Operating Systems Dilemma

Posted on 1st December 2010 in Something Daily

This week is becoming interesting. Mondays and Tuesdays are always pretty easy: I don’t have a lot of classes, and homework is usually due later in the week. So when I go home, I can hang out. Like how I didn’t really accomplish anything yesterday and just played New Super Mario Bros. Wii with Eric. I mean it’s a pretty good game – almost as good as being productive. Almost. We finished all the regular levels, including the crazy frantic battle at the end where giant bowser is running after you – we were all screaming. It was crazy. But now, since we apparently don’t have better things to do, we’re going through the game again and getting all of the star coins to unlock the really difficult secret levels. It’s not as bad as the replay gimmick in Super Mario Galaxy 2 that makes you play the whole game twice, but it’s similar. But who am I to complain? It’s fun – I mean I’m playing it, right? Anyway the week is getting interesting because I know that tonight is going to involve a large amount of frantic work that’s all due tomorrow. And the South Park season is over, so I don’t have that to break up the craziness tonight. But today’s the craziest. Tomorrow will be better. And now for something completely different.

Considering the process of building my own desktop computer has made me a bit uncomfortable with my affinity for Mac OS X. My original idea for a computer build was essentially “Make a computer that runs OS X”. Doing a little research, I found out about the Hackintosh community and the compendiums (compendia?) they keep of OS X compatible parts. This is all good, but doing a bit of research on the process outside of that community has led me to the realization that installing X on a non-Mac computer is ultimately more work than it’s worth. Choosing the correct parts seems to be the easy part, with the numerous lists of compatible motherboards and processors floating around the internet. The impression that I get is that hacking the OS, installing and running it successfully are the hard parts. I’m positive that it’s doable, and I’ll probably try to do it eventually. I won’t however, have a very high expectation of success, and I’ll pick hardware that’s compatible with both Ubuntu and OS X.

The thing is, I’m worried that using OS X exclusively will lead to me wasting money in the future, not to mention becoming married to one company/OS. I don’t want to have to ‘settle’ for an operating system that I’m not amazing with, or that doesn’t run the software that I need, because it doesn’t run on my hardware. My ideal situation is, of course, running OS X on non-Apple hardware, for the experience of building my own computer for a cheaper price than Apple and running the software that I know/require. I can see why Apple makes it so difficult to do this, though. They really don’t want me to do this. So I’ll try and make a Hackintosh when the time comes.

However, short of getting that to work, I’m practicing as much as I can with Linux (which isn’t a whole lot different anyway), because apparently Linux can run on tons of hardware types. I dual boot 10.6.5 and 10.10 on my white MacBook, and I pretty much only use the Linux partition these days. It’s good practice, and I love finding all of the downloadable packages for added commandline functionality that you can’t really use in OS X. It’s a great system, I just reeeeeally wish that Logic and Steam were compatible with it. If they were, I’d drop OS X in a second. Seriously. Watch, I’ll do it.

And no, I won’t use Windows. UNIX owns DOS and the system under Vista and 7.

Hey, I found a picture of young Stephen Colbert. Believe it.

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Secret Santa and Sufjan

Posted on 14th November 2010 in Something Daily

I haven’t been paying very good attention to blogging for the past week or so. It’s been an incredibly hectic and stressful bunch of days recently, and blogging hasn’t been foremost in my thoughts, which is why posts often go up at or around midnight. It’s also why they’re sometimes devoid of much content. But as of right now, I’m trying to get back into it.

The past week has been full of projects for school, essentially. I had a big pileup of audio projects due in a really short span of time, some of which were remembered a lot later than they should have been, resulting in frenzied last-minute sessions and desperate text messages. Our bluegrass Lil Jon cover encountered a major setback this week when all of our previously recorded material mysteriously vanished from the tape. Additionally, we remembered the fact that the music for the student film for which we’re doing audio post was due about fifteen hours before the deadline, which of course resulted in a bunch of extra work for me. Normal homework levels persisted in other classes, as well as the final electronics project looming closer. I plan to build a MIDI controller for Logic with an Arduino, but haven’t really started with that yet.

Somehow in the midst of all this, I managed to make a rage comic, write a bit of new Gameboy music, successfully scan and enhance a pencil drawing I did, and configure my MacBook for a dual boot with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx and Mac OS X. I just need to have projects, I guess. I feel wrong somehow if I don’t. I may draw something later today, or try and enhance another one of the old drawings I did a few weeks ago. But having time to recover from these (and some other unmentioned) stresses is the main plan for today. I’m going to play some New SMB Wii and do some drawing as I get ready for the Sufjan Stevens show tonight. As I type this, in fact, I’m giving my first full listen to Age of Adz in preparation for seeing it live tonight. I’m quite excited for this show, as I’ve never seen Sufjan before and I’ve loved his music since middle school. You can be sure that there’ll be a rundown of the show up here tomorrow.

Additionally, I managed to find time yesterday to sign up for Reddit’s Secret Santa gift exchange. So I made myself a profile and checked out the subreddit – as it turns out, Redditgifts admins use an algorithm that pairs you with someone based on geography and common interest, and then you go out and buy them a little gift and ship it to them. I haven’t really done anything like this before (that is, becoming so IRL involved in an online community), so I’m quite excited for this, both to see the reaction when my partner gets a rad gift, and to see what someone sends me! Check it out – Subreddit or Reddit Gifts. It’s going to be so much fun for me.

That’s a synopsis of most of my life at this point. We’ll see where I go from here. I’m going to go now and play some New SMB Wii, but here’s Link rising from the dead first. Have a great day, if you can!

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Eric Sluyter owes me some Dibs

Posted on 4th November 2010 in Something Daily

So around this time last year, my suitemate Eric promised me that if I ever finished Ikaruga, he’d buy me some of these:

For those of you who don’t know, Ikaruga is an arcade-style shooter that was released on Gamecube in 2001, known for its high degree of difficulty and innovative polarity-switching mechanic. People have called it a “bullet hell” game, in that at some points there are so many enemies and projectiles on the screen that it’s extremely difficult to find the safe areas. It’s a cult favorite these days, mainly because of how hard it is to finish. I got it about 2 years ago from a Gamestop (for 40 bucks used, it’s apparently rare), and I’ve been playing it fairly regularly since then trying to get past the especially difficult 4th level. I eventually did that and recently have been working on the fifth.

And I just finished it.

So now I can finally shut up about it on the blog, and to everyone I talk to in person.

So Eric, whenever’s good for you, you know? There’s no rush. Really.

-&-

Here’s another render that I did a few weeks ago with Blender (haha, blender render), this time of one of the iconic blocks that Mario has punched in so many games over the years. A little better with the lighting here.

Mario '?' Block, rendered 10/2/10

I finished my initial foray into PHP today, after learning how it’s used to grab data from MySQL databases, and how it makes HTML really easy. PHP is awesome. Also, I’m going home this weekend! I’ll probably still post, but it’ll be from Pennsylvania! Check it out!

Speaking of Blender, here’s the famous iPad Blend. Yes, it’s what it sounds like.

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Another Drawing I Drew

Posted on 25th October 2010 in Something Daily

Here’s another one I did today, of the cover of Super Mario World. Yoshi has an unfortunate baby-hand disease. Also, this is me not owning a scanner.

Mario and Yoshi

Super Mario World, drawn 10/25/10

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A Drawing I Drew

Posted on 25th October 2010 in Something Daily

There is a lot of stuff that I want to learn. Like being awesome at programming. Also, like making really cool music. And, as I discovered recently, drawing. Maybe it’s just a today thing, but I suddenly have this urge to learn to cartoon. It’s like I have a general idea in my head of things that it would be really cool for me to draw, but I don’t know how (or haven’t tried enough) to actually do them. But today I have a huge urge to draw. I don’t know why. But a few minutes ago I drew this picture of Mario’s face from the cover of SMB3 – it’s freehand, just from a picture of the cover I was looking at on the computer. I think it looks good. It just occurred to me, I don’t know why I drew this on graph paper. It wasn’t really helpful at all.

A decently sweet drawing of Mario

Super Mario Bros. 3, drawn 10/25/10

Ok also, while we’re on the subject of Mario, I just got 120 stars in Super Mario Galaxy 2, so I’m all “where’s my sweet prize?”, right? And then apparently you have to finish Bowser again and then play the entire game again with Luigi to actually finish. That is some B.S., for real. It would be a lot cooler if there were more levels, but instead they want you to play the whole game twice just to get to the bonus level at the end of the game. I mean, chances are I’ll do it eventually, because that’s the kind of gamer I am, but I’m pretty angry at this game right now. I mean who does this? I’ll tell you who: Nintendo does this, apparently. Yeah, I know, I was surprised too.

I’ve been playing around with every method I can think of to get the Gimp to increase the size of its 1-pixel pencil brush. Not like how you can just scale up the brush size, I actually want to draw single pixels that are really big…imagine it’s a slice of graph paper, and you can only have one color per little box – but the boxes can be whatever size. Like that. It’s really hard to get Gimp to do this, at least for me right now. That’s my headache for today. I think I’m going to go play some Super Mario Galaxy…2.

Oh yeah! Also, go listen to the album “Either/Or” by Elliot Smith. I like it, you just might too.

Today’s addition to the list: Paul Robertson, whose art inspired me to draw today (Links are NSFW)

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The importance of stretching

Posted on 22nd October 2010 in Something Daily

I learned the importance of stretching today. I spend a lot of time sitting up straight at the computer and/or holding my backpack on my shoulders, and the pain in my back today was getting to the point where I couldn’t really stand up straight. But then my roommate London showed me some stretches and we did them together, and now I can stand again! Remember to stretch in the morning, especially your back. You will not regret it, since your back will be mobile, as opposed to immobile. It’s funny that I didn’t know how to stretch until today. Maybe I should engage in more physical activity, then I’d know a little better. But now I know. So there.

I went to this comic book store on Broadway today called Forbidden Planet. That store is incredible. They have so many different comic and sci-fi franchises represented with all their merchandise. I got a shirt with a lot of the main Mario characters and enemies on it, and a Street Fighter II shirt as well. They are…quite awesome. In case you were wondering.

Also, I just downloaded the Opera browser a few minutes ago (and I’m currently using it to type this). Definitely check it out if you’ve ever thought about switching from Safari or Internet Explorer. So far it’s decently speedy for me, and I much prefer the speed dial function to Safari’s top sites, mainly because you don’t need to visit a site a bunch of times before it appears in the list. Opera’s cool. I like free and open-source software. I tried running Ubuntu 10.04 on my white MacBook over the summer, but ultimately I found the issues with firmware to be too much of a hassle for my needs. It took a lot of work to get each individual piece of hardware working – the iSight camera, the USB ports, the trackpad. Maybe I’ll try Linux again sometime in the future.

Maybe I’ll code some more tonight. We’ll see, but my hand kind of feels like it has carpal tunnel. So I may just take a rest. Either way, here’s the new South Park that makes fun of Inception. It’s awesome.

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How to learn Java in 9000 easy steps

Posted on 19th October 2010 in Something Daily

It’s hard to match the feeling of solving a difficult programming problem, especially after it’s been an obsession for far longer than would seem appropriate. Having learned a big portion of what I know about programming through trial and error, I’m certainly used to this type of issue popping up – you know, the kind where it seems so obvious that there theoretically exists a solution, but what that solution is is so completely beyond you.

Like last weekend when I learned how to load fonts into a Java app (a game I’m working on involving dinosaurs in space). It’s a sweet 8-bit videogame type font that I found on a free fonts site, very cool looking. After finding some example code from the Sun (now Oracle?)  demo pages and adapting it to my needs, my program was completely laggy and using about 20% of the CPU time. I tried moving the method that loaded the font, I tried saving the font in a Font variable, but kept hitting a wall when I tried to show paintComponent() the font data.

As I’ve learned time and time again through hours of  smashing my head against things, procrastinating, and eating too much chocolate, the surefire way to solve one of these issues is to start thinking like a computer. (I guess I don’t do this enough as it is, maybe I should have played with Legos more when I was little). But upon going line-by-line through the changes I’d made to the program since the CPU-destroying slowdown had begun, I discovered another previously unknown quirk of paintComponent() and the Timer class. As it turns out, my getFont() method was in the body of my main GamePanel class, outside the constructor and right next to paintComponent() (the GamePanel constructor contains the main Timer I use for animation, which uses repaint()). As a result, my getFont() was being called once per frame (!!!) which was causing the font data to be re-grabbed from the disk forty times every second. So apparently the Timer does that to methods that are on the same hierarchical level as paintComponent(). Who knew? Not me. But I moved getFont() to a completely separate .java file and that solved the problem immediately. And it took about 45 minutes to figure that out. Needless to say, that was the last problem I attacked that night.

That’s a pretty typical coding session for me. To summarize:

  1. Find the simple solutions to a bunch of problems that seemed impossible last session
  2. Gain confidence and decide to tackle a big new area of the app
  3. Quickly run into new, seemingly unsolvable problem
  4. Try at least five different approaches to solving the problem
  5. After about 90 minutes of this, close computer and play Super Mario World
  6. Repeat

Check out these pictures from the set of The Empire Strikes Back. Very cool.

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