The Laughing Man

Face Lift + Programming News

2008-05-01T21:26:00.007-04:00

First things first. A new face? Are you joshing with me? No wai! What happened here? Truth be told, I just took my other layout that I made for my other blog (an Anime North 08 Convention blog). I really liked it, and since I was gonna scrap the other blog once anime north was over, I thought "why not make use of it". Well, here it is, in all its anime-ish glory. There's some stuff I have to edit however (like making dividors appear at the end of my post). If worse comes to worst for the divider example, I'll just edit the html of all my posts and at the end, just manually add a separator myself. Cheap, but gets the job done.

Anyways, to the important stuff. We had a drag/drop assignment to hand in today. The day before I did a bit of a demo, where you basically had to drag items onto Suiseiseki -desu, and depending on whether they were edible or not, she would eat it. This was just a mock up (as I'd add the other stuff - which I'll mention in a second - at home). We had a substitute yesterday actually, and he insulted me! I started typing my phrases in netspeak (aka bad grammer skills). The subsitute was surprised to see a few of us done so early, and he came up to me and checked to see what I had done before playing my games. I showed him and it's almost as if he looked for a way to get me to go back to work. Then he looked at what I had written when you dragged an Aerosol can on top of Suiseiseki: "NO WANT AEROSOL CAN, CHIBI BAKA DESU", and then he started mocking me, saying how it was weird for me to get accepted into Mac's engineering with "atrocious" linguistic skills. Psshtt, what does he know ;).

Bah, so on with my program. My program was the bomb (as usual) and I went above and beyond what everyone else did... only because I got carried away with my madness, which isn't all to new anyways. Basically, I had 3 items that could be placed on Suiseiseki, two of which were edible and the other not. When you dragged the appropriate pieces on top of her, certain counters would go up (failure/success based on non-edible/edible respectively, and total) and then a calculation would be done to tell you how much of a failure you were. As well, I added a place holder image box onto the form, which would only accept the aerosol cans and a couple timers to clear the text boxes/image boxes as well as refresh the failure message. In the process of doing this however, I noticed that any image would drag unto the boxes unless I created some kind of check (in my case, I used flags). Flags aside, that's not all that was special about my program. I did a bit of research ahead of time, and looked up how to add sound files to ones programs. I had tried earlier in the semester, and I was successful in adding the wmp component to the tool bar, but could never get the code to work (and it was a pain looking for it the first time I tried... though ironically, after reading Mr. Chiarelli's examples, I easily found the same information on msdn... go figures eh?). So I took some sound clips from Rozen Maiden (the anime that Suiseiseki is on). I then set the files to my bin folder, and put the code in a bam~presto! I was finished and had an impressive piece.

Overall, I'm quite pleased. Now I've just gotta keep this pace up for the next few weeks, and score big on my major games to keep my mark up (or maybe possibly raise it a percent, though I'm skeptical). Anyways, I've got math to study for, so I'll have to cut it a bit short blog! Until then, see you later my few somewhat loyal fans!

Roy "Maria" Kaminski

C#: Graphic Lessons starts. AS 2.0: Event Listeners

2008-05-01T17:13:00.013-04:00

Well, we're finally hitting crunch time! There's about 6 weeks of school left (and then it's vacation)! With that, were getting into the BIG chunk of the course (where 50-60% of the course mark in programming is to be had/lost). So with all that stress building up from all those courses, I'm going to have to double time everything and put more hours just to make sure I can keep the marks up there. Programming being no exception. So all that extra flash learning I'm doing will have to be moderated in with all the other stuff, including the #C sharp game to still make!

Praise from the working corporate business chimps!

So we've started the graphical part of our course in visual C#, one of my more... favored parts ;). We've been checking out a few methods of applying images into different mediums (in particular, the form and the panel, as well as picture boxes). On top of that, we learned of various methods of drawing stuff onto and into these areas.

Things like .drawrectangle, .drawimage, .drawarc, .drawcurve etc (forgive the lack of capitols). They're all available to someone who writes in the code properly. Interestingly enough, you could even go further, and use image arrays to create moving images and animation. And just like before, there are a couple methods of animating as well; regular images loaded into a panel in timed intervals, image arrays, and even back buffering. As one can expect, each one has a different uses, each one more useful than the other, the ultimate being the back buffering as it resolves the common issue of flickering that is found in all other data types. I remember doing in back in the VB days; twas such a pain! Luckily enough, Mr Chiarelli says it much easier then VB, and apparently, there is a command associated just for back buffering :O! Holy crap! No wai! Haha, even so, it doesn't get over the fact that we have to use bitmaps for image (heavy on the file size) and requires masks in order to create transparencies. Such an ineffective method of animating (and to think, Ultima Online was made using .Net framework!). I would much prefer Flash's intuitive visual drawings over C# any day, any time, any place. You name it, flash > c# in terms of visual components.

Well... just plain C#. I looked around on google, and found there were plugins and what not for important more visual aspects into C#, but they weren't free and cost a hefty amount ($500+)!

In Flash news, more coding stuff. Little time on visual stuff. I've been tinkering with listeners. Funny that I bring this up. Today, Mr Chiarelli talked about enabling Keypreview on the form in Visual C#. It is pretty much the same principle. Just like in C#, where enabling it tells the computer to listen for keydown events, so too does the listener (though it can be applied to a few other things; in this example, a movie clip). Anyways, you create a key listener and it will look for whatever you tell it to look for. In the scenario I'm about to show you, it will load an image. On load start, it will display in your output panel that something is loading, while load intialization will output the fact that it's done (and display the image in the movie clip) while onLoadError will do as expected, and will leave an output saying the loading was unsuccessful.

//Define a variable to hold my image location
var imgUrl:String = "http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/3247/54yg7.gif";

//create an Empty movie Clip that will hold the object, given the name img_mc
this.createEmptyMovieClip("img_mc",100);

//creates the mcListenerObject, which is latter defined as a Listener
var mcListener:Object = new Object();

//as the listener looks for the loading start, it will //trace out that it is doing so
mcListener.onLoadStart = function() {
trace("starting to load");
};

//on load initialization (meaning done loading), the //trace command will tell you it's finished. If there is //an error, it will say error
mcListener.onLoadInit = function(target_mc:MovieClip):Void {
trace("finished");
};
mcListener.onLoadError = function(target_mc:MovieClip):Void {
trace("error");
};

var cliploading:MovieClipLoader = new MovieClipLoader();
//adds a listener to cliploading as well as load that image and places it in //img_mc.
cliploading.addListener(mcListener);
cliploading.loadClip(imgUrl,img_mc);

So there you have it folks. A simple program that just makes use of event listeners. I'll be using this for my key references, so it should be interesting to see how things turn out!

Well, that's all for today my few loyal (somewhat...I almost forgot that important part) viewers. Here's a youtube video to lead you on your way!

Youtube Clip: Baka Rangers

Roy "Maria" Kaminski

AS2.0: Error Checking = A #*$@%

2008-04-22T19:24:00.006-04:00

Well, I've been doing some of the tutorials that were included in the documentation for Flash CS3. And I have come to hate it, oh so very much. Oh boy, am I ever annoyed.

Let's begin by showing you my script:

class student{
private var _kidname:String;
private var _age:Number;
private var _lastname:String;

public function student(kidname:String, age:Number, lastname:String){
this._kidname=kidname;
this._age=age;
this._lastname=lastname;
}

public function get kidname():String{
return this._kidname;
}

public function set kidname(value:String):Void{
this._kidname=value;
}

public function get age():Number{
return this._age;
}

public function set age(value:Number):Void{
this._age=value;
}

public function get lastname():String{
return this._lastname;
}

public function set lastname(value:String):Void{
this._lastname=value;
}
}

Firstly, I'm working with a class, so it's an external AS script. I had a handful of fun little annoyances with this one! Oh boy! For example, when I was stating a function, I declared it as a :void, instead of :Void, and boy... was that a pain if I ever had to realize one. I mean, it took me 5 minutes trying to understand exactly what the compile error was trying to tell me (because AS is pretty bad at doing that too). Ugh, AS 2.0 is so case sensitive that it sometimes really frustrates you. And the compile errors are not always useful. I guess I'm a littler harsh when I say it doesn't help at all, but it's not all that great either. Happily, it will tell you which lines have occurring problems, but I just wish it was more visceral like it is in Visual C#.

Anyways, I've also been doing arrays in flash, which, just like the error checking, are quite annoying! I mean the logic is there, but it's far more de-simplified compared to something like VB or C#. Arrays are basically created within arrays... I mean, this is the only way I've learned (so far) in how to make arrays. Very tedious for something that could have been so easily done in other languages! Take this for example

var myarray:Array = new Array(3);

for (var i = 0; ilength; i++) {
myarray[i] = new Array(3);
for (var j = 0; j<3; style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">trace (myarray);

Wow... just wow... do you know how many lines you could do that all in C#? One. One line fits all... apparently, this got lost in translation. I am seriously praying that this is only an early lesson in the flash tutorials, and that I'll be taught a more efficient (as in, less time consuming) way of creating an array. Here's praying!

For Blake (taken from IRC):

GTA nowadays is for 14yo boys
who also enjoy playing counter strike and WoW

LOLOLOLOLOL

Roy "Maria" Kaminski

AS2.0: Data Types/Objects

2008-04-21T19:22:00.010-04:00

Went over some data types in Action Script. Declaring variables is done a bit differently compared to C#. In terms of data types, you have many which are found in other languages (Numbers, Boolean, Strings, undefined, Void, Arrays, Errors, Functions, etc) and a few that are specific to Actionscript (such as Objects or Movie Clips).

As you know, Booleans, Strings, Numbers, Null and Undefined. They are all declared after variable names by using a semicolon (:) followed by whatever type you need putting. These types of data are known as primitive Data Types, and are often found inside of Complex Data types. A complex Data type (or reference data types), are more action oriented compared to primitive types.

I'm not going to get into the gist of all the types you probably already know (or should). However, I will go over the Object. Objects, in essence, hold properties that are set by the user and can be called upon a whim. What's interesting to note about Objects is they way there are called. Take this for example:

//Second Method for Objects
var SecondObj:Object ={firstvar:"Hello", secondvar:"18", thirdvar: new Date(1989,11,24), fourthvar: "I like Anime"};

var i:String;
// the code block says that basically, :
// go up for every i in SecondObj.
for (i in SecondObj){
trace (i+": "+ SecondObj[i]);
}

When you look at it, it's almost like a Class in C#. In fact, it most certainly is (though I'm no expert in the termanology of C#, so it's open to questioning). Look at the code again. Specifically the line where i declare the variable SecondObj. Do you see how I'm assigning it? Like an array! That's the beauty of the object. It's got a cross reference between arrays, and has a bit of similarity to it. In fact, it is functions exactly like an associative array (I'll get on this topic another day). In short, an associative array calls upon data embedded in the array through the use of string literals instead of integers. But that's not the only way you can declare properties of the object, you can also do the traditional method:

//First Method of Objects
var FirstObj:Object = new Object();
FirstObj.firstvar="Hello"
FirstObj.secondvar=18;
FirstObj.thirdvar= new Date(1989,11,24);

As you see, there's just another way of doing it all. So many possibilities to achieving the same outcome, isn't that just the beauty of programming? You think you have one thing solved, and then BAM, there comes another more simplified way. I guess that may be one of the reasons why the need for Object Oriented Programming arose. Anyways, I'd give you a demo of some sort of flash stuff I've done, but lately been only doing programming aspect, and have been using the trace command to show all my work. Tough luck eh? Bet you were looking forward to my next works :D. Ah well, can't be helped I suppose. Maybe next time!

Well, in other news, Anime north is almost here! Just gotta wait on blake being accepted. Don't know if he has been accepted yet, but meh... I'm sure it'll happen soon. We kinda need him, since he'll be one of the drivers. Here's hopin'! Gotta keep those fingers crossed! I am so going to enjoy this event. First off, it's happening on a friday (so that means an early weekend ;)), loads of anime stuffs and goodies, as well as hanging with friends! What more could you ask for? NOTHING :D

Youtube Clip - Philosophy (Yue Ayase's Theme)

Roy "Maria" Kaminski

Flash: Getting ready for my game!

2008-04-17T23:14:00.011-04:00

I've gotten to work on my game! Yes, the boat has left dock, and it is now on her long maiden voyage! I'm holding back the tears right now... so beautiful. I see the light at the end of the tunnel... the very long tunnel! Yes, though I start the graphics, thats only one foot into the door. And this door is big... VERY BIG. Ok, so let my give you a run down of the game.

First off, yes it's an anime game. Did you expect any less of me? Not likely. But it's not just any anime game, it's one that will have a bit of life based off Negima, but not directly. The name of the game is Mahou Sensei: Alchemical Challenge (Magic Teacher: Alchemical Challenge). Basically, it's takes place in the Mahou Sensei Negima: Magister Negi Magi universe. No characters will make cameos, all will be original, but I just love the whole magic thing that Ken had going, that I always wondered what it would be like to put my own character(s) into his story.

So the game takes place (and this is all subjected to change if it be needed) in wales. You play the role of student named either named Eriko, Harumi, Kayami... ah let's just call her Kayami for the sake of the conversation. She's not the brightest of students, and she's doing pretty badly in school, her worst subject being Alchemy class. You take the roll of going through her lessons, which I want to make a cleverly designed puzzle game similar to bejeweled, if I am able to code it that is. Basically, each lesson is a level, and you must reach a certain point score before the timer runs out. When it does, you get graded upon how well you did, and you rack up experience based on your points. This experience can then be used in the character menu to learn spells. Yes, spells. Here's where I want to sort of redefine the genre. It's so common to just have a regular puzzle game, that if I were to do so, it would be nothing more than a "fancier" bejeweled. As such, I wanted to reward the player by allowing them to get cool spells that will both be awesome to cast, and provide them with a strategy and/or a last minute saving throw. In doing this, and combing a small story line (I'll probably stick it into 10-18 levels, and it'll be easier then you think because I can keep calling on the scene with the actual game, and just change the variables to account for the higher difficulties). The big problem however is the actual code itself.

This is what I've narrowed it down to: I'm obviously going to be using recursion. If you've never play bejeweled before, here's a picture. Try and keep up if you can, it may be hard to understand without actually playing it (that or my explanation skills suck really bad)

In bejeweled, you are trying to match up a set of colors within the board. As such, the objective is to move a piece into a line of similar colors of 3 or more, in order to make them disappear and add to your score. As they disappear, the column above the cashing in jewels falls down to replace them, and more jewels fall in from the top. If the jewels that fall down come into another chain where there are colors that are lined up with 3+ of the same color, they too will disappear, and will continue this chain until there is no more!

Now here's the challenge:

I have to make it so that when the jewels are initially set, they do not match in pairs of three or more, therefor causing a chain reaction from the get go
I need to make some sort of method that is called whenever jewels are moved into place. This method will then do a recursion to see if there are any colors around (horizontally/vertically) that are the same color and are of a chain of 3 or more.
Develop it so that whenever there is a disappearance of jewels, the top will drop more jewels to replace the empty spots.

That's quite a bit... And on top of that, I have to include spells so that regardless of whether colors are lined up or not, all the jewels within the spells range will disappear. I don't know how long it's going to take, or if I'm gonna have to change the formula a bit... but that's what I've thought up. I'm going to work in the next week purely on the game, worrying about the other details afterwards (story etc.). Once that's done, I should be good to go, and will hopefully be able to make this dream a reality. Until then, here's some screens of what I've drawn so far (the actual game menu in the school, and the actual game screen itself).

School menu: All hand drawn myself. As you can see by the lines, I've been using perspective lines. You don't see the other perspective lines for the 2d part, because they're invisible. This is just to give you and idea of what I'm putting in!

The game screen itself. I imported the text from Adobe Photoshop CS2 as an image, since that text won't appear on other people's computers as it would on mine on the account of them not having the font type. In here, you can see the mana (which is the alchemical container). The blue stuff inside (essence, or Substantia as I've searched up in Latin) will go up and down depending on how much mana you have/have recharged. I'll do this via a masking layer. Beside it is the spells, I don't know how many spells I'll have, but a few to have different area effects!

On top of this, I have some ingame music to go along as well. I'll be using one of the songs from the OST for Fable (xbox game). It has some of the best VGM (video game music fyi) I've ever heard orchestrated. God, how I loved the feel to that game! Such an artistic point on fantasy and fairy tale!

Oakvale - Russell Shaw

Well, with that folks though, I have to call it wraps! Best regards, my few semi-loyal and now privileged viewers :D!

The Gmail Email Client - Video Included <3

2008-04-17T22:40:00.013-04:00

Alright, well we've wrapped of the first half of the term. I've got a 95 (well 96 now, it went up after the handing in of the midterm). Pretty Sweet, eh? I'm glad I got the mark, it'll be extra good for handing in to University! Well, my mark went up because of my assignment... or so I'm guessing. What I basically made was that gmail client I was talking about a couple weeks ago! It's a pretty interesting topic, and I went through A LOT of work just to get it done. Interestingly enough, there were some mishaps that I had gone through before I finally got the thing to work. This biggest annoyance being a Captcha lock on my gmail client, which I needed to unlock in order for the SMTP server to work. I hypothesized that it was probably the result of something like anti-spam prevention, but I wasn't sure. However, I just noticed something this week when I went on to my source for Negima scanlations; when posting a comment on that site, you need to write a security key, which is used to prevent spamming and bots from flooding the comment section. I noticed however, that beside it, there was the word Captcha! I knew it had something to do with anti-spam! Aren't I a smart cookie? Hehe, anyways, back on with the topic. I got my lovely program to work with such finesse. I included a password verification, which is a requirment to get onto the servers for google mail. In doing so, I learned a nifty little property in the text field that I never noticed before. The PassChar. It's so simple, just put in a single character that you want to appear instead of the text that is your actual password, and presto - you've got yourself a password field!

Anyways, that aside, I got into the code, and it was a bit different from what I had before. I mean, the general gist was still the same, however, there was more needed. To log onto an SMTP server, you need verification, so I had to do this and that, as well as include and out going port to which I would send to. A bit of digging yielded results, and I was well rewarded. However, how unfortunate that I came to school and wouldn't you know, the school had blocked access to the specified ports... what a pain. But in the end, I got to make a video instead, using Camtasia! New experiences lead to new fascinations, and here is the result:

I am fairly happy with the result :) If the audio is kind of low, please excuse me... it's probably my setup or something else on my end!

Anyways, Mr. Chiarelli showed us some interesting stuff today in terms of what hidden little addons we can put into our programs. Things included Tool Strips, which is the same thing as a tool bar, as well as status strips and common dialog boxes. Interesting stuff, those boxes are! I couldn't believe how simple it was... I mean, going back to the email client, I made a common dialog box for opening a file... but I did it by hand and wrote it into my designer.cx form... which was a pain to look for btw! But mr. Chiarelli just came in, and with the press of a button and one line and there it is; a working dialog box! Ahh, I feel like shooting myself in the head because I had spent so long on it... it makes me want to cry. Status strip was nifty too, you can show the current state/process of what's being done by your program. Useful for all those people who hate being left in the unknown while their things loads (kind of like how I'm annoyed right now, because blogger = bad for processing attached videos... it's been attaching my video for like 20 mins... and speak of the devil. I mention it, and it finally finishes... talk about irony there). Anyways, I took in some of these techniques and will be sure to use them in the weeks to come! Until then, I've got nothin' else to say blog! Cya later, my few semi-loyal viewers!

Binary Searching

2008-04-16T22:38:00.018-04:00

The searching techniques in C#. This time, it's down and dirty with the binary search, and I'll be giving you a break down of what it does!

So what does the binary search do? When can you use it? Well, to begin with, the binary search is a more sophisticated search that can be compared to a phonebook or a list. Think of it like this (relating to real life that is). You're looking through a list that is ordered alphabetically, and you want to find a specific person or thing. Regularily, when you are searching for things, what you would do is go through every single person, from the beginning, in a sequential order. Now imagine looking through a list of say 1500 names and you can begin to see how daunting that could be! The real way of looking, would be to find the first letter of what you're looking for, and just browse through until you find it!

And that's a pretty good jist of the summerization of what a Binary Search is. It's a reasonable way of searching for a specific inventory/item/name through the use of some formula in order to avoid the combersome querry that would be required if you used a simple sequential search. Of course, for the binary search to work, you'll have to combine your knowledge of sorting, but that's from the previous post :p.

Anyways, the binary search uses and interesting method of searching. Here's an example. I have written the list of Negima characters (in order). Let us say I want to find what position Nodoka is located on

. In this case, I do my binary search and assign a Low number of 1, and a High number of whatever max number of items there are. Then, I find a Midpoint (J) and integer it off (cutting off the decimal). The way the binary search works is that it will take J, and compare it to whatever you are looking for. If it does not equal n(J), then it can do either two things:

If the order of n(J) [n at j] is greater than that of what you are looking for, meaning what your looking for is higher up in the chart, then it will do another sequential search, but this time, assigning a Low value of J+1, and retaining the same High value.
If the order of n(J) is less than that of what you are looking for, meaning that the certain position is higher then the word/item you are looking for, then it will redo the sequential search but this time, assigning a High value of J-1, while keeping the same Low value of the last search!

So as you can see through my step by step, Nodoka was finally found at n(7), yay Nodoka is found! Simple concept! However, there are time where sequential searches will not find anything, and depending on what you're doing with the return value of the sequential search, you may want to do some dummy proofing in your coding! And there you have it folks, the binary search, brought out into the open! There's some interesting things with this technique, and all I know is that I'm going to have to use this with the upcoming assignment we have going.

Ah well, after that, we're going to get into the programming of graphics. It should be more fun, but alas, not as fun as flash. And I found out that we're only going to have 1 month of flash (put in face of depression now). Why one month <:(. Dammnn, those lucky gr. 11's, next year, they're getting a longer period of flash! Ah well, truth is, I'm already working on it in advance. Sucks to be the ones who haven't followed suit. I am pro ;) Well, in other news, the month of may is approaching! Which means, Anime North is also approaching~<3 Ahhh, beautiful anime/manga. I'm so hyped for what's going to transpire there. We've got our group pretty much set:

Donald Tonello
Blake Monteiro
Kyle Boich
Anthony Basciano
Mark Cef.
Myself
Jay Tonello
Paul Ferritto

Most of us are coming for sure, with a few straglers that are pretty much decided on coming. If Mark does come (and I gotta talk to him some more about that), we'll have two cars to take us down on the friday afternoon. It's gonna be FREAKING awesome. I think I'll have died and gone to heaven <3! I'm still deciding on what to buy. I've got some idea, I mean things I NEED to buy. Those include Volumes 14-17 of Negima, Volumes 6-12 of Trigun, Volumes 5-12 of Death Note, and perhaps a couple volumes of either Rozen Maiden or Berserk. Ahhh but I need more money too, because I want to buy some anime figures/statues. ARGH, *does a crazy loop*... I wish I had INFINITE money :D Oh well. That's all for now blog, so until then, take it easy my few somewhat loyal viewers! And to lead you off, here's an amazing video. This guy makes custom modded consoles for a living, and jesus christ, are they AWESOME!

Snow Sort Assignment// Blake nearly screws me over... again

2008-04-16T22:38:00.008-04:00

Snow fall assignment was the name of the game. The assignment basically consisted of having to do with a pointer sort. Well, for the basic marks that is... if you wanted to go above and beyond, you needed to do some actual work and involve either a class or a structure (I myself choosing the latter one). Anyways, back to the sort. Basically, we went through a bunch of sorts these last couple days, and the sorts went from the traditional Bubble sort, to things like the Quicksort or Exchange. Each sorting method had different methods of achieving its goal, and a different amount of time to do the sort. However, this assignment was not about just doing the sort, it was about effectivity, and that was done through the pointer sort. What is the pointer sort exactly? Well, the pointer sort works on a method that the more items you need to switch when organizing the data, the more time it takes. This would be very ineffective if you had to sort, say, people's names alphabetically which also includes their age, birth date, sex, favorite color, etc. Instead, what the pointer sort does, is that it looks to see what's being sort (in this case, alphabetical ordering of names), and just assigns a position/pointer that indicates what position the current item is in on the list. In the end, when the sort is done, it will then organize the data by sending the pointer numbers, and therefore saving process time.

Sounds confusing, doesn't it? Don't worry, its probably just because I'm a bad explainer :p. Well, that's one method of doing the pointer. The method I did however, was much more effective, and was done in the use of structures. Here's the structure I did for the assignment:

struct snow
{
public string year;
public string site;
public double averagesnow;
}

snow[] info= new snow[50];

Basically, I create some structure called snow, and within it are the values year, site, and averagesnow fall. From this, you can call upon the structure anywhere else on the same form by simply doing

info[j].averagesnow

Once called upon, it will just grab the information straight from the structure (since it's stored there). Because of it's nature, this is a perfectly good method of replacing a pointer sort. Why? Because you compare the data like you would a regular sort, but without the need of a pointer, as all the information is stored right in the structure, and you can call upon all of it. Simple as that eh? No need to do and exchanging/pointing/temporarily assigned a variable/etc. Needless to say, I got perfect on the assignment... though BLAKE almost screwed me over... do you see the pattern developing here, or is it just me? Blake screws up the programming competition, and he nearly screws me over now...

Anyways, in other news, Negima chapter out :3. Pictures throughout the blog, seriously great stuff! Yay for anime <3

Plans ahead and Talking back about Learned Concepts

2008-04-03T21:17:00.005-04:00

So the Weeks behind were long and areduous; strings and mo' strings. Lots of strings people, from cryptology, to validations of credit cards, to decoding in caesar code, to VIN numbers, to ISBN applications, etc. etc. You get where I'm going; there's a lot of string stuff we covered. But of course, nothing learned is nothing wasted, and each and every little piece of information we take is valuable for later on. Interesting things we picked up were commands like:

some_string.CompareTo(someother_string)
int.Parse(value_string)
some_string.Substring(x,a) //where x=some initial position, a=string grabbed
some_string.Replace("a","b")//replace a's with b's instead.
some_string.IndexOf('a')//grab pos of first occuring "a"

Each piece helps a bit, and I've used all of them (for example, CompareTo was used today in the programming question for number 1). You pick up some stuff, and with a little practice, you can do some pretty darn interesting things. I know for sure, that quite a few of these things are going to be used in my future apps, and I'll definitely be translating this into flash! Speaking of which, if you hadn't noticed, I'm trying to pick up on the good habbits for actionscript by using the "_" at points. Meh, it's annoying, but apparently a lot of programmers use it, and I even saw it today in Chris' C# book. Anyways, I'm looking ahead at the notes, and there seems to be instructions in here as well. Depending on whether I have time this weekend, I might try and attempt some of these assignments, well that is, after I finish my web email client-ish thing for the show and tell.

Anyways, programming aside I've got this to say:

Mr. Chiarelli, if you are reading this (and I hope you are), please do not assign anything big on May 26th (I hope I got the day right, that should be a Friday). That day, me (and even perhaps Blake if he comes) will be busy outside of Hamilton... In toronto to be exact. I checked the day plans, and there's nothing assignment wise to hand in, well except for maybe blogs if it's being marked on that week. I'll be sure to finish the work from home if there's anything big, but it seems we're just doing some advanced flash, which I hope will not be to hard provided I just do the work.

Well, aside from that my somewhat loyal readers, I must be off. Until next time, enjoy!

Recursion: Its a multi-stepped process

2008-04-03T20:30:00.004-04:00

Recursion; one word that is a mouthful to understand. Just how does recursion work? Well, quite simple. Actually, I'll use Mr. Chiarelli's lesson of teaching recursion just to give you an idea. First, do you know what factorials are? Well, if you don't, too bad I'm not going to teach it. You'll have to wiki if you're that curious. But anyways, factorials can be used to somewhat describe a simple recursion.

For example, let us say you have 5!. 5! only knows that 5!=5x4!, and does not know what comes before it. As such, 5! goes to 4!, who happens to know that 4! is equal to 4x3!.It knows a bit more of the equation's sequence, but only so much, and much call up 3! in order to get more. And the same scenario repeats all the way down to 1!. 1! knows the ultimate answer, which is one, and sends this back to 2!. So now, 2! knows that it is 2x1, and sends this back to 3!, which now knows it is 3x2x1, and this goes all the way back up to 5!, giving a final answer of 5x4x3x2x1 = 120.

Tough, eh? Well not really, but the concept of a recursion is that a recursion will continuously call upon the same familiar, just with a different set of numbers that are further into the operation, and will continue until an end is found, and will send the result back to the other recursions. A lot to swallow, but that's alright. Anyways, Mr. Chiarelli should be doing the last program of the competition yesterday in class, and I'm SURE he'll bring up the incident; but as long as he blames it on Blake, I'm cool (and safe >.>)!

Ah, on a note related to the programming competition, I seemed to have misplaced my book (death note). I know I didn't bring it into the competition, but I had it at school when I was at my locker. What I'm worried about is where I put it; Blake says it wasn't in the car, which probably means, or should I say "hope it means", that it is in the locker. I am so simple minded sometimes, my head's in the clouds and I just seem to lose grip of all reality. *sigh*, that sucks!

Anyways, aside from that, I haven't talked about Manga news. Well, excluding the now MISSING 3rd Volume of death note, my orders for volumes 7-14 of Negima and 2-4 of Death Note came in last week, and man on man, am I on cloud nine! Beautiful manga, where would I be without you! Hehe, I am so in to the anime thing :p!

String Test

2008-04-03T18:17:00.013-04:00

Good evening, somewhat loyal viewers. Where to begin, well, I guess I should talk first about the test. So we had our string test back on Wednesday. Heh, I made sooo many mistakes. For starters, I lost 2 marks for not remember to close off a math statement with a bracket at the end, and therefore multiplied the 3 throughout the whole damn equation(btw, this was in the UPC question). After that, I seemed to have screwed up a bit on the Credit card check, if only a bit. To be honest, I rushed at the end, because I noticed that I did misread the last question slightly, and did not notice that i was picking up the last digit (the check digit) into my operations, which it shouldn't. As well, I seemed to have also mixed up my variables (S1 and S2 were inversed). Talk about rushing oneself! I need to learn to read more precisely it seems hahah! But aside from those two flaws, I got an 83 on the test, and for the strings unit (which is the hardest as I am told), I'm just glad to leave with a deep scar!

So the string test completed, I am not all the more closer to getting to flash. With midterms coming up, I've also got to worry about doing those approaching deadlines (like the assignment). With that, I should be good and ready to go! Speaking of which, I've got to find something useful to make in C#. What I was thinking was putting in an email client, where you can just load up the screen, and throw in your email address and what not, and you're off to the races as you type your message away. Currently, I'm looking at sites on google about this, and using the smtp (simple mail transfer protocol~thank god I took Computer Engineering before this!) protocols as well as adding the reference System.Web in Visual C#, I have good functionality and can probably make a pretty decent email messenger. I get most of the components to it, except for one specific part (I'll have to do research on it). I'll just run through.

//First, you have to run through adding the reference for web //mail, so you'll have to go into references and add System.Web, as //I mentioned before! After that, go to the top // of the form.cs, and //add the line below in order to send the mail from what I can //deduce
using System.Web.Mail;

//Simple, just like how we did StreamReader when adding //System.IO;, we must similarily add MailMessage, declare a //variable, and make it equal a new MailMessage! After that, the //other pieces are quite obvious!
MailMessage msg = new MailMessage();
msg.From = "me@my.mail.server";
msg.To = "you@your.mail.server";
msg.Subject = "how to send mail using VC#.NET";
msg.Body = "this is the answer";
msg.BodyFormat = MailFormat.Text // can be MailFormat.HTML

// This is the piece of code I don't entirely understand.
// I know that the message is being encoded, but I
// really don't know what "iso-8859-2" is, as the original
// author of this comment said it wasn't something that
// beginners (such as myself) should worry about at this
// point. I do know the ISO part though, International
// Organization for Standardization, which, is once
// again thanks to Computer Engineering.
msg.BodyEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-2");

// Here's another nifty trick; attaching a file! I'll fiddle
// with this :D
MailAttachment ma = new System.Web.Mail.MailAttachment"c:\\mydoc\docToBeAttached");
msg.Attachments.Add(ma);

// Another interesting part; you need an stmp server. *gulp*! //Luckily, gmail provides free use of their smtp server, provided //you have a free gmail account!
SmtpMail.SmtpServer = "smtp.yours";
SmtpMail.Send(msg);

All I have to do besides that code is just to throw in a few other additions, including a check to see if msg.To and msg.From have something assigned to them. It'd be interesting how far I can go with this actually, perhaps I'll do a bit more delving while I'm on the spot? I hope this is acceptable for an assignment :3! Until then, to-da-loo my few somewhat loyal readers!

Blame a Certain someone

2008-04-03T17:31:00.004-04:00

So we had our competition for programming. Our group consisted of Blake, Chris and yours truly. Of course, we each divvied the questions, and did our separate things. Chris and I did our questions, and finished with a finese. Such splendid work really. But, a certain someone didn't do so well...

Blame this on Blake. Of the 3 hours we had to do our programs, 25 minutes went to Chris's program, and 35-40 for mine. but what about the rest of that 2 hours? Blake. I guess he was under pressure, but gah, we didn't even do question 3 because of the time spend on that 4th one. If only, if only... GAH! We would have came 3rd at LEAST. And to top it off, later we were discussing where we could have gone wrong with question 3, and lo and behold, I find out that blake had the programming working initially, but he didn't realized it had to work for more than one box. GAH! WHY DIDN'T I PICK UP ON THIS EARLIER! If that were the case, I'd have just edited that one piece myself, all he had to do was another while statement:

while (true)
{

//insert code

if (read.ReadLine()==null)
break;
}

So ya, we could have probably easily gotten all 4 questions, but the problem was this:

we fretted too much, and didn't pace ourselves
lots of miscommunication. We needed to operate better as a team
Blake needs to spend less time on his programs and push forward

So there you have it folks! Those are the 3 reasons that we did not as well as we should have done. Ah well, you learn things from this. Well, in a sense though, I'm glad this is over actually. To be honest, I've had to cut back on actionscript 2.0 these last two weeks because I've been looking over my notes for C#, in preparation for the competition. Anyways, now that I don't have to worry about that, it's back to actionscripting for me! Hehe, can't wait ^.^. Well, that mark's this post. Until next time, see ya my somewhat loyal audience!

Love Hina: So full of awesome

March Break = Horrendous for Programming

2008-03-19T19:51:00.006-04:00

Yup, that's right kiddos. Did ya miss me? I mean, a week without a response, that's so UNLIKE maria! Well, that's very true, but let me first catch up with a bit of programming work we've gone through.

So these last two (or was it three?) days, we've been working with classes. What's that? Well, it's related to OOP (object oriented programming), which in short, is a clean and efficent method of programming that aims to create working applications/programs that are efficient, yet not so hefty in terms of lines in the code. It's apparently the "in" for programming in the last, erh I think Mr. Chiarelli said, 15 years? I don't know how over a decade can still be considered "the new" thing, but all I know is that for experienced programmers, it's a must. Anyways, back to classes (no, not the class you attend stoopid), classes are like a Blueprint to doing something. Another point is that it's a way of keeping people out of your code, and only allowing them limited access, taking only what they need. I believe the analogy is like changing the channels of a tv. You're given a remote, and all you need to know is that the up/down changes the channel, and are not required to go into the tv and change the channels by screwing around with the circuitry.

We also talked about making fields private/protected or public in the class, and if you're setting them to public, then you are doing a no-no, because that defeats the purpose of you creating the class in the first place. We were then given an assignment, and throw in some other terms, like Object (a result of a class, or the outcome), Inheritance (related to class), Method Signatures (pertain to Overloads) and you've got yourself a bunch of new terms to get used to. Happily, I got 24/24 on the assignment, so at least I've got good notes to look off if the case of studying comes up.

Tomorrow marks our first assignment however, for OOPS. We'll be getting a lesson on structures, and from there, we'll be given an assignment which I probably guess, will be due the day we come back from the long weekend or the day after that. We've been told to get images ahead of time, and I've already done that ;) Negima and Love Hina, my favorite mangas. No surprise there I'm guessing, I mean anime is plastered all over this blog; to say you didn't know I liked anime to this point most likely means that you're entirely oblivious, or perhaps really toned into the nonsense that is my post, that you really don't take time to enjoy the page that envelops these words. Back on track, the assignment, I'm guessing, will be based off of the car sample that we were shown in class. If that's the case, it shouldn't be hard at all.

Well, the last three posts were flash, and you're probably wondering why the no show to this point? Well, this is where I'm going to talk about the series of unfortunate events that occurred during and just before the break, that really limited my time on the computer. Let's step inside folks, into the dilemma of the march break!

It all started the day before. You see, my brother is a big gamer. In fact, he lives and breaths games. Talk about any topic in games, and guaranteed he knows probably more than you do. Hell, you could be one of the designers/programmers for a certain game, and he'll know more than you. Anyways, he plays a lot of 360, and we divy the time accordingly (he slightly uses the computer, since he's on the xbox). Well, guess what happened just before. Ya, that's right; the infamous red ring of death. Well, because of that, we had to get our 360 shipped off to get repaired, and that left my brother without a console during the break. And you can probably guessed what happened next.

He took over the computer.

It's a simple fact; take away one mode of gaming, and replace it with another one. Since this computer is a gaming machine, it provided my brother with a means of satisfying his crave. Consequentially, this cuts up my own time, and I'm left with left time to do the things I want, which happened to include programming. Now, I'm a reasonable guy. But when it comes to doing something on the computer, I like to sit down, and finish it in one sitting. The same goes with programming; If I want to do something, I want to sit down, think of solving the problems, and finish the work. However, now that I'm left dividing time with the youngest (curse the other computer being inadequate for gaming... need laptop badly), I found myself quite annoyed and not in the mood to work. However, besides that, there's also the fact that in order to pass the time, I resorted to my one weakness. The same weakness that many years back, gave me long summer days where nights were spent on the computer, and the day was sleeping. The same thing that can be blamed for giving me glasses. The darkest of all darkness. The evil of gaming; the MMORPG. Yeah, I found an anime MMO on Kotaku, and I said "hey, why not? I doubt I'll get addicted" but oh god; was I ever wrong. And soon, I found myself spending my free time slashing monsters and leveling up instead of doing other things. Well, the week passes, I accomplish little (did some actionscript, I squeaked it in somehow), and guess what? Monday comes in, and the xbox comes back fixed. Now talk about irony right there! I guess lady luck hates me...

Anyways, that's my sad yet touching story fellow readers. However, I must now spend the rest of the night studying for my calc test tomorrow (I'll be up most likely until 12:00 - 1:00 am). So I must bid you non-loyal viewers, adieu! Au revoir!

More Flash Fun in coding!

2008-03-04T19:12:00.016-05:00

Well, today marks another blog entry (I think this is starting to become a tradition heh). Today's blog will be entirely about flash and the things I have been fiddling with. Here's the first, a magnifying application!

Well, that's one of my recent fiddles with flash. The only actual coding in there is that of finding the x and y position of the mouse and adjusting that to the center of the glass_mc ( c being an abbreviation for moveclip). You're probably going, "wait... that's it? You surely jest Maria!" and I tell you this; no I do not. Flash has a dandy little function (one uses this a lot in photoshop depending on what they're doing) called the mask. Oh yes, what an interesting little function. I made a little comic strip to explain it, since it'll be easier to visually explain it, then to try and find the words to express what I'm trying to say:
Well, ignore the outline, the outline was only used to demonstrate that the shape of the image determines what is shown in the underlying one. Anyways, that's how I get away with the magnify glass! It's a really nifty trick, and you can do other things with it as well! Take this other example (excuse the mild language ^_^;)

You can make a mask underneath to hold an image with a black background, and put a search light on top that will only reveal the image underneath when the searchlight scrolls over it. One can make a pretty interesting hide and seek-esque game. Ahh just thinking of that flash game is getting me excited. You know, I have to read the course handouts actually. I've gotta print off the flash stuff so I can go through the lesson plans ahead of time. That way, I can even maybe get some of the work done ahead of time, and get even more work down for the final game. Speaking of flash and actionscript, Blake apparently gave up doing some side research on his own, saying it was too much to take right now. Nonsense! Silly Blake, doncha know, trixs are for kids?

Ahh well, that wraps up this post my not so loyal viewers! Until then, au revoir!

My Current Flash Project

2008-03-03T22:34:00.006-05:00

Well, I've been working on the flash project so far (and my god, was it a b*tch). No Time To talk about it, Ill edit this tommorow.

Well, I guess I'll start be showing the flash piece!

I made the custom load bar at the beginning (which I'm really proud of :p). The program itself was a test load images from an external location. Those 3 images are actually brought in from Imageshack (an external source).

In making this flash, I went through a couple difficulties. Honestly, looking at flash; there is a brutal amount to learn. In comparison to something like C#, C# is definitely more user friendly. For example, Visual C# has a really dandy way of providing help and autocorrecting misspellings (like forgetting to caps a letter in a variable). However, actionscript in flash does not do this. In fact, it barely provides you with hints for anything. Remember how I complained about the "_" the other day? Well, I found out that it's pretty much one of flash's ways of bringing up the list of variables. But aside from that, I can't seem to get the list on a whim, meaning a lot of the variables are to be MEMORIZED. And what's even worse is that actionscript does and EXCELLENT job in mixing random capitalizations within a word. Take this for example:

gotoAndPlay(3);

Firstly, that command tells the script to go to said frame (3 in this case) and play. Notice however, how go and to are all lower case, yet half way through, "And" and "Play" is capitalized within the first letters. I mean, did the guys at macromedia have a problem choosing whether to add capitalizations and decided to do 50/50? Ugh, what a pain. Anyways, I ordered some things from Animewild again. Heh, 11 mangas and some stuff to put on my bag :3. Negima vol's 7-14 and Death Note vol 2-4. Ahh, what a wonderful thing!

Getting ahead

2008-03-01T21:49:00.004-05:00

Good evening folks. It is just about 10:00 pm in the evening as I write this, and I'm just here to update the place.

Alright, well I've started looking at action script 2.0 today. And just to begin, Blake's going to have a similar distaste towards actionscript as he did for C#; the dreaded semi-colon. Bah, even I'm starting to hate it... must be blake rubbing off on me. Anyways, another thing I've noticed so far in the Actionscript part of it all, is that it makes wonderful use of the annoying "_" it seems. I mean, just from the few commands, it seems that I have to use an underscore. Why? Is it that redundant to do without? Ugh, I just never get these things sometimes.

Anyone, here's something I was screwing with (move your mouse left and right and it adjusts the alpha channels of the top most layer, revealing the image underneath,desu:

So ya, pretty basic; the code's simple as expected.

mouse_interval = setInterval(changealpha, 1);
//setinterval = timer

function changealpha(){
fader_mc._alpha=100-Math.round(_root._xmouse/550*100);

I got the lesson from Kirupa; it was a video log, so it was pretty useful in taking me through the tutorial visually, which is a big help. One difference you'll notice from the tutorialist's (yes, tutorialist; I made a word up, go sue me) is that I adjusted the mathematical operation ever so slightly. Alpha is the opacity, to speak on a visual notation (photoshop), of an attributed object. 100% alpha, means 100% visibility, and 0% means invisible coincidentally. Therefore,The higher the percentage, the less the opaque. In that case, it means the farther to the right I went with the mouse, the less opaque it became; which I did not want. Therefore, I made it so that it started off at 100% (full visibility), and subtracted the mathematical operation based on the x coordinate of the mouse from the 100%. Simple, but effective.

So that wraps up that portion. I've looked a bit into the programming stuff; The shooting gallery question I finished on Friday. It was really simple, and I ran through it once without a problem. Gonna finish up the night doing more actionscripting, but tomorrow I'll be studying Math, do a bit of chemistry, and finish up with either more actionscripting, or studying C#. Until then, cya later 3-4 viewers (yes, I got one more :D). And to end off; here's a catchy song!

Updates: Programming and Manga ~ desu!

2008-02-28T22:53:00.006-05:00

Programming News:

Bonjour 2-3 people who frequent my blog. Today's more of an update of what's to come and what's happened today.

Firstly; the school stuff. We went over random numbers today. Ah, wonderful random; how I love this word. It perfectly explains my personality~! But in terms of programming, it's more of a series of random insanity. I remember back in the VB days how much of a pain it was just to do these things. Ahh VB, I think I'm getting old now. The chill in my bones, I'm not the young lad I used to be... Well, thankfully, Visual C# makes it easier for my alzheimer's mind to remember. It's a very simple concept; you do:

Random n = new Random();

Basically, it just assigns a letter as a Random variable. To bring it up, you just bring up your variable which would this case be "n" and type this (this is just the hashed up code, just showing the variable itself):

int numberrandom = n.Next(1,9) ;
// get a random number from 1 to 8
// (yes 8, counts 0- (x-1) for the last digit

To even further randomize in C# - if you can recall back in VB, even though you did randomizing, this was based on a mathematical expression and often yielded the same results unless you used an internal timer - you can just type DateTime.Now.Milliesecond, to randomize the number to the milliesecond; pretty useful for games if I do say so myself.

Anyways, the day finished off with us looking at little apps that used this randomizing technique. In the end, we were either told to review the concept (since it was technically taught way back when) and/or to try making one of the programs. I did the one Mr. Chiarelli told us to do, and it took like 4-5 lines to finish. Easy? For sure.

Looking at the day plans, it seems that we've got a pinball application or something like that being demonstrated tomorrow? Sound's interesting, but that's kind of odd, I thought we were going to do Object Oriented Programming, but that doesn't happen apparently till after the break (March 17th to be exact) ? And looking even further then this, it seems that we've a test on the 6th, the day BEFORE the break. Bah, talk about bad timing! I was thinking of taking an extended vacati... ugh... I mean, I had a good feeling I was going to be sick that day ^_^;

Well besides that, I confirmed the question I brought up in the last post about which version of action scripting we're going to use. And lo and behold, wonderful 2.0, but that's not all. We are using FLASH CS3. Oh bundles of joy! The integration with Adobe Software, plus the power of my tablet means I will be unstoppable! This calls for a maniacal laughter from Suiseiseki ~desu!

I am full of win now for the Flash game. All the pieces are falling into place, and in the end, I will be on top. My plan for world domination is one step closer! Muahahaha~desu!

Now onto the Non-programming related news:

Negima Chapter 205 came out today! And OH BUNDLES OF EVEN GREATER JOY, NODOKA IS BACK (much <3). I'll summarize what happens in this chapter. Negi's been training and has finally neared the conclusion of whether or not he will pursue the path of dark magic. Chisame comes by and hands him a magic scroll. Then she relay's Jack message, telling Negi that whether he does take the dark path or not will depend on opening said scroll (which also happens to be the same scroll the Evangeline wrote in order to create her devastating and deadly spell). Negi comes back to the training grounds and what seems to be Negi returning the scroll and staying in the path of light ends up with him whipping the scroll open in front of everyone, saying that no matter how hard he tries to be like his father, he will never be able to be like him. He says that he will take his own path, and will take the dark path in order to gain power and consequentially, to help his friends.

You think it's easy as pie after that, but Jack warns Negi before opening the scroll, and he had go right to. As soon as Negi opens it, Evangeline speaks to Negi, telling him that if he cannot withstand the dark aura contained in this scroll as part of the first test (at least, i think it's something emanating from the scroll), then that he will meet his end. Alas, cliff hanger comes in and we're left in the dark as to what happens next. That's alright though, Nodoka now comes in (finally)!

Nodoka's been fairing the most out of everyone actually, despite being separated. This is all thanks to her magic book. Anyways, for the time being, she's joined up with a treasure hunting group, and helps out by shedding light on any traps that may appear in front of the group of adventurers (all thanks to her magic book of course). In the last haul of loot, Nodoka only takes a single ring from the share of the bounty - which I might add is stupid. If she used her book to see how everyone else was doing, she'd have known that the group needs the money in order to free Natsumi and the gang from the cruel slave traders. Anyways, that aside, Nodoka seems to only be interested in a ring, which appears to give information to who one's true love may be! Oh Nodoka, still going for Negi I see. I'd want to see them hook up in the end, but sadly, I have a good feeling that Negi won't go for any of the girls, since he's that suave. Damn bastard !
Later 2-3 loyal (ok, maybe not) viewers!

Programming - moar dan usual. Whr ma cheezburger?

2008-02-27T18:50:00.032-05:00

Good Evening ladies and gentlemen! 'tis another semi-exciting day in the world of Maria~

Well, no, not really. Exciting would be defined as doing something extraordinary, like going out somewhere, seeing a concert, or... making a game. Yup, it's been brought up, and I think we're getting a taste of it this week, so It'll be good to be getting into the dessert of the course; 'cause we all know, desert is the best part of a 5 course meal <3. Bah, now that I talk about dessert, I wish I had something sweet to bite on right now. Like some kind of a cake... or maybe chocolate... or wafers on the side of a bowl filled with ice cream, on top of which is a chocolate syrup sprinkled with a mountain m&m's....

Oh, I've seemed to have side tracked a little there (with a bit of drool on the side). So yes, about the game. I'm really excited in programming a game. Just as it was the previous year, this is the part of the course that I look forward to the most, however, it usually comes near the end, hence the analogy of it being like a desert in a meal. You've gotta learn the meat of the work (which is the main course) and pick up many other little concepts along the way (side dishes and whatnot). I've been thinking of what to do for a game. But before I go furthur in that, I guess I'll wrap up by talking about what I did the last two days.

Basically, we worked on GCD and LCD these last few days. It's easy to do in your head, but programming has it's quirks, so you've go to work around things. However, that said, once you start doing it, it's not that hard of a concept! In fact, it's quite easy. Here, let me bring up the code:

private int GCD(int aa, int bb)
{
// you have to declare your remainder, as you are using euclidean
// algorithm (I'm to lazy to explain the theory behind it, soo just go to
// the wiki page here).

int rema;

// You are basically doing a continuous loop until you get a
// remainder of 0, which means the last divisor is the greatest
// common denominator between the two

while (true)
{
rema = aa % bb;
if (rema == 0)
{
break;
}

aa = bb;
bb = rema;
}

//returns your answer out of the method to wherever it was hailed from
return bb;
}

So ya, easy as pie (I've got a dessert thing going here?). So I finished the assignment, which literally took me 5 minutes to finish. I did it before I was getting into the shower, and came back just to finish the commenting, which I may add, took longer to write then the code itself haha!

Besides that, I've also been looking at the programming club stuff. Jeez though, I've got to find time around my schedule to do some more. I've done the concept basically for last year's competition (my fav. being the encryption one, so easy but pretty damn interesting!). XOR (bitwise exclusive or) operations = easy. This weekend, i'll do some more. Oh and I've also been doing some studying on the side. I've set up a new grouping in my del.icio.us account, saving bookmarks for thing's I've learned in C# off the msdn network. I won't be able to go through all the damn tutorials (there's a lot), but I'll be sure to pick somethings up looking through; actually, i already have like the out command and jagged arrays (an array of arrays). I've added the url to these tutorials on the side, just so you can check it out.

Alright, well back with the sweet part of programming - the game(s). Two years back, I did a side scroller using ripped sprite sheets for Metal Slug X... or was it Metal Slug 3... Anyways, I can't recall how well I did, but I think I got a bit of a nailing in the flowcharts - which are the biggest pain if I do say so myself *hint for Mr. Chiarelli to take it out*. Needless to say, I don't have an idea of what I want to do for the Visual C# game. But I do have an idea for flash...

Yes, that's right. I'm thinking one step ahead. Flash programming is ideally where I want to make my game this year. But there's a reason, and that reason is for the benjamin's. The good ole greens. Yes, you heard me, I'm thinking of $$$! There be a website in this vast corner known as the internet (and I've introduced it to Blake) called Kongregate . It's basically a large scale flash website that has users submit games; providing different benefits aside from member perks. Firstly, there is a monthly contest that picks out the best rated game, and gives the winner $1500 USD. There are also weekly contests (meaning submitting on a Monday is probably the best time) that offer $250 for the best games ($150 for runner ups), and lastly; advertisements. Kongregate gives a percentage of the advertisements made from your game back to you, so you could potentially make a bit more money. If the games good enough, it's easy to get over 500 000 + plays, which you can imagine, will give you quite a bit of money in that regard. As well, aside from Kongregate, if you get your game sponsored (which isn't all that hard, you can go to armor games for example and they'll pay you cash) which is potentially at least $1000+ for a good game. So if you make a really good game, and provided you win the above, at the minimum (not including add money from kongregate), you are making almost $3000 for one game. Pretty good eh? On top of the that, I hear Newgrounds will be providing users with an option of generating some income of advertisements, but there's no confirmation yet...

Well, I've been doing a lot of warm up work in advance (in terms of materials to use). I've been thinking of what to do for the game, and right now I'm thinking of a defender-ish type game, or a side scroller. I want to make it based on airships and/or steampunk, only because I have an idea of where I could head with it. But I'm not making any promises with that, because it's subject to change as I start to learn more. I've also been looking for songs that are free to use for non-commercial work. Newgrounds provides many of these songs, which are free to use for flash works, provided you credit the original author. Which is great on my part, meaning I can avoid all those stupid legal hassles if they ever did come. Another point is the imaging for the game. Luckily, this year around, I have a new friend at my side; and that is the Wacom Tablet. Oh ya baby, it's a pad that allows you to draw upon the surface with a provided pen, which also has built in drivers that allow you to increase sensitivity depending on how hard you press. It's really nifty, but most importantly, provides one with the means of actually drawing properly, and not with a mouse! Intuos3 = ftw!

However, as anyone may probably know, all this is not important if you don't have the code to back up the work. So that's why this march break I'm going to get a head start looking up for the Actionscripting stuff - hell maybe I'll start this weekend? God only knows though, because I've got test(s) next week me thinks. If it's action scripting 2.0 (meaning I'm looking at Flash 8 or Flash MX), that'll be good since I do have the software to do said work. I'll ask chiarelli. Anyways, that wraps up the programming side of things.

Now to get into the random (aren't you glad it's back?).

Manga News:

Omg, Negima chapter 204. That's all I'm really going to get into today. If you didn't know, Negima: Magister Negi Magi would be my all time favorite manga (having beaten Love Hina, which has remained my favorite manga for the last 5 years before this!). It's by the same manga-ka (basically the creator, for all you weebos). Anyways, back on trap. The scanlation for 204 came out and holy shit did I ever laugh. Hahah, the character Jack is possibly the best manga character created by Ken Akamatsu. Seriously, Jack is full of hysteria only because his character is...well, stupid to be blunt. For all of you who haven't read Negima, I'm not going to try and explain over 20 volumes of the manga, but I'll just state that Jack is an old friend of Negi's dad (Negi being the main character). Negi has asked Jack to teach him how to fight in order to become strong. Of course, Jack, being the hysterical character he is, has to add comedy to just about everything he does and/or says. In short, I want to thank ken for being awesome. Thank you so much!

Later 2+ viewers

Programming Test 2

2008-02-21T21:49:00.015-05:00

Tomorrow marks the day of another test in programming (gulp!). As you can expect, I've studied for the test quite some bit. Pretty much did the entire 2d/1d array question concerning the test (since I'm wading that most of it will be based on this question entirely with smaller questions going towards the 3d Array Question). I pretty much went over as many possible questions Chiarelli could ask us. Let's see, from the top of my head, I did a question concerning the... ugh... brain damage; Sorry 'bout that, I just forgot what I was thinking of (not a good sign?). Alright, well looking over this print out, questions I covered where like:

Changing Specific cells
Removing 3 sales from each day excluding one day of the week
Commission (same principle as the weights)
Weekly Totals and Daily Totals
Highest/Lowest Sales based on a single day
etc

Well, there isn't that much more that I've excluded, the above pretty much wraps its up. 3d arrays and 2d arrays are very similar, in fact, extremely similar with the exclusion of the slice concept (which makes the 3d array... well 3 dimensional duh!). Mr. Chiarelli also mentioned something about levels within a game, where the 2d coordinates would contain the position of the characters on a particular level while the slice concerned which level the characters were on. Is this a hint as to what Chiarelli expects from some of the games this year :o? No, I don't think so... but on the topic of the games, I wonder what I'm going to do this year as well. Hrmm for C#... should I do another side scroller? I know for the flash game that I'm thinking of a defender-ish type game. Ah well, I'll think about it later.

Back on track; the test. You know, sometimes you can be 100% confident when entering a test, only to flunk the damn thing, leaving you asking this one question; how? Well, even though I think I'm going to nail this test, there are two things that are unsettling me. The first uncertainty concerns whether or not Chiarelli's slated examples are indeed what he told them to be, or will there be extra added difficulties? The second unsettling factor is the "bonus" question. He's keeping this one in the gray area, and it's really making me ponder as to what he could possibly ask of us. Well, whatever... I guess I should be glad that he's practically giving us 80-90% of the test straight on, so I should be thankful at that. Well, I guess I'll just have to find out tomorrow!

While on the topic of C#, I am extremely pissed today when it comes to naming variables. EXTREMELY pissed. Why? Well, to put it simply, the annoyance comes between "x" and "xx". If you have yet to come across what I'm talking about, let me forewarn you. Visual C# has an annoying (yet useful in certain scenarios) way of providing a list of possible spellings as you begin to type out certain commands. Well, usually this is a good thing, but when you come to use a lot of for statements, embedding variables within said statements, you want to keep things simple. However, if you want to type, say x, this is not suffice, as Visual C# automatically assumes you are typing "XMLreadmode" and happily places the code in for you. Wow, thanks C#. You SURE are a pal. So now, I have to go out of my way, and always add an extra letter to my "short" variables - xx, yy, zz, aa, etc. Perhaps that's a minor annoyance, but when you start to use these things a lot, it can get quite annoying.

Anyways, I'm gonna call it wraps. Wait a second, I know what you are thinking. Holy #$@!ing shit! Maria's not talking about something random, like anime or crazy youtube videos (what, the attached images aren't enough for you?)!? Yeah, quite the shocker. But I've got a chem quiz tomorrow, and it's not as well alluded to as Mr. Chiarelli's test; meaning that we were just told that anything in Unit 3 was plausible to appear on the test... Best. Hints. Ever. Well, I guess I'm off to study. See you 2-3 non-responsive viewers who think I'm entirely insane for writing such horrendously long blog posts.

random images of 10 year old pimp Negi from Negima: Magister Negi Magi is completely unrelated to programming, which is insulting. Maria needs to fix this!

Finished 2d Array Counter Assignment

2008-02-19T20:02:00.016-05:00

Programming News:

Bonjour blog, today marks another day that I've completed a 2d Array Counter. A sigh of relief! That just means I have more time to spend doing other work, if it be programming or not (which is dependent on whether or not Mr. Chiarelli gives out something new to work on). I think he mentioned that there was a review of some sort for the test friday? I can't recall, my memory always fails me when it comes to dates and what not. For starters though, let's get in about the coding I did today...

Where to begin, oh where to begin. Hrmm, I guess I should open up by saying that this wasn't a very hard assignment. I didn't follow the advice of just writing over the old program for the candidate 2d array because what would be the point in that? Nothing like brute force memorization, you know? Well, it's a principle I'd rather stand by. Why? For a good couple reasons, the most important being:

Any new commands learned are at least put into your short term memory, and with enough repeating, becomes a part of your long term memory - in short, you memorize things
You really get to get down to the bear bone of it all. In writing the commands and then following up with appropriate code, you get an idea of what exactly is being done by the code. I mean, I could just copy and past within the confines of a similar program, but then what am I really learning, right? If doggy wants to learn a new trick, doggy's gotta take the time to do the work!

One thing that I'm glad I got to get practice on in general those what the Startuppath/streamreader commands (yes, no capitals, sue me). I'm guessing a good majority of the assignments from this point on in the course will have some external documentation (particularily from notepad) to read and input data. If that's the case, I want to memorize this few but important lines in order for me to be able to pull this command right out on the top of my head without having to look back into the notes or any other programs to simply copy and paste these lines. Actually, here it is:

Private void ReadIn (declare variable[array if necessary] variable name, etc )
{
string StartUpPath=Application.StartupPath; //assigns variable to the folder this document is located on
string f = StartUpPath+@"\Pants.txt"; //attaches the file name to the location

StreamReader read = new StreamReader(f); //reads in the file name

{Do grunt work here}

read.Close(); //closes the text document in this case
}

Its important to note that you need the read.close(); at the end; crucial in fact. So keep good remembrance of that, its not enough just to get the StreamReader and StartUpPath going, you need the whole package, from start to finish.

Continuing on, I finished the damn thing and the result looks a little like this (click the image for larger screen).

Did you honestly expect any less from me, desu?

The program works flawlessly if I do say so myself! Now all I've got to do is a bit more commenting, and I'm off to the races. Wonder what the test is going to be on... actually. I'll check chiarelli's blog at this moment! Huh, and after checking, no hints yet (insert sad face here). Ah well, wishful thinking :p

Alright, well that does it for programming news, but I feel like ranting/talking a bit more. So I will.

Why Are My Blog Posts So Long?
I was told by a few people recently that my blog posts were considerably long. Well, there's a reason for that. If you actually take the time to read the side of my blog posts, you'll notice that one of my desired goals is to set up a website (though whether this site will be successful is another question on its own). Part of that, requires that people devote time to the website. If you cannot devote time, then you do not deliver the content. And if you are not delivering content, then people won't have a reason to come check your website out. No Content = No people. Now, I know what you are probably thinking. No one else reads this blog Maria, this is stoopid (as Blake would say it, minus the Maria nickname, and insert the Hippie Jesus). Well, let me tell you this. Does my blog address people other than Chiarelli? I mean, does it deliver content that could be considered by many, as interesting or time worthy? No. But that still doesn't answer why I'm doing this. Well, recall what I said earlier in the blog. It's called dedication. You can actually say it's sort of like a precursor to the future website. I want to test my devotion into writing things on this blog, and then to wade whether or not I can do the same for said future site. Everything I do pretty much has a purpose (95% of the time), sometimes visible to the viewer, while other times, not. I really want to make this website, but the question really comes down to time and content as well. I have a solution for the content part as well, but it's too early to talk about it now. Suffice to say, I won't be doing this alone, at least I hope. I've asked Donald Tonello, a former SJB student who now goes to Mohawk, to come and help me out. He and I have many common interests, and I think we both might be able to pull off what I have in mind. But like I said before, it's all hanging in the air right now.

Haruhi Suzumiya, an Anime Worth Watching?

Well, before I close off for the night (got some other work to do still), I'd like to talk about another anime that peeks many anime fans' interests. This would be called the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Ahh, what a fantastic show. It's full of the anime popculture, and it's lush with great animations and an amusing story line. In general, Haruhi is made of much greatness. I've watched it way back in 2007, probably around april/may? I don't recall, but trust me; it's good. And if you say otherwise, even after you've watched it; you're stupid, plain and simple :p. The basic summary of the show is that it revolves around a character named Haruhi Suzumiya (duh) who, throughout the series, slowly begins to exhibit a sort of Melancholy (an even bigger duh). However, there's more to it than just that. Caught in the web of the story that is Haruhi, are time travellers, ESPers, aliens and sliders! This may seem odd at first, but hear my out. Haruhi is not your ordinary high school girl. Haruhi is god, to put it simply. Yes, god. Well, to those who read the novels, that is what is believed. At the least, she has god like powers. However, Haruhi pretty much has A.D.D, and if her interests are not met, the earth may just face some sort of consequence.

On the first day of class, kyon (Cue enter the main protagonist and narrator of the show), has the misfortune of being seated in front of the heart-stopping beauty named Haruhi... as kyon would put it. Unbeknown to him however, is the fact that Haruhi is a powder keg waiting to explode. A series of short conversations leads to longer ones, and before Kyon knows it, he's been entrapped by the crazed Haruhi. After giving Haruhi the idea of starting her own club after many failed attempts in finding the right one to suit her personality, Haruhi decides to make a club called the SOS Brigade, which literally means Spreading Excitement All Over the World with Haruhi Suzumiya Brigade (how this abbreviates to SOS, no one knows...even kyon comments on this). Ya, quite the mouthful. Well, Kyon is dragged into this brigade and soon his world turns upside down and he's associated himself with an Alien named Yuki Nagato, an Esper named Itsuki Koizumi, and a time traveller known as Mikuru Asahina, all of whom have been summoned unwilling by haruhi's command, simply because she wished for it. Being a god sure does have its perks! I won't go on to spoil the rest of the show, but the plot revolves around curing Haruhi of her Melancholy, and later on (in the novels that is), it talks about other facts like more indepth looks at the organizations surrounding Yuki, Mikuru and Koizumi!

Opening Theme

Closing Theme

Well, that wraps it I suppose. Until then, cya blog!

Done Reformating, and most of the Reinstalling

2008-02-18T20:37:00.024-05:00

As the title implies, I've done most of the long work, and I can breathe a bit of a sigh of relief. I was backing things up yesterday, and only finished this morning. I then reformated, and since it takes about 2 hours to reformat a partition with a size of 250 gigs, it took quite some time. On top of that, reinstalling the drivers, updating my norton, and reinstalling the programs I had on before... jesus, its 8:30 and I'm just near the finishing of the whole procedure...

Well, I might as well give you a break down of thing that I reinstalled, as some of them may peek an interest. Hell, maybe you'll give some of the stuff I mention a shot!

Adobe CS2 Suite:
Well, for anyone that gives half a care about anything to do with art and computers, would insult only themselves if they did not know what Photoshop is. Currently in the CS3 suite (yes, I've only got CS2, but I'm really accustomed to it and I haven't a need to change just yet... that and I can't afford it. Though the new suite includes Flash as Adobe just recently merged with Macromedia). The suite includes Adobe Photoshop CS2, Image Ready CS2, Illustrator CS2, Indesign CS2,Acrobat Reader 7.0 (this I have to update to the more current version, which is 9.0 I believe) and a bunch of other programs that I haven't used all that much including Distiller, Designer etc. Adobe Photoshop is the base of all art related programs. With it, you can pretty do much anything in terms of art application. Image Ready is an addition to Photoshop, and I'm sure it has other uses, but I primarily use it to animate gifs and do other minor things. Illustrator is a really practical program for anyone that wishes to do anything in terms of effective designs, especially if you like to vectorized a lot of your work. And lastly, Indesign, which I've used on a few occasions but plan to learn more of, allows you to do a lot of fascinating templates for things like PDF documents, brochures, booklets, etc. However, unlike doing a brochure in say Word, Indesign obviously has a lot of integrated functions with the rest of the Adobe suite, which can result in fantastic looking work (though I have yet to live up to this testament; I'm an Indesign noob sadly). Seriously, if you love art and you haven't done any photoshop, you owe it to yourself to at least check it out here. Just check the downloads section, and try a trial of Adobe Photoshop CS3

mIRC (Internet Relay Chat ):

Pretty much the biggest chat client on the internet for anyone knowledge in the way of the 1337 computer skillz. But on a serious note, IRC's really good. Not only does it provide a base for people to chat and get to open up networks and meet new people, IRC is huge in terms of file sharing. Big. I mean, literally thousands and thousands of networks devoted to that stuff. Check out the Rizon network for Anime. And come by the channel #virtualinfusion if you want to chat with me and fellow anime fans. I'm known as Laughing_Man.

uxtheme.dll themes:

If you are a big fan of customizing your desktop (as am I; just check the image of my reformatted desktop), then you should check up on something called the windows GUI. Basically, it controls the visual component to the windows desktop (its the theme; you know, the bar at the bottom of your computer, the screen saver, the user log in screen, etc). Basically, if you've got a big thing about keeping things cool looking and tidy, while being efficent, you should definitely get uxtheme.dll. Well, hrmm, lets just say you already have this. In your win32 folder (egad, not that folder?!), there is a .dll called uxtheme. However, this is a non-editable version that only incorporates the default microsoft themes. However, its obvious that people have gotten around that. Let me lead you in this:
Get the uxtheme.dll patch
Firstly, you've got to get the patch. It's available at this location. Save the file and put it somewhere on your desktop.

Get the Replacer
It's not a simple drag and drop. You cannot simply go to your win32 folder, and paste the uxtheme. Hell, you might get a little screw up if you do, especially when you consider that windows has an original one sitting there, and you can't just replace it. Windows has this stupid habit of backing up and fixing anything that's been touched in the win32 folder, so this won't work. Instead, you got to get a replacer, which can be acquired at this location. It's a cmd prompt, and it works quite simply. Create a folder on your desktop (doesn't have to be, but its the most convient) and name it replacer or anything you want. Then, put the contents of the .rar file into this folder. Run the replacer (its a windows command script), and it'll ask you to input the original dll basically. So go to C:\Windows\system32 and simply drag the original uxtheme.dll into the cmd prompt. Yes, right onto it. After that, it'll ask you for the new one. So, simply drag the patched uxtheme.dll you downloaded early from your desktop and onto the prompt. Follow the instruction, and tada! You're pretty much set. Reset your computer, and now you can get custom themes!

Getting Custom themes
Firstly, go to a place like Deviantart and find custom themes for windows xp/vista, and then download the file. Once you've found something you want, browse to the following destination{C:\Windows\Resources\Themes}, and make a folder to hold whatever theme you want. Extract the downloaded theme and put it into said folder, and you've got yourself a new theme. If you want to apply the theme or any other theme, it should appear in your properties menu if you right click on your desktop, and if not (cause sometimes it's sensitive as to what the folder's named), you can just go to the damn folder and just click on the theme itself!

If you want more info on this stuff, or even more places to get themes, just check this helpful forum post on the topic!

Visual C# 2005

C# is a programming language I'm learning this semester. Happily, this is also the language I have to use next year for my first year at McMaster for the programming course in Engineering. Like I've said in an earlier post, it's like killing two birds with one stone. However, it's actually a good part on Microsoft's part. Surprisingly they've provided programmers with a free programming environment for VB (avoid this by far, but for beginners, you should try it I suppose), C#, and even C++! Even better is the inclusion of the XNA game studio, which will let users make their own games and then burn said games onto a dvd, and play it on their 360's! I was actually surprised the Microsoft actually provided express editions like this free of charge. It's definitely worth checking out if you want to tickle your fancy for programming! I'm using 2005 because it's the edition used in my class, but you can get the more recent version (2008) here.

Winamp (the free media player that rocks)
I have yet to install this (no time), but rest assured. I will. Winamp is a FANTASTIC media player that puts so much power into the users hand. If it's just that right amount of bass, or adjusting any other thing in terms of what you want to hear, winamp does this and more. Even better is the customization of winamp, even down to the user interface. It seriously has some nice skins. I've gone through many skins, including Love Hina (which was the first skin I downloaded way back in 2002). As you can tell, the only skins I pretty much download are anime. Anyways, go and download NOW. Check here.

And with that, I conclude my days work. I feel bad that I couldn't really do any programming today, but heck. At least I did one hell of a good blog post. I'll post again tomorrow, and maybe I'll include some more software for you to tickle your fancy! And lastly, on a random note, here's two funny videos I found...well one funny, one just weird, but catchy song!

Street Fighter: North American Style ~ Guaranteed to make you laugh!

I found this randomly... wtf is this o.O?

Reformating = Tedious

2008-02-18T10:29:00.007-05:00

Let's take a different approach to my blogs today. Usually, I start off with some programming news, but because of how things turned out this weekend, I had little time for myself let alone homework. To begin with, Friday started off with me being busy doing things around the house. You know, cleaning and the works. Actually, thinking back about it, Friday wasn't all that great. The only thing that I can say was good on Friday was the fact that I hung out with Brittany right after school and we got some Harveys... oh and I can't forget Death Note, it's the only show I make sure to watch every week. I can't wait until they get to episode 20, I'm curious as to see whether or not YTV will keep the original OP in fear of unsettling some of their younger audiences with the death metal intro ^^; So as you can see, I had about 2 hours of fun maximum on Friday. Oh joy.

Saturday rolled in, and I hung out with my friends Anthony and Kyle (both of whom go to Sherwood). Hey, don't blame the fact that I didn't do homework on them, it had been 3 weeks since I last saw them, and I don't get much of an opportunity to hang with people these last couple months, I've been extremely busy (this is the part where you play the sad little violin). Damnit, I've gotta get around to fixing that... but everything happens one step at a time. Anyways, back on track. We hung out at Kyle's house, and had rented Dragonball Tenkaichi 3 (Can't spell the name, its freaking long and ridiculous). But, lo and behold, we come back to his place and find out that his older brother took the Wii with him up north since he was hanging out with some of his college buddies. Looks like we'll have to play it together next Saturday. Anyways, we passed the night by playing some Guitar Hero 3 (no rockband, the drum kit seems to have broken 'cause EA's a bastard and makes cheap instruments), Call of Duty 4, watching some TV and browsing the net on his laptop, which I might add, has the crappy excuse of an operating system known as Vista. Kyle redirected me to the wonderful online episodes of the Angry Video Game Nerd, and man, I can't believe I forgot about him. Actually, here, I'll let you judge :p

Warning! Excessive Swearing! But it's extremely funny!

Silver Surfer Review for the NES

Bugs Bunny Hashed Up Review: Angry Fit of Rage Moments

I lol'd infinitely! Honestly, this has to be one of the best things to watch right now on the video game side of the internet! Anyways, we watched a couple of those episodes and we stayed over for the night. Sunday rolls in, and I come home to this garbage known as my computer.

Don't get me wrong, my computer is actually really good (and expensive). I bought this nice baby about 2 years ago, and maxed out everything. It was high class in its time. However, if you know anything about computers, 2-3 years is the estimated life span for a good gaming computer, and by the end of that span, you've pretty much got to upgrade if not do a total rehash of your system. Freaking quad core... Anyways, that's not the problem. I come back Sunday night, and I started installing a windows GUI changer, and god, was it then that I realized my computer was due for a reformat. Seriously, it's been a year. Some people say that it's better and less hassle just to uninstall everything, followed by a disk defrag and an Anti Virus scan. But you know what, even when you do that, the computers never the same. I dunno, maybe I'm going the extra mile... One thing that did occur to me is that anyone that loves to work with computers is usually really lazy when it comes to taking care of it or doing things. We always want everything done quick, efficiently, and with little maintenance. Ideally, thats how everything should be with computers, but whenever it comes to cleaning up the computer or anything that concerns time, we're always the first to jump about how tedious it is, how boring and how time consuming...

Well, that all doesn't matter anyways. It's Monday morning and I'm still backing stuff up. And on that note, I will also say that NERO is a piece of shit. Seriously, I want to hang myself as to how bad Nero is. It has problems burning, and fails 3/4 of the time it burns. Oh gawd, now that I think about it, Windows has this really shitty was of fixing things... Let me explain. Windows has a security measure where in noticing that a burning application fails repeatably, windows will automatically switching your burner to a mode that is know as PIO (Programmed Input/Output). Basically, its a method of burning that uses a lot of your CPU's processing power and directly reads and writes your information onto a disc at the same time. Not only is this a very sluggish method of burning, it is very inefficient. Any "modern computer", and by modern computer I'm probably saying 5-10 years old, uses a more convenient mode known as DMA (Direct Memory Access), which doesn't use as much CPU overhead. I'm not going to explain more about it, because not only will it make your head explode from the mere flow of info, it will probably blow my head up trying to explain (and fully understand) it. Essentially, the way I like to look at it, is that it's sort of like a buffer. Whether that is a correct analogy or not doesn't not matter, it's the best way I can compare it to anything. Anyways, knowing that I've failed to burn back up dvds repeatably, I can probably guess that my computer has been automatically switched the PIO, which means anything else I try to burn afterwards will be burning at 1x speed instead of say 8x or 16x... And fixing it is out of the question, simply because it's often tricky. The simplest method of fixing it would be to go to your hardware tab and then the device manager, and then to go to your IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller and switching the mode manually. However, more often then not, this never works. You are then required to go to your reg keys and MANUALLY reset a value for this, and if you do this wrong... well if you know anything about reg keys, this can be VERY disastrous. And I'm not willing to take that risk. You know what, looking back at it, I can see why reformatting can be tedious sometimes. What a pile of dog shit!

Ugh, maybe I should just copy everything to my 2gig thumb drive... I could probably do it, provided I compress it all in a .rar file. I Think the file is altogether 2.5 gigs that's left, and I can most likely compress it to 1.8-2 gigs! Ah well, I'll get back to you later blog. For now... I must finish this backing up and reformatting. God, I need an external hard drive...

From 1d Arrays to 2D

2008-02-15T08:58:00.007-05:00

So I'm sitting in class as I write this (a call for a change of space?). We just covered 2d arrays today. Hrmm, the pace is going pretty fast in this class this year, especially compared to the previous year I had been learning VB. I suppose that's a good thing, means that when it comes to the time of making my game, I'll be able to do a lot more cooler things ;).

But, it's not all sunshine and fun. Before that, you've gotta go through the brute work of code, and that includes 2d Arrays. Let me say this; array are not hard in concept, at all, but there is a pain in checking if it works all the way thoroughly. Hrmm, and the code can get horrendously long, but in the defence for 2d arrays, they reduce a lot of work as is, in theory. Man, with this walking back and forth, I can't tell if I like array, or hate 'em. I guess I'll just stand in the middle, and jump sides whenever I feel it's appropriate!

Like I said the previous night, the weekends coming in, and its a long one too! I guess when I go home tonight, I'll do some of those array things. Gotta get some practice in, if for the sake of just getting the concept down pat. Next tuesday, we start a new lesson and are finally getting into the real grade 12 stuff. Hrmm, 2d array counters, maybe I should look ahead with that too... Bah, no promises there, I don't know what kind of mood I'll be in on the weekend. Until then, sayanora!

Special Addons to the C# library

2008-02-14T22:14:00.005-05:00

Well, I'm looking around right now to see what special hidden goodies can be used with C# (and when I say looking, I mean, at a snail's pace). I did some intersting things, there seems to be a lot of addons to most programs that you have installed on your computer. A particular interest would be flash for example, though I'm not sold on doing this for the assignment just yet. I wish I got a hold of the "Microsoft Sam" thing before hand, seriously, that is full of win. This is going to take quite some thinking through...

I'm thinking of taking the offer of joining the programming team too. I mean, what have I got to lose? It'll be fun, and maybe I'll learn something new. Plus, in doing so, I know at the least that I'll be missing one day of school this semester for the meet (was it at St. Mary's?), though that's a bit of a selfish reason if I do say so myself :p! Ah well, I'll just call it an "added bonus"! I'm just curious though, what kind of crazy apps are we going to have to put together? I bet it'll be of the things from my novice programming nightmare... wait... novice? Hardly, I'm more like programming n00b XD. Ah well, I've got a semester to learn, and this team will probably help me out in the end. Plus, I need this for Mac's engineering course. It's like killing two birds with one stone! I'm so good!

To be honest, I didn't get to do too much today in programming. I usually put in at least 40 minutes to an hour of work every night just to review things at the least if, getting ahead. But I have a math test tomorrow and on top of that, a chem quiz. Ugh, what a bother! If it weren't for those two things, I'd have gone to work on the 1d Arrays, but as time permits me, this wasn't all that possible. Damn, time seems to be my greatest enemy. An enemy that can't be overcome sadly; guess I'll make up for the lost programming time by doing it on the weekend. Heck, it's the long weekend now that I think about it. Damn, thank god for flag day (an excuse just to put in an extra civil holiday to make up for the lack of a holiday in between the time of christmas and I think may... or maybe the easter weekend? I don't remember, but that's why flag day's been so convientently placed, just so you know).

Well, tommorow's another day of school, minus the test and quiz. And with that, I bid adieu as I go to continue my studying. Ill probably be up until 12:30 am D: !

On a side note: Suiseiseki is awesome :D, I've got a thing for Elizabethian art and anything old. So naturally, this obsession with 'desu' is only natural!

Arrays? Is it already that time of year?

2008-02-14T15:09:00.003-05:00

Arrays, oh how I... wish I could live without 'em. Not that arrays are hard, but you have to understand, sometimes the require a lot of work to do. Ironically, they save the amount of time to declare a bunch of variables/if statements and what not, but still. Such a pain! Well, I'm glad that it isn't all that hard. I can barely recall the difficulty of doing it back in the VB days (it's been what, 2 years since I've last been using VB; such a bad language!).

Learned some other interesting stuff today as well, specifically the error checking. Try {} and catch {}. Pretty nifty stuff, and thank god it's finally been taught. I was frustrating myself continuously with the loop holes in inputboxs and converting the values to int32/double. I mean, provided the user doesn't screw around, the program would still work. However, if say they wrote "HAHAHA" into an inputbox that was specifically looking for an integer, you'd have an error and the program would crash. Talk about inefficient, but now with Try {} and catch {}, I can finally start to work around that.

Well, that's all the interesting stuff that comes to mind right now. Ill post later tonight!

Programming Test Over with

2008-02-13T19:06:00.003-05:00

Scored 100% on the programming test, and boy, finishing that last question, I knew I nailed it hands down. The questions were based on three things that were found in the homework. First was the speeding question (which had to be written) and thankfully, it was open note. I didn't use it too much (I generally knew all the coding) except for one or two statements here and there. As well, forgot a couple capitals but fixed those before handing it in :p. It really only consisted of a while statement, with a method to return a string of how the person would be fined.

After that, came second question which was done on the computer. The pizzeria question; boy, funny thing about this. I was practicing this question at home (except I was basing it off the sub question in the folders) and blake can vouch for this, seeing as I sent him my problomatic program afterwards, to which not even he could figure out why it wouldn't work. But I had assigned a value for a radio button that would be used throughout the group, and I publicly doubled the same value so that it would be used by all radio buttons. However, the program would say that this value was unassigned or something along those lines. I continously compared my code to Chiarelli's sub code, and in theory there was nothing different. After fussing over what could be wrong, I sent it to Blake. He had the same trouble, and couldn't not figure out why. In doing so, he decided just to make a new variable and just replace the old broken variable, and guess what. It worked. Yes, quite confusing. Blake and me were stumped suffice to say, seeing as there was nothing different between this scenario and the scenario before. I still think its bugging Blake... well, it is for me to say the least. Anyways, the question finished, I gladly did not have a re-occurrence of this weird anomaly, and simply breezed through the question with no problem.

And finally, it came to the last question. The Schedule question which was pretty much the same as the patient info, if not easier in the fact that there wasn't a need to add a keypress limitation on which characters could be pressed within the text box. As such, it took my approximately 5 minutes, at the most, to finish this question. I guess hard work at home pays off :p!

Non programming news; finish Gundam: The 08th MS team, and holy shit, was it fantastic! I'm adding that one to my fav collection, and I'm gonna consider buying the boxset (since its only $50 for all 12 episodes). Well, after that anime, not sure what I'm gonna watch. Perhaps Hayate the Combat Butler? Dunno, or maybe I'll watch Rozen Maiden Ouverture? The OP is pretty sick. Here it is actually!

Meh, anyways, I also stumbled upon this cool Maynard video where he does the vocals to "Them Bones" by alice in chains. Funny thing is, is it considered a cover when the other band members are actually those of Alice in Chains? I mean, Layne Staley did die, but... meh. Yay its a cover, but Maynard James Keenen is still an awesome singer. You should look up Tool and A Perfect Circle if you don't know what I'm talking about :p!

Anyways, that is all!

Test Tommorow, desu :<

2008-02-12T18:42:00.001-05:00

Well, it's inevitable that we would have a test for Programming. Makes you kinda choke up sometimes, when you try to think of what could possibly be on it. Of course, I know what's there before hand, but there's always a catch. So there's something I'm gonna have to do. But what? I don't know :(.

Well, besides that, all has been good. I've been keep ahead with the tasks, trying to complete as much as I can at home. We've got a new assignment thing to do, where we gotta do a bit of research on interesting addition or hidden components within Visual C#. I lol'd infinitely when we were introduced to the "Microsoft Sam" extension to Visual C#. I had totally forgotten about that hidden gem! I think it's obvious that I continued to play with that small app as soon as I got home! But I'm curious as to what else I can find. I guess I'll see with time.

Well, onto the pressing matter at hand; Doing some prep work for the test. I'm glad as hell that I finished the work before and handed in today. Heh, I thought it was do today, and since I didn't have #5 done, I cracked out the question within less than 2 minutes. Such an EASY assignment, but I think it's thanks to the fact that I've been doing a little studying at home, so some of the commands are finally starting to kick in and come naturally. Well, let's hope this stays true and shows on the test tomorrow.

In non-programming related news, I got to episode 8 of Gundam: The 08th MS Team, and holy crap, HOW did I miss this gem?! It has to be the most REASONABLE gundam out of all the series. I mean, it's pretty surreal, and the gundam pilots aren't the overpowered prepubescent teens with the extraordinary ability to take one 50 other enemies at once. It's got a big emphasis on proper warfare tactics, and the troubles and reality of war. I'm loving every piece of it, especially the OP (Opening). In fact, here it is!

Many recent animes have been missing a lot, especially on the cut back of certain animations. And with the age of 3d, we've been getting either cheesy or badly done animes. Seriously, it should just go back to the day of the Cel. I miss watching the wonderful art style that I had grown up knowing in anime!

Well, anyways, back to work. While I do so, I'll listen to this song from the Rozen Maiden OAV, Overture!

New month; new post.

2008-02-09T00:10:00.000-05:00

Well, the first thing I should ask is this; Has blogging become a monthly ritual?
No, not really. It just happens to come and go, on a whim really. But enough of the irrelevant chit chatter. Time to get down to business.

Right now, I'm going to be talking about some videos that tickle my fancy! First up:

Desu-ltimate 527 Death Combo
Need I say more? 527 x Desu. That's like, Awesome + 526 other awesome moments in Rozen Maiden. Don't get me wrong, Rozen Maiden ain't the greatest thing in the world, but Suiseiseki makes up for it. Kthxsbai

Over 9000:
This is one of those Meme's that just go around the internet. Yup, it's old, but I've just come back to it, and it really makes me wonder. Why did I ever let go <3.

Haruhigelion
A cross between The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and Evangelion. What is the result? An OP that oozes goodness beyond any level. Kudos to the maker!

Yuki Fan Video
Man, Yuki rocks. But after seeing this video it made me realize something. She rocks EVEN MORE. God, why didn't I ever cross this video before. She's crazy sick!

Funny Things

2008-01-01T13:37:00.000-05:00

The online death note, notorious for the recent Kira killings that have been garnered around the world, has been taken offline by request. I can only assume that the reason being is that it was seen as a serious threat by some concerned people. I find it really hard to believe that people would take killing to such a stupid level as to base it off a show. I guess when people become so held be this fictitious realities, they cannot help themselves acting the way they have. But come on. People these days ^_^;

Aside from that, I've never hated Soulja boy anymore than before. It continuously surprises me as to how we praise stupid kids who can't sing. Sure, I'm probably a lot worse than him when it comes to singing, but in all seriousness, do you see me trying to get some damn record label? No, and I just hope that one hit wonder gets the bomb shell hard when he realizes that he's just a one time gig that ain't going anywhere... Same with chocolate rain. I personally hope that someone slaps those two into reality; YOU ARE NO ONE and NEVER WILL BE ANYONE.

/end rant :).

No pkg in sight (yet)?

2007-12-10T13:39:00.000-05:00

Well, the title summarizes all. Apparently, my package has still not come in from Animewild. Yes, its been nearly 3 weeks (by wednesday Dec. 12). So I wait patiently. I've contacted Animewild about this, but they have yet to give me my UPS tracking number, so I'll probably email them again just to remind them again. Besides that, I've checked amazon to see the average time of arrival for parcels in Canada, and it 5-10 business days.

Something is fishy... wouldn't be surprised if damn UPS left it on my doorstep (as they have been known to do) and it's been stolen. Great... First order online and already a problem :(. Is there never a break? I blame this on you hamburgaler.

2007-11-25T10:29:00.000-05:00

Jeeze, day after my birthday and I'm now eighteen. Big number for those wee teen years. Don't feel any different; though I really shouldn't The difference of one day before ones birthday should be enough to change someone. Some friends came by yesterday (Boich, Basci, Brittany, Andrew and Jon) and we had a merry time poppet! Oh yes we deed in deed suh!

Anyways, a shout out of thanks to those guys. Now if only one person called from all those places I applied.

Shipment Coming in

2007-11-22T17:30:00.001-05:00

Well, yesterday my order was finally done processing and started shipping. Hopefully in a couple days (maybe if I'm extremely lucky, maybe by tomorrow; though this is wishful thinking at the most). Anyways, as long as they get here within a reasonable amount of time, I'm cool.

Today it snowed for the first time in a while. Heh, I can't recall a time actually where it snowed in my area in November (let alone early in December). Favorite season of the year. Everything dies, but in the hollow trees likes this crystalline beauty. Gotta love how the whole thing works, ya know? I just hope in continues snowing... that or it snows a lot more than it did these last couple years.

Started Blogging

2007-11-18T20:32:00.000-05:00

Hrmm, well here I am. I just felt like I needed a place to post everyday (not likely). Well, I'm not going to introduce myself, you can just learn to get to know me from what I write. And if you don't have the patience, too bad.

Today I was browsing around to see if my order from animecraze has come in yet. Sadly, it's still processing. None of the stuff was backorders or preorders; all of it in stock. Shouldn't take so long, but I guess it's because its the weekend and it's not like they can ship anything on the weekends. Pooh... Look at this yummy haruhi figure I'm getting :) As well, I ordered a couple volumes of the Negima Manga, Deathnote manga, and trigun maximum. Oh, and some merchandise as well; damn I can't wait to get this stuff in!