Life Smash!!!

Recently due to HF downtime, I was hooked up with IRC. For those who doesn't know, particularly those recently using the net, IRC is an old chatting network (that exist together even before the net, I think). Anyway, not much new user like to use IRC, since everything is command-like, and without any fancy UI like the famous MSN or Yahoo. I used IRC before, not pretty much on chatting but to fetch some Nipponsei release, which only feasible there.

IRC is pretty much fun for discussion. Since I've join in part of the modders team (as a translator that is), the debate on modding and translation does happens some time, and it's fun to watch the discussion. Some of the folks I met are geeks, and I even found myself a Sensei / teacher who's also part of the team as translator. :p I think I'll hook up in IRC for now on.

Found myself an interesting blog. Gaijin Smash is about an English teacher who teaches in Japan. His point of view of Japan, as an outsider (which Japanese call gaijin) is slightly different than what we normally sees in TV. Anyway, some of his post is pretty fun, and you'll find yourself seeing Japan in another angle.

Damn hooked up with shaders programming. I intend to add shaders into my project. A last minute rush to enhance the project, but I'm only possible to program low level shaders. Yeah, it's low-level enough, that Ill have to play with ASM instructions. Dunno what ASM is? For example to declare a variable A = 3, you'll got to

TEMP A;
MOV A, 3.0;

That's the easy part. Sometimes in order to do some simple calculation, the instructions can be quite long. And don't forget that the number of instructions are pretty much limited, and with version 1.0/1.1 (which I'm programming), conditional checking (if/else) ain't available. The newer versions, such as GLSL and HLSL would surely ease things up, but unfortunately, I do not have the resource to program them.

Phong shading is complete, though I'll need some experiment on material to get the best result of the vertex shading. Nope, I'm not going with textures. Now on my way to testing out GPGPU's concept on programming GPU. Nice ideas, but I don't know how many of the concepts apply to my old GPU...

HF closing!!!!

Oh no!!!! One of my most active community site is coming to and end!!!

Oh my, the HongFire network is a welknown community site for hentai, doujin and other japanese related stuff.
And guess what, it's not because the user who complain, it's not the Japanese company who complain, nor it's the hosting company that complain... It's the forum software company (that the site use) that complain of the illegal content and moral issues (of hentai).
LOL

Catch the disussion on digg

Christmas :)

Hohoho Christmas time again! Just went over to MidValley just for some photo shooting :p. Check out the photo album for more Christmas craze.

Fancy a tasty Christmas tree?

AutoCAD closing it's format!!!!

Oh no! Autodesk (AutoCAD) is moving to close it's famous CAD file format, DWG. Hmmm... well, those who still using AutoCAD as their primary CAD tools won't be affected, but those who use other than AutoCAD will be affected, as most of them relies on Open Alliance for their reversed engineered OpenDWG format.

Being a private member of the Open Allience, I received a mail from the alliance concerning of Autodesk suing the alliance. I'm using the library for my project, and more or less is affected as well. The library is pretty much easy to use (although not quite as user friendly as one might think), and it ease my effort to implement CAD functions in my project. Hmm... I would wonder how long the suing effort will last...

The discussion on Slashdot (http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/12/20/1348205.shtml)

Opera? Again

I just wrote that people are arguing about Opera for it's browser capability. But yet, I just read that Opera is working fine in a new prototype system for just $100. Seems that Opera is gaining some shares in embeded systems and mobiles.

Check the original post at Opera in OLPC

Opera?

Just read up a heat discussion over the "Internet Browser" war again. And this time, it targets Opera. Opera is a nice browser that I had been using since few years back. I believe back then it was v3, and now the latest is v9. Wow, it was really quite a long time.

I love Opera for it's nice and clean interface. Nothing too fancy, no loads of toolbars or buttons that I do not need, unlike those in IE, or sometimes even Firefox got. Opera is the first to introduce tab browsing back then, and a lot of other features intergrate with it, such as e-mail client, chat client, RSS reader, and even torrent downloading. Although I'm not using most of it's features, I do support Opera for it's fast loading and cache loading.

However, there's a few known issues with Opera. ActiveX won't work in Opera, and some other internet components (not sure the names) won't work as expected in Opera. If you read the post in SlashDot, you'll find different arguments on who to blame. For me, it was both the web developer AND the browser developer. Web developer to blame if their web test only works on one browser, which would be IE. I've seen a lot of site that's been based on IE, and it's not surprised that a lot of developer used IE as a standard. Lol, there're still a lot of other users that doesn't use IE...

For some web site that doesn't load up succesfully, Opera would be the cause. Well, even so I wouldn't blame too much for my lovely Opera. Nowadays it was known that ALL software contains bugs, be it some serious bugs, or just minor glitches. It should be the user side to decide which browser that suits them most. For example, I use Opera for most of the browsing, downloads, google searching, etc, for Opera is faster than any browser out there. But for some site that's not loaded up properly, I'll had to switch to Firefox (and occasionally IE if even Firefox can't handle the site). So far, I had little problem with this sites, which mostly are just blogging site (blogger, live.com :p).

So, decide whichever that suits your needs. I'll vote for Opera for the speed. :p

the arguments on Slashdot

Tired... X2...

Just come back from Rachael's convo, and was kinda tired walking here and there, taking photos, and even have a small walk to KLCC for christmas season! Yeah, I finally see the largest christmas tree in Malaysia! LOL.

 
The largest christmas tree in the country, at KLCC Suria.

Thos who seeking for Rachael's convo photos, fear not. Although my site is down (maybe for good) I've uploaded the photos (at least those in my camera) to Dotphoto The photos are slightly resized for better uploads. If you need the actual photos, I've uploaded them at Sendspace (28.4mb RAR)

Tired...

Tired... not really from the body aspect but the heart aspect as well...
Been reading, reading and reading again on some old technologies (er... 3 years?) and looking at some damn ASM codes that's hard to understand...

LOL, that's what it has to deal with when you're looking at low-level shaders. If I got new technology in my hand, I'll sure goes for GLSL or HLSL. But unfortunately, that'll be out of the question. Upgrading is no longer possible (since the old and new platform of AGP and PCIExpress), and the possible solution is to go for a new pc (which I do not have the budget)

And now, 110mb.com sure find its way to make some headache. Hosting service down, unable to login and access the site for random times. I understand the hard time to maintain the good services, but it was getting way too much down time and problems with the hosting that I'm thinking of moving the site for good. For the time being, everyone can try login the site via backup provided by the host. But, yet, even the backup contains some errors as well. LOL.

I've found a good site (or at least seems to be) for hosting the forum. JConserve claims to be the #1 phpbb hosting company, and for just the hosting, it seems fairly nice and efficient. The gallery will be either stripped, or thinking of using dotPhoto which seems to be a nice image hosting site, although got some minor problems. Well, everything shall had to wait till 110mb.com let me access my forum for good to backup, and to restore them to the new forum.

Time seems to pass up quite fast when you're either busy or hooked up with something. Recently beside reading and researching for shaders development, I've hook up with a nice little flash game. A C70 doujin hgame that is, and unlike most flash games that just provide CGs, this game requires some skills, patient, and a lot of luck in order to really beat it. Check it out.

Dillema... of old and the new

I had once said that my project is in it's completion. Yes, the basic objective is completed, but I found the project is just a collection of methods and tools that existed for the past few years. In short, nothing new in it. So, with every time I got right now, I venture into something quite new in graphic programming, shaders.

Actually, shaders is not new. It's already exist for the past few years, yet it only emerge recently with the great supporting power of technology and GPU. So, what is shaders? Shaders is a small piece of program, that instead of execute in your cpu, it is run in your gpu (graphic card). The actual implementation of the shaders is to take the heavy load out of cpu, and thus improve the performance or gaming experience (in which shaders are mostly used)

As technologies improve over the last few years, so do shaders. In the past, shaders are called low-level shaders, as the programs are mostly in ASM alike syntax, but recently GLSL and HLSL are emerging, and it ease programmers to write their shaders easily. So now I'm in a serious dillema, to learn either the new shaders (GLSL or HLSL) or the low-level shaders. GLSL / HLSL is going to be the main stream for shaders from now on, but as you know, newer technologies means newer requirement. My old Radeon 8500 doesn't support GLSL. However, low-level shaders (via ARB_vertex_program) are supported, but low-level shaders are quite hard to follow, and it doesn't worth since the introduction of GLSL. Haih... what to do now???

POV

A lot of things happens in the past few days. Well, of course not just the event of eating, drinking (and of course breathing), other events that seems to happen now and then. Most of them changes my certain point of view (POV).

To begin with, I believe everyone know the word, rats. Yeah, almost everyone hates them, or scare them. Those tiny creatures that creep around in the dark, and keeps destroying furnitures or causing havocs in house. Nope, I dun like them, and with my house full with rats, it's actually a wonder how I can live with them for so long.

Yupe, my house is full of them. I've seen some largest rats around, almost the size of a small kitten, and the smallest is just around 5cm long. Those damn rats ain't dumb, and are actually very clever, very very clever indeed. Most of the food that was stored in plastic container was bitten to holes (the only one that survived is tin container. Chili saurce anyone? Yeah, even the rats eat chili (no kidding). The most clever things that I've seen is how the rats can bypass the baricades I set to keep the rats away from entering room. The small rats lift the barricade (which is actually plastic that blocks the small space between the floor and the door), and squeeze themselves in. The same goes to "Sou kei" (the one chinese normally used to keep their food from flies), where the rats manage to find a way to get in and eat the yummy food there.

Enough of rats. (There's one that just run pass the living room now. LOL)

We have normally seen best selling books from successful bussinessman. Some of them teaches ways to do bussiness, while some teaches the way to think in bussiness. There're a lot of good examples of successful stories of those that follows the books, but like I said, they're just examples. The books are mainly used as a guide, to provide insight and examples for those who read. The readers will had to decide when and where to apply into their bussiness.

Yet, there's a lot of people who thinks the books as quick guideline to success. Seeing that people are doing great by following the books, doesn't mean you can do so as well. Like I remember my physics teacher once said, it's useless to remember the formula, if you do not know how to use them at the first place. The same method used by others to succeed doesn't mean the same will happen to yourself as well.

Ah... another rat kena tangkap. Nice, that makes 3 in cage now.

Been keeping myself hands full for the time being. Writing my thesis (reviewing my own draft and making adjustment while waiting my lecturer's approval), writing an english journal (which I'm facing trouble as it's been a long time since I used *proper* english), and took part in a translation project for wiktionary. Yeah, I never thought that I'll join the wiki project, but since I've been looking for a decent nice english-malay dictionary, why dun just join in the online dictionary? It got a long way to go, since the malay words in the dict contains barely <100 words. LOL

Buying Friends?

We often read or listen that friends are priceless. There's not a single value that can be tagged on friends (be it good or bad friends).

But yet, I recently read that people ARE paying to get their friends.

Nowadays community sites are growing bigger and bigger. More and more people get to know each other in these sites, and it was really a great way to get new friends, across the nations. Yet, paying in order to know one? It's more likely buying yourself a friend. And worst, a virtual friend that is.

I remember I used to post a lot in community sites. Most of the time, these sites kept a record of the number of posts, normally viewed as how popular or your status in the community. Sometimes they also grant you some virtual money (buying some virtual stuff?) and charma (for popularity, again). I used to keep posting useless post all over the place, such like "Thank you", "Hi there", etc, in order to push my post's numbers. Rethinking now, it was more or less a stupid action to do so.

Nowadays some of the community site that I kept visiting are HongFire (for Hgame and Jgame news), Anikei (for Nipponsei release and anime chit chat), and of course, my own community site. Although I'm not pretty much of a poster, yet, I don't think I'll pay real cash (ever) just to get myself popular.