Class is About to Begin Again

Just a few days until I start going to class again. I managed to get into the evening physics class I got on the waitlist for (every other Physics class already had full/near full waitlists by the time I registered), and with the morning English class, I now get to stay on campus for over half a day! (on Mondays and Wednesdays) I've experienced going to class early in the morning and late at night (both Computer Science classes,) but not both at the same time. :/ In any case, I'm gonna have to figure out what to do in the ~6 hour gap between Math and Physics. Or maybe that length of time is long enough that it would be worth it to go home and come back later.

SMZX Video Converter, SCALE, PGP, and Other Such Things

A couple weeks ago I started working on my MegaZeux grayscale image converter from a couple several years ago, and extended it to do SMZX, color, and video. After re-enabling dithering, making more extensive use of histograms and other such things, I'm at a point where I can't think of much that will improve it. With that in mind, I'm releasing the (new) converter source code. Maybe somebody will be able to improve it, or at least use it in some interesting way.

I'm gonna be going to SCALE again this year. Hopefully, I'll be a bit more prepared this time around. Since there's gonna be a PGP keysigning party there and a PGP key fingerprint is one of the things you enter when registering to SCALE this year, I decided to go ahead and make myself a PGP key.

Maybe it'll come in handy some time.

In preparation for SCALE and other such things where having money will probably help (need to take a bus or other such transportation there, SCALE lasts until 9 or 10 PM each day, and the buses don't run that late, not to mention the need to eat) and for the lack of a regular job, I'm gonna try my hand at Rent A Coder and see how much money I can get from doing that.

I decided to try and crack my own Wi-Fi network using aircrack-ng to see just how vulnerable it is. Due to the DS's lack of support for WPA, I've settled on using WEP, but I've done other things like disable broadcasting of the ESSID, use a MAC whitelist, and make the subnet the Wi-Fi network uses as small as possible. airodump-ng was able to sniff out the ESSID quickly enough, and cracking the key only took a few minutes after capturing enough packets (took about an hour last night, but only took those same few minutes when my sister was watching the puppycam this afternoon.) I guess I'll see if there's any way to further secure the network while still maintaining compatibility with the DS but it doesn't look likely.

OK, Let's Try This Again

Once again I fail to post in my blog for a significant amount of time. New year's resolution: post in this blog at least once every two weeks. As for some of what happened in the 1.5 years I didn't post:

• Became president of the radio club
  
• Went to a Linux expo for the first time
• Developed an English translation patch for Subterranean Animism
  
• Had the campus radio station shut down temporarily due to construction and such :(
• Went to Disneyland with my sister and her friends who flew in from the other side of the country :/
• Failed to submit anything for the Summer 2009 DsDoZ
  
• Went to an anime expo for the first time
• Developed an English translation patch for Undefined Fantastic Object
• Did some work on LoadMii so I would be able to...
  
• Make improvements to the MegaZeux Wii port (GX renderer still freezes though :/)
• New netbook GET! (ASUS Eee PC 701 4G to ASUS Eee PC 1005HAB)
• Failed to submit anything for the Winter 2010 DsDoZ
• And a bunch of other stuff that may or may not be important

Hopefully I'll be able to actually manage to post here for more than a month. Let's see how that goes...

X-Rays and Jury Duty

I went to the dentist today for dental x-rays, and it turns out my wisdom teeth are still going in sideways (as if they'd suddenly turn the right way somehow.) I'll be getting a referral for an oral surgeon in several weeks, barring some sudden outbreak of excruciating pain.

I got a jury summons in the mail yesterday, and it looks like I'll have to be on call some time in the middle of September. The pay sucks and several people say it's boring, but I'm still kinda curious as to what it's like to be in a jury. I somehow doubt my likelihood of being selected for a jury is very high though.

10 days since last post. Must post more often!

I figured not too much has happened over the last 10 days, but it turns out I have a good bit to write about. I really should get myself to post more often.

The earthquake last week didn't do much here. I didn't even realize it was an earthquake until about half a minute in. At first I thought that the people in the apartment above us might've been doing something weird, and after a little while, I thought perhaps there was some construction going outside or something, which in retrospect doesn't make too much sense.

TehSkeen is hosting a Wii coding competition, which sounds interesting. Perhaps I should try it. I'll most likely make a game, if anything; I just need to think of a good idea for one. I already have some experience coding for the Wii with the MegaZeux port.

Speaking of which, I'm planning to do a little work on modifying the Wii port of MegaZeux to run on the GameCube as well. Pretty much the only stuff I have to take care of is some Wii-specific input code and build scripts. The libogg/libvorbis libraries are pretty much platform agnostic and libfat has GameCube and Wii versions included already. I don't have a GameCube though, so the only way to test it is to make sure it compiles for the GameCube and that it runs on the Wii when compiled for it.

The results are out for the Summer 2008 DualStream Day of Zeux, and our team got 4th place! Granted, the turnout this DoZ wasn't very good, but still! It's the highest-scoring entry I/we've made so far:

• Summer 2005 - 17th Place (296/1600) - Entry 6170 - A Space Exploration Game of Some Sort
• Summer 2007 - 9th Place (623/1600) - Entry 81621 - Incomplete! :(
• Summer 2008 - 4th Place (810/1600) - Entry 36825 - DoZing Off

If I wasn't busy with the DoZCast, we probably would've done better since we actually came up with the idea pretty early on and had a basic plot outline thought out more or less (or Manani did, anyway.) It didn't really get in because I figured work on the game itself was more important, especially with the specific topic scoresheet.

Quasar also judged the games as backup judge, though his scores ended up being unused. The "purple octopus" is actually Space Bunny, who made its first appearance in A Space Exploration Game of Some Sort as a sort of easter egg (in the ship selection screen, go to the rocket/missile thing and press up.) Also, I'm kinda surprised I managed to trick at least 3 people (Malwyn, Quasar, and Insidious?) on the "Don't Touch!" microgame with the "Save The World" button.

I'll be going back to class August 25th, and I'll end up going to class at 7:30 AM, since the ONLY Computer Science 2 class being taught this semester starts at that time. I'll also be taking English 1A and Psychology 5; we'll see how that goes.

For the radio club, I'm going to be working on getting an Internet radio system set up, with automatic dead-air detection and stuff like that. Hopefully I'll get that done by the beginning of the semester.

First post! :D Dead batteries! D:

Well, it's about time that I started posting in my blog. Hopefully posting will become a habit and the writing practice will help me with English class and such, which I never really did well in.

My sister, Dad, and I went grocery shopping today, and since Mom was in the Philippines at the time, her car hadn't been used for a while. We decided to take her car to the store so the periodic use would keep the car in good condition/keep the oil from draining off the engine or whatever. It turned out not to be such a good idea.

After we were done shopping, the car wouldn't start; the starter wouldn't even try to run. We then walked for an hour and a half in the California summer sun to get home, and it certainly didn't help that the plastic bags kept breaking. Near the end we kept constantly shuffling the groceries between us trying to get somewhat comfortable.

Once we made it home sweaty and sore, we immediately got back out in Dad's van to get some jumper cables and jump-start the car. Then Dad drove his van back home, while I followed in the car. The problem with the battery seemed to be affecting the engine, as whenever I stopped, the engine speeds would get dangerously low. I still managed to drive it home without it dying on me. However, when Dad brought it to the car battery repair station thingymabob, the engine decided to die right there. Once the battery was replaced though, everything worked fine.

After we finally went home to eat a four-hour-late lunch, a discussion with Mom on the phone revealed that we had a AAA membership that Dad had forgotten about, since Mom was the one who got it, and Dad never really bothers with that kind of stuff. So it turned out that the whole mess we went through was completely unneccessary! I also forgot that I had the number for a taxi service on my cell phone, so walking home was doubly unneccessary!

At least we got some exercise.