PhysXLoader.dll )

Other Notes: Uses Zlib for virtual filesystem (proof zwlibapi.dll -- which is probably a wrapper )

PAK files have GS extension. This doesn't seem to be a complex format, because I checked out one of the files with a hex editor, and the file "signatures" were there, possibly followed by the offsets to the "real meat" ... You know, data is a sleeping monster, and code is a living monster :) The 1st part seems to be the table of contents.

There are two data files "data.gs" and "london.gs" as of now.

Signature: GS10 -- this means GS v1.0 most probably

The sounds are in WAV format. Most of the textures seem to be either PNG or DDS. There are also ".font" with associated DDS files, which most probably contain the dimensions, positions, etc. of the letters used for text rendering.

There are scripts which have the ".script" extension, vertex and pixel shaders have ".vertex", and ".fragment" respectively.

Material (script) files have the extension ".material" .

At the end of the PAK files, there is a text which says: "If you are reading this, you have no life!" .

This amused me a lot ... lol, now I'm scared to death ... haha!

It has an external configuration utility named Config.exe, but it definitely worths checking out the "userdata/settings.script", especially if you wanna enable "debug" mode and a few other interesting stuff, though setting "motion blur" to true, didn't take any effect.

I didn't go any further, and waiting for new updated versions as promised in the "readme" file :)

Sylph Wind by Pieslice Productions

This is a really cool shoot-em up arcade game, really immersing, nice graphics, very good music, and good game-play .

Game Engine: in-house game engine, statically linked, so there is no separate engine dynamic library. Analyzing the imports, this also seems to be using Direct Input for Input (DINPUT8) and OpenGL (also GLU32 is imported ) for rendering.

Sound System: FMod ( proof fmodex.dll, and also credited in the "Manual.html" )

Other Notes: Uses the Cg Shader Technology from NVidia ( proof cg.dll and cggl.dll, and also credited in the "Manual.html" ) instead of pure GLSL .

Some of the resources are exposed like ...

The "devscripts" directory contains the "script" files which manipulate different variables, setup "spawn points" or facilitate the loading of content arrays with predefined presets.

The "devshaders" directory obviously contains the "Cg Shader" script files.

The level file have "lvl" extension and seems to have a long signature "pie_sylphengine_level3Ddata_v001d" .

Other resources like textures, sounds reside in the "data" directory as PAK files with "pr" extension. The signature of these files is "_PieResource02" . At the 1st glance i couldn't indentify any clearly visible patterns like file headers, etc.

It also imports the ChooseColor, GetOpenFileName and GetSaveFileName from comdlg32, which makes me think that a some sort of "level editor" is also included somewhere, but that's just a guess, because as always, I didn't go any further :)

This is a good game, worth playing :)

Kiuasturvat feat Vastaisku by Sx Cracked by Taat

This is the typical "rag-doll" type game. No strings attached.

Game Engine: Irrlicht

Sound System: Bass

Other Notes: N/A :P

Flipout by Mikkosoft Productions

Flipout is breakout game with pinball style controls. This is an innovative concept, IMHO ... but at first it's a bit difficult to control.

It has a Linux port, and obviously uses a great deal of open source libraries.

Game Engine: in-house game engine. Obviously it uses OpenGL for rendering. ( no GLU32 this time )

Sound System: OpenAL with Ogg Vorbis (proof libvorbis-0.dll, OpenAL32.dll, wrap_oal.dll )

Other Notes: Uses DevIL ( DevIL.dll ) for (image) texture loading loading. Also uses libsigc++ (proof libsigc-2.0-0.dll) which is typesafe callback system for standard C++ .

Uses a virtual filesystem to store most of it's data. The extension of the PAK file is ".data" . There aren't any clearly identifiable signatures, etc. inside, but again I didn't go any further :)

Frontal Assault by Eturintama

No comments, but not X-rated, neverthless interesting and spicy :P

Game Engine: in-house game engine. It uses GLUT32 ( proof glut32.dll ) and obviously OpenGL for rendering.

Sound System: FMod ( proof fmod.dll )

Other Notes: there is no virtual file system, so all the data files are exposed.

A Tribute To The Rolling Boulder by Kloonigames

This is a nice 2D platform game.

Game Engine: in-house game engine, uses SDL for rendering.

Sound System: SDL_mixer

Physics: Box2D

Other Notes: Uses SDL_Image for texture loading, and SDL_rotozoom for texture manipulation. There is no virtual filesystem all the data can be found in the "data" directory.

It has a nice "autoexec.txt" script file, which setups key bindings, pre-loads sound effects, etc. It also seems to have it's own in-house GUI framework. ( some of these is mentioned in the "readme.html" )

Dust by Sandbox Software

I was talking about no particular order, but I should have mentioned this one right after the 1st two as a 3rd. :P

Game Engine: in-house game engine. Uses SDL + OpenGL for rendering ( imports GLU32 ). It seems to import GLUT just for gluSolidSphere , also uses GLEW for extension handling. There are lots of XML files, because of the Collada file format ( proof FColladaR.dll, FColladaD.dll ) .

Sound System: FMod (proof fmodex.dll, and fmod_event.dll )

Physics: Ode ( proof ode.dll )

Networking: Raknet a cross-platform C++ game networking engine. ( proof RakNet.dll )

Other Notes: uses SDL_image for (image) texture loading. The config.ini worth checking :)

No virtual file system this time either, so everything is there at your own mercy. I think that Maya was used for modeling, hence the "Maya 8.5 | ColladaMaya v3.02 | FCollada v3.2" in content/scenes/alien.xml :)

The shaders are GLSL, textures mostly in PNG, sounds and effects in MP3 and WAV. Alos there are few FMOD specific files for sounds / sound effects.

Again, as always I didn't go any further.

TTS Demo by Aukiogames

This is another GTA clone, with a huge playable level, and lovely graphics.

Game Engine: in-house game engine, using DirectX8 for rendering and input, it also seems to be written in Delphi 7 which means that it's Object Pascal :) niceeee :) ... just check those nice TParticleSystem, etc. with an hex editor ;) :P

Sound System: Fmod ( proof fmod.dll )

Other Notes: again there is no virtual filesystem, but it does have a proprietary model format, with the generic "obj" extension.

Textures are in DDS, sounds and music in WAV, MP3 and OGG ... Scripts have the extension "tsl" and the language seems to be a subset of Pascal, combined with some PHP.

I stopped right here!

Uffff, this was a long long journey, it took my whole Sunday afternoon ... :) There were a few other games, but mostly they were seriously lacking quality or just failed to run reasonably.

I think that these prove that Indie Game Development do exists, and it is possible for a small team to create really nice games, even if some are just "tech demos", showcasing the engines behind :)

Also, this post has more than 1285 words now, so probably I should stop!!!

Be nice, and happy coding or gaming !!!

Simple Video Converter Helper

2008-09-07T00:00:00+02:00

I made this little script to be able to convert - resize videos easily, without typing in kilometric strings into the terminal.

It's not the most elegant script you ever seen, but hey, it works :)

As always, make it executable and put it in a safe place like /usr/bin :P

#!/bin/bash

# Author: Icebreaker
# Description: Resize a video to 1280x720 (HD).
# I'm using this script to resize videos to 1280x720
# ( maintaining the source quality )
# which can be posted to Vimeo.com for example and be converted
# automatically to a HD quality  video.
#
# This could be done a lot more elegantly ... I'm sure, but it does
# the job for me and that's all what matters :)
#
# The argument "parsing" is not completely n00b proof :P
#
# PS: vimeo.com is cool :P
#
# Requires: ffmpeg
#
# Public Domain
if [ $# -lt 2 ] ; then
echo Usage: mkhdv input.video output.video [-t "some video title"] </span>
[-s 1280x720]
exit 13
fi
if [ $# -eq 4 ] ; then
    # title
    if [ "$3" = "-t" ] ; then
        ffmpeg -i "$1" -sameq -s 1280x720 -title "$4" "$2"
    else
        # size
        if [ "$3" = "-s" ] ; then
        ffmpeg -i "$1" -sameq -s "$4" "$2"
        else
        echo Usage: mkhdv input.video output.video  
[-t "some video title"] [-s 1280x720]
        exit 666
        fi
    fi
else
    # we have size and title
    if [ $# -eq 6 ] ; then
        TITLE=""
        SIZE=""
        # look for title
        if [ "$3" = "-t" ] ; then
            TITLE="$4"
        fi
        if [ "$5" = "-t" ] ; then
            TITLE="$6"
        fi
        # look for size
        if [ "$3" = "-s" ] ; then
            SIZE="$4"
        fi
        if [ "$5" = "-s" ] ; then
            SIZE="$6"
        fi
        if [ -z "$TITLE" ] ; then
            TITLE="Untitled Video"
        fi
        if [ -z "$SIZE" ] ; then
            SIZE="1280x720"
        fi
        ffmpeg -i "$1" -sameq -s "$SIZE" -title "$TITLE" "$2"
    else
        ffmpeg -i "$1" -sameq -s 1280x720 "$2"
    fi
fi
echo Done
exit 1

Girl Of The Day - Stephie Coplan

2008-09-06T00:00:00+02:00

Stephie Coplan

Year: Senior
School: Tufts
Hometown: Rockville, MD
Major: Philosophy/Pre-Law

Click here for more.

Girl Of The Day - Rebecca Kelly

2008-09-05T00:00:00+02:00

Rebecca Kelly

Year: Sophomore
School: UNC Charlotte
Hometown: Durham, NC
Major: Education

Click here for more.

Girl Of The Day - Nikki Pekovitch

2008-09-04T00:00:00+02:00

Nikki Pekovitch

Year: Sophomore
School: Mount Marty College
Hometown: Chicago
Major: Childhood Education

Click here for more.

Girl Of The Day - Tiffany Reed

2008-09-03T00:00:00+02:00

Tiffany Reed

Year: Junior
School: Texas
Hometown: Tulle, France
Major: Psychology

Click here for more.

Jedi Tool #1 -- Regexxer

2008-08-31T00:00:00+02:00

I just stumbled across Reggexer today while searching for a tool to replace stuff in multiple files in an easy and convenient way.

Just as it says on it's homepage, my first thought was "Hey, I must have this!" :)

Girl Of The Day - Jenna Zidansek

2008-08-30T00:00:00+02:00

Jenna Zidansek

Year: Freshman
School: Duquesne
Hometown: PA
Major: Nursing

Click here for more.

How to fix broken folder icons in Ubuntu?

2008-08-30T00:00:00+02:00

This have been hauting me for some time now, and finally i found out an easy solution which works.

The key is to edit the index.theme file usually located in /home/[username]/.icons/[theme-name] ( after the theme is installed, but it can be done before installing and then just re-pack the patched version to use it right away ) and changing the "inherits=gnome" line to "inherits=none", then copying gnome-fs-directory.png to folder.png and finally reloading the theme.

The location of the gnome-fs-directory.png is dependent on how each individual theme is organized, so there no exact location for it, but it's there inside the theme directory.

One of my favorite icon themes is the "Glossy Glass" . You can grab it right here .

Probably the best way is to re-pack the theme after, to avoid repeating these if you wanna use the same icon theme on another machine, or you re-install your system, etc.

It seems easy when you already know the solution huh? haha :))

It's never too late ...

2008-08-29T00:00:00+02:00

Girl Of The Day - Maya Ma

2008-08-27T00:00:00+02:00

Maya Ma

Year: Freshman
School: Santa Monica Community
Hometown: china
Major: Fashion Design

Click here for more.

Girl Of The Day - Jacque Fuller

2008-08-26T00:00:00+02:00

Jacque Fuller

Year: Freshman
School: Mercer
Hometown: McDonough GA
Major: Marketing

Click here for more.

Girl Of The Day - Samantha Haynes

2008-08-23T00:00:00+02:00

Samantha Haynes

Year: Freshman
School: Missouri Southern State
Hometown: Joplin
Major: Art Education

Click here for more.

FreeDroid

2008-08-17T00:00:00+02:00

It was a long time since I last posted about a game, so here we go "FreeDroid" :)

Moved to Eclipse ...

2008-07-27T00:00:00+02:00

I've been living with GEdit + a few plugins, but today I moved my project to Eclipse with the C/C++ extensions. It took a bit longer to setup everything, but in the end, I got everything plus a lot more.

I also customized the color scheme a bit and changed the font to Bitstream Vera Sans Mono .

Randy Pausch, 47, Dies

2008-07-25T00:00:00+02:00

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon computer science professor whose last lecture became an Internet sensation and bestselling book, has died of pancreatic cancer. He was 47.

( Source: New York Times )

No Strings Attached ...

2008-07-24T00:00:00+02:00

Chet's speech

2008-07-21T00:00:00+02:00

Brick Walls and childhood dreams ...

2008-07-16T00:00:00+02:00

This is a quite an old video, but neverthless it's worth watching.

It's really really good stuff :) Enjoy ... :D

Google Desktop + Google Gadgets

2008-07-14T00:00:00+02:00

Here we go :) I installed Google Desktop and Google Gadgets on my Ubuntu box. Personally I find the RSS feed and the Google Calendar gadgets the most useful :)

Hmm ... what else you can see there? Well, the Apricot production SVN + the Blender Apricot branch which is also compiling on the right side, and some other random stuff :P

N.B: the name of the girl in the background is Valeria :P

Big Buck Bunny

2008-07-01T00:00:00+02:00

A while back I posted about a similar movie created by the Orange Open Project using entirely with open source software (Blender, etc), it was called Elephants Dream, and now here we go again with Big Buck Bunny ... Be sure to check out the project at BigBuckBunny.org and download the movie.

Mono Spaced Font Hunting ...

2008-06-28T00:00:00+02:00

I do lots of coding in different languages and under Linux, I use the excellent light-weight GEdit. It's really important to find a color scheme + font which really suits your needs, because you need a pleasant environment to work in on day to day basis.

I found the theme, which is the text-mate like "DarkMate" ( if I remember well I posted about this one ), as for the font I was oscillating between "MonoSpace" and "DejaVu Sans Mono" ... here they are side by side:

MonoSpace

DejaVu Sans Mono

Well, there is no big difference between the two, but recently I stumbled across the "Droid Sans Mono", here is a screenshot:

This has that smoothed MacOSX like font look, so this is definitely the droid I was looking for so long!

Since is it distributed under the Apache license, I also uploaded a copy just in case it disappears from the other locations. You can grab it right here .

Happy Coding!

... is the shit!

2008-06-15T00:00:00+02:00

LoL

2008-06-08T00:00:00+02:00

I just had to post this ... click on the image for the bigger version :)

Programming Tip #0

2008-06-05T00:00:00+02:00

I'll start a series of programming tips and tricks in various languages, and this will be the first one :)

These are very rare, strange and uncommon stuff for the normal mortals ... oK enough chit-chat let's see some code.

What's wrong with the following code snippet?

template <typename T>
class obj
{
    public:
        obj(){};
        virtual ~obj()
        {
            map<unsigned long, T*>;::iterator it;
            //...
            //...
        };
    //...
    //...
    //...
    private:
        map<unsigned long,T*> items;
};

Well this will fail, at this line map<unsigned long, T*>::iterator it; giving a rather confusing and cryptic error message which looks something like this error: expected `;' before it . Hmmm ...

This can be solved by putting the typename keyword at the beginning of that line. It took me some time to figure out what was the problem :)

Happy coding, and may the source be with you!

OpenSolaris

2008-05-31T00:00:00+02:00

I downloaded the OpenSolaris cd image and tried to boot it up in an virtual machine using Virtual Box. First I tried 256mb of ram, but with that it just got stuck up during the bootup process. With 512mb of ram it runs but it's still slow and sluggish compared to Ubuntu or other Linux distros running in a virtual machine.

I have 2GB of ram in my system, and it eats up around 500MB with compiz and stuff running Ubuntu 8.04 ( hardy ) ...

Other than the system requirements OpenSolaris looks quite polished and I quickly fired up the package manager to upgrade the installed packages ... but oooopppsssyy! ~ 1800mb to be downloaded??? are you kidding me????

Well, I won't download 1800mb of stuff, no way, that never gonna happen.

The "Virtual Box" additions are not available for OpenSolaris so it's really annoying when you wanna do something you need to click inside the virtual machine window, then press the host key to release it, etc. quite annoying.

I'll leave it installed for a few more days, just for fun ... I also found out that there is Nexenta a distro built around the OpenSolaris kernel with lots of open source software. It's really interesting, and I'll have to check it out in the near future ...

As a conclusion ... I'm a developer myself so I could build my own stuff, though I won't drop my Ubuntu for OpenSolaris yet, but that may change :)

The Sixty One

2008-05-31T00:00:00+02:00

I just stumbled across this awesome place ... TheSixtyOne.com :)

No comments!

Another day, another script ...

2008-05-29T00:00:00+02:00

A few weeks ago I posted a script I made to make customized wallpapers for my system using twinview. Recently I made another nice little script to convert all the images in PNG format from a folder to JPG format.

This is really simple and it fits my needs ... of course as always there is room for improvement :)

#!/bin/bash
ls *.png | awk '{ printf("Converting %s ... ",$0); \
system("convert " $0 " " substr($0,0,length($0)-3)".jpg" ); \
printf("Done!\n"); }'

I made it executable and copied it as mkjpg to /usr/bin/ for convenience.

Happy scripting!

Textmate like color scheme for GEdit ...

2008-05-29T00:00:00+02:00

I found this awesome Textmate like color scheme for GEdit here . You can see it in action in the screenshot below.

(oops, you can see OpenSolaris booting from the Live CD on the right, and on the left a portion of a component from my 3D engine )

Beach Volley

2008-05-26T00:00:00+02:00

Logging & Filters ... etc

2008-05-21T00:00:00+02:00

I think that is extremely beneficial for every desktop application having an flexible yet powerful logging system.

This can "log" to a file, to a console (internal or not) or both. Anyway, the most important thing are the different log levels, and filters.

Let's say that we have Text, Info, Warning, Error ... each represents an level. Then we can setup a filter to "show" only the Warnings, or the Errors supressing all the other messages. This is extremly useful if you have bunch messages showing up in your log file / console.

Now let's see some code :)

#define SAFE_ARRAY_DELETE(x) if(x) {delete [] x; x=NULL;}
#define INRANGE(x,min,max) ( (x >= min) && (x <= max) )

namespace Log
{
    const int Text        = 0;
    const int Info        = 1;
    const int Warning = 2;
    const int Error       = 3;
    // used only by the filtering
    const int Any     = 4;
};
static int g_logFilter = Log::Any;
void setConsoleLogFilter( const int logFilter )
{
    if( INRANGE(logFilter,0,5) )
    {
        g_logFilter = logFilter;
        return;
    }
    g_logFilter = Log::Any;
}
void consoleLog( const int logLevel, const char msg, ... )
{
    va_list ap;
    // is filtering turned on?
    if( g_logFilter != Log::Any && g_logFilter != logLevel )
    {
        return;
    }
    char text = new char[ 2048 ];
    assert( text );
    memset(text,0,sizeof(text));
    va_start(ap, msg);
        vsprintf(text, msg, ap);
    va_end(ap);
    switch( logLevel )
    {
        case Log::Info:
            printf( "INFO: %sn", text );
            break;
        case Log::Warning:
            printf( "WARNING: %sn", text );
            break;
        case Log::Error:
            printf( "ERROR: %sn", text );
            break;
        default:
            printf( "%sn", text );
            break;
    }
    SAFE_ARRAY_DELETE( text );
}

This is very very straightforward ... it's C++, but it can be adapted to C, by replacing the memory managment stuff ... new with malloc, delete [] with free :) and moving out the constants into an enum :)

It works out great for me, and I use something very very similar to this on a day to day basis :D

Happy coding!

Spread Linux with a chick

2008-05-20T00:00:00+02:00

Original source here .

Automatic Build number incrementation

2008-05-10T00:00:00+02:00

Automatic build number incrementation always was a hot topic especially under Linux. My solution is fairly simple to implement, so let's see some "code" right away:

#!/bin/bash
echo Fetching and updating build number ...
cat Core/Build.cpp | awk '{ printf("unsigned int g_internalbuildNumber = %d ;\n",$5+1); }' > Core/_Build.cpp
rm Core/Build.cpp
mv Core/_Build.cpp Core/Build.cpp

This is a nice little bash script, but you already knew that, what it does? Well it reads in the previous build number and writes it back after incrementing it with 1.

The initial "Build.cpp" must contain the line:

unsigned int g_internalbuildNumber = 0 ;

... please notice the spacing because it is very very important, since awk parses the tokens based on the spaces.

Now make this script to be executed as the first thing inside your makefile, and make sure that the "Build.cpp" is compiled and linked with your executable, shared object or whatever.

To access the build number from within the code, you just have to do an "extern unsigned int g_internalbuildNumber;" and there you go, nothing fancy but still cool :P

Maybe it's not the most elegant solution, but hey ... it works for me and that's all what matters :D

Windows Mail high CPU utilization fix

2008-05-07T00:00:00+02:00

I know that Thunderbird is a lot more powerful than Windows Mail, but I prefer it under Windows Vista, mostly because it's simple, and I absolutely love the "Junk Mail Filter". Anyway I don't want to open a war between the two camps, and that's not the point of this post.

After some time, I noticed that once I start Windows Mail, my CPU goes to 100% and it stay there forever which obviously made the system unresponsive and very very unstable. Please note that the CPU was an single core AMD Turion ( 64bit ) running at 2.2Ghz with just 512kb as L2 cache.

I started digging around, and stumbled accross users with similar issues, but none of the suggested "solutions" solved my problem, and then I took a look under the folder where Windows Mail actually stores the files, and BOOOM!

What? There were like 10k EML files with 0kb size no subject, etc. Hmmm? I deleted them all, and started Windows Mail again, and it worked prefectly ever after. This is why it was struggling, and I have no idea how those files were created or anything, but deleting them solved the problem, and that's all what counts.

What a story huh? LoL

Libtouch and more ...

2008-05-05T00:00:00+02:00

Today I saw this excellent HOWTO at http://ssandler.wordpress.com/mtmini/ on how to make your very own multi-touch pad, which is the coolest thing i've ever seen during the last two decades ... cough, cough ...

I haven't made one myself yet, but I downloaded touchlib and I found it quite annoying that it used my built-in cam from my toshiba sattelite laptop however I plugged in another external one.

So, I did a quick fix to be able to use /dev/video1 ... oh yeah, I tried this under Linux, more specifically Ubuntu, because I was lazy to setup all the libs with headers and shits under Windows.

In the CvCaptureFilter.cpp right in the void CvCaptureFilter::setParamater( ... ) I added two more lines, so my version looks like this:

void CvCaptureFilter::setParameter(const char *name,
                                   const char *value)
{
   if(!capture)
   {
      if(strcmp( name, "source" ) == 0)
      {
        strcpy(source, value);
        if(strcmp( value, "cam" ) == 0)
        {
          capture = cvCaptureFromCAM( CV_CAP_ANY );
        }
        else if(strcmp( value, "cam1" ) == 0)
        {
          capture = cvCaptureFromCAM( 1 );
        }
        else
        {
          capture = cvCaptureFromAVI(value);
        }
      }
   }
}

With this done, i can just change in the "config.xml" the "source" to "cam1" and make use of my other camera device on /dev/video1 :)

That's all I need :D

A few other thoughts ... you can give an index from 0..99 to the cvCaptureFromCam( ... ) and then it will try to find the first available driver for that particular device, or if you give something >=100 then it will try to use that particular driver with the first available video device; CV_CAP_ANY = 100 .

Nimuh

2008-05-04T00:00:00+02:00

This is another sweet game i stumbled across a while ago, but I don't think that I blogged about it, or maybe I'm wrong? Hmm... anyway, here are two screenshots as a teaser, and if you like it then grab it over here .

Digg a Tech Girl

2008-05-03T00:00:00+02:00

Vote for Leah Culver on Digg a Tech Girl by clicking right here .

Another day, another game ...

2008-05-02T00:00:00+02:00

As I'm a developer myself (i'm writing my own cross-platform 3d engine), I love to check out different game sources which can be a valuable inspiration source when it comes to engine design, etc.

Todays game is Battle Thanks, a 2D tank arcade game with multiplayer and split screen modes.

I grabbed the sources and compiled it, because I prefer to compile myself where possible rather than installing precompiled packages.

( it uses "scons" instead of automake, or jam )

... here is an in-game screenshot:

If I raised your interest check it out here .

Short Skirt/Long Jacket (Geek Version)

2008-04-30T00:00:00+02:00

... original source here .

I want a girl with a kernel like a diamond I want a girl who knows what's best I want a girl who ctrl +x's to cut And eyes that burn like cigarettes

I want a girl with the right memory allocations Who is funny and witty And geeky as a white hat She's playing with her compiler She's putting up her source She's touring the lab And picking up slackware

I want a geek girl with a short skirt and a long jacket

I want a girl who plays games early I want a girl who stays up late I want a girl with uninterrupted uptime Who uses a debugger to hunt down mem leaks With fingernails that shine like justice And hair that is red like fire

Who is funny and witty And geeky as a black hat She's touring the lab And picking up slackware

I want a geek girl with a short skirt and a long jacket

I want a girl with a smooth leather cuirass I want a girl with good stat rolls At a gaming session we will meet accidentally We'll start to talk when she borrows my dice

She wants a computer that is penguin powered She wants a computer that will get things done She's changing her name from Kitty to Karen She's trading her win box for a white Apple laptop

I want a geek girl with a short skirt and a long jacket

Just because ...

2008-04-29T00:00:00+02:00

73lab.com

2008-04-20T00:00:00+02:00

XMoto the Open Source Elma clone

2008-04-19T00:00:00+02:00

XMoto is a really really good cross platform open source 'Elma' clone with thousands of user created levels.

If you liked Elma, you will love XMoto for sure :)

Here are some screenshots ... if you like what you see then grab a copy right here .

Using Subversion (svn) locally ...

2008-04-18T00:00:00+02:00

It does makes sense using Subversion locally even for small projects, because later it can be easily exported and imported into Sourceforge, Google Code for instance.

On Windows this can be done fairly easy with TortoiseSVN, under Linux there are also a bunch of GUI svn clients, my favorite one is KDESVN, but you can always fire up a terminal and use "svn" ...

We can create a repository with the following command:

svnadmin create /home/user/svn_repo

Now let's import some "initial" content into with the following command:

svn import /home/user/projects/krad_proj file:///home/user/svn_repo -m 'initial import of krad_proj'

We don't work right in the repository so let's make another directory and get a copy of the project from the newly create repository with the following command:

svn checkout file:///home/user/svn_repo/krad_proj

So this way we can alter our "copy" and then just commit the changes, all locally without any server or exposing our system in any way, which is great.

For more commands, information feel free to visit http://subversion.tigris.org/ .

May the source be with you, and good night!

Elephants Dream

2008-04-13T00:00:00+02:00

Elephants Dream is the worlds first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license.

Forging wallpapers ...

2008-04-13T00:00:00+02:00

Recently I bought a nice 19' wide LCD monitor with an 1440x900 resolution, so I quickly setup Twinview between my laptop running at 1280x800 and obviously moved down the first screen by 100 pixels, to achieve the same effect as "Extend my ..." Wind0ze.

Everything was fine, until I wanted to set a wallpaper, and it hurt my eyes ... duhh, it was horible ... stretched between the two screens. yuck!

The wallpapers designed for dual monitors assume that both have the same height, which obviously wasn't my case ... so the only viable solution was to create my own wallpaper by arranging two images in GIMP.

I like to have the same wallpaper on both screens, so that wasn't a problem, but it was rather annoying after trying 2-3 wallpapers.

Instead I thought of the nice utility package called "ImageMagick" ... Yay! and wrote a nice little bash script to generate the desired wallpaper from two images given as input.

Here is the contents of the script:

#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -ne 3 ] ; then echo "Usage: $0 image1.png image2.png outimage.png" exit 13 fi

convert -size 2720x900 xc:black "$1" -geometry +0+100 -composite "$2" -geometry +1280+0 -composite "$3"

echo "Done ..." exit 1

I named it "mkwlp" , made it executable (chmod u+x mkwlp) then copied it into /usr/bin for convenience ...

This can be customized for other resolutions, etc and it's fairly straight forward so i won't go into this.

(I highlighted the customizable parts for convenience)

Voila!!!

Here are a few wallpapers i "forged" with this little script :) Enjoy! (click to see the bigger version)

Oh, I almost forgot to tell that EWallpapers.eu is my number #1 landing place when I'm looking for high resolution wide screen wallpapers ( but not only! ) and also Hollywood Desktop.

R.I.P

2008-04-13T00:00:00+02:00

I've seen that lots of people are looking for these two wallpapers so I decided to "host" a copy of them over my place. Enjoy! (click for the bigger version )

Drunken escapades with Glest ...

2008-03-23T00:00:00+02:00

I grabbed Glest tonight, and wanted to compile it, but BOOM! when I wanted to compile the map editor, tons of errors related to wxWidgets popped up ... of course the 1st thing on what I was thinking is that my wxWidgets version is too old ... and so it was, so I grabbed the latest wxWidgets and after compiling it several times enabling one by one every feature required by the Glest map editor i did it ... Yay!

Here is my "configure" command ( just for the curious ):

./configure --enable-unicode --enable-config --enable-std_string --enable-std_iostreams --with-gl --with-gtk

wxWidgets takes quite some time to compile, even on my dual-core @ 1.8Ghz ... damn, usually I compile in a "yakuake" session so I can forget about it :P

One thing I noticed though, if I compiled wxWidgets with X11 the editor didn't flicker, but with GTK flickers heavily ...

I think that wouldn't be wrong if I would say that Glest is the best open source RTS at the moment in all means, graphics, ai, etc...

Anyway I'm planning to contribute to Glest ... maybe fixing some bugs, or making some improvements, we'll see ...

Until then, happy coding and may the source be with you!

Live On Care is lame big time ...

2008-03-07T00:00:00+02:00

Awwwwww ... a virus ... how nice ???

... and the contents of the "virus" ... haha!

... this is soooooooooo lame, it seriously cracked me up :)

Operation Sexy Men Vids ... Yay!

2008-03-04T00:00:00+02:00

My final Compiz Theme + Wallpaper

2008-03-01T00:00:00+02:00

Here is a screenshot with my favorite Compiz Theme and wallpaper featuring this great black sista' ... Ciara :D

My 'new' favorite geek chick ...

2008-03-01T00:00:00+02:00

My new favorite geek chick is Leah Culver. You can see her "in action" in this Systm episode by clicking here .

Finally ... Ubuntu + Compiz + Kiba Dock

2008-02-29T00:00:00+02:00

We all know that the Geforce 7300 series are somewhat problematic under Linux and obviously under Ubuntu especially when it comes to Compiz ... and if you don't have compiz you can't run 'eye' candy apps which make use of a composition manager ... yeaaak!

Compiz was working fine for me except that the Windows Borders never showed up, no matter what I did. So here is how I made this work ... make sure that you have this line in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf .

Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"

The easiest way to do this, is to fire up a terminal and type in the following:

sudo nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals -d 24

Then restart compiz, and the borders should appear. Of course this assumes that you have installed the "NVidia" drivers (restricted) .

I also compiled the latest version of the "Kiba Dock", and played around with the Compiz settings. Now i'm in the hunt for the perfect theme and maybe background ...

May the source be with you, and good night :D

PS: until now I didn't had the will to play around with these extensively ... haha!

Spring

2008-02-28T00:00:00+02:00

Today I grabbed the latest version of the "Spring" RTS from the svn, and compiled it ... it took quite some time, but worth it. Then I downloaded a few maps and one mod to test it out... so here is a screenshot :D

Looks really nice ... i like it!

Nice stumbles ...

2008-02-27T00:00:00+02:00

My "dark" VS theme ...

2008-02-24T00:00:00+02:00

I am in the race for a good "dark" theme for some time now, but today I just came up with my very own one ... haha!

When it comes to fixed size fonts, I prefer "Monaco" :D Also the guy who proposed that "blue" background for Borland C, Borland Pascal, etc was really clever ... haha.

Here is a screenshot with my very own theme.

If you like it, you can download it right here .

Skype Bug ...

2008-02-11T00:00:00+02:00

Anon?mous

2008-02-08T00:00:00+02:00

Girl Hack ...

2008-01-28T00:00:00+02:00

Here is an old "document" I stumbled across some time ago, and now I decided to post it :)) PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE OF THE TROUBLED FEMALE TEEN Author - Seth McGann Date - 5/25/98

OVERVIEW

In this report I will attempt to quantify the personality traits of the troubled teen with the intent of creating a psychological profile (or signature). The techniques used to arrive at these conclusions are the same used by the FBI to profile unknown serial killers to facilitate their capture. All the conclusions are based on real-life interviews, long exposure to several people possessing the target personality, as well as some behavioral psychology. This report is divided into a theory and a practice section as well as a small section on exploitation. At the end of this report you should have all the information you need to identify the personality type defined in this report and with practice should be able to exploit the female for your enjoyment.

THEORY

The personality we are defining is that of a troubled teen. Specifically, we seek female teens from 12 to 18 years of age (possibly older) with severe unipolar depression. The reason for this will become evident later. We also seek a highly extroverted personality with little or no inhibitions. A side effect of this will be mild to severe hyperactivity, which we must also look for. So, we desire a depressed, extroverted, hyperactive female. Luckily, these traits go hand in hand. Additionally, the behavior associated with them is easy to identify, even from a distance. In the next section, a behavioral profile will be provided that can be used a template for this personality.

PRACTICE

We begin our profile with an examination of the subject. This can be broken into several pieces. As with any profile, not everything will be the same for every subject. The more parts that fit, the better the chance of a match.

HEAD: Examine the subjects head. Is her hair dyed? Does it show evidence of being dyed multiple times? The more times the better. Next look at her ears. Multiple self-inflicted piercings with strange studs should be evident. Also look for make-up. We want a purple color scheme, though this may, or may not be evident. Also look for scarring, (white or red lines). The more scarring the better.

ARMS and LEGS: Look closely at the subjects wrists and forearms. Search for evidence of scarring in these locations. Heavy scarring on the wrists is an indication of attempted suicide (a plus for us). Also look for names that have been carved into her skin. She may chose to hide her names by carving them in hard to see places, so don't be discouraged just yet. Another good sign is burn marks. Be careful though, severe physical or sexual abuse will produce the wrong type of personality, we want all the damage to be self-inflicted.

BODY: The overall female should be very thin most of the time, although obesity is a possibility too. She will have used starvation as a means to attempt suicide in the past. We seek a physically attractive female, so feel free to discard females that are disturbing to look at.

Now that we have screened for a female with the above physical characteristics we have to take a look at her mind. Even here, observation is key. It will be easier to inventory her mind if you try to start a conversation. The proper type will undoubtedly start the conversation for you, and begin telling her life story, given a little prodding. Watch her body language as she talks. She will subconsciously emphasize certain points, which we want to know about. Here is what we are looking for:

BEHAVIOR: The female will try to always be at the center of attention. Given the proper setting (a house party, for instance) she will not hesitate to run around completely naked. This is a very good sign as it requires a VERY uninhibited personality (even with large amounts of alcohol). She will begin to talk to whoever is near her, and will continually steer the conversation back to her. She will complain about her life, how bad her day was, and given enough time she will drop important details. This release of information will happen whether the subject is inebriated or not, the hallmark of this personality. Areas to question the subject on are as follows:

DRUG and ALCOHOL USE: The subject should use drugs heavily, if not now, in the past. She may have convictions and be on probation for use and sale of marijuana. Generally, she will not use harder drugs than pot, if anything else it will usually be "shrooms" or LSD. She will also use alcohol heavily, generally in a social setting. All this drug use will generally take place with her friends in a closed setting. Don't expect to see this at bar or other open gathering.

MEDICAL HISTORY: Here is the most important section. If you've gotten this far everything here should fit perfectly. She will have been treated for "depression" in the past, most likely with an in-patient stay at a mental facility. The reason for her stay will be attempted suicide or suicidal ideations (thinking about ending it). The methods she will use will not be effective (like a shotgun blast to the head) but will be designed to attract attention. Horizontal wrist slashing will bleed a lot, but is generally not fatal and can be repaired. Overdosing on over the counter drugs, and consuming household cleaning products are also popular. While these methods can work, the subject will call her friend and tell the friend that she just tried to commit suicide. This leads to the hospital, a suicide watch, and in-patient commitment. The subject will also be seeing a therapist. The reason for this is that the medication she is taking requires monitoring by a psychiatrist. Popular brand names are Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, but they all are anti-depressants. Specifically they are selective seritonin reuptake inhibitors, in other words they work by increasing the pool of seritonin in the brain, thus reducing depression. She will most likely not be taking the old school anti-depressants. These so called MAO inhibitors have so many side effects that is usually prescribed when nothing else will work. She will also need something for that hyperactivity, Ritalin being the drug of choice. To summarize: she is currently on anti-depressants and is seeing a therapist due to depression and attempted suicide. If you can come to this conclusion from your conversation, then you are in good shape.

FAMILY HISTORY and CHILDHOOD: The subject will have had a relatively sheltered childhood with in a small town. This can vary actually, she may in fact live in a city and may have one or both parents, who can have a varying amount of financial security. Obviously, you want to find a female with rich parents. Something goes horribly wrong. The female will be rejected by her mother, who will continually disapprove of everything she does. This will lead to continuos feelings of rejection and anxiety. In an attempt to get attention she will latch on to anyone who approves of her and soothes the pain in her mind. This is where the promiscuous sex comes in. She uses sex as a tool to ease her mental pain, but this will not work. No matter how much sex she has, how many boyfriends she gets, no matter how much she drinks, or smokes, the underlying pain always comes back. She will do a good job covering it up, but she overcompensates, leading to exaggerated reactions. If you spend enough time with the female you will see that she does not deal well with change. Her personality will "break" for awhile, during which you will be treated to fits of screaming and crying. During these episodes the female will be feeling completely alone. If the episode last long enough she will try to commit suicide. To her, physical pain is nothing compared to the mental torture she has to endure. This also explains the need to carve her body, and do her own piercings. The control she exerts on her body, and the pain she inflicts, gives her an escape. To find out how closely the female fits in here requires good conversation skills. Watch her body language and try to see what you can pick up. Chances are, all this will hit dead on.

FRIENDS: She will have many friends and acquaintances. Her best friend will usually be fairly normal, so it would be good for you to question her alone. Not to much in this area, take mental notes about who she likes and dislikes, it will be useful in the future if you try to start any sort of "relationship".

SEXUAL ORIENTATION: The subject will almost always be bi-sexual. Depending on how much she likes you, she will be willing to have a sex with you and two or more girls. In fact, your best bet for group sex is with this personality type. The other partners will usually be her friends, or someone she feels comfortable with. Due to the sensitive nature of this topic, you should find a way to figure it out without direct questioning or until you've known the subject for awhile.

After you've done a satisfactory interview you will know whether you have found the right person or not. If you are sure you have a proper personality fix you can move on to the next section. Otherwise, try somebody else, in the next section we talk about ways to increase your success.

EXPLOITATION

To actually exploit this type of personality you must first find some candidate girls. Here are some excellent locations:

Boarding Schools for Girls: Basically these are psychiatric facilities for rich girls. Try and find a party near the school, chances are some of the most lucrative finds will show up. If possible, through your own party (this is kind of extreme though).

Rural High Schools: Everyone knows people out in a rural setting have nothing to do. Use this to your advantage by infiltrating the party scene. You will undoubtedly find several targets.

Colleges: Less likely, due to the fact that someone as mentally disturbed as we want would most likely not make it to college (though there are exceptions). Worth a try any ways. Get into the party scene, go to bars around the college, frat parties are great, IF you can get in.

Clubs and Bars: Everyone who goes to these are underage. Use this to your advantage. Profiling is harder in this setting, but if your good you should have no problem.

What you do once you have found your target? Well, I'm sure you can figure it out. Capitalize on the person for sex, money and drugs. The more involved you get with the one girl, chances are you can get her friends too. One thing to keep in mind though, you will either get a positive or negative reaction. Discard the person if she responds negatively. If you really want a particular girl, you can try, but with this personality, there is an immediate reaction. If the reaction is positive, your in with about 5 minutes effort. Otherwise, it will take much, much longer. Don't bother, find another one.

CONCLUSION

If you have completed this report you have all the necessary information to identify this personality. Now all you need is practice, and lots of it. A disregard for ethics is also helpful. In no time you should be getting more sex than you know what to do with.

Understanding art for geeks

2008-01-24T00:00:00+02:00

I found this over here , and I find it extremely interesting. haha!

Customize Your Ubuntu ...

2008-01-15T00:00:00+02:00

I'm posting this, mostly because some people showed interest in how do I customized my Ubuntu's look and feel. So here we go ... an image worths more than 1 million words ... ha!

First take a look at the following screenshot.

Nice huh? If you liked what you have seen, then continue, else STOP reading now.

The background can be found here .

The theme is customized, so here are some screenshots:

Now a few words about the panel on the bottom. Well that's not the Kiba dock, that's just a normal dock. So here is an image on how to set that up to achieve the look and feel of the one in the screenshot.

The themes, etc. are from either Gnome Look or Gnome Art .

Enjoy indefinitely .... haha!

Brain test ...

2007-12-31T00:00:00+02:00

This thing is really, really freaking me out :)) I found it over here.

I can see it spin clockwise too, but can reverse it at will.

Can you???

Easter Egg in Winamp 5.5

2007-11-27T00:00:00+02:00

I did a search after I found this on Google and found nothing relevant, so maybe I'm the first one who discovered this. :))

To see the easter egg, start winamp, go to the "Preferences" then to "Modern Skins" and select the last tab which says "Current Skin", then double click on the "Bento" text, BOOOM! there you have a nice "snake" like game :))

Enjoy, and have fun!!!

PS: be sure to eat all the Lamas !!! Haha!

4kb Intro Kit

2007-11-18T00:00:00+02:00

This is a bit old -- it was released by the Northern Dragons demo group, but it's still an useful resource for someone who wants to break into the "demo scene". :)) It contains useful tutorials, examples, which can be useful even for those who are planning to make a 64k intro, or why not a "demo" which can be up to 16mb :)

I definitely found it useful -- so greetz fly out to Northern Dragons :))

... oh yeah -- you can get it here.

Great texture & music resources ...

2007-11-18T00:00:00+02:00

Well, if you are an lone wolf developer like I am, and you want some nice textures and music then you should check out these two websites, and most probably you will find something you like. Of course I'm assuming that your productions won't be commercial, lol -- so you will be able to use them :P

http://ccmixter.org/ -- music

http://www.imageafter.com/-- textures

I'm planning on using some resources from these to commit a few experimental "scene demos/intros/games" in the near future :) with my new 3D engine :P but shhh, everything at its time :))

Tiny3D Winamp Visualizer Framework w/ OpenGL

2007-11-18T00:00:00+02:00

Today I released Tiny3D under GPL license -- my very own framework for writing 3D visualizer plugins for Winamp 5+. It also includes the "demo" why this framework was born. More info and the sources can be found over here.It was written in the last few days, so don't expect too much ... haha!

Skype + Linux + Video = Love

2007-11-10T00:00:00+02:00

A new Skype beta was released for Linux, which finally has Video support. I quickly grabbed and installed it on my Ubuntu system. It works perfectly with the integrated webcam in my toshiba sattelita a200 pro :))) I'm happy with it.

I guess this will be a major hit for aMSN, Pidgin, etc, because they all lack the Video support and isn't planned in the near future for either of them.

Hip-Hip ... Hoooraay! Go you Skype!

More Common Ubuntu 7.10 problem fixes :))

2007-11-03T00:00:00+02:00

Today I found solutions to two other frequent problems with Ubuntu and newer laptops.

1). When the headphone jack is plugged in the sound doesn't stops in the internal speakers.

The workaround to this problem is the following:
compiling the latest alsa-driver, alsa-lib, alsa-utils and alsa-firmwire
try adding the "options snd-hda-intel model=lenovo" line to the end of the "/etc/modprobe.d/alsa_base" file.
and after a restart it will work as expected, or very very close to that :))

2). Getting hardware acceleration enabled with the 'problematic' Geforce Go 7300.

Well in this case we could go the hard way, and re-compile our kernel and nvidia module by ourself,etc -- but there is a lot more simple solution, and it will work almost 100% guaranteed.
All we need to do is to get "envy". Debian/Ubuntu users just type in a terminal: "sudo apt-get install envy".use
Now that we have envy installed we switch to the "real terminal" by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1, and kill the GDM.
"sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop"
after this we call "envy -t", and press 1. You may have to solve some dependecies manually if the "process halts", but that's piece of cake especially under Debian/Ubuntu, because the problems will be listed by "apt" :)
repeat the previous step after you solved the dependencies, and let the "envy" do his job.

When "envy" done, will ask you if you wanna let him to modify the "xorg.conf" -- answer yes to this question, then it will ask if you want to reboot -- chose yes again.

Now, if everything worked well, you should get to the "login" screen. If anything goes wrong just copy back the backed up "xorg.conf" and restart just X or the whole machine.

How to check if we have 3D acceleration? Well that's quite simple ... in a terminal type: "glxinfo | grep -i "direct" "

If you get "direct rendering: yes" then you can celebrate and you have 3D acceleration, if you get something else, then you may have to digg, and modify your xorg.conf, because there are big chances that the problem is in there.

Also to check the 3D in action, type "glxgears" in a terminal window. :)) Enjoy :)

Regarding to issue number two, I tried: Unreal Tournament 2003 (with all the details to maximum), OpenArena,Sauerbraten (a.k.a Cube2), just to name a few, and they all worked very very well :)

Wireless + Ubuntu 7.10 = love

2007-11-03T00:00:00+02:00

As almost everyone around here, I was waiting for the new Ubuntu mostly because it promised improved wireless support. 7.04 haven't even recognized my wireless card, after install, and also I had sound problems, though anything else seemed to work great.The 7.10 solved these right out of the box, but I still wasn't able to connect via WPA-TKIP and WPA2-AES to my wireless Netgear router.

So, after a few days of digging and reading, I managed to make my wireless connection working. It's not the most elegant solution, but for me it works, and that's all what matters. In this guide, I assume that your wireless card is recognized by Ubuntu, and it's functional. In 7.10 you have the wpa_supplicant installed by default, so you won't have to worry about it. Here is with what I came up, and making my wireless working, exactly as it works under Windows.

I removed the silly network-manager by typing "sudo apt-get remove network-manager" in a terminal.
Now go to System->Administration->Networking, and make sure to fill the fields with the correct info, and enable the wireless connection.
To make sure that everything is right, check your /etc/network/interfaces file. Open up the file by typing "gksudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces".

For WPA-TKIP:

iface wlan0 inet static address 192.168.0.25 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway <your router's ip> wpa-ap-scan 1 wpa-pairwise TKIP wpa-group TKIP wpa-psk <your long wpa key> wpa-driver wext wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK wpa-proto WPA wpa-ssid <your essid>

auto wlan0

For WPA2-AES:

iface wlan0 inet static address 192.168.0.25 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway <your router's ip> wpa-ap-scan 1 wpa-pairwise CCMP wpa-group CCMP wpa-psk <your long wpa key> wpa-driver wext wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK wpa-proto WPA2 wpa-ssid <your essid>

auto wlan0

Make sure that these, are in the file, if not then add the lines, and save the file, then you can close the gedit window. 4. In a terminal type in the followings, exactly in this order: "sudo killall wpa_supplicant" [enter] "sudo /etc/init.d/networking stop" [enter] "sudo /etc/init.d/networking start" [enter]

Now we should take a look at our connection status in the "Network Monitor" applet.
Finally we can do a "ping google.com" right from the terminal.

So, by now we should have a working wireless connection, but if you will restart your PC, you will have to type in the commands from "section 4.". That's really, really annoying, so here is the solution to get wireless at startup automatically.

Type in a terminal "sudo gedit /etc/init.d/wifi" and paste the followings in the file (basically our 3 commands):

#!/bin/bash

kill all wpa_supplicant instances

killall wpa_supplicant

stop the network interfaces

/etc/init.d/networking stop

start the network interfaces

/etc/init.d/networking start

Close the gedit window, and type "sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/wifi" to make the script "executable". When done, we must add it to be executed at every system start-up as the last "thing". :))

To do that type the following in a terminal window:

"sudo update-rc.d wifi defaults 99"

Later if you will like to disable this you have two choices:

1. "sudo update-rc.d -f wifi remove" OR 2. "sudo chmod -x /etc/init.d/wifi"

Too test out this, just restart your computer and you should have internet access right after boot-up, just like on a Wind0ze machine. Totally rad huh?

[Updates Sun Mar 30, 2008]

This "post" proven to be really popular, so here are a few updates, to make even more users happy :)

If you are getting your IP from your router automatically then you can replace this:

iface wlan0 inet static address 192.168.0.25 netmask 255.255.255.0

with this

iface wlan0 inet dhcp

If you ping and you get no "reponse", then it worth to check out your /etc/resolv.conf and make sure that it contains the following lines:

nameserver <your router's ip>

You can edit / create this file by "sudo gedit /etc/resolv.conf".

If it still doesn't work, you may try changing "wlan0" to "wifi0","ath0" ...

If you get disconnected you can always fire up a terminal and run "sudo /etc/init.d/wifi" to get your connection back, without any hassle ...

Because the silly "network-manager" was removed you can add an "Network Monitor" to one of your Gnome Panels ...

Also I'm thinking on coding a nice little GUI tool to do all this stuff, so stay tuned!

[Updates Sat Apr 26, 2008]

This works perfectly in the final release of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), just like Dave confirmed that it works with the beta.

[Updates Sat May 10, 2008]

The development of little GUI tool is on hold, eventually I will continue the development if there will be enough requests, but I seriously doubt it :)

Please feel free to post any comments/suggestions/experiences, etc. related to this. :))

Hottest Geek Chick ever ...

2007-10-14T00:00:00+02:00

No matter what she says, she's still the hottest geek chick ever :))

Now that you watched the videos, I guess you fully agree with me ... but there is one thing I don't like about her? What's that? Well, she likes to whisper lol .... :)))

Medal Of Honor - Collectors Edition :))

2007-10-14T00:00:00+02:00

I was wondering if I would buy the game, I would get the bundle? It's hard to say ... but do creatures like "this" exist???

I'll let you decide ... :)

U-Tsu-Shi-O-Mi!

2007-10-14T00:00:00+02:00

This is the coolest fucking thing ever!!! Totally rad!!!

Simple 'hack'

2007-07-06T00:00:00+02:00

Ever wanted to download all the photos in located in one album on PhotoBucket.com ? If the answer is positive then here is my very own and very simple trick to do it.

All you need is a browser and the little downloader named wget. Linux users most probably have it on their systems, and windows users can get it from here.

Now what this 'hack' consists of? Go to the PhotoBucket album you want to download and chose the "View All" to get a page with all the photos. Now view the source of the page and check the last "urlcodeN" where N is the total number of photos. Write down this or keep it in your mind, and paste the following script in your browsers address bar and replace the N with your number of photos.

javascript:var wnd=window.open("about:blank"); for(var i=0;i<N;i++){ wnd.document.write(document.getElementById("urlcode"+i).value+"<br>"); }

Now press [Enter] and wait until the script finishes. It can take a few seconds.

What this script will do anyway? First of all it will open a new window with blank contents, and it will write all the "paths" to the photos inside it, each on a new line.

Now that you have all the download paths to the photos, copy and paste the contents into a text file and open a terminal (windows users a command prompt - cmd) navigate to the directory where you saved the file with the list, and execute "wget -i saved_urls.txt" and sit back. This will download all the files. Windows users make sure that you have wget in your path else the command won't work.

It's great to create a new directory and place the "saved_urls.txt" inside that, and this way you already organized the photos.

This works 100% all the time, and you can have the photos you wanted almost with no effort.

Enjoy :-)

The script can be improved to prompt for the number of files, and this way we transformed it into a "bookmarklet" script!

Here is the improved version:

javascript:var n = prompt('Enter the number of photos:',0); if(n != null && n > 0) { var wnd=window.open("about:blank"); for(var i=0;i<n;i++){ wnd.document.write(document.getElementById("urlcode"+i).value+"<br>"); }}

You can put the last version in your Firefox "bookmarks" toolbar, and have it just a click away, when you want to get some photos.

We always get what we want, because we can!

A Poem ... just for me ...

2007-04-29T00:00:00+02:00

Here is a poem written by one of my friends (lol ... Gem) for Mickey (Yay, that's me!!!) ...

tell, tell, tell, tell

tell, tell, tell, tell

i shall tell him- who he is? i shall tell him of the barriers to be climbed?

A sunny day- go out and cherish one, or many (i love a mouse, she says but i'm not minnie).

shall i tell him- the truth of it? the eternal secret?

what is real?

to tell some things would be folly, the mouse learns but trial and error.

for mickey... hehe

Thankx Gem ... :D

Chinese girls can piss you off so badly ...

2007-03-08T00:00:00+02:00

Quote:

Icebreaker: hey ... all Chinese girls have that attitude which can piss you off badly?

MoonShine: most of the time

MoonShine: i always figure it's some cultural thing that doesn't translate

MoonShine: gotta run!

MoonShine: later

Icebreaker: thankx, my life saver

They just turn you off with their attitude.

Any comments are welcome, and will be appreciated!

RantRadio

2007-02-25T00:00:00+02:00

RantRadio . Sean Kennedy rocks!!!

Nothing more to say! Be sure to check it out ;-)

Spruzme a MySpace Killer?!!

2007-02-24T00:00:00+02:00

I am subscribed to some YouTube video bulletins, and I stumbled across Spruzme.com in one of xGobobeanx videos (my favorite YouTuber ... Jill you rock!!!). I quickly checked out the site, signed up and I was pleasantly impressed.

The community is small right now, but the Bug Reporting/Suggestion feedback thingy is really working. I posted a topic on the forum that profiles are not displayed correctly in browsers like Firefox, Opera, and the thing got fixed in less than a day. The developer team has all my respect.

I am developer myself too, so when I visit a website or I try a certain program I always try to look at it from the developers point of view first, and only after that from the end users point of view. I also know that creating a social networking site is not a hard thing if you have the necessary server/client side scripting skills (PHP or ASP and HTML/CSS/Javascript), but maintaining it, keep it secure, patch the holes to prevent exploits, etc are the hard work.

I think that Spruzme has potential, and it could grow to a MySpace killer, all it depends on the number of users, and on how many spread the word.

The guys behind Spruzme have 5 stars from me, however there are more bugs to fix, but if they keep up this tempo the reward won't be disappointing.

Good work guys :D