Long week over

Whew, I just came back today from a damn long week, thanks to guard duty last Sunday and a parade today. Spent the day cleaning up my computer desktop and reading up on some web sites. Sadly my actual room is still a mess. I don't know what I'm gonna do this week for block leave. I hope I don't waste the whole week away on playing games.

Flock

Trying out this new browser has given me a chance to update my blog again. Flock is based on the Firefox code base and features integration with various web services, such as Blogger. So now I'm posting using the browsers built-in interface, and it's a bit unwieldy but a lot more convienient than the web page interface. Not that I write a lot here (too busy with this).

Edit: Ok I just saw that I can view all my previous posts and edit them with Flock's interface. Just changed a few errors in my post. I'm never using the old Blogger site to post again.

Testing some desktop stuff

Just finished a few hours of Dungeon Siege 2.. it's the digital crack I never wanted. Didn't do much today, but spent quite a bit of money still. Random crap like a 2-pin AC plug and music cd. Also, watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (not to be confused with a certain 80's musical). Very surreal, certain parts were very amusing and creepy, and it completely destroyed the impression I had from my naive childhood memories of the book. Thank you Tim Burton! Willy Wonka certainly has got some deep-rooted angst! Flaming gnomes!

I was surprised to see one of my company-mates in the news today.
Link.
Damnit, he's smart.

I've changed the title of this blog to better reflect the content.

Programming programming programming.
Ok.

Using a combination of Ruby with RUDL, I've been trying to develop a simple GUI. My first goal is to display a window that can be dragged around the screen. Other interface elements include buttons and a text field.

I also have some idea for a simulation game, but still not sure where to start. That's why I bought the Pragmatic Programmer book, maybe it will give me some wisdom to begin with.

Virtual Cobwebs

Damn, this place has become abandoned, even more than my usual tardy standards. I've been on some army courses lately, but that's just an excuse... I simply haven't got any energy to write, and even my own programming projects have fallen by the wayside. Over the weekends I've been playing a lot of games, to recharge my batteries. Now that the course is coming to an end, I have yet another one coming up! This time it's only a two-week engineer course, hopefully it's a bit more relaxed.

I brought a whole bunch of music cds to camp this month, and I've finished listening to most of them. The ones I like the most are by the Flaming Lips. I have 3 of their albums and they all rock. Among my other favourites are the White Stripes and Badly Drawn Boy. The CD I'm listening to right now is Bodily Functions by Matthew Herbert, and it is good.

So..

Why no updates recently? That's because I've been having little to gripe about. Life has been pretty good in the army ever since I got my injury! Getting excused from physical training rocks, I can always go to the gym on my own anyway.

Err anyway, I sprained my ankle while playing soccer, and I've had difficulty walking ever since. I've gone for western and chinese treatment to make it heal faster, but only now (4 weeks after injury) my leg is starting to recover. I'm not too sure whether that's a good or bad thing.

Guild Wars has also been taking up a lot of my weekend time, I can't even get started on my programming project. Damn my lack of willpower!

What I have been doing the entire weekend

Ritual
Originally uploaded by Eugene Tan.

Link.

Wargames

This week, our brigade conducted a wargaming exercise. Basically a war strategy game held on computers.

Although my trainer described it as 'being like Starcraft', I found that difficult to swallow, because the graphics are minimal at best, the gameplay is boring as hell, and one Starcraft mission lasts 2-4 hours, while one Wargame mission can last 2-4 days.

It's a pity I didn't get to catch a glimpse of local celebrity Tay Ping Hui, who was locked inside the opposing forces room. After seeing the carefree manner in which our commanders expended the troops during battle, I can only hope that those great military leaders use us a bit more sparingly in the event of an actual war.

Flickr

FYP Presentation Day
Originally uploaded by Eugene Tan.

Just testing out my Flickr account, a service for storing and sharing photos. This photo shows my final year project group during those fun-filled poly days. That's me in the back, looking hip n' all.

Weekend

This week was even more monotonous than the last. Besides SOC, which I failed to complete again, there were no other activities of note. For some reason, a bunch of guys brought their guitars. So we had a near-continuous stream of pop music in our bunk all week. I went to Borders today and bought a bunch of new rock albums, to help cleanse my ears.

Before that, I had lunch at Hotel Meridien with my family, to celebrate Mother's Day. It was a pretty glam affair, because Minister of Development Mah Bow Tan was there.

Sadly, I didn't get the chance to work on my game project. On the other hand, I finished watching the 1st season of Bleach, and I'm now starting on Beck, which is cool! ^_^

2 days left...

I started on my weekend project today. Woke up early, around 10 a.m., then surfed the net for some information on Ruby (which is the programming language I'm using). Then my mother wanted to use the computer, so I had to wait. After lunch, I went out to play soccer.

Came back around 10 p.m. Didn't really get to do much work today, haha. Right now, my shooting game looks like some red blood cells are attacking white blood cells. I'm going to plan out a list of to-do items here:

1. Implement the controls
2. Create the scoring system
3. Put in a few types of enemies
4. Figure out how the game ends
5. Steal some nice graphics from sites like this
6. Put those graphics in the game, and some background
7. Make a main menu
8. Package everything into an exe file

Seems like a lot to do. I'll get to it tomorrow.

By the way, I've been using this bittorrent site a lot lately. It kicks ass, because the anime episodes are packaged in complete series, and they have manga, plus live-action movies too. If only it were updated more often. You need a user account though. Get one from here.

Slack

This week was quite a good week, and we had quite a bit of time to rest and relax. There was an IPPT test again, which I somehow managed to pass. That leaves SOC to clear. Finished watching Constantine on my palm. It was fairly entertaining, despite Keanu Reeves. It's crazy how much content I can fit on my Palm, I almost have to force myself to go through them. Maybe I will start writing some reviews of comics and anime. :)

There's just so many distractions around me. I still remember when I first came to BRC, I set a few noble goals for myself:
1. Learn Japanese
2. Learn Ruby
3. Improve my guitar skills
4. Make a video game
Ok, maybe they're not so noble, but at least it's a lot more productive than... whatever I'm doing now. 10 months into national service, and I'm still no closer to achieving anything. I really do need to focus a lot more, and treasure what time I have.

Weekend project
I had this idea of using the coming long weekend( due to labour day ) to focus and build a small game. My chances of success are slim, but even if I can't meet the deadline, I hope to learn something and gain a small measure of satisfaction. If it gets done eventually, I'll write up a "game diary" of all the steps taken, which I'm sure will be lots of fun.

Fun PDA stuff

Having a pda definitely makes my life less dreary during the long hours spent in camp. I can safely say that all those days spent away from home has forced me to find new uses for my handheld. Anyway, here's a list of things I do on my Palm :

Manga
I download manga from websites like this. Then I upload and view them using GrxView. I can fit about 7 volumes on my 256mb SD card, inclusive of all the other crap I put in there.

E-books
The screen on my palm is sufficient to read books comfortably. I use iSilo and Repligo to view my books. Sometimes I put web articles/ guitar tabs in there too.

News
Using Plucker together with Sunrise lets me download web pages/ Rss feeds for later perusal. If you don't know what rss is, think of it as the pure text portion of a web site.

Games
I used to think emulation was dead on the palm, but then I recently found Little John. It can emulate snes/ genesis/ gameboy games at a decent speed.

Blog
At the moment I'm writing this post on my palm. It's the first time I'm trying this, but I should have thought of it earlier. Perhaps now I can add more entries to the site so it doesn't seem so damn dead.

An invaluable tool I use is cardexport, which allows me to access the sd card in my palm directly. It's much faster and more convienient then using the default palm install method.

Smooth buttery pleasure

After some technical handling, my computer is up and running again. It turns out the problem was with a few bad sectors on my windows drive. Fortunately I had two OSes, so I was able to run scandisk to solve the problem.
I'm running counterstrike:source as I'm typing this. It's great that the developers had a 'run in window' option. Initially the game gave me some problems with lag due to my wireless network. Turning off "wireless zero config" under windows services solved the problem. Multiplayer is a smooth buttery pleasure now.

Infrequent updates, superficial content. What's the point of this site really?

I created a del.icio.us account, so anyone can visit it. Maybe gain some insight into my viewing habits, and learn of some interesting links, which are all stolen from other users anyway.

I just learned that my friend army vocation consists of maintaining web sites. Chatting and surfing the net while playing games. And getting paid to do so. As if that wasn't ludicrously fortunate enough, he's being sent on some advanced dreamweaver/flash course to upgrade his skills. I ought to wish him all the best, but my thoughts consist only of jealousy and rage.

Been toying around with Firefox lately. I just installed an extension which offers IRC chatting capabilities. Poking around the #singapore channels and such gives me the impression that IRC denizens are a pack of sexual predators.

Yet another quickie update - I'm just squeezing them in the best I can. Recently purchased Half-Life 2, which probably needs no introduction to any PC gamer. It's very slick and intense, and I'm just at the beginning. Quite a few things have been keeping me busy lately. These things mostly include the playing of video games. It's not like I can help it - it's been a month full of blockbuster games so far. My "To-do" list includes the aforementioned Half-Life, Vampire: Bloodlines and Metal Gear Solid 3...

Meanwhile in my military life, I've failed to get into the bike course, which means that I'm staying in camp while my compadres get to race around on scramblers. Oh well, at least I have quite a bit of time off, to do my own thing.

A random smattering of links

del.icio.us a bookmarking website, i just use it as a source of interesting links. seems to be updated every time i click the refresh button.

ruby take the hassle and pain out of programming by learning ruby, a high level programming/scripting language. not only is it easy to use and flexible, it can also be integrated with Java or C, so you're not throwing your existing skills away.

shacknews games news, updated daily with interesting features like 'late night consoling'

Hehe, another sproradic update. I'm having a long weekend right now. Life at my new unit is real slack at the moment. I wonder how long it will last... real training will probably start after my motorcycle lessons. It's getting hard to update this site, my life is so routine at the moment. Time really passes when you're in the army. Plus, blogger keeps eating my posts :)