Dragon Quest VI Arrives Too Late For Gaming Grandmother

So.. fish. Why fish? Well, honestly, why not. We can’t have cats in our current place (legally), so dogs are out of the question too, so we went with something that doesn’t need to be walked or trained. Sure, they have the huge aquarium and the cost associated with all of that. Need to make certain the pH and oxygen levels are stable, got food, filter is working, water temperature is correct and ALL THAT.. but it’s a lot of setup and basic maintenance to look at some cool looking fish. So the tank we got is a 28 gallon euro tank, water weight is ~240 lbs. After determining that our first location in the living room wasn’t safe and viable, we set the tank up in our bedroom on one of my plastic tables. 200+ lbs bends that table quite a bit.. so we moved it to a much more sturdy wood table and that is where it sits currently. When they say to not move even partially filled tanks, that’s probably good advice, but hey.. we did it anyways. 150 lbs is awkward between two people but at least it got moved and we didn’t have to make another 30+ trips to empty it and then another 30+ to refill it. Screw that.

Either way, it is setup currently and being allowed to run for a few days before even considering the idea of adding some tropical fish to it. We’re hoping for 2 different types of shark (bala and rainbow), some green tiger barbs, and a bottom algae-eating dude to boot. We’ll see how that goes. Not a whole lot of fish will go into our tank, following the general advice of 1 gallon of water per inch of fish in the tank (especially at full length), but it should be a fun and interesting adventure along the way. Oh, and here’s a sucky photo of it for your viewing pleasure.

[singlepic id=49 w=320 h=240 float=center]

In other news, GDEV class is going well. Got past the first voting period and I am fleshing out the idea for a quick demonstration sometime soon. The class meets Wednesdays for 2.5 hours and thus far has been very long in the tooth, but hopefully the first hiring and second voting periods go well. I’d like to keep on a team lead, not only so I can be the bossman, as that seems like a much better use of my talents and gives me something to work on that I can apply in other parts of my life, personal and business. Platforming concept that is a smash-up of different concepts from various games but ultimately the idea will be to have a Mario-esque platforming experience with the puzzling of Lost Vikings 1&2, including the abilities and character swapping. I’m tempted to thrown in some effects from the portable Castlevania games, and probably will in the long run, as long as just refining the feel of the game to include what I feel is the best pieces of different games out there. Either way, looking forward to the class again.. and will be quite annoyed if I have to do it completely solo but that might be for the best if I have nobody useful to hire/work with.

Oh, and it was quite neat to see some more of my Taekwondo students obtain the rank of black belt, either 1st Dan or 1st Poom. Body is still repairing itself from the destruction that was Saturday but at this point, it was totally worth it and looking forward to congratulating all of them further in Tuesday’s classes.

That’s it for now. End transmission of ramble..^D

Yet the other questions have either been really rather dull, like should all if statements have a set of encapsulating braces when they are not needed or should they always be there (rather dull, but makes a big difference in readability.. I went with always, for now), and others are neat in a different way. In my GUI class, the professor uses Moodle to manage the class and her habit is to have every link to a document, such as a tutorial that she finds great or even the assignment pages, must open in a new window. Generally, this wouldn’t bother me in the least as I am used to center-clicking links to open them in a new tab and will only occasionally run into a website that futz up my browser. Thank goodness for browser override on that targeting behaviour. But with Moodle, when you set it to always open in a new window, it checks to see if the page is in a new window, and if it isn’t, it gives you a stupid sh*t-eating-grin error message with a link to the page again. Luckily, you can finally get the page open in a new tab instead of a whole new window but it took two page visits and two clicks to get there because the UI didn’t respect your environment settings. This only amuses me because it’s a UI design class where we spend more time on programming iffy assignments in Java and finally JavaScript at the end of the semester. Thankfully the professor didn’t have time for databases.. might have to throw a fit and likely a few chairs. This is probably the only UI design-related question I’ve had all semester for a UI design class. … Oi. But this issue made me question what I think about how hyperlinks are designed for targeting the web page. Well, first.. let’s break down what the targeting is…

<a href=”http://TheWebPageUrl.com” title=”Some fancy title” target=”_blank”>Link text</a>

The bit in bold above is the targeting section of the entire hyperlink. That’s some generic non-standard-specific HTML, btw. Target can be defined to a few different values and that are:

• _self
  • Default action. Whatever window/tab/frame the link is in is focused.
• _blank
  • Open a new window.
• _top
  • Essentially _self outside of multiple frames, but opens in the whole window (if there are 3 frames, this will cause there to be one frame with the document in it)
• _parent
  • Open in the parent frameset. Dealing with frames.. ugh.
• framename
  • Open in that frame. Ugh, frames!

The ones that generally matter are _self and _blank as they have the most meaning still. The others are generally when dealing with frames (ugh, frames). I like to pretend that frames died out a long time ago. (Looking at the old Nintendo of America websites is always interesting for not only the frames but fully image-based navigation.. things I did when I was 14 and early into web development.) So either way, one opens in the current frame and the other is a whole new window, by specification. Of course, that doesn’t mean the browser has to do what the specification calls for, which is obvious with all of the browser presentation differences, but in this instance.. this is an awesome thing. My browser can choose to just open _blank in a new tab and it’s all dandy. But another user can have a new window. No fuss, no UI difficulties. Yes, the browsers should follow the spec but when it comes down to it, is that piece of the spec still meaningful and is it all that bad for a browser to do what the user wants instead? After all, the spec is the guidelines for what things should be. The user is the one getting the experience so why are you catering to the spec? The spec doesn’t care, but the user does.

Anywho, the whole question is do you want to control the user or just let the user do what they want. There is only so much you can do the save the user from hurting themselves, and there is a back button for a reason. And there’s even a multiple-back button by clicking the little arrow or right-clicking the whole thing. Magically, it all works out that the page is stored somewhere. I know my idea is still to just let the user open the link however they want and I won’t design anything that checks to see if you opened a new window or not. Seems like a lot of wasted development time and user time for something that really shouldn’t happen in the first place. Now if only I could get my professor to see that so I don’t have to have either 10 windows or double the clicks to get it in a single window with multiple tabs. The semester is almost over either way. . .

Now, this is likely not why I am having issues with everything I’ve been setting up. It may be, but my difficulty probably stems from the libraries being designed purely for 32-bit with 32-bit limitations in mind… naughty programmers. Either way, this 32-bit emulation at the user-level is an issue mostly for items that need the have access to the kernel. Things like your drivers that need to be run at kernel-level are dead in the water if they are 32-bit on a 64-bit Vista/7 installation. Sucky.

For those who don’t really understand what user and kernel level mean and why we care, this is a quick explanation.

{

Imagine an OS sammich. Going from bottom to top, it’s the kernel, the kernel-level processes/threads, and lastly the user-level processes/threads. At the user-level, the kernel can only see the process and to get to perform kernel-mode operations, a TRAP instruction must be executed. All threads inside of a user-level process are unseen to the kernel, it just sees a single process.

At the kernel-level, the kernel can see all processes and threads and operate on them independently. This is awesome for scheduling, but that’s not important now. Kernel-level is privileged, while user-level is where all of our user applications run. A user application must ask for the kernel to do something, which it will do when it comes around to the job. This is what causing blocking and all of that.

What this means to this issue? User-level emulation means that the application being emulated cannot run at the kernel-level.. which means a driver cannot do its job and even function. Oi!

} // End explanation

Either way, just an interesting circumstance that annoys me enough to debate installing a new OS that won’t have this issue, in the event I run into this issue in the future. Yay Windows development. >_>

Here is the article that helped out the most in coming to this realization: http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-windows7-vista64-support-32bit-applications.htm Thanks go to the author and the folks at SuperUser who answered a question. =)

As you can see above, I have two windows shown for comparison. The top is the Design portion of the editor in The Netbeans while the top is the executed version of the exact same window, from within The Netbeans. Why they look different and have different sizes of elements? No fscking clue! <.<`

What. The. Hell. The. Netbeans?!

I should just go back to using vi for everything again…

Tons of Halo 3 was played. Some off-and-on gaming was done by folks who weren’t playing Halo at the time. Eventually around 11:30pm we got 6 computer rigs together for Rise of Nations. 3 v 3 gets a bit hectic, especially for the folks whoever never played a RTS like RoN before. Either way, it was a lot of fun. Especially when Cody didn’t have a missile shield and everyone kept dropping nukes on his head.. even people on his team. It’s amazing what a little nuking can do the the Armageddon counter… going quickly to zero. Game 2 ended the same way but with only 4 people playing in a Free-For-All game. 30 minutes of people and most people were ready to start development of the last tech and start attacking each other. Using the turn-and-burn tactic with nukes isn’t as effective as it could be, especially when its Nuclear ICBMs and not just the normal missiles. Things seem to die in a much larger area with those ICBMs. Hrm. With everyone calling it good at 4:30am, it was a fun 12 hours plus of gaming, and totally worth it. Looking forward to the next one in probably a half month, this time hopefully on campus though. =)

I may put some photos up soon, if I can get them off my only camera (my phone…). Not too many but enough to warrant a little effort.

People who came: Zach, Cody, D, S, Drew, Sam (and his girlfriend Amanda), Joe (even though he just hung out and didn’t game much), and obviously myself. Hope everyone had fun eating my awesome pizza and playing games with friends. Even Amanda who really looked like she didn’t want to be hanging out with a bunch of geeky gamers. =D

Until next time.