As of yesterday, it’s been 5 months since my last update, which made me realize that it’s about time I do something about it. I still have a couple of weeks left before I going back to classes, and at the very least I should have enough free time during the first week of classes. I came up with three things to do for my blog while I still have time. First of all, I finally gave up to my insisting brother, so from now on I plan to start using del.icio.us. However I was unable to find a WordPress plugin that fits my del.icio.us needs so I decided to make my own plugin. Unfortunately it turned out to be harder than I expected and it’s going very slowly, but so far it’s coming along nicely and it’ll probably be the first WordPress plugin that I release to the public. My second project is to release Chaotica 2.0. I had some features planned before its release, but since I have no idea when I’ll be able to get myself to do that, I decided that it would be best to just release it as it is. It’s still a huge update to Chaotica, and as soon as I finish squashing some bugs and polishing some details I’ll release it. Earlier today I was fixing some bugs and I think I’m almost done, so it shouldn’t take too long to finish working on it. My last project is to finish writing the article about the Chaos game. This one is probably the hardest of all three projects since it still needs a lot of work, but I’ll try to get to it soon.

I’ve also been watching lots of anime and playing some games lately, so if I’m in the right mood I’ll try to post about that, but it’s not really a priority. On the upside, when/if I finish with my del.icio.us WordPress plugin, my blog should have a somewhat constant flow of links which should keep it alive while I’m not posting.

It’s been a long time since my last post, and I’ve decided that I won’t be posting much anymore. It takes up too much time and it’s not worth it. Instead I’ll try to invest my time in writing articles or doing something else for my website. I’m also thinking about a way to make it really easy for me to post links in my blog so that I can keep posting links without necessarily having to write a whole post to do so. I’ll post more about that if I figure out how to do it. I will try to keep posting every once in a while, but from now on it will be a lot less common.

Once again, I have a huge amount of links waiting to be posted.

First up is this suspended Honda F1 car. You’ve probably seen this done in a movie or an ad using with CGI, but what makes this so special is that this is the real deal. All of the car pieces are suspended from the ceiling using cables. Needless to say, it looks great.

Next is (or rather was) an amazing snake game which unfortunately is not available right now because of bandwidth limitations. It used to be a snake game that used browser windows as body parts for the snake and more windows as food pellets. You moved the snake using the arrow keys and the browser windows moved accordingly. It’s one of the most creative uses of DHTML I’ve seen, it’s a shame it’s no longer available. Hopefully it will be back up soon.

The Graphing Calculator Story is a story about the guys that made the Graphing Calculator that came with Mac OS 9. The most interesting part is that most of the time they were not officially employed at Apple, and therefor were not getting paid, but that didn’t seem to stop them. I like this story because I think it reflects the philosophy that every mac usre should have.

This is a demo of a multi-touch touch screen. I’ve always been a fan of this kind of stuff; I’m looking forward to the day when this kind of technology will be widely available. I think multi-touch touch screens will make using a computer even more intuitive that it already is.

Stephen Wiltshire is an autistic savant who is famous for being able to draw very detailed pictures of a city after just flying over the city on a helicopter for a few hours. I’ve heard stories about him drawing a map of London, but in this video he repeats the feat in the city of Rome. It’s simply amazing what this guy can do.

PS3 vs. Wii is an extremely funny fake ad in the style of the Mac vs. PC ads Apple has recently released. It’s definitely worth a watch.

Next up, is this video of a Japanese show where someone plays the shadow of a girl. It’s very well done, and it reminds me of the Matrix ping-pong video that is quite popular by now.

This Grand Theft Auto style Coke ad. For anyone who has played any of the GTA games this will probably be quite funny.

elgooG is a Google mirror. Literally. Try searching for something.

Beautiful China is a set of great pictures from China. I usually don’t like to post pictures, but this were simply too good to ignore.

Finally, there are a couple of games:

Insane Orb which is a remake of Pong with some twists and a very funny final boss.

And Bullet Bill which is a Mario game where you play one of the bullets instead of playing Mario. It’s an interesting concept, and it’s actually somewhat hard.

That’s all for today, I’ll try to prevent the links from piling up next time, but I doubt I’ll be able to do it.

It’s been some time since my last post and there’s many news which I should probably post about. First of all, regarding my website, I have put the writing of the article about the chaos game on hold. To be honest I think I’ve been focusing too much on it lately and I needed to do something else for a while. However it’s almost finished and I’ll try to get it done sometime next week. Instead I’ve been working on Chaotica 2.0. So far this new version is looking a lot better than the current Chaotica 1.1. Some great new features are coming along. Most of the important stuff is already done, but there’s still a lot of minor work to do (mostly setting up some preferences and polishing the interface). I’m still thinking about using OpenGL to render the fractals, but I’m not too confident on my OpenGL skills (although it should be really simple). I will probably decide wether to use OpenGL or not right before I release Chatoica 2.0, which hopefully won’t be too long from now.

In other news, I have watched all of the episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and the first Ghost in the Shell movie. I really liked Stand Alone Complex, but watching the first movie after that was a bit disappointing. I will try to watch Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence before next week; once I do that I will probably write a more in-depth opinion on everything Ghost in the Shell related.

As of next week I will also start going to university. As I’ve said before I will be studying Mathematics which should be fun. My first semester consists of four classes: Differential and Integral Calculus I, Algebra I, Analytic Geometry I and Modern Geometry I. The only setback is that the first semester I don’t get to choose my schedule, instead I was assigned one. And thanks to my luck I will now go to school in the afternoon. I have classes from 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM, except a couple of days where I don’t have a class from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM. I’m not sure how this will turn out; on one hand I’m used to going to school in the morning, so at first it will probably be weird, but on the other hand — when I think about it — going to school in the afternoon fits my sleeping pattern better. I’ll probably continue to go to bed around 3:00 or 4:00 AM, and wake up around 11:00 AM, take a shower, waste some time and then I’ll have lunch and leave for class. But there’s really no way of telling how this is going to work until next week. On the upside, it’s far more likely that I continue to post in my blog this way since I usually post at night.

And finally, it’s time for my opinion on today yesterday’s WWDC keynote. I wasn’t really expecting much from the keynote besides the Leopard preview, but I ended up being somewhat disappointed. I simply don’t see myself using most of the features shown. Time Machine looks very cool, but it requires some place to actually save my back-ups which I don’t have. The new iChat has some nice features, but none that I would use, especially since I have very few AIM contacts. Spaces doesn’t quite convince me either, the way I work now is by simply hiding the applications I’m not using so I have no clutter problems, and I can’t think of a way to organize my applications into different spaces; some applications (like Safari) would have to be in all of my spaces. As for Dahsboard and Spotlight, I’ve never really been a fan of those. Dashboard is great for the Calulator/Calendar/Weather/Unit Conversion widgets, but that’s about it. I can’t think of a reason as to why would I want to have a website in my Dashboard when I could just as easily have a bookmark in Safari. Spotlight actually made things harder for me. Since I’m a somewhat organized person, most of the time when I’m searching for something I know what it is called or where it should be. Now when I want to search for something it brings up many things which contain the term I’m looking for instead of only the files whose name matches my search. I can always use the plain old Cmd + F, but then I have to fighting against it to make it look where I want it to look. I hope the new Spotlight will finally make it easy for my to search my documents again. As for Mail, I found it somewhat funny that at first they mentioned that Vista copied Tiger on the “mail only” application, and a few minutes later they go ahead and introduced a new mail application which is no longer only about mail. It doesn’t look bad, but again, I probably won’t use the new features. I hope that some of the “top secret” things that they didn’t show will be better, so far, the only thing I’m actually hyped about in Leopard is the new Xcode 3.0 and Objective-C 2.0.

A week ago I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, unfortunately I have been too busy too lazy to actually post about it. One the things I wanted to change from my old blog when I started this one, is that I would no longer post about every movie I watch…it was too time consuming. And that’s actually what I’ve done. In the last month I’ve watched Cars, Over the Hedge, Superman Returns, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, and so far I have only posted about Cars. But being the fan of Pirates of the Caribbean that I am, I decided that I should post about it.

To be honest, I don’t really have anything in mind to say about this movie. Except that I can think of two reasons why I don’t have anything to say about it. The first one is that it was exactly what I expected. One of the reasons I like the original Pirates of the Caribbean so much is because the movie is just fun to watch. And Dead Man’s Chest is just more of that. Johnny Depp is great playing Jack Sparrow and watching him and the rest of the characters get into all sorts of trouble is very fun. There really isn’t much to this movie, but I actually think that’s great. To me, it’s the perfect mix between comedy and drama; it’s not all about the jokes, but it’s not a very serious movie either. The other thing I really like about both of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies is that there is a lot of attention to detail and the world in which the movies take place seems to have been planned very carefully. Throughout both of the movies there are many tiny details which you are sure to miss the first time you watch them, but which you’ll start to notice when you watch the movie again. I know that this “movie replay value” is not that rare, but in the case of Hollywood movies, it certainly is.

The second reason why I think I don’t have much to say about this movie is actually a spoiler of the movie’s ending. So this is probably a good time to use my blog’s spoiler hiding capabilities for the first time. Show Spoiler I wouldn't consider that the ending of the movie. The way I see it I have just watched the first half of the movie. To really be able to say what I think about this movie I will have to wait until the last part is released, which unfortunately won't be for another year. Hopefully I'll still be blogging by that time and you'll get to see what I think.

Maybe I’m not sure of the reasons, but I really liked this movie and I’m actually quite hyped about the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Although by now, I’m pretty sure that no matter what happens in the next movie, I probably won’t change my mind. Apparently I don’t need a reason to like this movie.

Apparently while I’ve been busy working on my article about the chaos game, I’ve also gathered a somewhat large amount of links that I wanted to post in my blog. So without further delay, here they are:

The Amazing Chris Bliss is a video of a juggler who was on Montreal’s Just for Laughs. He only juggles three balls, but what’s amazing about this video is that his juggling is synchronized to the music. I actually know how to juggle and I can even do a few tricks, so I know what I’m talking about when I speak of juggling. Most of the tricks he does are not too hard (notice the word most), and I’m sure that with some practice I would be able to learn how to do them. However his timing is astonishing, it follows the music flawlessly and looks very cool.

Arwing in Zelda is a video of an Arwing from Starfox in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which to my surprise is actually real. Apparently using a GameShark, you can switch one of the kids in Kokiri forest for almost any character in the game, and one of this characters is an Arwing. The programmers even included some enemy AI for it to attack Link and a somewhat crappy explosion when it has been defeated.

The Matrix XP is a funny Matrix spoof which is very well done. It’s fun all along and the ending is particularly funny, although the title kinda spoils it.

Four Second Frenzy is a game which consists of 50 minigames that last 4 seconds each. All of the mini-games are controlled using only the arrow keys and the space bar. Most games don’t say much about what you need to do, so you need to quickly figure out the rules of the game. There’s even a “Final Boss”. I’ve always loved games where you need to figure out the instructions yourself, and I think this is a good example of that type of games.

My Animated World is a stop motion video full of gaming references. An incredible amount of effort must have gone into making this video, but the end result is great. Props to whoever made it.

Mathematical Pi is a music video of a song called “Mathematical Pi” which is based on the more famous song “American Pie”. It reminded me of Hard ‘n Phirm’s Pi song. If you have never heard it, you can listen to it in this YTMND.

Finally, Fuzetsu is one of Jos Hirth’s entries in the Java 4k competition. The objective was to create a game in Java which was under 4 kbs in size. I suggest reading how to play before trying it out, I didn’t and since the game contains no instructions I had a hard time figuring out how the game works. Basically you need to kill the red circle in each level by shooting at it. The catch is that to shoot you need to get as close as possible to the enemy “bullets” without touching them. It’s actually quite fun. It’s a Java Web Start application, so you need to have Java installed to be able to play it. You can download it from here.

That’s all the links I’ve got for now. Sorry about not posting any sources, but I don’t remember where I got each link from. All I know is that they all come from one of these: digg.com, Jay is Games, the IGN boards, my brother, or my friend Nor.

Today, while I was working on my article about the chaos game, I discovered a critical flaw in Chaotica. When I was developing Chaotica, I noticed that when the fraction was less than 0.5 the image did not fill the window, and when it was bigger than 0.5 the image was also bigger than the window. To solve the problem what I did was to zoom the fractal in/out according to the fraction. Today, while I was looking at some IFSs(Iterated Function Systems) that represent instances of the chaos game, I suddenly realized that I had made a somewhat stupid mistake in the code that calculated the position of every new point. Instead of calculating the right position it was mapping all of the positions to a resized copy of the image placed in the upper left corner. I know that’s not very clear, but it’s not easy to explain where the mistake was; the important thing is that it is now fixed. To be quite honest I feel kinda stupid that this mistake went unnoticed, but I find it somewhat funny that instead of assuming there was a mistake in my code I just thought that was the normal behavior and implemented a workaround.

Because of the workaround, there is almost no difference between the images generated by Chaotica 1.0 and Chaotica 1.1. The only noticeable difference in the images is that now you should always be able to see where the original points of the polygon are located (in Chaotica 1.0 when the image was zoomed to fit, the points would end up outside of the visible part of the image so you were not able to see them). Other than that, the only change is that I have removed the “Keep real size” option from the preferences since all it did was enable/disable the “workaround”, and should have never been there in the first place. I have updated the article were Chaotica was posted accordingly, you can download Chaotica 1.1 here.

I’ve noticed that many people reach my old website looking for icons or desktop pictures and are redirected here. Unfortunately I no longer make icons or desktop pictures, my interests have changed and I was never very good to start with. However, I’ve decided to post the icons and desktop pictures that I used to have on my old website in case anyone still wants them. I also decided to release a new set of desktop pictures which I made but never posted on my old website. Here they are:

Aqua Icons - click to download

Risings - click to download

Precious Stones - click to download

It’s been more than a week since my last post, so I decided to finally post again. This time I actually have a somewhat good reason for not posting. I have been developing a Sudoku solving program. I thought that it would be an interesting challenge to do a Sudoku solving program that relies only on logical deductions and never on brute force trial and error. Right now, it solves all of the easy and medium Sudokus, but it can’t solve most of the hard ones. After taking a look at this site though, I’m not sure if I’ll continue developing it. It turned out to be a far more complicated task than I imagined, and if I want to continue its development I have decided that it would be best to restructure the whole program, so that’s why I’m still not sure what to do. On one hand it seems like a fun challenge to program each one of the solving algorithms, but on the other hand there are just too many of them. I’ve also been reading some stuff about Sudoku solving programs and apparently there are some Sudokus that so far can only be solved by trial and error programs. As things stand now, I do plan to at least restructure the program and add a couple of the simple solving algorithms, but I have yet to start doing it. The funny thing about all this is that I usually don’t like sudokus.

Aside from programming, I’ve been watching some more anime. This time it was Elfen Lied. You can read my thoughts on it here. I also lost numerous hours of my time to Motherload and Super Serif Brothers. Motherload was very fun at first, but once you go deeper it just gets frustrating, I lost to a lava pit because I didn’t know what it was and thought I was digging up a ruby. Then I played again following the advice I found on digg’s comments and was killed by a gas pocket completely unaware of its existence. As for Super Serif Bros, it was great. For some reason I didn’t expect a text based game to be so hard, but I am still surprised at how much I like it.

I also wanted to post about this house. I’m not convinced that it’s a very good idea, but it certainly is interesting. A couple of pictures and a diagram of the house are available here. Also, this house reminds me of this other house, which I also wanted to post about. Source: digg.com

On a blog related note, I received my first comment spam today. Apparently while I was away from the blogsphere comment spam evolved. The comment read “Love the blog -I always look forward to the posts here !!”, so at first sight, one would think that it’s not really spam, but when you look at the url of the poster it becomes clear that it is. Just in case I’m wrong, and Lisa is indeed a loyal reader of my blog like she claims (and she is without a doubt reading this), then I apologize. Next time please use a less suspicious URL that does not advertise stretch mark removal creams.

I first heard about Elfen Lied on the IGN Boards, where some people said it was great, others said that it was “too disturbing” for their tastes, and everyone only seemed to agree that the opening music was great. Then I read its page on the Wikipedia which basically starts off with: “The story contains graphic nudity and a great deal of blood and gore, as well as psychological violence and extreme graphic violence.” By now I was already expecting it too be the goriest most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen. But it wasn’t. It certainly does have “nudity”, “a great deal of blood and gore”, “psychological violence” and “extreme graphic violence”, but none of it is there just for the sake of it. There is a reason why each one of those “disturbing” aspects is there. From what I had read, I actually thought it was going to be bloodier, sometimes people get cut up in half and there’s not that much blood coming out of them. Even Kill Bill is bloodier.

If you continue reading the Wikipedia article in search for what Elfen Lied is about you’ll reach a link to a Wikipedia entry titled “Elfen Lied body count” and then a description of how the show starts, which basically says that there is a naked girl killing everyone she finds. And its not wrong, but that’s not at all what Elfen Lied is about, at least not in my opinion. Basically, what I’m saying is just a remix of the good old “don’t judge a book by its cover”.

Elfen Lied is great in many aspects. The animation is good, and the backgrounds are simply beautiful; the music (especially the opening song) is great; the story keeps you interested throughout the series; most of the characters are very deep; and even though I don’t understand an ounce of Japanese, I thought the voice acting was good. However the depth of the characters is what surprised me the most. Each character has his or her own story and their actions reflect their background. In particular Nyü/Lacy’s character is simply amazing. In theory you should hate the character but in practice you end up liking her. Somehow although she is the one doing the most brutal killings, the others turn out to be the bad guys. Actually this is my favorite thing about Elfen Lied, it’s often hard to tell who’s right and who’s wrong. Most of the characters seem to either be doing the wrong things for the right reasons, or the wrong things because they were pushed into that position, and only a few characters seem to be doing the right things.

I won’t say anything else about Elfen Lied because I don’t want too spoil too much about it. But if you have a chance you should consider watching it, I highly recommend it.