Website Backups

Today I made a Website Backup. This post has nothing to do with the Server I'm currently working on. Unfortunately I didn't get time to work on it, as I promised myself that I would only work on it for an entire day at the minimum.

I made the site backup using the FileZilla FTP Client. Of course it runs on Linux, otherwise I wouldn't use it. It's quite convenient, here's a (huge) screenshot of it running:


And yes, the blurry parts are not some cool graphic effects of the program, they where added in by me using GIMP for security reasons.

The backup took me quite some time. After realising it was going to take longer than expected, I wanted to know what exactly was so space consuming on my server. My first guess was correct, the pictures where to blame. In dismay I realised I had forgotten to compress them before uploading. This obviously wasn't good, so I started GIMP and slowly re-saved every picture at a lower quality. Of course this could have been done using a macro but there weren't that many pictures and I was bored. As a result my site may (should) load quicker now.

And that's all for today, just a quick post about my site Backups =)

Exams Ended & Got tons to Do !

Those terrible terrible worthless ugly exams are over!
I have two months of free time now! YAY!
Jealous Much?

Here's all the fun stuff I'm planning to do:

(I'll strike them out as I finish them)

- Get my Site up to Date
-- Update Articles
-- Update Software Section
-- Maybe add a Login Section
-- Add Comment Section
-- Add a ToDo list
-- Finish of the CSS
- Create a New Blogger Style
-- Similar to Style of my Site
- Install SSH on an OLD laptop
-- Wipe HardDrive
-- Somehow get a Command Line Running
-- Note: Windows and X Window Server don't work
- Help a Friend finish psp.zirconcode.com
- Read a Book on the Linux Kernel
-- 19 / 19 Chapters Left to Read

Those are the things which I'm going to finish first. After that, I'm going to start on the more heavy stuff =D

Edit:
The ToDo list has moved to my sites ToDo section.

Exams coming up

Yup, that's right. I have exams in exactly two weeks. I apologise, I don't have much time at hand right now to do anything, I'm wasting using up all my time studying.

And guess what the good news is?

After that I get a 2 month vacation =D

Plans for Summer Break:
1. Finish of Website (remove bugs, update content)
2. Work on a MMORPG (hopefully finish Beta!)
3. Work on my Neural Net
4. Write tons of tutorials (AI/HTML/CSS/DOS/BASH/PHP/C/Java/Delphi/etc...)
5. Have Fun =D

I really can't wait =(

Myself in Code

// I was bored so I tried to define myself in Java-like Code

while(alive)
{
if(challenge)
{
workhard(challenge);
fun = true;
}
else
{
System.out.println("Bored!");
fun = false;
}
if(getNewIdea() != null){challenge = getNewIdea();}
drinkCofee();
Ego++; // according to my friends =D
}

Blogging Schedule

I have noticed that my blog is causing me some stress and time loss. The problem is that I feel like I need to post something as soon as possible so that I won't disappoint you people reading my blog. What makes this problem a real problem is that I have other things to do besides blogging. I need to go to school for example.

Well the solution I came up with isn't really great for you readers, but it's great for me. From now on I'm going to post once every week, either on Saturday or Sunday. This doesn't apply to holidays of course. This way, I can't disappoint anybody since they don't expect me to write anything during the week. The positive point for you readers is that my posts will be of a much higher quality than my previous posts, so don't be too sad.

I'm mostly writing this because I have lost 10 RSS subscribers since my last post and I really don't want to lose any more. Please think of my blog as something you read weekly, not daily.

If this post makes you sad, comment.
If it's fine with you, comment and tell me so =D

I would also like to thank the Holy Chris Pirillo and Zaibatsu and all the other people for sending 1191 views to my previous post =D

Update

I finally finished the Exams and my reward is the next Semester =/.

Right before the Exams I got interested in Neuroscience. I kind of started thinking how easy it would be to simulate the brain if you would know how a neuron worked. You would just have to make many of them right? After watching this and this Goggle TechTalk I was really interested in the stuff. Unfortunately I had to study so I didn't have time to pursue the matter. However I did borrow some Psychology books from my schools Psychology guy.

I got pretty good semester and exam Grades, all of them above 90% except for French which was around 75% =(. Well I guess I can't complain since I never studied for anything except for the Exams. I'll just have to start studying =(.

After the Exams I got a 4 day break and I created a working model of a 100 neurons interacting together within a week (I think that's pretty good). Unfortunately the connections are random and static, something which I'm going to work on next. Also I'll have to implement some output and input 'neurons' so I can put the brain into a testing environment.

The negative aspect of me getting interested in Neuroscience is that I won't be able to work on my MMORPG as much. My excuse is that I probably won't have an entire day to work on it anyway. I will continue the work on my MMORPG as soon as I enter the next Holidays. I feel kind of bad about abandoning the MMORPG for now but I think Neuroscience is a lot more important to my career. I hate to make choices =(.

Since I don't have enough time to write more here's a List of things I have/want to do:
- Work on Brain (not mine)
- I'm developing a Twitter Application to save time
- I feel like making a Monster Hunter Portable 2G cheat which will make me start cooking in the middle of battle. Just to annoy my friends when we fight something important.
- Finish off an FTP Password Cracker
- Release some of my older Delphi Apps.
- Improve website and add more Social Networking Functionalities.
- Create a timeline of my life for various unexplainable reasons.

As you can see I have tons of things I want to do. Now I just have to fight my laziness and do them =).

Back to School

There are only two days left of the Christmas Holiday for me and unfortunately I still need to do some school work. This means that I probably won't have a free day for working on my MMORPG for a long time, hopefully I can get a free day next weekend but no promises. This time of the year is the time I hate most since I have exams and projects due soon after returning to school.

I calculated that I have about an hour of free time on a typical school day if I don't go to bed too late (little sleep = me be grumpy and dumb). I'm not sure what I'm going to do in that hour yet, maybe work on some small project or improve my website or something similar. I've always been interested in psychology and I'm currently reading an introduction (600 pages!), maybe I'll delve deeper into neuroscience (sounds interesting). Or maybe I'll just play Shogi (Japanese chess), I learned it in just half a day so there's probably room for improvement (learning some strategies etc.). I'll probably find something to do, lets just hope it's productive =).

side note: This reminds me, I wanted to make a list of a 100 negative words because my English teacher said I should learn new vocabulary and this was the first thing which came to my mind (go figure).

MMORPG Day 9

On Day 9 of MMORPG development I turned the player into a grey box and allowed him to walk around. To do that I had to implement collision detection, which is easy to do for tile based maps.

The walking was handled by four methods in the Character class: walkUp, walkDown, walkLeft, walkRight. When a method was called (probably by a key press), it checked if the player would collide with the tile the player was about to walk on and then accordingly moved the player. The collision system looks something like this:


Each tile had four edges, each of which could be walk-through or not. To move the player the walk-methods had to check if the corresponding wall on the current tile was walk-trough and if the corresponding wall on the next tile was walk-through. If this was not the case, the player was not moved. In the above case the player (black dot) wants to move left. The tile the player is on allows that but the tile the player is going to move too doesn't so the player isn't allowed move.

I had to make an additional collision map for my current test map. The collision map stores the collision values of all four walls of each tile in the map. It was a simple arrays of 0's and 1's, where a 1 stands for collision and 0 stands for walk-through.

Each time the player moved his height he had too be properly adjusted so that if he moved to a higher tile, he doesn't sink into the floor and if he moved to a lower tile, he doesn't float above it. This was also handled by the four walk methods. The methods simply found the average of the tiles Vertices and used that as the players height. This has some disadvantages on very very steep tiles but I'm not planing to let the player walk on top of tiles with more than a 45 degrees slope.

It's kind of great to be able to walk around the small test world and I'm happy because the MMORPG is now a big step closer to being finished.

Christmas Break

I have just entered Christmas break!

I have given up on the Hardest Logic Puzzle on Earth for now. My friend has told me that the answer can be found at Wikipedia so if you are curious take a look. I myself won't look until I think I found the correct answer, I'll keep trying every few weeks to see how much my brain has grown.

As I stated above Christmas break has just begin for me and I know have exactly 20 days of free time on my hands. Maybe take away one or two days for Christmas and after. I'm currently trying to think of a big project to start and finish during these days but I haven't thought of anything fun and exciting yet.

I have optimised the website layout further and my "Games and Applications" section is starting to take shape. It's still pretty bland but I have already uploaded my very first Java game. As you may have guessed, it's a Pong game. It's not the best game but it's certainly fun to play for 5 minutes or so (I hope). The sound magically vanished when I uploaded and I'm trying to fix it.

Have a Nice Christmas Break!

Fighting Boredom

I'm not getting anything done lately since I'm very bored. I'm not so sure yet why I feel like doing nothing all day lately but I'm sure it's a severe case of boredom. I don't think it's laziness since I don't feel like doing fun stuff either, things like programming or writing random stuff are normally things I like to do but lately I just don't feel like doing them. I think I got bored by these things because they don't provide a challenge any more. Of course programming takes a lot of time and is something hard to do but I have the blueprints of how I'm going to do everything I want to do in my mind and there are no obstacles standing in my way. Except time of course, but that's not really an obstacle since I have more than enough of it. I hope I'll get over this total lack of enthusiasm soon.

Since I'm not going to get anything done due to boredom I've decided to make a list which I have to follow. Excuses about boredom are not accepted.

List:
- Make website Internet Explorer Capable
- Finish of Website Layout
- Create Help Files for my Website
- Add my E-Mail address and the likes under "Contact"
- Add one Game under "Games"
- Finish of Current Content
- Think of more ways to use up time:
- Maybe get Traffic?
- Put on more games?
- Create an Article Section?

Im Back

I'm back from the holidays. It took me quite a while (eight weeks) to meet all my friends again in Germany and Switzerland (I'm currently living in japan). I went to a sea in the middle of the woods in Germany, it's very beautiful out there. I saw my grand-parents (all four are still living). I ate tons of pudding and Swiss chocolate. I saw a gigantic digital billboard at a train station displaying a blue screen. I took the airplane twice and ate really bad food. Unfortunately I didn't have Internet access during that time so I couldn't post (that really sucked). Did I mention that the airplane food sucks?

Anyhow, I've decided to pause my development from my 3D engine and create myself a website. I really need one to post my Java apps/games and I'll add this blog to my website too (if I can). The website will also contain a contact formula (not showing my e-mail address). Later on, when there are more visitor I'm hoping to add a forum and an account-system which saves your game high scores and the like.

That's it for today...

Going on Holidays

Yeah, I'm going to switzerland for about 6-8 weeks or so I'm not gonna post anything during that time. I'm in a rush right now, have to pack this and that....

btw: I hate Flying

Ubuntu

SummerHoliday = True;
if(SummerHoliday) System.out.println("Yay");

A friend of mine(my teacher, heh) got me interested in Ubuntu and I must admit it's rather god(intention++; spelling--;) compared to windows. I'm trying to install Ubuntu on my current computer so I will have dual boot(XP/Ubuntu). So far it's all working except the start-up takes 5min., that's the thing I'm working on right now of course.

Ubuntu is a great operating system if you enjoy do-it-yourself guides and want to know whats going on behind the scenes. It has shiny, quick, great, beautiful, work-enhancing, graphics which you can turn off if you have a different opinion. It's very clean since everything can be installed by packages from one place. No need to buy a CD or search the web for a cracked version, everything is completely free. (rambles on about how secure it is...) *dreams on*

After installing Eclipse and if needed JDK/JRE (Java Development Kit/Java Runtime Environment) I'll be back to my 3D engine. I thought about a simple implementation of colored triangles and field of vision fog.

Timeless

The end of the (school/university/whatever) year is quickly approaching and with it the terrible tests. I don't have a lot of time this and next week so I'll just do some simple speed optimizations on my 3D engine.

My very First Post

Hello,

I've finally decided to get a blog. I'm new to this thing so if I'm doing anything wrong (which I'm certain of) please leave a constructive comment to help me out.

I've been programming for about two to three years now. I first started out with Delphi, an object oriented programming language coming from pascal which is relatively old now. It's really easy, you just drag components onto a form and double click onto them to add source code. It was kind of a shock to me that you couldn't do that with java when I finally switched over to it two years late. I got over my shock quickly and have learned to love java. My current development environment is Eclipse and I mostly make applets since they are easy to share over the net.

If anyone DOES read this please comment. I will be very happy.

p.s. I'll be working on this template a lot so don't expect this site to stay like this
p.s.2 I'll try to post a lot (you've probably heard that often by now)

Delphi: http://www.codegear.com/products/delphi/win32