/index.xml

project practically done!

peace. at last, i am done with the code for the project. i am almost done with the report, as soon as i finish it, i’ll post a page here with screenshots of the project in action and the code. (this is at my professor’s request, i am not a nerd, i wouldn’t have put it up here otherwise… err… i guess my writing code on my free time (the slippy game, for example) disproves that… oh well)… more updates soon (tm) [insha’Allah].

project update, etc

greets… i spent the majority of the weekend writing code for my project… seemingly, however, no matter how much i write, or no matter what i do, i always realize or discover that i forgot something else and have to go back and fix it or account for it… not to mention that some of the stuff just takes forever… bleh.

i came across some interesting stuff today while reading /. - the first is a story of a one year old pakistani baby who got an eye transplant. pretty amazing.

on a somewhat spiderman-ish note, this site (warning, contains spoilers) has a list of mistakes in the movie. i didn’t notice a good amount of these things…

finally, check out what an article published by msn (who, of course, is owned by microsoft) is saying about browsers - in summary: “use firefox, not internet explorer.”

spiderman 2...

… is an awesome movie.

an aim-less attempt...

effective tomorrow, july 1st, 2004, insha’Allah (with God’s willing) i am going to attempt to remain off aim. the reason: i have less than a month left for the end of the semester, and i need to finish up my project… otherwise, really bad things could happen.

so i suggest that if you actually read this site (or want to read it) that you bookmark it or memorize the address or something because you won’t be able to get it from my profile (unless of course i break down and log on, but i am hoping that won’t happen).

but yes, i will continue updating the blog throughout insha’Allah.

exhibit your rappin' rhymin' skills

based on the crazy slew of comments on the other posts, i came up with the idea of this thread…

basically, anyone who wants to participate should comment with a rap or rhyme of sorts, and ppl can reply back with their own raps and rhymes and yeah…

i just think it could be interesting… if people participate…

slippy now in early beta stage

greets! did some more work on slippy today. the game works and is totally playable. the things left to do are: 1. save the state and load it up when the program starts and ends, 2. add some menu items to allow someone to jump to levels they’ve beaten, reset levels, and give instructions on how to play, 3. test some more.

i’ve redid the graphics (well, i took the graphics from the ti86 version for the black and white one, and just added color for the color one). the problem is, when i embiggen the graphics, it ends up looking really bad (like the previous post’s screenshot).

the results…

slippy screenshot (b/w) slippy screenshot (color)

due to the slew of questioning comments on the other one, i guess i should explain the game. slippy is a puzzle game in which you control slippy, a penguin. he’s trying to get a bunch of coins (well, i guess i should make the coins into fish but that means i have to make fish graphics…). in order to do so, he/she must move the blocks around. however, due to the slippery nature of the slippery slippy game and the arctic climate in which it takes place, once slippy pushes a box, it keeps moving until it either hits a solid wall (then it stops), or until it hits some ice, in which case it destroys the ice and magically disappears. so yeah, the objective is to get all the coins.

that’s all for now…

productivity in the wrong place?

greets… so rather than work on my school work like i should be doing, i got carried away messing around with palm programming… after finding a really nice palm programming tutorial, and downloading some open source examples (the boulderpalm source was really helpful) and finding my really old calculator stuff, i started to write slippy for the palm…

slippy palm dev screenshot

i got the first level to draw and revamped the graphics from the old one, although the coins, the penguin, and the non-solid ice need some work… if anyone wants to help me make graphics, email me or im me and let me know.

more email stuffs, kernel 2.6, etc.

greets. so on the current thread of email and such, i read two interesting things on /. - the first is the fact that yahoo and hotmail put gmail messages directly to bulk mail… i am not sure if this refers to any emails or just to invites, i have yet to test this. if anyone can confirm or deny this, please post a comment.

secondly, hotmail is supposedly going to up their quota to 250 mb, seeing that yahoo’s upped to 100 mb. this is supposed to happen sometime soon i guess… the article is here.

the lake got a weblog! its very random, don’t say i didn’t warn you.

i think i am going to start utilizing these categories that this weblog allows, so that people who want to ignore the technical brouhaha can do so.

[technical stuff follows]

i forgot to mention this, but i submitted a patch to the liferea project to do auto discovery of feeds given a url. the patch was accepted (and modified) and put in liferea 0.5.0! i guess that would be my second patch ever (hehe).

i spent a good few hours yesterday trying to get guikachu compiling, but to no avail. i don’t have gnome 1.4 installed still, and i tried cvs, and got a plethora of errors. i think its a problem with their yacc file (or with the version of bison i am using, perhaps, although i tried other versions with no avail)… i’ve emailed the mailing list and shall see what they say. (well actually, i did get it to compile after modifying the yacc file myself, but i don’t think the changes i made were “safe,” per se, so hence i emailed the list to see if anyone could suggest safe fixes).

i also started reading some of the palm os developer files yesterday as well. the reason for both of the above is that i happened to run into some games written by aaron curtis for the palm – a long long time ago, we both used to write games for the ti calculators. seeing his palm stuff inspired me to look into palm programming, so i’ll aim to play with that at some point…

i also upped my kernel to 2.6.7 today. after many reboots and recompiles and tries, i finally got things working. the nvidia drivers were especially a pain to get working (i could start x, but if i tried to exit x, the computer would freeze). things seem to work now, and best of all, i figured out how to get my card reader to work in linux!

two new cats

less than a week after sufi left the residence, she was replaced with two cats, whom my brother decided to name “peach” and “mango” – not quite sure why.

picture of new cats

i guess that’s all for now…

webmail, etc

argh, yesterday was quite a day. first off, i deleted all the numbers on my palm pilot accidently (i hard resetted the palm, and thought that when i sync it, the program would send the contacts and calendar info back to the palm… but i was mistaken). so after spending time and restoring an old backup and updating it, i then proceeded to accidently delete my entire mp3 collection. argh.

patrick o’leary from gt was nice enough to give me a gmail invite. its pretty cool, i think i am going to start using it. here is a screenshot:

gmail screenshot

interestingly enough, yahoo raised everyone’s quota to 100 mb too… i wonder where that leaves hotmail with its nice, generous, 3 mb storage.

update: i just saw this on slashdot, there’s also an indian company that’s giving out free 1 gb email accounts.