Chrono Trigger looks like an awesome game

Posted on 22nd November 2010 in Something Daily

Check it out: I’m listening to Aesop Rock right now, because I’m just in that kind of mood. The album None Shall Pass is definitely cool, Eric hit me with it not long ago. I love the song “Catacomb Kids”, as well as the title track. He’s got a real dark vibe going on – I’m not usually so into it, but it’s really fitting for tonight.

As far as I’m concerned, right now the school week is over, as all of my work is done, I’m seeing mc chris tomorrow, and then on Wednesday morning I’m getting on a bus. I’m hoping Thanksgiving is good, guess we’ll see about that.

I had a Thanksgiving dinner last night in Brooklyn. It was great to meet a bunch of people and eat some amazing homecooked food (thanks Dave, Andy, Declan, Lou, Kenny, and Meghan!). And then I get to do it all again on Thursday! Thanksgiving is good. And hopefully I’ll get to see everyone I want to see, and maybe have time to do a project. We’ll see if I can find some wood to build something out of. That would be rad.

You know what? Here’s the code for “esync”, the rsync alternative I wrote in Perl this past week. Why? Because I must.

Yeah check out my awesomely redundant variable names. You can use this if you care to, it’ll search the directory you give it as the first argument and copy all of its files and subdirectories to the directory specified in the second argument.

It just occurred to me: who in the world do I think the target audience is here? Probably myself, as it turns out.

Here’s an incredible short story I read today. Check it out, it’s nuts.

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Turns out Steam games come with a bunch of raw content

Posted on 20th November 2010 in Something Daily

Hello everyone, welcome back to another exciting edition of Three Stegosaurus Moon. We’ve got a great post planned for you today. It has it all. Even dinosaurs.

After a few days of me being mentally elsewhere due to this project that I won’t shut up about, I have returned. I woke up this morning without feeling the uncontrollable urge to start coding and solving problems. I slept in (until 8:45…late, huh?), had a nice long stretch, made myself some breakfast, and have so far had a very relaxing morning. I think I’m going to avoid skating today, in light of what happened last time I did. The scratch on my arm is healing, but it still looks pretty gross. I catch people staring at it sometimes…my eyes are up here, okay?. I believe I’m going to do almost nothing today, as I feel like I deserve it due to the big amount of concentrated effort over the last few days.

Let me just say one last thing about my esync/backup project. Writing a Perl script that recursively traverses directories and copies their contents is something that I didn’t think I could do four days ago. In a way, I still don’t believe that I can. Yet somehow I managed to do it – within the space of three days – and it works exactly the way I intended it to. I must be getting better at programming, or something. I just wanted to make it known that I, Emmett J. Butler, am proud of myself. For once.

As you may know, my roommate London had a recording session for his class last night on which he asked me to assist. The first thing I found out was that the Clive Davis studios are way nicer than the average Music Tech studio. Everything is just cleaner and bigger, and in better condition. But not to compare the two programs or anything. They’re completely different.

The session was to track a woodwind/brass section for London’s hip hop track, which involved seven musicians playing live. So we had lots of mics, gobos, and headphones for everybody. I’ve never engineered a session with that many people on it before, and it really drove home the point that to make one of them work, you have to know exactly what to say to the musicians to get the best performance. It’s like you’re putting on a disguise every time you hit the talkback button. The session was great, and I ended up assisting in a pretty big capacity.

I made the discovery last night that every game you download on Steam uses an unencrypted directory full of the media such as videos, audio and textures that it needs to function. I stumbled on this folder last night during a backup, and literally everything from the games is there in raw form. Every Team Fortress 2 map video, every zombie scream and gun sound effect from Left 4 Dead, the Portal song, everything. It’s just there, in .wav or .mp4, for the taking. I don’t know what I’ll do with this knowledge, if anything, but it’s crazy to see. You definitely don’t get that with a console game.

Check out what I found. I know somebody who’d eat The World’s Largest Gummi Worm (hint: it’s Andrew)

Dinosaurs.

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Programming is Tiring

Posted on 19th November 2010 in Something Daily

Ok, before you say anything…I know I missed a day yesterday. I try not to let that happen very often, but I got a little (read quite) carried away yesterday with coding. This has happened before: I get an idea for a program in my head and I can’t stop myself from working on it until it’s finished. It happened with the mouse game I made for CS 101, and with parts of the space dinosaur game I’m currently working on. Never, though, have I been this singularly obsessed with one goal in programming (or most other aspects of my life, come to think of it). This started a few days ago when I almost lost the code for that very space dinosaur game through negligence and was able to reclaim it from the abyss with the help of cloud storage. Despite having solved the issue, this for some reason made me want to completely rework my backup system. I wrote about this before, check it out.

Done reading? Good. To make a long story short, I wrote a perl script that searches a given directory and copies all of its files and subdirectories to a given source. The idea was/is that I’ll use this in place of rsync for future backups. Let’s say, though, that esync is still in the beta stage. After testing the functions thoroughly (but as I soon learned, not completely), I tried them for the first time on my actual filesystem, full of music and code and games – all of my files, basically. Upon doing this (about an hour ago), my iTunes library quickly vanished from my computer and onto an external drive, not copied, but moved. The same thing happened to a bunch of Application Support files in my Library, causing things to spontaneously quit and restart, lose their settings, et cetera.

Thankfully, no data were actually lost, just moved around a bit. But it was crappy. I’m tweaking a bit more, and hopefully I’ll have something functional by the end of the night. And if that’s the case, I can stop obsessing over this project! Sometimes it’s hard to avoid the thinking addiction that accompanies learning programming. And unfortunately, I don’t have too much else to write about, as this code has been filling the majority of my free time since Thursday. I am going to a Recorded Music session tonight to assist, though. My roommate London is recording a track for a class, and he asked me to help out. Leaving soon, we’ll see how it goes.

EDIT: This is my Friday night. The dinner of champions: Mega Man X, Yuengling, Perl, and fried rice. But not necessarily in that order.

Here’s a link that I had to use today during my exploits, you might find it useful. How to show hidden files in Finder

As always, thanks for reading!

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A Busy Day with Perl

Posted on 17th November 2010 in Something Daily

Wednesdays are bananas. Really just Wednesday evenings, actually, but it all sort of blends together when you stay in motion between 5 and 11 PM. I stuck myself with a bunch of homework tonight by becoming obsessed with this perl script I’m writing. Due to yesterday’s episode involving lost (or almost lost) code, I decided to seriously revamp the script I use to automatically back up my data. It was previously a BASH script that used rsync to update the home folder on two drives, as well as a few other folders in other locations for ease of use and redundancy. One of the big flaws, though, was the lack of multiple backups. In my old system, only one image of the drive was stored at any one time, making it difficult to reclaim lost files (as I discovered). Another problem with it was that BASH does not have easy support for runtime switches, which I want to use to customize the action of the script. As an added challenge for myself, I’m not using rsync anymore, but rather writing a recursive function that traverses a directory tree and copies the contents myself. It’s a bit of work, but quite educational. And to top this off, I learned that I actually sort of love Perl – the built-in support for regular expressions and the $_ variable are helping me see what an easy language it is compared to some.

But the point of all this is, I didn’t get much else done today until crunch time. I spent the day when I could have been blogging or doing homework instead working on an algorithm. Which is great, but it means I have more work right now. It also explains why I’m updating moments before midnight. I just wrote a lab in 30 minutes, and another 1-page paper is soon to follow.

We had another session tonight for our “Get Low” cover, and this time, the material that we had recorded the previous week was actually still there! It was a miracle! After tonight, we have guitar, bass, lead and backing vocals tracked. I engineered for the most part, and I sang a high backup part (with my incredible vocal range….right?). This project is starting to become a lot of fun, though. It wasn’t so much when we had to start from scratch every week, but it is now.

Apart from all this, the reddit secret santa is approaching, and I can’t wait to be paired with someone. Also, I’m seeing mc chris for the first time on Tuesday at the Knitting Factory. It’s going to be a completely rad show, you know it’s true. In case you don’t know mc chris, here’s a starter. It’s called “Robotussin“.

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