Four Island

On the third day of Kirby Week, Four Island gave to me: A review of a random web-service.

HI. Welcome to Wednesday. Kirby Week is halfway over, how sad is that? Anyway, today's post is not as late and not as completely insane as yesterday's. Today, I'm reviewing Google Wave!

Okay. I'm not usually the first to know about something and this is no exception. I only found out about Google Wave about two months before it was released and that was only because Bluemonkey was ranting about it for some reason that I can't be bothered to check my chat-logs for. :P I wasn't really that interested.... that is, until I saw the features.

Google Wave boasts equal parts conversation and document. I didn't really understand that at first. Perhaps I still don't. All I did know was that it looked cool and people were apparently going nuts over it.

I finally received an invite from Bluemonkey and got to discovering. Google Wave seems to be a way to communicate and collaborate efficiently and quickly (in real-time, in fact). The thing is, however, I don't really know what I'd use Google Wave for. If I want to chat with someone, I'll use GTalk or Skype or Yaplet (which we are bringing back! :P). There isn't really anything compelling me to continue logging in and checking for new waves.

Not to say that my feelings toward Google Wave are completely negative. Wave seems to have some pretty neat applications. It's just that I haven't really found a need for any of them.

To end off this post, I'm going to present you with a surprise! I finally received my Google Wave invites today! So, if any of you still don't have Google Wave and would like to join in, please comment and I'll send you one! :D

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

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!

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

Okay, the other day, Bluemonkey sent me an email with a few links to some articles about RSS Cloud, a long-forgotten, but majorly AWESOME feature of RSS that hasn't really been implemented. Until now.

Basically, RSS Cloud is a tag in the RSS root that defines a "cloud" server that the RSS feed exists on. RSS readers that support the feature, upon finding that tag in an RSS feed, will connect to the cloud server in question and "subscribe" to that feed. What does that mean?

Well, when an RSS feed has a cloud, whenever something happens that will result in an item being added to the feed, a message is sent to the cloud saying "hai thar, i've got a new item!" And when a subscriber subscribes, it recieves all of the updates from that feed in real time.

Now what does that sound like? Yes, InstaDisc. But it has a few advantages and disadvantages over InstaDisc.

For the advantage, RSS Cloud is adding onto an existing method of data discovery, RSS. It doesn't require you to download some kind of new program, just the newest version of your favorite RSS reader. This also means that webmasters don't have to work as hard at making their feeds real-time. They would just have to add a cloud server to the feed and set one up instead of the complicated Subscription thing I had going on with InstaDisc.

However, it has a disadvantage. RSS Cloud only works if the subscribers' computer is web visible. Hey, that also sounds familiar! Yes, that's the reason why the first specification of InstaDisc failed. If RSS Cloud wants to succeed, it needs to take a leaf from the new specification: Use Reverse AJAX. Keep the connection open, use a heartbeat. Because the majority of people nowadays use routers and NATs and thus cannot be web visible.

So, there's my rant on RSS Cloud. It's awesome, but it has it's disadvantages.

NO NO NO. If you are making a funtastic level game like Karoshi, even though it may seem like a good idea, Level 49 of Karoshi 2.0 was a mistake. In case you are clueless, it involved you putting an Audio CD in your disk drive and stepping on a blue button in the level, which plays the first track on the disk and then advances you to the next level.

Ummmmmm no. Not everybody has an Audio CD. Not everybody has a CD drive. Not everybody cares enough to go out to the store, buy a blank CD-R, search their hard drive for a random song, download a program that burns CD Audio (Red Book is surprisingly nothing like any other CD format) and then burn the song.

However, I am insane. Lol. I reeeaallly wanted to beat that level so I thought "Hey, why don't I create an ISO file and mount it as a second CD drive?"

Ummmm no. First, WINDOWS IS EVIL. I'm stuck with Windows this week and Windows didn't want to help. I eventually found a program that mounted ISO files on Windows, but it was terrible and ended up being worthless. Apparently Red Book CDs cannot come in ISO files. Gah.

So, after a whole ton of false turns and ffsdfsdfdsfs, I discovered the solution. I downloaded Virtual CD (sadly, it's a trial) and CDRWIN (also a trial, gahness, but I really only needed to do this once :) ). CDRWIN is a simple program that lets you burn various types of CDs, including the elusive Red Book format. Virtual CD is a fake drive management program. Very useful.

First, I opened Virtual CD and created a fake burner, a fake CD drive with write capability. Then I clicked "Create a blank virtual medium" in the "Burn" menu and filled out the form so as to create a blank writable virtual CD in the virtual CD burner. Next, I opened CDRWIN and burned a simple Audio CD with one song I found on my memory stick (Christmas Canon by The Trans Siberian Orchestra) and burned it to the virtual CD burner.

Finally, in Virtual CD, I mounted the CD image created by the virtual CD burner onto the REAL CD drive. When I opened Karoshi, the stereo triumphantly did not state "NO CD" and I watched in happiness as the sound waves from the stereo pushed a safe onto my character.

Yes, I feel like omg cool yo. O_O That was weird, but YAY I DID IT. Lol, this post is going insane. Anyway, yes, I mounted a virtual Audio CD on a real CD drive. Funness. :)

I love how conversations, or even trains of thought, can go off on random tangents that end up somewhere completely different from where you began. For instance, this morning, I was bored and wanted to do something interesting having to do with a microblog (Automattic's new P2 Wordpress theme is really cool :) ), but I ended up writing an obfuscated C program that calculates a value of Phi. :)

First, I randomly searched Google for some interesting specialized themes, like P2, that could be useful. I found some that emulated Tumblelog, something I've wanted to recently. However, I had no clue what to do with my tumblelog, so I searched for it on Wikipedia and found that the name "Tumblelog" was coined by "why the lucky stiff". That name sounded familiar, so I looked into it by clicking on the link to his Wikipedia page.

Okay, maybe I'm easily sidetracked. :) Anyway, it turned out that he wrote "Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby", which I used when I was learning Ruby. I clicked on the link to his website, for some reason, and was instantly greeted by his latest blog post, something to do with Hello World programs.

Being kind of random, I clicked the link in the post and found a collection of Hello World programs in different languages. I searched for some of the languages I knew, and eventually I found PHP's. Near PHP's was a language called Piet, which drew my attention because it was a graphical language, not a text language. By graphical, I mean that the source code is actually an image, not some text. Those are always interesting. :)

Anyway, I looked around and found some more pretty programs written in Piet, one of them called JAPH. It had no explanation of what it did, and it didn't execute properly on my computer, so I clicked on the link and found myself at a Wikipedia page called Just another Perl hacker.

Apparently JAPH is a meme where you obfuscate Perl programs that say "Just another Perl hacker" and put them in your signature. I tested a few examples that were on the page and was astonished that they actually worked. Now, obfuscated code is fascinating, so I clicked on the "Obfuscated Code" Wikipedia page to find more examples, and even found a step-by-step guide to obfuscating code!

So, I just had to write an obfuscated program. I eventually decided on calculating the Fibbinocci sequence up to 100. It came out nicely and obfuscated, but I wanted more, so I changed it to calculate Phi (which was easy because I already had the Fibbinocci sequence).

Happy with my code, I looked at the tabs I had open in Firefox and suddenly realized that I had gone off on a MASSIVE tangent. I had completely forgotten what I had started out looking for, a fun microblog thing to do. Weird.

Anyway, I feel like I should post my obfuscated C program. This is for last week's poll's Phi-lovers. :)

#include <stdio.h>
_(double __,double ___){__+___<(sizeof(int)!=__LINE__
?~(1<<sizeof(int)*8-1):~(1<<15))?_(___,__+___):
printf("%-10.64f\n",1+__/___);}main(){_(1,1);}

Oh dear. A few days ago I read on Daily Blog Tips that due to Google acquiring FeedBurner that all feeds should be moved to Google's servers. The problem with that is that Google set a deadline. Feburary 28th. Worst part is, any feeds not transferred before said date will 404.

It's pretty easy to transfer your feeds. There's a link at the top of the FeedBurner member pages entitled "Move my feed now" or something similar, which lets you sign into a Google account to move the feeds to. Then it transfers the feed, which may take a very long time depending on the length of said feed. Then, you're done. You won't be able to sign in to feedburner.com anymore, but feedburner.google.com works. You'll also be advised to change your feeds.feedburner.com links to feeds2.feedburner.com, but if you don't, they'll redirect.

I think Google's mistake, though, is setting unmoved feeds to 404 after the deadline date. For instance, if I didn't read Daily Blog Tips, I would not have known about this. At all. I'm so detached, I didn't even know FeedBurner had been acquired! Imagine the problems. I probably wouldn't know a thing until June when someone complains that the RSS feed has stopped working.

So, you peoples who use FeedBurner, make sure that you transfer your feed to Google's server!

Ah yes. Due to some sortof reasonable reasons, I recently had to install McAfee Internet Security Suite on my Windows partition. A certain Wi-Fi network I depend on doesn't allow me to connect unless I am running "approved" anti-virus software. So, after the fee, I attempted to install.

Oh, would you look at that? McAfee comes with this new-fangled (you know I'm kidding, right?) download manager thing that downloads the programs for you. I loaded it up, and it just sat there and clicked. You know the sort of click, as if Internet Explorer is refreshing the page over and over again. Yes, I lost sanity. Easy fix though: Mute the speakers. But that didn't help me install McAfee.

I searched teh interwebz and found that the most likely problem was that I already had a virus. So I downloaded McAfee Stinger (which thankfully worked) and scanned my computer. Three hours later, it completed and told me that there was nothing wrong. GAH.

After a while, I found out that another problem may be that I didn't uninstall my trial copy of McAfee properly. So I ran McAfee's MCPR.exe program thingy and forced myself to restart the computer. Nope! Didn't do anything.

Exasperated, I finally tried the "Virtual Technician" thing it provides on the help page. It ran some sanity fixes (such as clearing the DNS cache) and lo and behold, the download manager worked! That was weird!

Wait a minute! After the download manager did a lot of stuff, it just sat there and told me that the installation had failed. .... I then tried the Virtual Technician a few more times and the installation a few more times and it finally worked. But that had taken QUITE a while. And all so I can continue to email people during Lunch. Hm. :)

One last thing I'd like to mention that's annoying me: At the bottom of the support page for McAfee, they have a button labeled "Fee Based Support". Is it just me or is it unfair to change people for support? For instance, a company could build themselves up (so they get good reviews) and then deliberately introduce bugs into their programs so people have to pay to get them fixed. Hopefully that's just me being paranoid, though, right? ....right? :)

Ooh, here we go with a series of coincidences that happen to make a problem, just like the Rubiwin Glitches. What do you get if you have Ubuntu, BIND and no internet access? A 50MB log file full of entries like below, of course!

too many timeouts resolving 'weather.noaa.gov/A' (in '.'?): disabling EDNS

Nah, I didn't find it that funny either. In fact, along with my Apache error.log of death, mah log files were spiralling out of control because they like to repeat cyclic data out of order so they cannot be shortened into:

last message repeated 303 times

Something had to be done. At first, I hadn't a clue why the negative my computer was attempting to access a .gov domain over three hundred times a second. Was it a conspiracy?

Um, no, probably not. I finally remembered that Ubuntu comes with a handy weather lookup feature in the time panel. It was constantly attempting to access weather.noaa.gov--where it, apparently, got it's weather data--and because I don't have internet access, it was resolving through MY BIND server instead of a root server's. And since I don't have any entries for weather.noaa.gov, it failed. And computers take the mantra "If at first you don't succeed, try and try again" VERY seriously.

I thought, "Oh, okay, I'll just go disable the weather thing." Wasn't that easy. I disabled it, but something was still querying the remote server. I then came up with a cheat: I'd add weather.noaa.gov to my BIND server! Then, it'd resolve, but nothing would come of it so everything could be the same just without the 50MB log file!

YAY! There's that done. Now I just have to figure out what the negative the below message means in Apache's error.log:

[debug] mod_deflate.c(619): [client 127.0.0.1] Zlib: Compressed 16400 to 4363 : URL /index.php