News and Stuff

Got comments? Feedback? Criticisms? Praise? mail me!

Want more recent news? Try News after Zero.

Monday, 24 July, 2000

Which is louder... the sound of one hand clapping in rage, or the sound of two clapping through co-operation?

Thursday, 20 July, 2000

The heatwave is excessively militant.

Later.

Thursday, 13 July, 2000

Will this be a good or a bad thursday? Will the heatwave cease? Can I get some air conditiong in here? I need a library that is open at 2:31 am or something. Grumble.

Wednesday, 12 July, 2000

• three updates
• The heat wave seems to be over. Of course, it is dawn as I write this, so, who knowns what will happen next?
• Wow, I know a lot of people! Writing a Credits list for something...
• The heat wave is back! Grumble! Complain!
• It seems hotter inside here now that it is night, than it did in the day. Well, thus, I am going outside. Later.

Tuesday, 11 July, 2000

Today I glanced into Computer Graphics : Princples and Practice, and it was a very scary place... lots of maths. Not that maths scares me, but I need a better calculator...

I must have turned super saiyan or something, because I am writing C++ in a calm yet progressive manner, and even thinking about how to do unit testing and whatnot.

Contrast this with the haphazard models that fostered the M series, KC, and so on.

Must be those brief naps I had today... mind you, before midnight, it was much too hot to do anything... but recently, it rained, signifigantly. Much thanks for the pleut.

Anyhow, The Pragmatic Programmer is a great book, and so far, Game Architecture and Design is also good... it is actually larger in scope than the title implies, and repeatedly points out that interactive entertainment does not have to be in the form of a game.

The excuse for game development going from a few weeks to a few years is that the games have higher quality, but I believe this to be fallacy.

In truth, the technology is a complex series of kludges, in both hardware and software (or cementware, there is not much soft about software, trying to change or create it is exactly like working in cement), and hinders game development more and more with each new revision.

K31 trivial:

I own both Yars' Revenge and E.T. for Atari 2600 (but don't ask when is the last time I actually played them), and although the former is tons more fun, I actually played E.T. a lot... perhaps I was really bored. Asteroids is my second all time favourite Atari 2600 game, the number one being Word Zapper. Although, Asteroids got a lot more play, I had it a lot longer, so that is expected... then there was Millipede... oh my! Now, that was a game!

Monday, 10 July, 2000

The brutal heatwave continues to torment the Most Militant developer. Despite it, stuff happens...

• I now own a local (registered in Barbados) business, Eli K Lan, which is doing research and development in the field of Interactive Technology.
• I found some mp3z of some old dub and stuff. Good stuff.
• Went to a church concert last night with my best friend. Most fun. She is uberkool. More later.
• The paperwork for the business is immense. Nonetheless, I am enjoying it as I am finally combining my knowledge of English with my knowledge of business.
• Did I mention that it is really, really hot?
• • Vagrant Story
  • A friend left Vagrant Story at my house this weekend (on purpose). Okay, so, I might soon do a review of that game.
  • It took him about 30 hours to beat it the first time, then then it automatically saves over your last save slot with a new quest, the same map and story but you retain most of the weapons, abilities, spells, et cetera, from the previous journey.
  • Hence, rumours of the game lacking longeivity are totally false.
• It takes five hundred dollars to open a business account... How about that! I suppose it makes sense in a way, why start a business unless you already have money... well, no, actually, that doesn't make that much sense to me in that paradigm. Instead, I think the idea is to encourage more commercial activity, as well as non-trivial solvency.
• The stuff I hated in Principles of Accounts in secondary school, I still hate now.
• It is possible to wear shoes which "eat" kool-looking white jeans, even if the shoes themselves look kool. This occurs when the heel is too shallow, such as with my black hush puppies (which work okay with my black jeans, as they are slightly shorter and have narrower bottoms).

Trivia about K31:

• I graduated at the absolute top of my class in primary school, to the great surprise and chargin of many, and the smug reassurance of a select few.
• I have Grade 1 'O' Level Certificates in both Principles of Business and Principles of Accounting.
• Actually, I have distinctions ('A's in all areas) in Physics, Mathematics, and Principles of Business.
• Modern electronic equipment has an expected useful life of 3 years, and a scrap value of at least one-tenth of the original value.

Wednesday, 5 July, 2000

Today was so hot in the evening that I slept.

Then I woke up.

Monday, 3 July, 2000

third update:

Today is so hot that the heat appears to strike anyone who dares to be awake with the broad side of a sword, smiting them mightily.

I am here reading the last issue of PXCL, and thinking that it's a shame because it seems like a really fun mag. Ah, but, there is less an less fun in technology every year... nay, every month, some major thing happens to put tech back a year or five.

Originally, Sony's PlayStation was supposed to have around 6MB or RAM, as opposed to the 2MB in the current units. Because of the cutback in RAM, they were numerous problems, but the one I want to call attention to is that in such little RAM, it is practically impossible to run a web browser on the PlayStation console. If it were not for this, Sony would have been able to do everything that Sega is doing with the DreamCast online, with the PlayStation, whilst the Saturn was still the main machine of Sega.

Friday, 30 June, 2000

quick update:

Today was domestic day, did laundry and other such ilk for at least most of the evening.

Thursday, 29 June, 2000

quick update:

• Finally got some time and quiet to read in ernest. The smallest book must be over 600 pages long, so I'll be reading incrementally for a while...
• Re-discovered that while everyone seems to recognise that current programming tools are not suited to designing interactive entertainment software, there isn't anyone addressing this issue, even as the cost of not changing increases. odd, isn't it?
• Consider this: software isn't really soft, nowadays. It is harder to change software than it is to change hardware, for most people in most cases. Cementware would be a better discription. This applies especially to Open Source software, because the build/install cycle is just like casting cement (configure) and waiting for it to dry (compile), then smoothing the dry surface (install).
• Worked on NB1 some more. When I realised that it was taking me forever to refactor the code, I went off on the philisophical tangent that spawned the above comments.
• In case you haven't read it yet, check out Tim Sweeny's Critical Look at Programming Languages , which is obviously not written by me (smiles) but expresses some of the same things I kept ranting about.

Wednesday, 28 June, 2000

• Stuff I did today:
• Saw a few dreamcast games for the first time "live":
  • Rayman 2, which was impressive but for me, not as refined looking as it was in 2D... but I won't be critical of it yet. (and yes, I do understand that 3D renders and 2D hand-drawn sprites are two totally different things...)
  • Crazy Taxi, which looks to be even more fun than driving on the notoriously narrow roads of Barbados,
  • Dead or Alive 2, which is a lot of fun but needs more interactive backgrounds... ahem, bushido blade, taunt, hint.
• Realised how extemely critical I am of everything. Laughed. Glanced at the last issue of PCXL. Other misc. things.
• I had orginally planned to go to Capieora in the evening but for various reasons, this didn't occur. This is okay, though... the day was well spent. I mean, most of the day is useless to me anyhow, as I hint at below...

The minor rant

I am alive, and personally, internally, I am well... but when it comes to being part of this environment, and such ilk, I am not at all well... I am highly displeased and frustrated and even as I learn more and more, I do less and less (as I no longer have ignorance as an excuse).

I will create the balance.

Today I had a lot of fun, and I also realised that the reason I work from midnight until dawn is that it is the only quiet time in a typical day (they are exceptions and irregular events that cause divergence from this rule).

The signifigance of this is that it is impossible for me to work for the majority of the day, due to ambient noise and activity.

Memories of [a past job], in a remote area relatively near to the coast, confirm that I am more productive (or, only productive) when I can relax and accept the ambient silence of a peaceful environment.

Tuesday, 27 June, 2000

second update:

Whe.

Today I went on a quest to return tapes to the video store. This was a bit complex because

• I needed to retrieve a tape from by a friend's house, which happened to be around 20 km away
• I needed to use public transport due to some scheduling issues regards the package car
• because my friend resides in a remote area, I needed to take three ZR vans to accomplish what would have otherwise been a trivial exercise not worth mentioning, but instead turned into a great, adventurous quest worthy of an RPG...
• my actions were described as ambitious, foolhearthy, fun, professional, and amusing, but I may have exaggerated the adjectives to perpetuate various myths...

Saturday, 24 June, 2000

third, minor update:

• Ice cream has an uberfilling effect.
• I want to eat, but I am not hungry...
• Fist Power is a really kool action movie..., like a NES game in that it's mass fight, boss fight pattern, with humour, and fighting, and action, and simple plot.
• Fixed a typo... thanks Carol... (probally added a few more, though, to err is human, the perfect human will err).
• The Warrior, which I watched for the second time, was even better the second time around. Violent, great fights, immense carnage, great fights, great, long fights.
• This weekend has been awesome so far, wonderful, balanced, relaxed, exciting, adventerous, unpressured, progressive, expressive, expansive, and other good stuff.

quick update:

I went fetting (partying) last night and this morning, from like 11 pm to 4.5 H past midnight today.

This was preceeded by drama with Omar and Rohan, but eventually, Omar came and drove, me and TWood went, and I am not partially, temporarily deaf.

Lots of fun... I am alive and well, more details may come later, after breakfast and stuff.

quick, quickies:

• The official Jet-Li website, [ url : http://www.jet-li.com/ ] , kicks ass... best use of Flash I have ever seen.
• I need a lot of space to dance, especially when I mix in Capieroa-derived motions.
• Carlisle Bay Centre is the place to be on a Friday night for a fete.
• Jeans can be too stiff to dance properly in.

Friday, 23 June, 2000

quick update:

• Went to sleep before midnight yesterday, which must be like, the first time I did that for the year.
• Implemented a very limited sham of a scripting engine, using more of the STL (C++ generic programming) that I have in previous projects.
• See my SXX Page for the source-only release (only useful to koders, but it's fairly portable C++ so you don't need DJGPP, Linux should also be sufficient).
• Woke up before dawn, feeling refreshed. This early to bed thing might actually have merits.
• Viciously attacked my bath tub, with a scrub brush and so on, thereby cleaning it...
• Did I mention how kool vagrant story is?
• I have a new quote: "all of our days are numbered, but my denominator is zero".

Thursday, 22 June, 2000

second update:

• Vagrant Story, by Square for PlayStation, kicks ass and names names. The technology isn't what makes it kool, it's the fact that it emulates a board and dice RPG, basically. Kick ass. See the psx.ign.com review.
• I got a few books today.
  1. Game Architecture and Design, by Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris
  2. The C++ Programming Language, Special Edition, by Bjarne Stroustrup
  3. The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
  4. Computer Graphics : Principles and Practice, Second Edition in C, by Foley, van Dam, Feiner, Hughes
  5. The Practice of Programming, by Brain W. Kernighan and Rob Pike
• The transparent Sony PSX Memory Cards look really, really kool.

These books are good for reasons that should be obvious from the titles... so, in order not to become a total recluse, i plan to update my webpage even more often (variety reverses burnout, increases Joy(*1)). Most thanks, hails, and props to Larry!

So... today TWood and I watched Larry tick down some Vagrant Story. Most thrills.

Wednesday, 21 June, 2000

another quickie:

Today was a very relaxed day, as Wednesdays should be, regarding M8, I mostly spent time looking at the big picture... watched some TV, read some of some books.

• Read through some of a book about Reiki (no relation to Kei as in my (shortened) name),
• did some work on my linux installation, got my old ISA sound card working fine with Linux/Allegro, at least, for playback.
• KDE sucks
• freeciv sucks
• and that's all for now

Tuesday, 20 June, 2000

quick update:

• Visited the optician, that was fun,
• finally bought a hard case for my glasses,
• so now I have somewhere to put them that they won't get dust, etc.
• fiddled more with my TV antenna, got a funny splitter thingy, it works okay but the coax male connector is a bit too small, so it feels loose.
• anyhow, I also installed Caldera OpenLinux on my box, again,
• and I avoided doing any C++ as I was very busy today,
• and I got a new black ink cartidge for my printer,
• and am testing out an PCI sound card thingy that is... a bit odd, to me, but I haven't played with it much yet.
• and that's all for now.
• boy, I'm tired. seems like I spent most of the day running errands outside (it was a very hot day) or setting up stuff inside (take it from me, turn you box off before you try to connect an amplifier to it)

Monday, 19 June, 2000

Second update:

• Work on my secret project to show my " mad C++ STL skillz " :
  1. yielded a problem quake,
  2. I solved problems I didn't even know I had,
  3. but think it best not to work without sleep,
  4. so they will wait for a while before I implement the solutions
• This news page is shorter, and more current than the news page of last week.
• The backlog of old news is at this link.

I watched some TV! This is remarkable for several reasons, the most relevant being that it was technically impossible for me to do so until recently, when I fiddled with my antenna thingy, and discovered that in order to watch Channel 8, I need to oriented such that I can no longer listen to HOTT 95.3 FM. The CBC/StarCom rivalry continues... anyhow, my bad for using the same antenna for TV and FM reception, and not setting it up properly in the first place.

• Some seasame street, an episode in the 3000 series (which I previously described as heresay, but then found out what heresay means (choice) and laughed at the whole thing... but I digress), in which snuffy learnt, after nearly giving up many times, and after causing numerous shockwaves measuring 4 or so on the richter scale, to tap dance. Seeing snuffy being " light on his feet " was a unique experience.
• Batman of the future has great animation and is actually really kool, although great is a relative term... it certainly does not look bad... the characters are great, the attention to detail in their development is almost astounding, almost because I would expect no less of Batman... and because I've seen some anime that goes father
• some monster cartoon series thing... it was really entertaining, in an abstract way.

Sunday, 18 June, 2000

Today was Fathers' Day.

I am not, personally, a father... but I did wish my dad happy fathers' day and stuff.

I watched a few tapes...

• The Wood , which I watched already, and is okay...
• The Sex Monster , which was hilarious...
• Double Platinum , which was very slow paced (boring), a drama, but the story seemed okay. (Like I really care about a drama's plotline. Fyre bunn de drama!!!)
• Mighty Joe Young , which was sorta predictable, but I guess that's expected. It was okay. The gorilla was really smart, this was thrills to watch.
• A thin line between love and hate , which seemed to be lots of fun, but I didn't watch all of it as I went and cooked in the middle, and did some other stuff at the beginning... it is a comedy (duh, it stars Martin Lawrence), with romantic parts, and some thriller-type action (guns, knives, dramatic-fall-into-body-of-water-ism)

What else... I rested a lot, because I sneezed a couple of times and decided to avoid catching a cold. I ignore suggestions that it is merely dust causing me to sneeze. Smink.

I had a large quantity of sound, slow, large sleep over the past few days. The sleep has been immensely helpful.

Oh, and for the record, I can cook well, however, there seems to be an aversion to eating my food, at least amongst certain friends of mine. Just because it is a little more adventerous than that plain old ordinary stuff that everyone else cooks. Tish! Bah!

I took a look at Verge (see www.verge-rpg.com for more info), which is actually sorta cool, but I didn't really play with anything verge-related much this weekend.

Wednesday, 14 June, 2000

Did some physical exercise, as in pushups and stuff.

Slept for over eight hours.

There is nothing really exciting for me to put here, yet... stop pressuring me, dammit! (looks around, realises he's alone in his room, wonders who he's talking to) um... nevermind.

Tuesday, 13 June, 2000

Okay, it's been a full week, and I've been hard at work on M8-related things. I have a solid idea of what I'm working on, but as it is still a research and development project, there is nothing much to show yet.

I also went out to BMEX 2000, which was okay, I guess, but it hasn't interested me that much since Commodore went bankrupt, back in the early 1990s.

Tuesday, 6 June, 2000

Okay, these are the quickies:

• This weekend, I saw Battlefield Earth, Rules of Engagement (again), Super Nova, and Gladiator.
• My work on M8 began afresh and I realised what I need to change and stuff. The vacation was effective. Now it's to work.. and a lot of work it is. I'm making it more fun this time, I realise M1 was a lot of fun to do and from there I enjoyed koding less and less.
• I spent a lot of time with a lot of folks I know, and had a lot of fun. Too much to go into here, but the whole weekend had a magical quality to most of it.
• Talking to myself! That's what I stopped doing! Silly me! It helps a lot to talk to myself, and create imaginary friends to talk to, sometimes even when real friends are present (all the more fun). There's a sound reasoning to it, but basically, when I don't talk to myself, I'm never sure that what I'm doing is actually what I want to do, which obviously leads to a lack of confidence, and other ilky ilks.
• Brainstorming, did a heck of a lot of it... and, I followed through and did some stuff that I though about. And now I have evidence to supplement my theories. Things are going nicely.
• Me and a friend decided to attempt to play Street Fighter Alpha 3... more specifically, to beat the Arcade mode at a difficultly level of 8 (the highest). With Evil Ryu. Who has to fight Shin Akuma as the last boss. Say that slowly now... Shin Akuma, last boss, level 8, vs. Evil Ryu. Mind you, we are both Ken freaks, so we were there unsuccessfully trying to use Ken-style combos and estimating the range of the Shoryuken as if it were the move Ken has. That was the definition of pain and humilation, esp. with TWood (you! it was you! I saw you!) heckling us and cheering on Shin Akuma.
• I went to the beach at night. This is, I think, the most relaxing thing possible... and the most important. Something feels so right about going to the beach at night.
• Oh, and I suddenly realised that I needed to throw away most of the M8 code and start over within another paradigm. Actually, I had the idea a while ago but it didn't seem viable, and I wanted to finish the current fork to a certain extent... I really hate doing unfinsihed work... but in the process I really got the experience to show myself like, where I needed to change and how the new system would work.
• Wrote a page about M8, which should demystify what I'm working on a bit. Or not. Anyhow, go, read, feedback is welcome...I won't bite or bark too hard, and even if I did, this is the 'net, get used to it.

Other place on the pages of K31:

The old news archive page.

The S+ Page, featuring my very own silly little scripting engine.

My low-content introduction page .

This has been a production of K31. All mites create dust.

(*1): For reasons which I won't go into publically, De Menz always spell Joy with a capital J. .