Funk

by Dennis••5•Posted inJournal

Funk YouIt’s becoming harder and harder to deny to myself that I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. For the last few weeks now I’ve felt lethargic, lacking in energy and motivation, which hasn’t done me any favours in terms of work, training or Corrosion. Also, I’ve been foolish with the amount of sleep that I’ve been getting, but when I do get enough sleep, I never really feel rested when I wake up. As everyone knows, I’m a big proponent of snow. It started when the snow went away. I’m not sure if there’s a correlation, but there you go.

As a result, I’ve been struggling through my work days, doing things with little motivation, which makes everything take about ten times longer. Work also threw me a curve ball a couple of weeks ago. (Around the same time the snow went away, incidentally. Hmmm.) Right at the start of our bi-monthly release cycle we had a server migration; three or four different servers were going to be rolled up into one, big, power-server. Unfortunately, as my boss is wont to do, he didn’t think it’d be the big train wreck that it turned out to be and assigned me to take care of many of the problems that resulted from the migration. The Law of Escalation Misery also caused all kinds of unexpected related things to snowball into oblivion, so I’ve spent about three or four weeks out of the eight week development cycle trying to take care of these problems, going back to network- and system-admin work that I’ve been trying so hard to put behind me.

Corrosion has suffered because of a general lack of oomph. I’ve been doing little things, here and there, bug fixes, small changes and additions (like the chat system, for instance) but nothing significant and nothing that I’m particularly proud of. Hopefully that will change again because there’s still a ton of things to do, like expanding the magic system, implementing lifestyles (started on that), crews, Matrix, Astral, new missions, finishing The Arena, etc.

I’m also starting to miss Eva more and more. Even though we keep up pretty good contact over e-mail, ping and we Skype once every week or two, I still feel a gap in my social life with her gone. The same goes for Sam; we’ve had ups and downs in our friendship, but before she left things were finally looking up and we were hanging out a lot. Moulsari’s got less time for me because of her blossoming social life, which is something I’m very proud of her for — that and much more — but it leaves me in the cold a little bit, unless it is to be her punching bag when things aren’t going her way, an ungrateful and dissatisfying job, to say the least, but one someone has to fulfill.

Waah waah waah. I guess life throws you a curve ball every once in a while and it’s all about how you respond to it. Well, it’s looking more and more like spring is coming soon, and even though I don’t have my favourite terras friend in the country, life can’t be all bad. :)

iPhone Apps

by Dennis••4•Posted inJournal

This is a list of currently installed iPhone applications:

Facebook; The standard Facebook application. I use it quite a bit.

Echofon; this is my Twitter client. I haven’t really used any other twitter clients so I couldn’t say whether it’s good or not. I use it a little bit, mostly when I’m in public transport trying to pass the time, otherwise I’ll use the webclient.

PingChat!; I use this quite a bit to talk to friends who also have an iPhone. I’m not entirely sure why I have it and why I don’t just use WhatsApp instead, since that also covers BB’s and other phones. I guess it’s more habitual than anything else.

MMAFighting; This is a news application that shows the news feed from www.mmafighting.com/mma.fanhouse.com. I prefer The UnderGround’s application over this one, but this one carries more diverse news, like Japanese MMA news.

The UnderGround; This is the main source of MMA news that I read. I snagged it when it was still free and enjoy it quite a bit. I never use anything but the news section of it.

eBuddy; I have to admit that I hardly ever use this. It’s a chat client that combines gTalk, FB chat, AIM, ICQ, YIM and MSN in one client. I hardly switch it on, but when I do I’m pretty happy with it. It remains running in the background when you switch it off, and it also supports the landscape view on the iPhone which is a must for a chat client.

WhatsApp; free SMS’s, just like PingChat!. Since I use these two ping-clients, I don’t send SMS’ anymore and I could probably scale back my calling plan. I’m really happy that it supports BB’s as well, though Eva has an annoying habit of waking me up in the early morning by sending me msgs. :)

Daily Mugshot; This is the client for www.dailymugshot.com but I hardly use it any more and my account is pretty dormant. I don’t think any of my friends really use DMS any more lately, even the real die-hards like Jim kind of stopped taking their daily mugshot.

Speed Test; An application I downloaded once just to see what the speed of my internet connection was on my mobile phone. I don’t really use it.

T-Mobile Belstatus; This was a really cool application to keep track of your minutes and SMS bundle, but now that I use PingChat!/WhatsApp, I hardly look at the status any more since I don’t ever go over my monthly limits any more.

NetwerkRadar; This is a support application launched by T-Mobile where you can do a quick and (very) simple diagnostic on your connectivity and report any problems you might have. Never use it.

Buienrader.nl; If I would give more about whether it’s raining or not, I’d probably use this application more often than I do, which is almost never. I know some people that are addicted to Buienradar, so I’m guessing they might be addicted to this application, too. :)

NS Reisplanner; I’m…not entirely sure I’ve ever used this application. I’m nominating it to get deleted after I’m done with this post.

GVB; This is a terrible application with no practical use. It’s supposed to be an application with all the local public transportation times within Amsterdam, where you can plan trips, lookup departure times, etc. As it stands, it’s getting deleted as soon as I’m done here.

ABN-AMRO Saldo; This wonderful application gives the balance as well as the debits and credits on your bank accounts, which I love. You can schedule or perform payments with it yet, which is a bit of a shame, but I think that’s going to happen some time soon.

SitOrSquat; This application was thought up by a friend of mine, Danika, while she was on a trip to the Netherlands to visit Moulsari. She had been toying with the idea of making a website where you could rate public bathrooms and expanded that idea to include an iPhone application where you could find the nearest public bathroom and leave or read reviews of it. She got quite a bit of national attention with this application in the United States, and has since gone into developing many different iPhone applications and making quite a career out of it, too. I never use it, and downloaded it out of solidarity. :)

Skype; While I don’t think this is going to put telecom companies out of business any time soon, I do think this stuff is the future. With 4G being introduced, I don’t think it’s going to be long before we’re all just making Internet calls to one another. The sound quality is so much better, too!

Pathé; This is a pretty cool application that will allow you to look up the film times for the largest cinema-chain in the Netherlands. I think that you can also make reservations nowadays, but I haven’t tried it yet. It offers descriptions as well as trailers for films.

IMDb; IMDb has been the “go to” website for film buffs for the last ten years or so. This is their application, basically an extension of their website, with film, cast and crew information, including trailers, photos, reviews, etc.

Uitzending Gemist; An online cache of television programs for the three Dutch public televisions channels. Never used it but it might come in handy when I’m abroad and want to snag the last episode of Tegenlicht and don’t have access to a computer. Or something. :)

Shazam; When I first heard about this application, I was intrigued. When I first used it, I was a big fan. Basically, you can use it to record a couple of seconds of recorded music — not live, and you can’t sing it or hum it — and it’ll consult a big online database where it has digital fingerprints of a zillion songs and try and figure out which one it is. It’s like magic. :)

Units; This allows you to quickly convert any measurement into different units. Very handy, though I don’t get to use it very often.

Aji Reader; for a long time I wanted to have a PDF reader so I could carry some of my dorky RPG books around. There were plenty of PDF readers that would read online PDFs (in fact, I think the iPhone has a built-in PDF reader) but nothing that would allow you to download one to your phone and read it from there. I don’t use it much any more, and it’s a little cumbersome on such a small screen, but it’s served me well so far.

Backgrounds; An online collection of backgrounds for the iPhone. Don’t use it often.

Peggle, This is a really great game, very addictive and cute. It’s kind of like rolling Tetris, Bejeweled and Arkanoid all up into one.

geoDefense; Another really simple game and again very addictive. I don’t play this any more so perhaps it’s time to delete it.

SmartGo; Another game, this time it’s Go against the computer. Really difficult.

WoW Armory; The World of Warcraft official Armory application, which allows you access to all kinds of statistics about your character, guild, etc.

Dungeon Hunter; This game is freaking amazing and really showed me the power of the iPhone. It’s basically a simplified version of Diablo, but beautifully done with a rather fun storyline. The only thing I can say in opposition to this is that it’s a bit too short. It took me a few days of casual gaming to finish it.

WoW Authenticator; Another World of Warcraft related application, this time the authenticator, which helps you keep your account secure against spammers and scammers.

Bejeweled 2; Bejeweled, another Popcap game, like Peggle, which is simple, colourful and addictive.

Duke 3D; Somebody was awesome enough to port Duke Nukem 3D to the iPhone and it’s a flawless port! Like with all 3d shooters on the iPhone the controls suck a bit, but the game is completely identical otherwise. I still remembered many of the secret areas, which is a testament not to my memory but to how much time I wasted playing this game.

Cut the Rope; At one point in time this was the best sold game on the App Store. It’s another simple, casual game that requires you to find the Om Nom, a small dragon that was delivered to you in the mail and eats candy. Very cute and very addictive.

Streets of Rage; This is a port of the immensely popular and atmospheric Sega Megadrive/Genesis beat-em-up game Streets of Rage. I love this game and I love the mood of it. I’ve finished it a couple of times now and will probably revisit this game for a while to come. :)

C64; A Commodore 64 emulator with a bunch of games, including one of my favourites; Bruce Lee! Unfortunately, it disallows programming in basic, which would’ve been sweet, but it does have its own app store with games you can download for a small price.

Necronomicon; Some stupid, Lovecraft-based game that doesn’t make any sense to me. I thought I had deleted this app?

Worms; Another great port of a great game. Worms with guns, bazooka’s and exploding sheep trying to murder each other in a 2-dimensional landscape. I don’t know what’s wrong with that! One point of criticism is that iPhone screen is a bit too small, so you spend a lot of time scrolling the screen around, unfortunately.

iSicBo; Sic Bo (a.k.a. Hi-lo) on the iPhone. Basic gambling game.

Entanglement; This is a simple game of connect the lines. It’s simple, fun and you can make it as challenging as you want it to be.

As you can see, I’m a bit of a nerd and I like my computer games. I think the iPhone is an excellent device to port some of the golden oldies to since the screen resolution isn’t very high but the graphics engine can handle quite a bit. I can’t wait to give the port for Warblade a try. :)

How Far You’ve Come

by Dennis••0•Posted inJournal

Yesterday, I spent some time helping my brother on a development project he had for school. It’s going well, but it’s going slowly and it reminded me a little bit of how I started out. I didn’t have anyone to teach me PHP, MySQL or HTML or Javascript and I got into the CSS game very late. I had to kind of figure things out on my own, based on tutorials and examples I could find online. I remember well that I couldn’t figure out how to grab some info from a database and present it on a screen until Paolo Marcucci, a.k.a. ThatPaolo, sent me a little snippet of code. I guess it all started with that one little snippet he sent me over IRC.

My brother has me to ask questions to, to give him examples, to teach him some best practices, and even though I’m a horrible teacher, with little patience and a bad eye for sensing whether or not he actually gets what I’m telling him or whether I should change my approach or wording, it’s already going way faster with him than it did with me in those first few months. It makes me wonder; how much time have I logged trying to figure all this stuff out? And was it worth it? I’ve had tremendous fun and satisfaction doing it, but I could also have gotten my master’s degree with all the time I spent figuring this out.

I also went back into some of my old code — I actually put a very old game I coded, which I dubbed GridRunner, but which isn’t anything more than a simple game of kamertje verhuren, back online — and most of that was pretty terrible and inefficient. I remember GridRunner failed because I didn’t know what an index on a table was, so after a few games got started, the speed of those games dropped to abysmal lows as the database ground to a halt. (Indexes have still not been applied at the time of writing, so if you’re going to follow that link, know that it might still be slow.)

To top it all off, I went through years of photos that I’ve collected over time. I looked ridiculous five years ago. So skinny, less fat as well as muscle tissue. How far I’ve come. In a nostalgic way I wish I could go back and make some different choices, but that would mean I’d also have to go through the pain of some of the things that happened that weren’t the consequences of some bad decisions I’ve made, like my parents dying, etc.

Some people say they don’t have any regrets. I think that’s nonsense. Sure, you make the best decisions with the information you’ve got at the time, but decisions are like code; if you can’t revisit your code, or your decisions, in six months and can’t improve it, it means you haven’t learnt anything in that time.

Regret just shows you how far you’ve come.

Amazing Performance

by Dennis••2•Posted inJournal

Some people are getting very creative with light and shadows lately, projecting enormous light-shows on the side of buildings making it seem that buildings are crumbling, etc. Below, there’s a short performance piece of Japanese swords-play, where the protagonist fights with a swarm of shadowy, demonic creatures. Really well done.

Monsanto

by Dennis••0•Posted inJournal

While recently banks and financial institutions have been getting a lot of the heat from people for their complicity in the global economic crisis, it’s taken a bit of wind out of the sails of people trying to expose other corporate missteps. As news coverage of corporate malfeasance and misconduct focusses on big bonuses in the financial industry, they’re taking away from the coverage of a far more insidious problem in the food and gentech industry. Want to turn into a tin-foil hat wearer in an instance? Look into Monsanto for a change. It’s enough to make you want to pull a Unabomber. Here’s the tip of the iceberg.