Blog-Typoastic

Nearly exactly three months later

2004-07-20T10:30:00.000-05:00

Oh yeah it's been what it seems like forever since I have posted a blog entry and to me it hasn't really been that long since I've been pretty busy with college life and my side projects going on. I guess this blog deserves a recap on what's been going on and updated on progress of some things, so here I go:

Mozilla and blogspot.com
Well this problem seems to have faded away and I haven't ran into at all since the last time it involved with my blog so I guess everything is fixed now.

phpMyChangeLog
This project is still being worked on and doesn't have anything much that is new to show off to the general public just yet. Project site for this project is still http://sf.net/projects/phpmychangelog and will hopefully have a real site to call home to at http://phpmychangelog.sf.net until then all progress is shown at http://t2n.org/~tron/php/phpmychangelog/changelog.php.

vbBattleShip - Still 86% Complete?!
I basically gave up on the project at the end and I ended up getting an
A in the class at the end of the course anyway and I have to say spending
so much time and dedication into a Visual Basic application is a huge waste
of time that should be better spent on a project written in C++ or even java
maybe. :)

As it stands the complete VB6 source code of the game can be downloaded that is 939KBytes in size. Note that I will not support the project in anyway so don't come asking for any help of any kind related to this project.

Climax! Game Engine
The rumors are true! Well that is if there were any rumors about this that is that I am working on my very own OpenGL game engine written entirely in C++ and I plan on releasing it as LGPL because most open source game engines out there these days that are any good are licensed under the GPL and how can anybody create a game with those projects without having to hand over all their work they've done for them selves to be different and creative from the rest? Well they can't with the General Public Licensed engines, but they can with Lesser General Public Licensed engines!

You're wondering just what do I mean by that and here I explain. With a LGPL game engine you can use the engine's library by dynamically linking to it without any fear of having to release your game's source code, but with GPL you most certainly will have to worry because there is still a lot of debate about weather or not GPL permits non-GPL projects to use GPL'd projects as libraries without having to release the source code as GPL. That's my main reason for doing this and I know I am putting my project at risk of being stolen by commercial developers or corporations looking for a free ride. Well the thing about that is by the rules of the LGPL if ANYONE makes any changes to the library's source THEY MUST RELEASE THE CHANGES NO MATTER WHAT! You got that? Good. So if you dynamically link to the library and use it then no worry, but if you directly use the source in your projects or make modifications to the library's source to do whatever then you have to release the changes of the library or project in which you used the LGPL'd source code with. Rules are rules.

I will post some nice screen shots of the current state of the engine later and that's about it for now. Laters everyone! :)

Its Friday! Still have a lot to do...

2004-05-21T14:00:00.000-05:00

Yeah... yeah... yeah... Taking me forever to post a new blog entry as usual. Here are my blog entry topics for today:

Mozilla and blogspot.com
I have begun to notice that Mozilla Firefox does not display correctly when viewing certain blogspot.com hosted blogs for some reason and I believe it has to due to how the web server responded in some way that catches Mozilla off guard or some reason or another. I have even noticed it happening when I try viewing my own blog and for some reason right when I republish my blog index it fixed it completely. So maybe it really has something to do with some conflict between cached web pages from blogspot and how it's web server responds to queries.

It's working for me now, my blog anyway.

phpMyChangeLog
Several days ago I have brought back alive an old PHP project that I did so long ago that I named phpMyChangeLog and that its main purpose was used at a job I use to have to easily maintain changelogs or project progress without much fuss. Well after while sitting on my hard drive collecting dust I have decided to bring it back alive and share it with the public, let them make additions to it, mod it to death, and hopefully make this project more complete than what it is now.

I currently have it temporarily running at http://t2n.org/~tron/php/phpmychangelog/ and working on it there whenever I need to take a break away from another project I'm working on which I will talk about that in the next topic. I've also taken the chance and registered over at SourceForge.net. I was lucky that the project name phpMyChangeLog wasn't taken yet. :)

So I now have http://sf.net/projects/phpmychangelog project page up and going with no files content as of yet. I am wanting to make phpMyChangeLog a bit more complete before I release it to the public. The changelog system written in PHP was originally going to be an add-on component to a quite large project management system written in PHP, but the company I was working for was very uninterested in that concept so I never wrote the main system for it and the changelog component was barely operational. So with that in mind I worked on it some on my spare time and got it working to the point where I could use it to dynamically alter or add new project updates to the changelog. Well I guess that is enough about phpMyChangeLog for now. :)

vbBattleShip - 86% Completed!
Yes, I am still working on this project and it takes time to even develop a simple game such as the old school board game of Battleship, except this time it will be two player only over the LAN or Internet using the LAN browser that it has built-in or grab current active games off the Internet tracker daemon I'm also working (that runs on Linux, has some Windows support which isn't recommended). I have the drawing routines completed, the ship placement and collision checking (keeps player from stacking ships on top of another) completed, and some networking routines that still need to be finished.

Overall it's going very well and I'm trying my best to have it completed by this coming week's Wendesday Night so that I'll have a grade for my final Visual Basic class project. Once I am finished with the game and all it's components I will be releasing the source code as open source under the General Public License. That's all I have to say about this project for now.

Services 'n Stuff: jabberd, ircd, and IPv6!
Oh man have I been busy for the past week or so not only working on my final VB and phpMyChangeLog projects, but also doing some networking related activities. Such as I recently got back on to the freenet6 IPv6 tunnel network so that I can have IPv6 connectivity which I sort of like playing around with, it's very neat, and got UnrealIRCd 3.2 release compiled and running over at irc.t2n.org.

I currently do not have any other services working with IPv6 yet since I haven't bothered to doing so. Also I am currently not running my jabberd server (usually at address t2n.org) because it has been running pretty unstable and I got tired of restarting it after it has closed out for some reason or another. Well T2N.org's IPv6 address is 3ffe:bc0:dda:1:0:0:0:1 and have a single ircd using it at this time. You might be wondering well how come you didn't try 6to4 IPv6 networking instead of tunneling? Well the thing is the router that keeps replying to the anycast queries has a broken link between its private IPv6 network and 6bone network, so it's basically a dead end there.

Well that's all for now and everybody have a good weekend!!!

Finally some gmail screen shots!

2004-04-27T14:36:00.000-05:00

Oh yeah here they are a few screen shots mainly in the order of process to having an account minus the actual sign-up form (couldn't fit in a screen shot). Also you might be wondering just why don't you do some HTML code dumps into pages so we can check it out for real? Well Google did something very clever by dynamically creating the pages on the fly using java and random hashes that make it nearly impossible to copy their web pages' source code. With some smarts and clever hacks of my own I could maybe pull it off, but I don't feel like trying since I've got other things I need to be doing hence the reason why I didn't get the screen shots posted right away along with my last blog posting.

This is what I saw when I logged into my blogger account and of course hit 'YES' to apply for the beta program. These images here and here show off the two pages I had to go through in order to get to the sign-up page. Finally here is what it looks like. And yes that storage isn't exactly a gig as you would think since an exact gig is 1024MBytes. I believe this was done on purpose.

I hope you like the few screen shots I've done. I'll plan on doing some more before the weekend and I've also saved a text file of the User Agreement that gmail users have to agree to.

GMail offered and I said Yes!

2004-04-25T14:43:00.000-05:00

Today around 1:43PM (GMT -06:00) when I signed into blogger.com I was offered a chance to beta test the Google mail program and I was interested so I said Yes. I was told by a good friend of mine, Erik, that I should log into my blogger account and check out the new Gmail beta tester offer because it sounded pretty cool and he knew about it from the posting on Slashdot.

I'll post screenshots sometime later...

Everything is going to be OK! I finally made a blog posting...

2004-04-06T20:03:00.000-05:00

Yeah as usual I don't make a blog posting in days or sometimes weeks then finally make one. Well what can I say I've just been doing the same routine such as going to school at ITT-Tech, doing the college homework, and work on side projects of mine whenever I can. I'm also currently trying to get a job so I can afford the pleasures of life like pay my DSL line and build a replacement server machine. :)

I'm right now still working on my VB6 programming class final project which is a BattleShip game that I'm doing. Here real soon I will post some screen shots of it even though there isn't much to look at really and I got the networking code about 20% complete. Yep I'm implementing somewhat multi-player support into it since I only want it to be a two player game and that's about it since I do not want to implement A.I. logic into the game because that would be too much work involved.

I plan on this weekend to continue finishing up the Go Project site so that'll be a lot more functional for those of you who actually use the thing. Well that's about it and I hope you had fun on April Fools day cause I know I didn't do anything special. ;)

Dude you got screwed... A bedtime story

2004-03-24T03:26:00.000-06:00

Once upon a time a guy that's a complete noob (not a newbie, this guy is a lot worse) when it comes to computers turned on his machine and decided he would download his goat porn. And well he ran into some problems which turned out to be massive reboots, slight error messages when booting up (Wiznogoes, go figure?), and the computer no longer makes it's love churp to him upon POST. So he decided to make a big error in judgement by blaming it all on his poor little download software called BitTorrent and he made a mistake of looking like an idiot that just returned from a mental hospital.

--- THE END ---

Kids, the moral of the story is that you never ever download goat porn... I mean to be sure to always run anti-virus scanner on files that you download and don't use Windows (well at least try not to). If you must then please... please!!! Do NOT use IE nor Outlook [Express] programs. Instead use alternatives and help keep the Internet clean by not downloading goat porn.

Man that guy got owned by a trojan or something. ;)

I'm still alive...

2004-03-23T01:15:00.000-06:00

Long time no blog! I've been busy working on my side projects at home and college work at ITT-Tech. Amoung my projects are is a BattleShip game done in Visual Basic 6 for a final project in the VB6 programming class I'm in at ITT-Tech which is going pretty well since I've got the networking basics down pretty well for the game and hopfully will have a decent beta to show off with screen shots here on the blog. I also won't be doing those interesting news stories anymore since that got boring pretty quick and it's best that you check out the postings at Slashdot yourself rather than me writing up an excerpt.

Other projects that I've been doing are the Go Project and a IRC client and Windows Explorer clone which are both using wxWidgets (formally known as wxWindows) which is a great cross platform GUI toolset (the best in my opinion). Speaking of GUI components a friend of mine good ole Logikal came across a very neat web-based WYSIWYG editor using just java script and it works not only in Internet Explorer, but also in Mozilla (Galeon, Firefox/Firebird, Netscape) too. It might even work in Opera as well (I haven't tried it yet) and as I said before it's very neat. Not to mention it's also free (not as in beer either) as well you could say it is open source since it's using the BSD (or BSD-based anyway) license.

In other news I've also have been successfully running a jabber server as realm t2n.org for the past few weeks. Sure it crashs from time to time, but that's easily fixed by a cron job to check on it every once in a while. ;)

Welp that's about it for now, blog ya later.

It works! Sort of....

2004-03-12T19:45:00.000-06:00

I finally got my jabber server working, but it seems it likes to crash from time to time just because a client quits when it doesn't expect it to. Anyway my jabber server's address is t2n.org and SSL connections are NOT working (a bug with the server). My contact is tron@t2n.org and server is listening on the standard TCP port of 5222. Enjoy while you can.

I'm still alive!

2004-03-12T15:00:00.000-06:00

Sorry for not posting anything for the past day and half I've been feeling like crap and trying to get a Jabber server working to play with on my Debian Linux machine. Once I get it up and running like I need it to I'll open it up for public use and see how well it goes. :)

I've also been working on a BattleShip game in Visual Basic language so I can get my skills up to speed because I haven't touched VB in nearly two years about the same time I last touched vbIRCd. The BattleShip game won't be in 3D or something very cool with any graphical action, it'll just be a basic grid display battleship game practically like those java ones you see out on the net except mine will have networking support so you can play with a friend over the LAN or on the Internet. Which also means I won't bother putting in computer AI for single player gaming unless I completely get the thing done as I wanted it to and have some free time to work on it more. Reason why I am getting up to speed with VB (Visual Basic) is because this upcoming second quarter of college I'm taking a programming class which is "teaching" Visual Basic (Yeah right like I actually need it. From what I've seen of the books I could teach it the correct way. Yeah the books do contain the wrong way of programming by at least 70% of it).

Anyway I'm asleep.... I mean alive and I'll try to keep you all posted. :P

Wednesday's Top News Stories... So far

2004-03-10T22:33:00.000-06:00

Tonight's top most interesting (in my opinion) news stories so for. As all of the stories are talked about on Slashdot I've picked the most interesting:

Comcast Cuts Infected PCs' Network Connections
An article at InfoWorld is reporting that Comcast cable internet service provider is doing something about infected machines with viruses and trojans, especially ones being used as open spam relays to deliver spam, by basically taking them off their network and keeping them off until the machines' owners resolve the problem themselves. I know it sounds harsh and very annoying, if not frustrating, to those poor customers. But hey somebody has to do something about it if you're not responsible enough to ensure that your machine stays clean then the ISP should step in and ensure you're no longer apart of the "information super-highway" which keeps your machine(s) from pestering ours.

Apple Sued in France for iPod Music Royalties
Apple Computer, Inc is being threatened by France association representing recorded music rights holders to sue Apple for not paying royalty fines that require any vendor using hard drives and/or blank disc media for their products to compensate the artists and rights owners just in case they're used to pirate music. Basically what Canada is doing right now too with blank disc media and even hard drives? The bottom line is Apple isn't forking over the crash to pay off their "debt". Maybe Apple will raise the price of those already expensive ipods to compensate them when they compensate the French recorded music rights holders association, if they ever do pay up, well of course they will.

Four Big ISPs File Six Anti-Spam Suits
More spam busting action going on as four major ISP have filed six lawsuits against spammers under the CAN-SPAM law. The companies are Microsoft(MSN?), America Online, Earthlink and Yahoo. I'll leave the rest of the details to your reading pleasure of visiting the link. ;)

Pixar Switches to Mac OS X and G5s
I bet Steve Jobs is happy knowing that Pixar is officially moving their workstations over to the Apple G5 and we all knew it was coming since a rumor was running around on the net saying that the only reason why Steve Jobs wanted so much power into the Apple G5s is so he could have new toys for Pixar. I hope Pixar enjoys their new toys and I cannot wait until AMD Athlon 64bit systems are actually affordable. :P

New Net Battle Over ".mobile" Looming
Just when we though we had enough Top-Level domains on the net today, a joint group of Nokia, Vodafone, and Microsoft have applied for the ".mobile" mTLD. Plus the fact that another group apparently have been trying this about a year ago before Nokia, Vodafone, and Microsoft's attempt and it might become an ugly fight. The whole business of trying to get a dedicated TLD for mobile devices is because they cannot process information like web sites like normal computers can (no duh), but the funny thing is won't cell phones end up just like current PDAs were they're becoming so powerful that they are easily comparable to the old top of the line i586 PCs? If so then this whole plan is pointless and basically just another scheme to make more money off of nothing.

An Anti-DoS Tool That Returns Fire
"Security company Symbiot is about to launch a product that can help companies fight back during a DDoS or hacker attack by launching their own counter offensive. A ZDNet UK story quotes security "experts" questioning the legality of such a product and asking how it will will avoid being fooled by hijacked PCs and spoofed IP addresses..." I have to say that is the most dumbiest thing you could ever do is to return fire during a DoS attach and doing so will most likely tick off your ISP. Plus the fact when being DoS'd your servers are replying back out using up your bandwidth, so it's a real useless attempt to try to fire back. The best thing you could ever do during a DoS attach is to DROP those packets.

U.S. Army Warns Microsoft To Back Off
Apparently the U.S. Army dropped their wallet on the side walk and Microsoft attempted to pick it up when they looked up and noticed big guns pointed right at them, and was told to back off the wallet or die. OK sad pathetic joke I know, anyway the real story is that Microsoft has been giving away free MS Office discs in post mail and well the U.S. Army did not like that at all. The reason being the U.S. Army doesn't allow that is because they have a ethics code which all employees go by which is when you get right down to it no more than $20 max (in value) of a gift per occasion and no more than $50 per year total from a single entity, or something like that. You get the idea.

Real Sues Baseball Over Windows Media
RealNetworks is suing Major League Baseball because Real feels that MLB should carry RealPlayer streams with Windows Media streams. Maybe it's really about a contract gone bad since it was revised? Becides why in the world would anyone want to play RealPlayer streams? It's awful, really awful... and Real just needs to get a life and realize that "Hey, you suck Real!".

That's about it for tonight I guess unless something else shows up on slashdot tonight or tomorrow morning. Nothing like ending a news post after bashing RealNetworks. :D

I'm going to bed... But wait a minute what's this?

2004-03-10T03:14:00.000-06:00

Alright I was about to head to bed right when I hit refresh in my browser on Slashdot and noticed a very odd posting that read "Recovering Secret HD Space: The Inquirer has posted a method of getting massive amounts of hard drive space (link fixed) from your current drive. Supposedly by following the steps outlined, they have gotten 150GB from an 80GB EIDE drive, 510GB from a 200GB SATA drive and so on.' Could this be true? I'm not about to try with my hard drive.".

Really... I wouldn't try that on any of my hard drives that I wanted to keep in working order. When I first saw this I thought it was just another joke floating around on Slashdot, but then again it isn't April fools just yet. Basically what happened is, like many people on Slashdot have noted and even a dear friend of mine on ICQ (logikal), that the partition table will become corrupted to the point that it reports the wrong free space or partitions overlap giving you three times more space than what you actually have when you pull that stunt with Norton Ghost. Can you actually believe to get 510GB of free space from a 200GB hard drive? I think not.

Anyway, now I am going to bed to sleep and wake up in about nine hours from now as usual. I need sleep so badly my fingers are refusing to press another ke[Connection reset by finger].

Tuesday's Top News Stories... So far

2004-03-09T21:04:00.000-06:00

Tonight's top most interesting (in my opinion) news stories so for. As most of the stories are talked about on Slashdot I've picked the most interesting:

New HP Drive Lets You Burn Your Own Label
It looks like HP created a drive that uses the same laser used to burn DVD-ROMs to burn a label on the label side of the disc with any monochrome or grayscale image you like. The catch is that you would be required to use a special kind of CD to burn the label on to. Well I don't know about you, but I'll be sure to stick with the normal CD label stickers.

The Command Line - Best Newbie Interface?
A contributor of OSNews.com, Richard Wareham, has posted an essay describing results about how the command line is a better choice to learn than a Graphical User Interface (GUI). I, for one, agree with Mr. Wareham since I enjoy entering commands into a terminal on Linux than having to go jump through hoops to simply move files around or edit a daemon configuration file. Note that the essay is four pages long, yikes.

Playstation 3 Already Won the Next Gen Battle?
The BBC has an article that basically claims the Sony's Playstation 3 has already won the battle for the best console of next generation gaming consoles. I believe so too since Microsoft first of all announced that the XBox 2 won't be having a hard drive and they still won't announce the complete official specification of their console, and Nintendo's last big hit was the N64, so the gamecube wasn't that great, and I doubt it'll come up with anything better than Microsoft or Sony anytime soon with in the next five years. That's all I have to say for now on this matter.

US Government Upgrades RAM
Techworld has an article that reports the U.S. Government spent $4.7 million for 2.5TB (TeraBytes) of RAM (they got a discount for buying in bulk?) for usage in their tax return handling machines? Here is a quote from the article:
"A RamSan 320 unit holds up to 64GB of RAM in a 3U rack unit. The US government order is housed in three full height rack units. There are over 320 2Gbit/s Fibre Channel ports and the aggregate I/O rate is 36Gbit/s. That is some serious hardware."
Yes some serious hardware indeed and so much for Bill Gates' "640K ought to be enough for anybody." theory right out the window or Windows. ;)

Kodak Sues Sony Over Digital Camera Patents
A Reuters article is reporting about Kodak is currently only going after Sony because the company is using ten of Kodak's patents without permission and maybe other digital camera vendors have paid their toll fee or got granted permission? Who knows. The slashdot posting also noted about more info from Bloomberg article.

And Finally an update about Viacom vs. Dish Network! Sort of:

Echostar/Dish Network Pulls Viacom Channels
Today Viacom's channels have been officially taken off of Dish Network and I bet Dish Network's subscribers aren't too happy about it either. Apparently a contract deal didn't come to an agreement between the two parties and no word yet on when it should become resolved. Also EchoStar (the company behind Dish Network) will credit Dish Network subscribers one dollar (USD) per month for programming outage. I don't know about you, but a dollar per month credit for missing programming doesn't work with me especially when the programming package at least costs $25 a month. All I can say now is that... bittorrent forever!

I hope you enjoyed my little news reporting on my blog since I had nothing more interesting to post about and anything more interesting comes up I'll post again tonight. But of course I'll post when it's my bed time, why not? ;)

I'm going to bed... I'll update Viacom vs. DishNet first

2004-03-09T03:28:00.000-06:00

It's very late at night and I'm going to bed. Oh yeah, the greatest blog posting of all time that says I'm going to bed. Man am I pathetic at this blogging activity or what? I'll try to have something interesting to blog about tonight this evening or whenever I get up.

=== News update, before I head to bed. ===
The Viacom vs. Dish Network problem (WARNING: Don't click link if you're using a cell phone) looks like it wasn't resolved in time and now we get a peek at what the end result was. Apparently Dish Network customers... ahem... subscribers aren't going to be happy when they flip on the tube in the morning to watch their family daily morning cartoons on Nick.

Like I actually care I'm a DirecTV subscriber and I enjoy it. Plus when I really want to watch my favorite TV shows like StarTrek: Enterprise I download from bittorrent and enjoy it in nice decent HDTV quality on my computer monitor which is by far better than watching it on TV. Oh did I menchen no commericials on those downloaded episodes? ;)

Good night all, I'm tired and lack brain activity...

Welcome!

2004-03-09T02:50:00.000-06:00

Welcome to my sad attempt of a weblog for my own personal use and enjoyment. Yes I named this blog after my appearance of typos that come up every now and then, especially when I don't proof read before posting. :)