Twittering Mad, or Why I Hate Visual Studio

Gah! It's been too long. I finally have the pento project hosted somewhere that properly allows PHP. Thus, the Pentomino Word of the Day should show up in the sidebar. Tell me what you think.

Afterthought: Please don't use the copy hosted on my site. Just ask me for the source.

I found an interesting website a few days ago called twitter. It's a sort of microblog service, that lets you use IM or SMS to post short blurbs about your current status. Your twitter home page has a list of recent twitterings from friends (subscribees), which you can alternatively have sent to you by, again, IM or SMS.

You might have noticed the twitter section of "about me" in the sidebar. At the time of this writing, it shows that I was "extremely pissed at Visual Studio" yesterday. Allow me to explain:

I spent half of yesterday debugging a Half-Life 2 mod. With Visual Studio. Half-Life 2 was never meant to be modified using VS, but Bob (CS 3500 instructor) hacked to fit anyway. It takes around 25 minutes to compile either of the two main projects. Unfortunately, this means that if you mess anything up, not only does it give you enough time to read an entire article from Exploding Unicorn, but it will also spew 637 linker errors at you, sometimes crashing VS. After each crash, I'd fix it by adding the appropriate library or whatever then build it again, and it would give different results! It turns out that if you try to abort the build (or it crashes during compilation), during the next build it will get very confused as to which object files have actually been compiled successfully, and produce invalid executables or libraries, forcing you to rebuild. This makes me wonder why they even let you abort, if it fouls up the process so much. Anyway, after discovering this, I used the half-hour before the bus left to speed-debug the whole thing, and it turns out I actually did find out why the flashlight wasn't turning on.

You'd think that this is typical, that I just made a mistake, but it doesn't have to be like that. There are plenty of ways of determining whether a file was built correctly. VS just doesn't bother. It assumes you know everything that happened last build, and just builds anything that hasn't been built yet (successfully or not). This may be slightly more efficient on its part, but it becomes less so when the program has 700 source files and you're forced to completely rebuild (twice).

OK, end of rant. By the way, if you have AC:WW and want some peaches or a mush-room suite, let me know here. I'm "Questionmark".

And, uh, happy Hallow's Eve.

Let it be hosted; let it be posted.

I have the script online at my old website, and I have a project page for those who want to learn more about my pento project.

EDIT: Direct access to the script isn't working, becuase the server is being stupid with permissions. When I get it fixed, you'll be able to see the word of the day in the sidebar, too.

Look out, Hyrule!

It's Camp Hyrule for me this summer. The virtual week-long summer camp, organized by Nintendo online administrators (NOA), is a sandbox of Nintendo-related online activities, including live chats and bulletin boards, Flash games, and unpredictable occurences. Campers are organized into cabins, which act as competing teams in many of the activities; prizes are awarded to members of the winning cabin.

Registration is still open through today, so get moving if you want in.

Completoration!

I've had much free time lately, so I've finished the PNG pentomino generator. Have a look!

This is the default image:

The script also has several parameters other than the word to penominify, such as

color,

size,

and bevel (depth).

Also soon to come is background color! Of course, since my script can let the background be transparent, that is probably the style of choice for most websites.

I'll soon give links to the source, once I get it hosted. I still want to be able to print some neat ASCII art pentominos, but expect to see a Pentomino Word of the Day or something in the sidebar soon.

EDIT: Heh, you've probably noticed the extra space at the top of each image. I'll try to get rid of that.

Pentomination!

My latest personal project, on which I have been working for a few weeks, attempts to draw words using pentominos. (Like Tetris pieces, but with one more 'mino'.) It's written in PHP, and I've got it doing things like

[]          []    []          
[]    [][]  []    []          
[][]  [][]  []    []    [][][]
  []  []    [][]  [][]  [][]  

which spells 'hello', and

   [1]                           
[1][1][2][2]      [4][4][4][5][5]
[1]   [2][2][3][3][3][4]   [5]   
[1]      [2][3]   [3][4][5][5]   

which is the word 'pants'. (For the confused, the pentominos are crammed together, distinguished by number.) While this is a good start, especially since I haven't before done anything like kerning letters together, I plan for the script to be able to create things like

                           _         
       _         _        | |    _   
 _____| |  ___  | |_      | |___| |  
|_   _| |_| . | |_  |_   _| |  _| |_ 
  | | |_  |  _|   | | |_| | | |_|  _|
  |_|   |_|_|     |_|_____|_|___|_|  
                                         
     ___                   _             
 _  |  _|    _            | |_       _   
| |_| |_____| |_   _____  |  _|___ _| |_ 
| . | | .  _|_  |_|  _  | | | .  _|_   _|
|___|_|___|   |___|_| |_| |_|___|   |_|  
                                           
   _             _                     ___ 
  | |    ___   _| |___           _ ___|  _|
  | |_  |_  |_|  _|  _|  _____  | | . | |  
 _| | |_| |_  | |_| |   | .  _|_| |  _| |  
|___|_____| |_|_|___|   |___|_____|_| |_|  
                                                 
       _         _                               
 _____| |  ___  | |___ ___     _     _       _   
|_   _| |_| . | | | . |_  |___| |  _| |_____| |_ 
  | | |_  |  _| | |_  | | |_   _| | . | .  _|  _|
  |_|   |_|_|   |___|_| |___|_|   |___|___|___|  

with a single command, and, ultimately, generate heavily customizable graphics in real time for websites such as mine (ooo...pentomino word of the day!). Once I finish one, the other should shortly follow, so expect several further updates.

EDIT: Here's one of my early experiments, showing the graphical style I had settled on:



Since I am still planning to follow this prototype, consider it a preview of what's to come.

Old S|<0oL tools

CS Lab on Wednesday introduced us to something new and exciting: the dot utility. Er, it's actually around 15 years old, but it's still as functional as ever. Here's how to draw a simple flowchart, for example:

First, I type this bit of extremely simple code into the file Flowchart.dot, so simple that many people reading this should be able to understand it:

digraph Flowchart {
    node1 [label="Program starts", shape=rect, style=rounded];
    node2 [label="Ask user's age", shape=parallelogram];
    {
        rank=same;
        node3 [label="18 or older?", shape=diamond];
        branch [label="Quit the game", shape=rect, style=rounded];
    }
    node4  [label="Finish starting up", shape=rect, style=rounded];
    
    node1 -> node2 -> node3;
    node3 -> branch [label="NO"];
    node3 -> node4 [label="YES"];
}

...then I type dot -Tpng Flowchart.dot -o Flowchart.png on the command line, and I get this:



Very slick, no? All I need to specify are the nodes and the connections between them, along with a few parameters for node shape, etc., in order to produce a nice, polished flowchart/graph/thing. Why are we fiddling with graphics and flowcharts, though? Well, we're currently studying directed graphs and shortest-path problems, and in order to help visualize the problem, we use dot.

Even neater is the fact that this utility, as well as several other similar ones (e.g. that draw radial or circular graphs), were recently packaged up with the name GraphViz and released under an open-source license, so that anyone can easily make a graph of the courses needed to complete their major:



Not that anyone besides me actually opts for Computer Engineering.

w00t, I'm published!

I got this email a while ago:

From: InfoWorld Letters
To: Y2kBugxp90
Date: Jun 16, 2006 6:11 PM
Subject: Re: Thank you for supporting Mac tinkerers.

We enjoyed your letter (below) -- and we are interested in publishing it in InfoWorld.

If you would like to grant us permission, please reply to this e-mail (preserving the history) and include your city and state for the letter's attribution. Your e-mail address will not appear in print. Should your letter appear in the magazine, please note that it may be edited for length or clarity.

Looking forward to your reply,

Alec C. Wagner
Deputy Managing Editor
InfoWorld


On 6/14/06 1:19 PM, "Y2kBugxp90" wrote:

Although I myself am not the type to recomplie Darwin, I most certainly sympathize with those who want to do something new with it. Your article hits the nail on the head, and exposes the commercialization of Apple's formerly liberal policies. Hopefully Google will continue to support open source, too.


Nifty, eh? OK, maybe not a big deal, but I've always wanted to make some sort of public stand for open source. If you're wondering, my letter was in response to this article.