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Recent Search Terms

December 16th, 2006 (permalink)

It's been a while since I posted oddball search engine terms with which people have found their way here, so here goes.

About half of the searches are related to SQL or SDL, which is quite understandable. Then there are lots of programming and somewhat fewer (but still surprisingly many) electronics related queries. And then there are the weird ones..

There's also plenty of queries related to the Bloodshed Dev-C++ suite. Unfortunately, it seems that the project is dead (or at least silent), and as such I don't see much point in trying to support it. Please don't write me questions about it. If the tutorial that I wrote is helpful, great, but I'm still not the Bloodshed tech support.

Anyway, some of the searches that I picked from the list:

Right.

I believe they are rather similar to their 1d siblings.

Welcome to the 21st century.

Welcome to the X-Files.

Instead of lookup table, you may wish to try the Taylor series. For example,

x - (1/3)x³ + (1/5)x⁵ - (1/7)x⁷ + (1/9)x⁹ ...

Yes, I do believe the biohazard sign is symmetric.

Not for me at least..?

Ewww. I don't know, though. If it was possible, it would probably be common knowledge, knowing people. Some people, that is. Not everyone. Nuh-uh. And no, I'm not suggesting anything.

Depends on the graphical lcd. Unfortunately there's no one standard for that.

Good luck!

Try www.fluidtoon.com

Time to clean it then?

Good question. I've been taught that brain runs on sugar, and since you're supposed to use your brain when coding, I guess it makes sense that you'd need more sugar. Maybe.

Yep, I guess we are.

I don't even want to know.

Introduction to pc? Like, "this is a keyboard" kind of thing? Curious. Where would you run it?

They've done all sorts of things but web comics?

I'll pass, and anyway, I'm married already.

Oh please God no!

Leave it there, please. Or even better, get rid of it.

I think you've confused some things there.

Possible, since xp has to virtualize the old system, so it tends to take more cpu.

Never used after effects, and I haven't even heard of illusion in this context.

Now, I've never owned a rifle, even less one with a scope, but I'd guess you can just let it melt and dry it?

(value >> bits) & 1

Mostly just by reversing the steps you made when taking it apart. I hope you didn't just bang it on the table, as those kinds of steps are a bit hard to reverse.

Now, if you're just confessing your beliefs to the search engine, good luck with your game and all that, but if you're looking for someone who claims that, well.. good luck in general.

I like to think that this is what the above person said after not finding anyone. Why would anyone use those search terms and how they ended up here is a mystery to me.

Wash. Your. Hands.

The snow-simulation chapter of the graphics tutorial seems popular..

Is someone really looking for the "most original idea" by googling?

Creepy. Go see a doctor.

Now, people may think that I'm against mmorpgs in general just because of my stand that everyone and their mother shouldn't start their own hobby mmorpg project (gather some like-minded people and do a co-op! It's fun! Just don't ask me to code it for you for free!). I'm not. mmorpg:s have potential, even if at the moment they do seem like web chatrooms with fancy graphics and repetitive gameplay..

How lazy can you get?

You may wish to look up fatmap2.

Welcome to the 21st century.

I think the official standing is, "don't", but I guess you can do it by changing the application's code segment memory protection to 'writeable', and remember to flush code cache after editing. Don't ask me how.

Using XOR. See my boolean algebra tutorial.

Since shifting by 4 is the same as multiplying by 16, it makes sense that multiplying by 16 is the same as shifting by 4..

Buy a faster PC?

((X & 0xf) << 4) | ((X & 0xf0) >> 4)

...

The question includes the answer. What's wrong with you people?

I guess based on the context that thrust is the force that affects acceleration, probably in an increasing manner.

sqrt(-1)

This query has several things in it that I don't quite get. The first being how it ended up here. Second is that the person who wrote that probably thinks that search engines can understand the syntax "starts with letter", which, as far as I know, they don't (unless you do things like x*, which then is specific syntax to the search engine in question).

If you're referring to 'boom boom driller', it saves automatically. If it doesn't, you're probably out of disk space or are running the game from a read-only directory, such as directly off a CD.

It's not available for public download that I know of..

Bookworm Adventures

December 10th, 2006 (permalink)

Been wasting some of my time playing bookworm adventures. After playing it through with my wife, (and noticing that the game's dictionary doesn't have many useful long words), I figured I'd run it through again, this time cheating with a program that uses a huge dictionary.

Get the cheat program here (about 3 megs). It may also be useful if you're playing other word games where you have to find meaningful words out of alphabet soup, like scrabble. Naturally it will reduce the game to utter boredom, but hey, I'm not forcing you to use it. =)

The cheating program's dictionary - which is based on the material from wordlist.sourceforge.net - is not cleaned up in any way, and contains all sorts of curse words, so be warned. It also contains thousands if not tens of thousands of words more than bookworm adventures has, so its use may be somewhat frustrating. Anyway, I figured someone might find it interesting..

As the tool is not an engineering marvel in any way I won't be releasing the source unless someone specifically requests it.

Bit Twiddling

November 17th, 2006 (permalink)

New tutorial, rejoice! Bit twiddling - My take on bit masking, bit manipulation and Boolean algebra, for all of your shifting, xoring and notting pleasure.

Tolkien vs the Finnish Population Registry

October 25th, 2006 (permalink)

Some fun stats from the Finnish population registry. Mia did some database searches based on some of the Lord of the Rings character names, and apparently there have been people named as follows in Finland (mostly after 1980)

• 1x Aragorn
• 1x Bilbo
• 1x Celeborn
• 1x Elbereth
• 1x Eowyn
• 1x Isildur
• 1x Luthien
• 1x Merry
• 1x Mithrandir
• 1x Theoden
• 2x Meriadoc
• 2x Peregrin
• 2x Tinuviel
• 2x Turin
• 3x Beren
• 3x Frodo
• 3x Varda
• 4x Lorien
• 5x Gandalf (one of whom is a woman)
• 5x Silvan (all men)
• 7x Galadriel
• 18x Arwen

There's also some small updates in my Fluidtoon and GameToy projects (where I've done some "mobile 3D").

The invitation demo to TMDC 9 should be out soonish, even though it won't be by me.

TMDC9 Prizes, Fluidtoon, Recent Search Terms etc.

October 15th, 2006 (permalink)

TMDC9 prize info is available, go check it out now! We have some very cool prizes this year. Maybe even too cool. You might get a frostbite.

Another little project of mine - www.fluidtoon.com - a lightweight, easy to use animation program for Windows.

Boom! Boom! Driller! is finally starting to get some downloads, over two thousand in the past week! Glad to know that people are finding it finally.

Some recent oddball search terms that found this site:

Try Wolfram MathWorld.

Try good old Pythagoras.

Try.. what?

Never heard that one, sorry.

I don't quite get what this person was searching for..

..but this one oddly sounds like schoolwork. Just guessing, naturally.

Using lines?

Who is this iki person? Thing? Whatever?

And what does he (she? it?) have to do with shoes in japan? And how did that end up here?

Nope, haven't made line age 2 yet, and no plans to do it either.

I probably should roll out a simple bit twiddling tutorial at some point.

That probably depends on how you disabled them in the first place.

Yes, it often does.

Such is life.

Uh, thanks, I guess?

O_o

There's No Such Thing As an Overkill

September 21st, 2006 (permalink)

TMDC9 site is open, go check it out.

I thought I'd share with you a little thing I did a couple years ago, which could go under the heading "what happens if you give too unclear tasks" or "definition of overkill".

Background: I was taking a beginner's C programming course at school. Before we had covered stuff like addition or substraction, one homework we got was worded (approximately, as I'm translating from Finnish);

"Define structure that describes a cpu. Think what kinds of things go into a cpu, and declare the suitable fields." Part B of the task was "Use the CPU structure. Create two CPUs and output their information."

This is basically what was wanted:

#include <iostream.h>
#include <string.h>

struct cpu
{
 int speed;
 char brand[20];
}; 

int main()
{
 cpu mycpu;
 mycpu.speed = 200;
 strcpy(mycpu.brand, &quot;Intel&quot;);

 cout << mycpu.speed << &quot;\n&quot;;
 cout << mycpu.brand << &quot;\n&quot;;

 cpu second;
 second.speed = 1000;
 strcpy(second.brand, &quot;AMD&quot;);

 cout << second.speed << &quot;\n&quot;;
 cout << second.brand << &quot;\n&quot;;

 cin.get();
 return 0;
}

Now, this is what I actually did: (I've omitted comments from this version to save space on this page; the real version was very throughoutly commented)

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

struct CPU
{
    char stack[256];
    char ra, rb;

    char *ip;
    int  sp;
};

void init(CPU *cpu, char *code)
{

    cpu->ra = cpu->rb = 0;
    cpu->ip = code;

    cpu->sp = 0;
}

void state(CPU *cpu)
{

    cpu->stack[cpu->sp] = 0;

    cout << &quot;CPU state:\n&quot; 
         << &quot;ra: &quot; << (int)cpu->ra
         << &quot; ('&quot; << cpu->ra << &quot;')\n&quot;

         << &quot;rb: &quot; << (int)cpu->rb
         << &quot;\n&quot;
         << &quot;ip: 0x&quot; << hex 
         << (unsigned long)cpu->ip << &quot;\n&quot;

         << &quot;sp: &quot; << cpu->sp << &quot;\n&quot;
         << &quot;stack: '&quot; << cpu->stack << &quot;'\n\n&quot;;
}

void run(CPU * cpu)
{
    char command = *(cpu->ip);

    cpu->ip++;
    switch(command)
    {
    case 'a':

        cpu->ra = *(cpu->ip);
        cpu->ip++;

        break;
    case 'b':
        cpu->rb = *(cpu->ip);

        cpu->ip++;
        break;
    case 'p':
        cpu->stack[cpu->sp] = *(cpu->ip);

        cpu->sp++;
        cpu->ip++;
        break;
    case 'd':

        cpu->sp--;
        cpu->ra = cpu->stack[cpu->sp];

        break;
    case 'j':
        cpu->ip += *(cpu->ip);

        break;
    case 'o':
        cout << cpu->ra;

        break;
    default:
        cout << &quot;\n\nUnknown command: '&quot; 
             << command << &quot;'\n&quot;;
    }
}

void main()
{
    CPU a, b; 
    init(&a, &quot;p!papppppipephdododododododoj\343&quot;);

    init(&b, &quot;pHdopOdopIdoj\363&quot;);

    int iteration = 0;

    while(iteration < 100) 
    {
        iteration++;
        run(&a);

        run(&b);
    }
    cout << &quot;\n\n&quot;;
    
    state(&a);

    state(&b);
}

This was an online course. The only comment I received from the teacher was ' :-) '.

GameToy Update

September 19th, 2006 (permalink)

A little update on the GameToy front..

Story Time

September 17th, 2006 (permalink)

It's been over four years since the last one, but I've just posted a new story, mostly written on long bus trips this weekend. It's a bit dark.

Games Getting Easier, Better?

September 10th, 2006 (permalink)

I probably should be doing something study-related, but I figured I'd blog about something people don't seem to realize about the history of computer games.

Were old games better than what we're getting today?

At the beginning, most computer games were coin-ops. When you design a coin-op game, you want to optimize it so that it takes as many coins as possible. If you tried 'Gauntlet' now, this would be rather obvious. The game is difficult, but you can get more health by pouring in more coins. Gauntlet II was a real multi-player: one player plays the game, and the second pours in the coins.

So it was natural that games were hard. Most of the games people created for home computers were influenced by coin-ops, but they took home the wrong lessons: games were hard to play. Which was ok, I guess, to make the games more replayable, but did little to make games widely popular.

Old sierra on-line games (like early Space Quest episodes) consisted mostly of ways to kill off the player without any kind of warning.

When Lucasarts started doing adventure games, they turned things around and made some base rules, such as that players should never find themselves in a situation where they have to start all over again because of some mistake they made long ago. They also added a lot more content to the games while they were at it.

Games have gotten easier, but also more complex, as time has passed. If you look at Grand Theft Auto series, for instance:

• As far as I know, there's no way to save in GTA1, except maybe after you've solved a whole city - never played it long enough to find out.
• In GTA2, saving costs you money (assuming you find the place where to save to begin with).
• In GTA3, you only have one place to save at any time, and returning to old save places is bad idea.
• In Vice City and especially in San Andreas you don't only start off with several save places, but you can buy more.

I guess someone can argue that GTA1 was better game than San Andreas, but I think they'll be in the minority.

Nowadays the game making science is aiming to optimize games in other ways than just trying to eat as many coins as possible. Console games are different from PC games for a reason. There are some games that work both on console and on a PC.

PC games are typically played by a single person, possibly against some other person on some other computer over the net. Console games tend to be more social, livingroom multiplayer happenings. Wii will most likely change things even further.

Now we have a new category of games, namely "casual games", which show that you can have smaller scale games that are still fun - without killing your character off every five seconds!

Making money with casual games can be difficult, though, as while the market is much bigger than it was in the 80's, reaching the customers can be just as difficult, and there are plenty of games out there already. Finding the very good casual games is also getting more difficult for the same reason.

Another new thing is this "episodic content" thing. I've had an idea of episodic RPG, kind of like Sierra's Hero's Quests were, for over a decade. I suppose the idea was just too obvious =)

Since the industry is re-inventing itself every now and then, I'm hoping someone will come up with a roguelike that doesn't do its best to kill off the player every five seconds..

IMGUI and Text Fields

September 10th, 2006 (permalink)

Added a rather code-heavy new chapter to the IMGUI tutorial - text fields.

Let's Get Physical

September 9th, 2006 (permalink)

Been busy and moody lately. Schoolwork is also ramping up. I have received a couple of physical mails that I haven't mentioned on this site which I have postponed far too long.

First is Carlos José Pereira, a teacher from Brazil, who was kind enough to send me a bunch of gorgeous postcards and a hand-written letter. His mail arrived over a year ago, so I'm really, really, really slow at processing these.

The second is Juho "Gylo" Pulakka from Finland who also wrote me a hand-written letter.

I'm sorry for not mentioning these earlier, and it's difficult for me to express just how much these things mean to me.

If you've gone through my site, you may have noticed that I'm not asking for any money on this site (never mind that it would be illegal in Finland to begin with), and all of my hobby projects are pretty free for anyone to use.

The only compensation I get (or desire) is a friendly email (postcard, or a written letter) every now and then. If something I've done has made you happy, tell me about it! (As for the google ads, they really don't even cover the server costs).

There's also a small bugfix release of the 8051 emulator available.

Looking at the search terms to find this site, I can see that there are tons of terra nova, SDL, AVR, 8051, wxwidgets and lcd searches going on. Here's the latest bunch of oddball searches:

Welcome to the 21st millenium..

Pretty much the same as dee 2, with a new intro code if I remember correctly.

there must be millions of sites with these keywords out there, and you found mine?

that's kinda small, but I suppose you could make it readable, if you stick to upper-case alphabet. Maybe.

for a single source file, sure, but other than that, I don't think so.

That's a bit out of my league.

Add colors together, look out for overflows.

I'm pretty sure I don't cover after effect stuff here.

The folks at avrfreaks may be able to help you, but have you writed the reset pin?

Hard call, but lots of cool textmode demos are available at the TMDC downloads page.

(bpp >> 8)*pitch*height, or thereabouts.

dev-c++, the last time I checked, was free software. If it isn't, check out codeblocks.

the answer to that depends much on your target environment.

Rounding is a tough question, as there are multitudes of ways to round a number and none of them is really "correct", but usually you may get away with trunc(value+0.5).

it's karma cameleon, not coma cameleon!

I don't care what you keep in your closets..

Good luck!

With care?

Not from me, at least. Not anywhere, hopefully.

Linux doesn't use BIOS at all, so you don't get to use int 10h either. Maybe you'd better check out SDL instead?

Creepy.

Graphic LCDs don't have standard font sizes. They're graphic, you know.

Maybe you wanted to look for MUDs instead? You know, multi-user dungeons?

What's with all these weird religious searches finding a mostly tech-related site?

Although I did buy and build one, I haven't used mine for anything. And it's quite likely that I'd rather use an AVR controller as USB host if I'd make something that uses USB, but for quick tests or something, the experiment board is fine. Who knows what I'll end up using it for..

I hope my explanation cleared things up.

Your multithreaded programs are more likely to crash if you haven't taken care of thread synchronization correctly.

Google Money

September 3rd, 2006 (permalink)

Got my first google adsense payment - exactly one year after I put the ads online. =)

Also, updated GameToy a bit.

Sometime in the summer I started pondering on whether it would be fun to play around with a wacom tablet. Fact is, I can't draw - if I practised a lot, I might still learn, but never to be very good at it. What I meant with playing around was to write software for one.

So, we were shopping for a laptop for my wife, and I noticed that the lower-end graphire pads was going for about a hundred euros, and since our bill at the computer store was already high enough, I figured to buy the tablet for the heck of it. They had 'normal' and 'studio' versions available, with a couple euro's difference, so I went for the 'studio'.

As it happens, the main difference between the two was the inclusion of photoshop elements, and the version included in my version was an old/outdated one, which explains the low price. New ones appeared in the store next week with something like 50 euros higher pricetag.

Anyway, I played around with the pad for a while, and figured I might as well install the elements thing, and the installer asks whether I'd like to purchase the full Adobe Photoshop CS2 for a very high discount.

I pondered upon it for a while, since we'd just blown tons of money and CS2 isn't cheap even with the discount, but ended up taking the offer. In a way, I had just bought Photoshop CS2 with a steep discount, and got a wacom tablet for free along with it.

I've only glanced at the programming API since, but it appears that the pad is fairly easy to program for. We'll see if I find the time sometime this decade to do something with it..

IMGUI Tutorial

August 30th, 2006 (permalink)

Sometimes I wonder about strange things, like, which are more greedy, ZZ-Top with "Gimme all your lovin', all your hugs and kisses too", or blues brothers when they go, "Gimme some lovin', every day?"

Anyway, a new tutorial: Immediate Mode GUIs, using SDL. Comments appreciated.

Since the school has started, I don't know when I'll have time to play with hobby projects again. Then again, since I tend to tie hobby projects with school ones, there might even be more activity around here..

Recent Search Terms

August 20th, 2006 (permalink)

Among tons of Alpha Centauri, 8051, SQL, AVR and programming search terms, recently some people have managed to find this site by hitting google with the following:

You'll get over it.

Sounds like something from Japan..

Try it sometime?

It appears they no longer give this out, and all you get is a 30-day trial or some such. A pity.

Tried sprintf yet?

Mail me about it, maybe I can help?

Don't mail me about it, try valve instead.

Why would you want to?

Translate random point to origo, rotate, translate back. Or something like that anyway.

You took time to write that into google without trying file->new->project?

Uh, ok.

Pirates Movie, the Second

August 18th, 2006 (permalink)

On subject of Pirates of Caribbean: Dead man's chest, I agree with vgcats. On the ending bit, at least.

School's starting soon, so I don't know whether I'll have much time on hobby projects again for some time, but we'll see..

Post-Assembly Braindump

August 12th, 2006 (permalink)

Time flies when you're having fun, and also when you're serious enough with it not being fun, in my case getting a stomach flu of some kind.

Anyhoo. I thought I'd go a bit more bloggish again. You may notice that I had some time to ponder about things between trying to sleep with a fever and trying to throw up..

First off, Assembly came and went, and with it, 10th position in the game contest. I don't feel bad about not getting a top position, as there were plenty of great games in the contest this year (and surprisingly all were completely different).

What I do feel a bit bad about is that the ranking was completely based on the video shown on the big screen. All of the top 3 games had funny videos. The winner by unreal voodoo deserved to win, in my opinion, since it was best of show; the second place, by Jetro Lauha was easily the most innovative one.

But the third one - a game played on a PocketPC, which reportedly didn't work on just about any PocketPC out there even? It's very unlikely that many people could have tried it out on the party place. But it had a video with a lot of profanities (in Finnish) which, I guess, people found funny. Our game had a lot of small details that were lost on the big screen, so it didn't look that cool. Oh well.

Anyway, for the 'secret' that I mentioned beforehand - As I know that anything that is released on the Assembly site gets a wide distribution, and the game contest file size limit being 50 megs, I figured I'd give a bunch of indie bands a hand and build a "ea sports"-style jukebox into the game, promoting said artists.

So, what follows could be subtitled "Sol's adventures in indieland", or, "Sometimes it's hard to help some people."

Indie artists are trying to get their music out there, to make a name, maybe score a big contract, so I figured they'd leap to grab this kind of opportunity. In addition, all of the songs I was asking for were already on the next big hit, so it's not as if they were risking the "loss" of anything to the great wide audience or anything. Maybe it was my approach, but the results were a bit different.

In the end I approached 20 separate bands. 7 said 'no', either in a very kind way (thanks especially to Danielle McKee for that), a very professional way (a nod towards Connor Raus), others in less kind and some in a rather angry manner. In one case we were even asked to do some extra work in order to get rights to use the song, at which point I was left wondering why am I trying to help these people?

Another couple never answered, and one mailbox bounced, being full. That was, by the way, that band's only contact address. One band had split up, one had just got a major label deal and could not care less, and one had just decided to give up all their rights to a copyright management agency, so their hands were tied. Yet another band was just changing record labels, and their rights were so tangled up that they couldn't - even if they were interested - get into the project at the schedule the deadline demanded.

Then there were some people whose contact info I simply could not get, however hard I tried.

So. Humongous props to ANEMO, RiPPED, Jake Niemi and United By Sound for joining me on this little experiment, and I do hope the game will drive their sales, as all of them, in my honest opinion, do deserve to "make it". Buy their stuff!

The game itself is easiest to grab from the Ass Hat Designs website.

On another note, watched underworld: evolution on DVD. The DVD gives even further incentive to stop buying DVDs and just get the movies off the net. Why am I forced to watch the trailer to some crappy horror movie that I could not care less? It's not as if I want to watch the trailer ever again if I want to check out some extras from the DVD, but they force me.

Someone showed a bit of skepticism about my "never downloaded a movie off the net" mention earlier - just as a note, I've bought over 100 movies on DVD, and that's not including a bunch of boxed sets. As such, I think I could be considered a "good customer", and I'm slightly ticked off that I'm being punished for playing along with the rules.

As for the film itself, as sequels to hugely successful movies go, it wasn't horrible, but it could have been so much better. The original had a complicated plot, something that made it as good as it was. The second one had the plot so stripped down and spoon-fed that there wasn't time for much interesting, and as such it felt like many of the scenes were just fillers. Yes, we know that the vampires fought the lycans. Point made. Move on. And for character-building purposes yes, the fact that Selene and Michael had a moment in bed, ok, but implying that would have been enough, even though the acrtess is beautiful.

Talking about character-building, it just didn't happen in this movie. It was like the whole good/evil bit was thrown though a treshold filter, and everything rotated around a bunch of main characters, forgetting the huge legions of lycans and vampires out there.

That said, it wasn't bad, but after letting the audience scream for more after the first movie, it's a pity. If they hadn't tried to make the sequel accessible to people who hadn't seen the original, it might have been a better. Maybe they just couldn't get the actor who played Lucien on the first part and had to scrap the original script. Who knows?

I guess that's enough ranting and raving for a bit.

Boom Boom Driller etc

July 31th, 2006 (permalink)

The game we worked on for Assembly will be out tomorrow at the assembly site (around noonish finnish time) along with the other contestants. We'll see how it goes..

Look for 'Boom Boom Driller' by Ass Hat Designs.

I'll probably be too busy to take notice, however, since tomorrow is my first working day at Bitboys.. or ATI.. or AMD? =) Funny old world.

I've ranted about stupid copy protection earlier, but I'll share a little rant with you about something that happened to me recently. I've never copied any moves off the net. I don't see the point. There's few enough good movies out there, and I happen to like the extras they put on DVDs. Now some movies have started to have this unskippable anti piracy advert in the beginning of the DVD, which simply screams to me:

If you had had the sense to pirate this film - See, we're actually showing you that you can actually download movies off the net for free - we wouldn't be able to torture you with this stupid piece of crap.

Media companies, please. Stop punishing the people who actually pay for your goods.

As a side note, I ordered a few indie albums off cdbaby recently. Appears there's plenty of great non-major label stuff out there, and some podcasts like the next big hit that help shift through the masses for the gems. Your mileage may vary and all that..

Update on Various Fronts

July 20th, 2006 (permalink)

Put the hardware project on pause while concentrating on enjoying the summer, spending a lot of time in our summer cottage, and working on a game for Assembly. Not the same game that I mentioned before, though. There'll be a couple of surprises there though, as I've made a rule that there's no point in me doing anything for Assembly unless I'm doing something that nobody has done before.. =)

Played half life 2: episode one. Short but good. Also played hitman:blood money, which is not as short but also good (although I wonder how they managed to make a street with a hundred people run without problems but a single christmas tree slows everything down)..

Little else to report so that I don't spoil the surprise. I've been looking at the search terms people have used to find this site, and since some are rather funny, I'll give you some (and thus will probably generate some completely random traffic to this site as well).

Most of the search terms are what you might expect, like "graphics tutorial", "galaxql", "sdl putpixel" or "sql tutorial", but then, there are some stranger ones..

probably refers to the keyboard cleaning project.

probably ended up with my MMORPG rant..

and various other permutations show that other people want to play the game on modern systems - and I hope SolVBE helped..

didn't find it here.

.. right.

sounds like someone tries to figure out what this 'life' thing is..

I wonder how that ended up here =)

try some soft padding maybe?

Sorry, no such thing.

doesn't, as a sentence, make much sense to me.

no thanks, I'll keep using firefox for now.

it's kinda like gouraud, but you interpolate normals instead. Mkay?

Sorry, no can do, but have you tried SDL?

that'd be lovely, but nobody seems to exactly know who owns the rights to terra nova these days.

now that's a very good question.

.. right.

..but neither do windows exes on macs.

See, someone's asking for it, but they won't let me do it. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

this one creeps me out. Especially the fact that it ended up on my site.

Beats me, but I'd guess that it mostly depends on what you do on that extra year. Myself, I was coding.

that's nice, but how on earth did you end up on my site?

a² = b² + c² + d² - for 4th dimension, just add e².

well, not exactly..

hint: arrays.

I think it's sugar, lemon, lime and carbon oxide, mostly.

Wrong sol, perhaps?

ttcore.dll is a part of the Compuware DevPartner performance analysis stuff. If you think you need that DLL, it's likely that whoever built the executable you're trying to use forgot to disable the profiler before building the distributable copy.

floor(yourvalue + 0.5) might do the trick.

that's one bent ruler, I tell you.

uh oh =)

What the..?

Many people seem to be interested in deluxe paint animator and its animation format, which, to me, shows that there's some interest in a simple animation program. Hm..

There's also plenty of questions about bloodshed dev-c++. At the moment it seems that the development of said software has stalled or died (yes, I know, my graphics tutorial seems pretty much the same at the moment), and as such I'm pondering on supporting code::blocks in the future instead.

..and the Sky Full of Stars

June 22th, 2006 (permalink)

Been busy with several projects, and read a bunch of books as well - Terry Prattchett's "thief of time" is another pretty good book by him. On a slightly sad note, spacemusic podcast ended. Oh well, it was fun as long as it lasted.

On ludum dare front, the results for the eigth contest are in. No top-3 places for me this time, although I think I still fared fairly well with "..and the sky full of stars" - fun:5th, production:8th, innovation:5th, graphics:35th, sound:6th. Tonic grabbed three top-3 places with his 'lone warrior'.

I also submitted GalaXQL 2.0 into the Apple Design Awards, although I'm not exactly holding my breath on the results =)

GalaXQL 2.0 Source Release

June 4th, 2006 (permalink)

And to wrap up, the GalaXQL 2.0 source release, which should compile out of the box for linux. This time also supports wxWidgets unicode builds, so should work under ubuntu as well.

GalaXQL 2.0 OSX Release

June 4th, 2006 (permalink)

And here's GalaXQL 2.0 Mac os X ppc/intel universal binary. Thanks to Seth A. Robinson for testing on an intel mac.

GalaXQL 2.0 Windows Release

June 3rd, 2006 (permalink)

Can you tell whether I'm on vacation? Introducing.. GalaXQL 2.0 (windows version only for now)

GameToy

June 2nd, 2006 (permalink)

Presenting GameToy, my summer hardware project. I'll be blogging about it on that page.

Hell Froze Over

May 23th, 2006 (permalink)

So. The hell finally froze over. Wouldn't have expected that to happen in my lifetime, but then again, never expected to have to choose between nvidia and ati as work places either.

I have a couple of projects planned for the summer; we'll see how well they go. First is this idea of a game that I might be able to wrap up in time for Assembly game compo; the idea requires several technologies (including network) that I've never done before, so I'm not entirely sure I have the time =)

The second, which I'm even less sure about, is a hardware project. I'm thinking of building my very own handheld console. Not a PSP killer by any means, as it'll be based on a 8-bit microcontroller and a monochrome screen.

Schoolwise, I've now accumulated over 150 study credits (out of 240 to graduate) - since that's over 100 old-school 'study weeks', I'm feeling pretty good about it. Still a couple of years to go, but the biggest obstacle I'm seeing right now is swedish, which is a mandatory course. I haven't spared a single thought on the language for the past ten years, but I still have to study it, most likely to quickly forget it afterwards, again.

A limited-time offer: if you're a finn, or just happen to live in finland, are a coder, and interested in working on high-end mobile game technologies, toss me a mail, as I know a couple of companies who are recruiting.

8051 Simulator 0.7

May 14th, 2006 (permalink)

Released version 0.7 of the 8051 simulator, along with sources. This version includes support for 44780-style 2x16 character text LCD output.

Forgot to mention earler about these 'rules' I wrote about surviving a ludum dare 48 hour game design contest. As usual, comments appreciated. That also applies to the 8051 simulator.

Ass Hat Designs

May 9th, 2006 (permalink)

First off, I registered a new domain as my "game label" - if I ever start to sell games or some such, I'll probably use this as the "company". Check out the minimalistic game portal at www.asshatdesigns.com.

Second, ludum dare had its eigth 48 hour game design contest, and I entered with "..and the sky full of stars". No idea about how well it ranked yet, as the voting is still going on. Some people do feel that it's addictive, which is promising.

Third, after good five and a half years at Fathammer, it's time to move on. After a long process, I decided to go with Bitboys, who have been recently been acquired by ATI (this wasn't the deciding factor on my choise though).

8051 Simulator

March 24th, 2006 (permalink)

Sorry about the downtime, the server was being upgraded.

Months just keep swishing by, don't they? It was just a few short weeks ago that I posted pictures on my keyboard-cleaning project..

Oh well. Anyway, the somewhat oversized image is about my latest project; an 8051 emulator. 8051 is a somewhat simple microcontroller which intel introduced around 1979 or so. I think the most important aspect it has today is that it's easy to program and it's easy to do electronics projects with.

Why am I writing an emulator for it then? Basically because the old ones used in school were a bit.. outdated, I asked if I can make new ones as a project. And here we go. You can find more about this on the 8051 emulator page (also accessible through 'stuff').

Keyboard with a Wookie's Worth of Hair in it

February 25th, 2006 (permalink)

I cleaned my keyboard after six years of daily use. Lots of grimy pictures.

I spent most of my vacation writing some physics lab reports, but I did have time to run through the bad-to-okayish Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (while heavily cheating) as well as the great-to-amazing Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (without cheating). If you've played warrior within and was disapointed (esp. after sands of time), be sure to pick up the two thrones; it's the best of the three by a very wide margin.

Got Married

February 19th, 2006 (permalink)

Got TMDC8 prizes mailed finally; sorry for the delay. One reason for that, as well as for the lack of updates on this site is.. well.. I got married! =)

I have a huge stack of stuff I have to go through related to GalaXQL and the graphics tutorial, but right now I'm not sure when I'll find the time.

Busy

January 14th, 2006 (permalink)

School started. Busybusybusy.

Some applications, such as Civilization IV or QEMU have problems working properly under multiprocessor or hyperthreading environment. I hacked together a program launcher that can be used to launch a process so that Windows tells it only to use one CPU. Use at your own risk, etc. Sources included.