Geiodo

Sooo, while watching some TV show about how a body builder named Jillian, visits obese people for a week, and forces them to become committed to becoming healthy citizens… My mom oh so conveniently mentioned that I would be on her weightloss program, with… The TV reincarnation of Jillian!

My mom is going to try her best to be as abusive as Jillian, while I get my self into shape.

Because of the fact that (Omit), some information will be omitted:

My (Omit) has finally payed off! Why? Because in the online (Omit) assignments, I am taught the underlying syntax of… Java! Little did I know that… JAVA IS BASED ON C!! Which means, that CS, comes quite naturally, to a person who knows Java!!

Because of the fact that (Omit) requires me to work in CS (C Sharp), I am thus forced to… Use CS. Anyways, my schooling in Java is quite useful, as it helped me convert a 240 line JS file to CS syntax in under ten min! It was a very important file, that was a MUST-HAVE, and works at full capacity in CS now!

Granted, I could have learned it all by looking at other people’s code. However, my (Omit) assignments came in quite a bit of handy of speeding that process up.

I hope that all makes sense!

Recently, whilst reading a book on Java programming, I discovered that chars, are actually numbers! Or at least in Java.

Before I go on, I’m going to explain a couple fundamentals about strings, and chars… First of all, this entire post, is recognized by WordPress, and the whole gang of serverside applications that go with it, as a string. What is a string? Just a bunch of text. In the Java, and JavaScript world, strings are just a whole lot of chars lined up one after the other! And so, we get into chars… Though, in both Java, and JavaScript, they are defined as chars, in english, we call them characters, or letters.

Anyways, I’ve basically dived into the science behind how Java stores strings! Think of a string, as a list, or as we programmers call them, arrays.

The sentance “Hello, World”, is really represented as:

H,

E,

l,

l,

o,

,,

And so on. Each item on the list is a char. Interestingly enough, chars are actually two types of variables at once! A number, and a letter. In your computer’s memory system, a char is actually stored as an octal number – Base eight! Why is this? Well, it’s simpler to store numbers base eight, rather than base ten (Decimal) for two reasons:

1. Computer memory is base two (Numbers, and other data consists of only ones, and zeroes.) Eight is power of two, but ten is not, so it’s simpler for the programmer, and computer, to use base eight. Why eight, and not, say, four? Because eight is the closes power of two value to ten. Had computers used 0’s, 1’s, and 2’s, such values might be base 9, which is the closest power of three value to ten. Unfortunately, at 1’s, 2’s, 3’s, and 4’s, we would jump to base 16, as 16 is more powerful than base 4, but just as close to base ten.

2. Computer memory is separated into parts of eight! There are eight bits to a byte, 1000 bytes to a kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes to a megabyte, 1000 megabytes to a gigabyte, and 1000 gigabytes to a terrabyte. (Currently, computers come with an average of 500 GB (gibabytes) of storage space) (Note that these are not exact, in fact there are just around 1024 MB in a GB, not 1000, as 1024 is power of 2)

So, now that I have schooled you on why computers internally use the number 26 to represent 32, I’ll explain what this all has to do with my interests… As stated earlier, chars have the capability to act as numbers! So, theoretically, someone could, (call me crazy), apply math to text, and thus encrypt text!

Imagine that the number for a is 36, and I want to encrypt it… I multiply 36 by a power of two, and divide it by two, generating a semi random letter. This a could now be ¥, or ?, or even ®! The secret to decryption would be to apply reverse math! Multiply the current char number by two, and then put that to a power of -2! Back to normal!

JavaScript is not so lucky. Chars are just plain chars, and you have to use special functions to convert them to their Unicode counterparts. Unicode is the system that determines what number each char gets. If different computers had different char codes, then if I wrote “I love you” on my computer, your computer might display it as “I hate yau”. Unicode is currently the standard char number system, and is what makes sure that my love letters carry out their purpose.

Fun fact: Apparently, the letter ^ is a mathematical operator for JS, but has no relation to exponents, and is not documented anywhere on the internet (As far as I can search). I really can’t tell WHAT it does.

Welp, I’m playing around with creating mac installation files! Parents, and your parental controls, rejoice! As parental controls only apply to installations!

But seriously, this could have some major impact on my projects.

Anywho, my installer is programmed to, first of all, pick a random number every time it is run! If that number is below 0.5, then the installer alerts me to a failure. If it’s ABOVE 0.5, then, the install continues! After that, it simply adds a text file to my home directory.

So, I have this blog. And I hardly do ANYTHING on it. I guess I’m supposed to blog about the things that I’m doing/what I’m working on. As I have virtually disconnected my self from the real world, the things that happen to me really ARE what I’m working on.

I suppose I could simply monolog on what programming truly is, its nature, an its relation with me, but I bore my SELF when I do that.

Soo… Continuing with my previous train of thought… I’ll simply start blogging about my most recent project, that hasn’t yet been blogged about…

SmartEmbed! Recently, a very particular player  who just so happens to *hint* *hint* read this blog occasionally, complained about in-webpage Unity embeds causing lag! Various other players, including my self, came out of the dark, and voiced our opinions as well.

I then, spontaneously, decided to program an easy to use, auto-embedder, that comes pre-packed with solutions for lag, and a show/hide webplayer functionality!

Of course, the angry people had negative things to say (as usual) about this project. I never really realized until the beginning of this year, but the angry people are a LOT more common than I thought! And they never relent either…

So, after a day or two, the angry people went away (Wait, I thought they never relent?), and the happy people started commenting thanks, and complements!

Anyways, things were rather calm, until one day, I was asked if SmartEmbed could support Flash! I thought to my self : No… However, I decided to immediately program flash support, so as to get SmartEmbed as versatile, and hence, as popular, as possible!

Sooo, there you have it.. An embedding utility. I think this was more about the angry people than about the utility. But hey! At least I’m TRYING to blog.

I must now think of something that actually possesses (OMG Mississipi?) some form of interesting content to blog about…

*Shout out to AlejandroNB* You rock, man!

What is life without machine guns?

Last night, we had a couple friends over to dinner! Our crazy neighbor drove her van into another neighbor’s driveway – Which somehow made the car all ready inside that driveway dissapear. All the while, our crazy neightbor seemed to be outside the van, but still driving it.

While still glaring at us, she got into her car, got out, pretended to have just noticed us, and yelled “OH *!” After which,the street turned into a giant waterway, banked by exotic plants, and filled with some giant seaweed…

Our crazy neighbor proceeded to hop into an amphibious schoolbus (Which had just appeared), and drive down to the other side of my vision. During all of this, I think that the guests we had over were teleporting between seats… When the schoolbus reached the other side of my vision (which took about one second), this side happened to be an unexistant fork in the ro – waterway; Our crazy neighbor then decided to jump out of the schoolbus (while it was still going about 60 MPH), leaving it to float down the left canal. Our crazy neighbor finally landed on a speed boat half a second later, and then another half second later, she had gone UP the right canal. (Yes, the water was flowing UPWARDS).

After that, it turned into a road again, and we, for any reason OTHER  than following the crazy neighbor…. Followed her. At this point, one of our guest a started acting like the grandpa of the family, and said, wisely, “We’d better hope we don’t run into her again…”. We, however, did. She was in the top of her speedboat – Well, now the speedboat was the van that she had parked earlier – and was throwing insults at us. I can’t remember what she was saying, as I could only sense the insults with some sixth sense. They were really men, though.

We drove up, and parked the car on a cliffside SMALLER than our car.

Fiiinally, the dream ended.

(At this moment, Opera is being a bad browser, and putting all indents at the TOP..)

Sadly, I don’t have a regular bloging time – Which means that I can go anywhere between a couple days, and six months, before posting anything new on this blog.

As a result, my readership is down to my loyal, imaginary fans, who spend every second of their life trying to comprehend the mysterious meaning of my words. I’d be happy just having them, but they don’t do much to affect any stat counters.

So what do I blog about?  This? I guess so.

But then… That makes me all done! The problem is, I can never find anything to blog about.

Sure interesting things happen all the time, but they would bore you out of your mind. Either I am so secretive, that I dare not blog about such things; Or, the things that I would blog about, would, as I said, bore you out of your mind.

Instead, I will do what any good gaming company does… Perplex you with tantalizing photos, instead of confusing you with spiky code:

It’s been quite a long time since I last blogged about anything… At all. Not that anyone really reads this, but, it’s nice to pretend.

Anyways, why not blog about my browser issues?

As of late, safari, the only truly decent browser EVER, has been giving my computer quite the hard time.

It started with this simple bug: When running things in browser, at the same time as other applications, it would cause “Freezes”. Freezes are mini computer freezes, which last for UP TO a second, and then allow the computer to resume work. However, they tend to come in packs..

I eventually got used to the mini freezes, however, they developed… They mutated… Into a worse problem… Of doom… And lots of dotdotdots… Scary…

If too many of these freezes occurred, a complete computer crash would be caused. (”You need to power down your computer”).

Surprisingly enough (to you), I do not mind these crashes because I loose my work – I save every second, and in fact, I need to do so in order for my scripts to run. The REAL issue, is total computer failure. If too many computer crashes occur, computer failure comes; The kind of failure that requires complete hard drive wipe/replacement, and TRULY looses all of your work.

After a while, a predecessor to the current mutation occurred… The YouTube crash. While playing a video on youtube, the system would start having those mini freezes. However, they were not ordinary mini freezes… If I started getting those freezes during youtube, I would have 1-3 seconds to close the youtube window, which takes longer due to the fact that the computer is freezing through all of it. If I did not close the window within three seconds… Complete computer crash.

Things got so bad, that I started flinching at anything that even resembled the animation of a computer failure! (When the computer fails, it is sort of like a vertical motion transition screen).

After that, things truly got bad. It didn’t matter WHAT I was doing, youtube, outside applications… Safari would cause crashes. Random crashes.

And the final mutation was beyond a crash. Instead of seeing “You need to power down your computer”, the computer just turned off, making its little death pistol “pew”.

If you are wondering how I know this is safari, my computer leaves convenient logs of what happened before the crash. And each and every one of those logs said the same thing: “SAFARI DID IT!!!”

At that point, I made sure I had all the browsers possible, and then I ceased all use of Safari.

The rundown:

Opera is pretty good, but it has major issues with copy/paste, text boxes, and Unity web player controls – Which makes it a non-optimum tool for testing my games.

Chrome does great with regular internet surfing, copy/paste, and text boxes, but it does not have very good bookmarks, leaving Opera as my main research browser. Chrome too has major issues with the Unity web player.

Firefox does quite well with the Unity Web player, although I had to do some modifications to my code. However it sucks at connections – various chats that I use to communicate with testers will not work, making chrome dominant for non-videogame work.

Internet Explorer just plain sucks, it is the dominant browser for sending insults to/wanting to delete. No offense to you windows users, but jeez! You could do better.

At this point, I am typing to you from chrome, with firefox open as well. Opera stays closed most of the time, unless I need quick access to my research resources.

So, the irony here? Apple’s own application is the downfall of Apple’s own computer.

-George (Yes, I have decided to use my real name.)

P.S. Don’t take this post negatively. Just laugh at it, and pray that I don’t loose all my stuff.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything but gaming ads, so it’s kind of hard to criticize something that doesn’t lie that much.

Anyways, here is the latest bing fail. I’ve always hated Microsoft (Since I got a mac, and learned they were different), but I didn’t know they would go this low…

At first glance, this image implies that the system uses some kind of image analyzation program to detect the size of the dog. (Not only would this be a technological feat for search engines, it would also imply that the system has text recognition, and knows that to look for.)

However, a closer glance, shows that the picture of the chihuahua is actually smaller, in pixel size. “–images by size.” basically means “–images their size.”, and not “–images by the size of what they capture.”

That picture of the chihuahua could just as easily be a high-res picture, completely outdoing the  monster dog.

Further investigation (A visit to bing.com) shows, that not only does it use IMAGE size, you don’t even get to specify pixel range! All you get are the four options: Small, Medium, Large, and Wallpaper!