Four Island

Gah, another two-week poll. I should really.... stop doing that. And I should really continue working on Pillowcase. Speaking of Pillowcase, here are the results!

YES!11!!!ONE - 3 vote(s)! No, 'tis archaic - 0 vote(s)! Maybe, cheese - 0 vote(s)! Indifferent - 0 vote(s)!

If you didn't get the archaic joke, read Drifty's The Girl In The Story. Unfinished as it may be, it's still very funny. :P

I've been noticing something with the Poll Of The Week. From some locations (by which I mean actual physical locations, as in another house), the AJAX Poll Of The Week doesn't work. I think I may modify the POTW so that if the AJAX request fails, it does a normal, non-AJAX request. The only reason I'm not sure I'm going to do this is because of the uncertainty of whether or not voting on the POTW will refresh the page, which could be very annoying.

Hey.... there's something different about Four Island.... Well, Fouripedia's back! Like, duh. :P

Fouripedia was removed when I created the 7th layout because I couldn't be bothered to fix it to conform to the new layout/it was hideously broken anyway. Well, I've made some changes. First, I've done some SSO magic, so now, if you've logged into the rest of Four Island, you've logged into Fouripedia as well. It also looks nicer and integrates well with all available layouts.

So, now that Fouripedia's back up, what're you going to do? WRITE PAGES FOR IT YAYY!!!!! :P

Even if you know me, you might not know that I am not good around glasses of water. Seriously. If there is a glass of water around, I am very likely to accidentally spill it. Lol, really. I've spilled water on books, homework, precious memories and expensive electronic equipment. And this is a problem because I'm almost over-hydrated, I drink way too much water.

So, it was just a matter of time before I did something with a glass of water that I would really regret. Sunday, November 8th, 2009. 11pm. I was in bed, with a glass of water on my bedside table. I got up to go to the bathroom, and as I did, my hand spazzed and I spilled my glass of water all over my laptop computer.

Yes, you read that correctly. Go back and read it again if you're not sure. I spilled a glass of water on my computer. I immediately pulled the battery out and dried it off with paper towels, but, being the impatient idiot I am, decided to try to turn it back on after only 7 minutes instead of the generally accepted 72 hours. It actually turned on.... for about 30 seconds, after which it would not turn on at all. The power button did nothing at all and even inserting the AC adapter wouldn't light the charging light at the front of the computer. So basically, I killed it. What's worse is that I got that computer on November 9th, 2008. Yes, you read that correctly too, I killed my computer an hour before it's first birthday. Oh, irony, it just keeps coming back.

So, after switching between freaking out and lying on the floor doing nothing for three days, we finally brought it into Geek Squad at Best Buy. We waited for an hour and a half on that line, and even tried turning the computer on while in the line, but it didn't work. When it was our turn, I placed the laptop on the desk and, seriously, the guy put his finger on the power button, pressed it, and the computer turned on. ???? I know, very weird.

I was ecstatic that the computer was working as I was expecting that it would have to be sent off to someplace for weeks and that I would have to survive without a computer. But, the enthusiasm didn't last. My precious fourie was spazzing a bit. Most of the keys on the keyboard didn't work, but luckily, the arrow keys did so I was able to boot into Linux. However, one of the keys must've been stuck because the username prompt kept filling up with "u"s and it was nearly unusable. The tech person told us that the computer would continue to get worse until it completely died, and advised me to buy an external hard drive to back up my data to. I ended up getting a 500 GB Seagate drive (which was really exciting because I'd never had an eHDD before) and left feeling very happy because my computer was at least working.

It didn't last. When I got home and tried to back up my data, I was having a ton of trouble with the eHDD. Eventually, I decided it was corrupted and was annoyed that I couldn't use it. Instead, I returned it and bought a flash drive (the exact same flash drive I use to backup trindla) and now use mondoarchive to backup my laptop nightly.

My laptop has been getting better, though. The spazzing keyboard has stopped, and even though I have to use a USB keyboard now (which is very annoying), the computer doesn't have any other visible problems. I even ran an extensive (it took 30 minutes) test on my hard drive and it came up as completely healthy. So, here I am, typing up this post on my precious little laptop. It's just so resilient :P

The moral of this story is, if your hand spazzes when it gets too close to a glass of water, don't put a glass of water next to books, homework, precious memories or expensive electronic equipment. :P

EDIT: Lol, I keep saying that I killed my computer an hour before it turned 1 year old, but I actually just found that November 9th has nothing to do with my laptop. November 9th 2008 was the day Four Island went back up from it's extended downtime. OCTOBER 9th was the day I went laptop-searching and found this computer, but October 12th was the day I got it. :P

The Gates Of Sleep! For those of you living under a rock, The Gates Of Sleep is my band-name-alias-type-thing-with-lots-of-dashes. One day, while playing the Debut Album game TimTam posted on the Fourm, I got the band name "The Gates Of Sleep", the album name "I Might Be Wrong" and an album cover depicting four glasses of differently colored liquid. And I thought it was the coolest thing ever and that it should be a real band/album.

So guess what I did. Yep, I gave myself more work. I started making music for this album. My first song was called "You Are So Wack" and sampled various songs, as did my second song, "Just Dance Under My Umbrella". I wanted to have some original work, though, so I then created "All Alone". Then, one day while making ice tea, I got the idea for the song "Ice Tea" which became extremely popular for some weird reason. :P I actually ended up making a video for it.

10 more songs and 2 bonus tracks later and I finished my album, "I Might Be Wrong". You can listen to it online at its website. Beware, though, it's very weird. :P Actually, making this music was very fun for me and I'm considering coming back with a second album next year. I've already got the album name and cover art for it. :P

By the way, this is the 250th post on my blog. :D

Okay, so last night, Drifty and I were talking about how I give myself a whole ton of work (Four Island, The Sabrina FanWiki, True Falsities, Pillowcase, Endlenge, whatever story I am currently writing for Four Fiction, KFM, FourPuzzle, my annual RPG and more....) and she dared me to do the following things in one day:

• Make 3 Pillowcase comics
• Write a Four Island post
• Write up an episode of Sabrina
• Write a True Falsity
• Finish chapter 1 of my novelette
• Work on my current programming project

Now, it's 3:56pm and I'm just completing the final item on the list. However, I didn't exactly follow the bet. Instead of making 3 comics, I made 6. Instead of writing one post for Four Island, I wrote 3! (The other two will come out daily, as per usual)

I didn't, though, write up an episode of Sabrina. I had decided that I was going to do that task first, and I went to the FanWiki to see which episode I needed to do next, and it was very evident to me that I hadn't visited it in a while. Every single page had been replaced with spam. And I mean replaced. The original pages weren't in the history so I couldn't revert the spam. So, basically, the Sabrina FanWiki has died. That's why it's been removed off of the Website Projects list. It amuses me, though, that I procrastinated from that project for so long that I didn't even notice it being covered in spam.

I still think I won the bet, though, Drifty, because I doubled my Pillowcase output and tripled my Four Island output. So you have to follow up with your side of the bargain. :) Oh, and my awesome True Falsity? The Gates Of Subliminal Messaging. :)

Um, whut? Half of you are alive and the other half.... don't care? :P

Yes - 1 vote(s)! No - 0 vote(s)! No, but neither are you. - 0 vote(s)! Indifferent (What?) - 1 vote(s)!

Gah, the Poll Of The Week is quickly becoming the Biweekly Poll. :( I have to stop being so lazy. I still haven't written posts on how I fixed my Ubuntu problem, The Gates Of Sleep and how I totally broke my computer.

As some of you may know, Ubuntu 9.10 was released a few days ago. I was really excited because each new version of Ubuntu comes with great new features and other improvements. However, the upgrade process needs to be improved upon.

As some of you may also know, I have never undergone a peaceful Ubuntu upgrade (except for Hardy to Intrepid, and incidentally Intrepid is my favorite release of Ubuntu :P). Gutsy to Hardy failed mid-download the first time, after which the upgrade button stopped appearing in the Update Manager, so I had to download the alternative CD and upgrade using that, which actually took 8 hours and resulted in Four Island going down for a while. Intrepid to Jaunty was done in a situation without my laptop charger (which technically is my fault) which nearly resulted in my computer powering off in the middle of the upgrade (which would have been bad). And now Jaunty to Karmic is not an exception.

The first thing I did when I got home on the day Karmic was released was to boot into Ubuntu, open the Update Manager and click "Upgrade to 9.10". I was then informed that downloading the required packages would take 27 days with my internet connection. Umm.... not quite acceptable. So I switched to the wired network, after which the download halted. I was confused, so I thought of restarting the download. No. After I clicked cancel, the Upgrade button vanished from the Update Manager just as it had done in the Hardy upgrade and do-release-upgrade wasn't a help either.

So I decided to do what I had done with the Hardy upgrade and download the alternative CD. Except, for some reason, my Internet connection was wavering like crazy, so I used the torrent to download it. At the rate it was downloading, it really would have taken 27 days to download. So, for some reason, I switched to Windows and tried downloading the torrent there. Surprisingly, it completed within an hour.

I then switched back to Ubuntu, mounted the ISO as a fake CD drive and upgraded using that. I was then notified that the disc only contained 1200 of the 2052 packages I required to upgrade. What?!?!?! Why wouldn't the disc contain all of the packages if it was meant for networkless upgrade? Annoyed, I let it download the rest of the packages, but it only managed to download about 100 of them because my Internet connection was so bad.

The next day, when I was out, I used a free WiFi network to download 200 more. However, there were still 600 packages I needed. When I got home, it downloaded packages for about 8 hours. Finally, the download completed and the upgrade started, though I fell asleep before it finished.

The next thing I knew, it was 3 AM and Ubuntu was showing a message stating that the upgrade was complete and that I should restart. Internally rejoicing, I restarted the computer. I noticed the new boot splash and the new login screen. It looked a little memory-expensive to me, but I let it pass and logged in to see my beautiful new OS.

The first thing I noticed was that the mouse no longer worked. I'm seriously, the mouse wouldn't move or click. At all. I opened a terminal using my majestic keyboard skills and googled the problem. Absolutely no helpful information on it at all. And the next thing I knew, the entire screen had gone gray and was covered in spazzing "E"s. ....that wasn't good.

I restarted (I actually had to pull out the battery to get the computer to turn off) and the mouse still wouldn't work. The gray screen problem hasn't yet reappeared, but my productivity is majorly impeded by the fact that I cannot use the mouse. I deeply hope this problem will be fixed soon because I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with 9.10.

So, there's my Ubuntu upgrade experience. Not very positive. Has anyone else here done the upgrade? Post your experiences in the comments section. Bye!

Hmm, no one voted for Pillowcase? Interesting....

The Blog - 0 vote(s)! Pillowcase - 0 vote(s)! Endlenge - 1 vote(s)! Other (specify in comments) - 1 vote(s)!

Incidentally, I have just started working on Pillowcase's third season. I don't want to put a date up in case I can't make it, but expect Pillowcase to revive around the end of November. :)

You may have heard of FourPuzzle. Sounds familiar, right? If it doesn't.... then you may have a point because I can't seem to find the post on Four Island about it. Anyway, FourPuzzle is my grand project. I know I already had a grand project that majorly failed, but I'm sure about this one. FourPuzzle is (going to be) a C++ library that allows you to easily make an RPG game.

"Right," you may ask, "but what does that have to do with the title of the post?" I'm getting to that. See, I started implementing FourPuzzle around November of last year. In Java. Yes, it was originally a Java library. When I had implemented about half of the specification, I came to an important realization. Java is slow. Mmmmhm. It's awesome library and cross-platformness came with a price. A price that didn't work out so well in a game.

So, I stopped development on FourPuzzle in March and sort of forgot about it. Then, when it became time for me to start working on my yearly RPG, I remembered FourPuzzle and though "Hey, it would be great to make this year's RPG in my own engine." So I started trying to implement FourPuzzle in various languages to see how it would work. C++ lasted about 5 seconds before I realized how complicated that would be. C#/Mono lasted a bit longer, but it simply wasn't cross-platform enough for me. Then, I discovered Qt.

Qt. Is. Awesome. It's a C++ library that I like to explain as "Java for C++, without the Java." It's cross-platform. It has a huge amount of classes and functions that I can use (some of which have names very similar to their Java counterparts. I mean, really, FontMetrics and QFontMetrics? :) ) It has a resource compiler. It has a UI designer. It has everything. I am in love. :)

I had previously disliked Qt for the sole reason that KDE was written with it. For those of you who don't know, I use GNOME. GNOME PWNZ. :) But Qt is not responsible for how it is used. Qt is awesome. And it will be used to implement not only the FourPuzzle library, but also an editor program that will allow non-techie people create a FourPuzzle game without having to touch a single line of C++. Stay tuned for details :D

I did it again. Stupid me with the stupid habit of not updating the POTW. Pralsh.

4.5 - 2 vote(s)! 6.2 - 0 vote(s)! 7 - 1 vote(s)! Other/None - 0 vote(s)!

YAY 4.5 TIS AWESOME. Okay. :) Anyway, horray for the Theme Switcher! :) And I totally fail at updating! Like, anything!