Digital Dave

I’ve been borrowing some space from a friend while I was in college and today I decided this was the time to move on out.  I’m not one who tries to overstay his welcome.

I’ve also been developing a website for a local business and we needed to find him a hosting service.  Roaming the different providers led me to www.dreamhost.com, and what looked to be an outstanding deal for MLK day.

Pay 2 years now, and get 2 years for “free.”  So, what is typically around $8 per month, pulls down to $4.  In addition, get unlimited disk, bandwidth, domains.   I had to jump on it.

The other alternative was to go with a pay-as-you-go service: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net

Either my blog has taken another a step into internet glory, or talking about my previous subject (Starts with F) is a highly sought after word for bots. I’m thinking the latter.  Either way, I guess it’s time to find myself a filter. o_O

Blizzard conditions, and I’m sure Calix is loving every minute of it. Luckily, it has passed, but the amount of snow it left on the ground is nasty. Out my window, in that parking lot, tons of people are getting stuck trying to get out. Why travel? I’m not sure. Even the main roads look pretty slick, because traffic is crawling right now as I look out my window. There were quite a few pile ups today. One in Kansas that involved 30 cars, and another in Missouri had a 20 – 40 car pile up, including 3 big rigs. Snow is certainly beautiful, but it’s a silent killer, which I can’t say I enjoy. I also drive a ’99 Mustang, and that just magnifies the nastiness for being a rear wheel-lightweight vehicle.

So, the entire wallet situation came out alright. The fella didn’t decide drop a haymaker on my credit and debit cards. All of the transactions that he/she did do, were all caught early enough to be declined. So that loss hits the retailers for NOT CHECKING THE SIGNATURE against a PHOTO ID. About the only thing I am really disappointed with was that I had my Christmas money in the wallet. Think I’ll just leave my drivers license, debit card, and nothing else in my wallet from now on.

I had enough time today to implement one portion of this puzzle, the heuristic. The heuristic can be determined a variety of ways, and I’ve implemented what is called the ‘Manhattan’ method. Which seems fitting, because I live in Manhattan, KS. Ha-ha! Only kidding. This method only allows vertical and horizontal movement. It calculates each space by 10*n, where n is the amount of nodes to the end node. I’ll explain this more in depth when I have more time to do a write up.

It’s not too exciting. You can see how it works. 0 is the end node. The map size can be of a custom size, defined by the user, and it’ll work the same way.

I ended up getting a new camera today. My old camera was about 5 years old. It’s the new Sony DSC-T200. Touch screen, 8.1 MP, 5x Optical Zoom, Facial Detection, SMILE DETECTION (which is, actually, pretty darn cool). My life is slowly migrating to a touch screen world. iPhone, Camera… What next?

So my weekend was consumed with birthday joy.

I plan to start up some coding tomorrow.

Is it just me, or is this website incredibly slow? I don’t know if I like this wordpress… But, I guess that is the price you pay for free. I saw some other great engines that would be nice, but there is just no way I would pay for a blogging engine. I love to write, and I love to share. And hopefully, I’ll have some tutorials up soon to accomplish 2 things: 1) Solidify my coding, and 2) Help others. While there are a plethora of tutorials and such online, I’m sure #1 will reign supreme. But, I don’t hold any grudge if people come in and find a good source for clear tutorials to learn from.

But let me know. If this site is so slow, it could possibly deter you from coming back, I’d like to know. I think I’ve read somewhere, in the past, that most people in this generation have about a 3 second tolerance to loading. If it takes longer, they’ll skip somewhere else.

So, nothing too exciting going on in school yet. I’m finding Philosophy to be an incredible mind warp. I enjoy reading, but I’ve concluded that I’ll never read anything philosophical after I’m done with this course. Unless, of course, I need to for a specific project. But, I doubt that’ll happen… Ever.

Nothing has fired up in my coding courses, yet. COBOL looks like it’ll be easy as pie to pick up and run with. The upper level networking course might consume a good portion of my time.

As for an independent project, I’m not quite sure what I want to start. I have been thinking about creating some applications that will be focused around A.I. I’ll probably attempt to replicate a few searching algorithms — A* and Dijkstra’s — graphically. From there, I’ll see where I could potentially take it. I need to find some interesting aspect of programming that I can concentrate on again. AI is really interesting to me, so I’ll start there. After this networking course, that’ll pretty much determine if I enjoy networking/distributed systems type things.

And, before I go… You MUST see this awesome desk! I want it! Click to View

Well, raising a Siberian Husky can definitely be an adventure. Huskies have a tendency to bore very easily. Which, makes sense due to their work ethic as sled dogs. Well, Calix is getting big enough to annoy the living heck out of me when he is bored. So, I decided to take him for a walk/sprint journey tonight… *listens… to… nothing*

Yup, he’s zonked the heck out. Problem solved (for tonight, anyway)

In other news… I’ve updated the development page with my projects. I have yet to include the majority of the downloads and source code, but it’ll be there soon. I reformatted my laptop, and my desktop just recently, so finding all of the files that I need and re-installing all of my libraries might take a while.

Game Development Lesson:
Don’t overburden, loyal, devoted, paying customers, just because Piracy exists.

I ended up getting 2K’s Bioshock demo downloaded today. Great game. Visually stimulating, and incredibly creepy (especially if you turn the lights out). Awesome storyline with some outstanding game mechanics to back it up. I want more… But one big problem is stopping me from buying this game. For whatever reason, the developers decided to use such harsh protection on the game, which only allows the user to install the game twice. If you want to install it on another PC, you’ve got to uninstall it on one of your other 2 computers first. Or if you format your drive, you’ve got to uninstall it first. If your computer crashes and you reformat, guess your out of luck. Well, not entirely, but you’ll be burdened with making phone calls.

Game development companies can not escape a pirate. All of this protection is an action provoked by a studio to ‘slow’ the cracking cycle for a pirate. But, face it, no studio can out wit some of the brightest individuals that are roaming this net, unemployed, with a tremendous amount of free time. In the mean time, while j0Hkr07 is busy releasing the cracked version of the game, the loyal fan base that has never pirated anything in their life are burdened by this protection feature that has absolutely no benefit for themselves. Instead, they are stuck with trying to maneuver past this issue, and ultimately may be led to a decision where pirating a game is easier than buying the thing.

I’m not saying that game development companies should, all of a sudden, stop protecting their software. What I am saying is that they don’t need to be doing it in such a way that causes substantial harm to their loyal fan base, which in turn, just loses customers. How many times have you pulled out an old classic, popped it into your computer and played it? 10 years from now, I don’t want to be trying to install Bioshock receiving an error: “You’ve exceeded your installation amount, please call so-and-so.” Newsflash: So-and-so is out of business, and your out of luck. Thanks, sucker.

What a long day.

I don’t follow a whole lot on television, but one show definitely grabs my attention – America’s Got Talent.  Terry Fator ended up winning tonight, and I’ve got to say I am extremely happy about that.  At the beginning, I was rooting for Cas Haley, but after a few performances by Terry, I just couldn’t believe my eyes… He kept blowing me away even further. A true gift.

You should check this man out.
First Performance: Click to View on YouTube
Second Performance:  Click to View on YouTube
Third Performance:  Click to View on YouTube
Fourth Performance: Click to View on YouTube 
Fifth Performance: Click to View on YouTube
Sixth Performance: Click to View on YouTube

The time and energy this man put into his talent, makes him a perfect winner of this competition. Amazing fella, and I can’t wait to see him in person.

But, first…. @#$&@(#*$@)(#@*$)@(#*@)(#%*@#)($*@#$)(*!!!!!!

Ok, now that is behind me… I updated the glorious Windows Vista, and rebooted… Now, the boot process involves beeping normally, presenting the motherboards picture, and freezing… I can’t get to the BIOS, I can’t get to Safe Mode, I can’t boot from a CD because I can’t get passed this motherboard screen… Leh SIGH!

** Update to the crisis…

I unplugged every single USB device I had on the PC, and it finally went past the post, and on into windows vista…

This is purely ridiculous. Stay away from Vista. Or dual boot Vista, XP, and Ubuntu. But for god sake, pray you have a backup PC and never rely on Vista. Ever.

** Update…

Windows Vista lost my network card… Wonder what else…

But, before I get to those, I watched 300 today… Talk about an awesome movie!  It started a little slower than I would have liked, but once it started, it hauled.  Great story, lots of animated blood, and some great battles.   I definitely recommend renting this one if you have not seen it and are into action flicks.

I’ve added a few pages; about, development, images, resume, transcript, and writing.  One future addition may be tutorials, but the layout is good for now.  I’ve implemented the about page, and the transcript page (for those wanting an idea of my college experience).  I have one more story to link up to my writing page, and that’ll cover it.  I plan on putting together the development page tomorrow, which will take me a good time to get done.   Everything should be done by Friday (I hope).