Drones of societ...
» Written on February 23, 2007 at 7:56 AM «
Usually appear as such, though perhaps with more colour. I’m thinking about doing just that, but, you know. Laziness. Gotta love random sketches that I just seem to conjure out of nowhere, then abandon, to leave for decomposition.
This little character spawned out of something else entirely, contrary to my usual sources of inspiration; I kind of thought him up while having, ah, iridescent thoughts and such about school. Do note the overabundance of sarcasm in that statement.
Basically, I was bored, and started randomly doodling around on my Tablet PC, having all but blazed through my other guilty pleasures, coming up with the little critter you see right there. It’s kind of influenced by a whole lot of stuff, so I won’t really go into detail here, but do know that there are multiple sketches of this guy available on my tablet’s hard drive. I might actually post a few of them if I get the chance to.
I’ll probably be working on him in the latest version of Corel Painter, which I’m actually interested in putting through its paces; its supposed new realism brush sets are supposed to be a killer feature. It’ll be, if nothing else, a nice change of style for once; I have been working mostly with Illustrator lately. I haven’t even really done any 3D modelling of any sort in the past few months, as a matter of fact. Atrophy issues come to mind, but let there be no talk of such dreadful matters.
You can probably tell by now that I’m just barely managing to restrain myself from turning this into a whine-ry, rant-ish post about school life and the troubles and turmoil of a student with authority.
So let’s brighten this with some additional viewing tidbits: if you haven’t noticed yet, I’ve recently dumped quite a few new pixels into my Flickr photostream, so you might want to check that out; it’s not just about the Chinese New Year festivities, I assure you.
By the way, remember Adobe Lightroom? I know I’ve already mentioned that it’s gone all commercial and stuff, but what I didn’t know was what the actual retail version added after Beta 4, which is what I have. Well, today I opened up Lightroom just for fun and got a little notification, from Adobe, no less, telling me about the 1.0 retail release and a suggestion about upgrading. Which was when I saw the added features: dust and speck removal, and better image controls. Now, I’d imagine that most professional photographers don’t exactly walk around with dust and grit-infested cameras, so the former is pretty much a gimmick in my opinion. For the latter, unless they mean better image resize controls, along with more sliders and such to play with, I seriously doubt that it’d be an improvement over the beta. I’d have to see for myself just what those features are, of course, but at the moment, USD 199 doesn’t exactly seem like a very introductory price to me, especially for the feature set.
Companies will be companies, I guess. Although Adobe isn’t really that bad in terms of consumer negligence, just because a dog poops less than another dog does on your lawn doesn’t mean you kick it any less harder.
Blue slips
» Written on February 20, 2007 at 10:46 PM «
Are actually little slices of heaven when they are adorned with signatures of sorts, namely yours, your supervising tutor’s, and your parent’s. The last of those three being what I need on my own slice of heaven, though.
They’re actually a mechanism of sorts, something to pacify the school authorities with whenever you decide that you need some sick leave, and lo! I am the proud owner of said get-out-of-jail-free ticket.
Of course, it’s not exactly something I do without reason. I am absolutely annoyed to death whenever I am struck with diseases that impact my schedule on such a drastic basis. In fact, usually I just gut it out and try to get on with the day’s trials, but today I made an exception. Why, you ask. I’m not sure either, but perhaps it had to do with the fact that the excretion, or rather, secretion from my nose was slowly turning a wonderful shade of green (or yellow, is my vision affected as well?), indicating a recurrence, or a worsening of my condition. As I had accurately predicted, but alas, to my mom.
So I guess I could have had an extra 3 hours of sleep, the trade-off being not trapped in insanely-cold lecture theatres for 2 whole hours. Thanks a lot.
On the upside, though, I’m feeling a lot better today. Although I suppose that could have something to do with watching the first few episodes of House, season 3, instead of just imagining its amusement via reading episode transcripts. No, our local cable providers haven’t started showing it yet, but let’s just say I proactively took certain actions to secure my viewership and leave it at that before the dogs come sniffing around my door.
Or worse, bulldogs. Those things are like something Nature forgot about when coding in the genes for aesthetics.
Anyway, you could say that I’m in a quasi-rehab right now, living off cheese-and-jam sandwiches along with doses of orange juice, not to mention dhatalin, serrotipeptidase and of course moxilin. Go look those up in a medical dictionary if you’re really bored or something; they’re basically anti-inflammatory meds and meds for diluting sputum.
I’ve had to use my inhaler, Ventolin, for the first time in a very long time, though. That’s actually worrying, and annoying at the same time. It’s odd how those two feelings usually counteract and yet coexist with each other. And if you didn’t know before, yes, I am asthmatic. Though it’s been pretty much in remission for the last couple of years.
I can’t go without my daily dosage of software, technology and Internet-related sensations, though; I hear the folks over at Blender have released a new version of, well, Blender. And for the completely uninitiated, it’s an open-source 3D modeler which now apparently has sculpting capabilities, something that doesn’t really grow on 3D-software-package-trees, if you catch my drift. At least, not without buying $10,000 USD seeds.
Ok, maybe that’s a little bit of a stretch, but it sure feels like it. I mean, XSI doesn’t even have sculpting-based mesh tools, and it costs like 5 grand for its ultimate edition.
I’m interested in seeing what their new upgraded baby can do, but I’m busy counting my earnings from the current Chinese New Year. Last year I hit about a thousand, I think, without including my mom and dad’s contributions. This year, with the recent tax increments, I’ve kind of hit a little dip in my calculations; so far the grand total stands at around half of that record.
A shame, really. But with the extra dough my mom still owes me, I might be able to purchase a new rig of my dreams. And then we can see about installing Blender.
I did manage to achieve something over the holidays, though; I finally stopped the reset loops my PDA was going through by finally performing a hard reset on it, a first for me. The subsequent re-entering all of my contact information, not to mention setting the settings, was absolute torture.
Yes, I realized I could have done a quick backup/restore action, but I wanted this to be a clean install. Hopefully now it’ll recover from those damned glitches after I attempted to load it up with all sorts of crap. Like my own body; I damn well better be weaned off those pills in a day or two, or I’ll seriously consider, um, taking more pills?
Print this site
» Written on February 12, 2007 at 11:15 PM «
Or view it on a handheld. It’s been specifically tailored for such mediums now, though the beauty of that single attribute, media="handheld". Or print, I really don’t care. I just know my site’s accessibility just took a momentous leap into the highest of rankings.
Though, perhaps, not to the Sony Playstation Portable’s Netfront browser, which will actually be the subject of this post, along with its inherent parent element, the PSP. (Developers, see what I did right there?)
Anyway, I’m pretty much pissed at the state the PSP is in at the moment, with the downgrading and homebrew scene being more active than usual, after the discovery of the GTA: Liberty City Stories exploit that still lingers in firmwares recent. I’m almost appalled by Sony’s hypocrisy, their apparent harsh stand on homebrew being complemented by their pathetic attempts to stem its growth. In fact, I’m seriously considering purchasing a copy of GTA for this very purpose, though the prices for a suitable copy (the unpatched version) kind of range in the extravagant to the are-you-fucking-kidding-me range, the fault of greedy Singaporean capitalists who somehow think charging 70 bucks (about 35 USD) is justified for a game that’s about as old as my mom.
OK, maybe not as old, but you know what I mean.
Back on track. So anyway, if you didn’t know, my own PSP is of a certain shade of ceramic white, and unfortunately, it’s one of the newer ones, meaning the dreaded TA-082 motherboard. In other words, it’s not conducive to being downgraded. Until now, that is.
However, while I am an avid supporter of homebrew development and anything that has to do with open-source, I am not supporting a culture of piracy. While I do look upon Sony’s proprietary UMD format with great distaste, I feel the evils of piracy do have bigger fists.
I am, however, still an avid supporter of common sense, and Sony deciding to brand their product, which can be held in a single hand as a device meant for screen purposes, is not, unfortunately, common sense. Don’t believe me? Try viewing this site on a PDA and a PSP; you will notice the immediate differences almost immediately, barring the visually-challenged. This is, of course, a mere smite compared to the regular fuckups that Sony regularly manages to perpetuate upon its consumers, but as a web developer, I simply fail to understand why, or how Sony can even imagine that their beloved handheld device does not qualify as a handheld, and must instead receive the same rich content that would normally be siphoned to its older brothers and sisters, which, if I daresay, seem to have about 100 times its processing power.
And that’s not even taking into account that the PSP browser crashes when it runs out of RAM, which is not really in abundance, if you know what I mean.
And when my 3-year old XDA can display this site using the proper CSS stylesheet attributed to it and a much-touted “next-gen” console cannot, it gives you pause to think about the branding behind both products. You are then led to conclude that perhaps, the latter of two companies would be completely fucking retarded.
I love my PSP’s games to death, I love the PSP’s potential media capabilites to death, heck, I even love the PSP’s design. I’m even willing to forgo that second analog stick that was omitted from the design, but really, if Sony really doesn’t want me to be one of their customers, I’m going to have to go right with that presumption.
You may find me scouring the streets for an unpatched, un-price-hiked copy of GTA LCS very soon. Short of bricking my PSP, I’ll probably be chucking away those remote controls around the house and using L1 to watch the latest season of House.
Except that we don’t have House anymore since Season 2 ended. But that’s another issue for posts forthcoming.
This country sure is at the forefront of technology. Just like Sony.
Microformats
» Written on February 11, 2007 at 7:59 AM «
Are now available on the About section of this site, specifically, my vCard information and my hResume. What odd names, for incredibly perplexing formats. Even for microformats, as the term goes. Yes, I am aware that the hResume specifcation isn’t exactly finalized yet, but hear this: I henceforth make the bold prediction that it will be.
Bold, isn’t it?
If you have absolutely no idea what that last paragraph of geek-oriented rubbish was about, know this; microformats will change the world as we know it, though maybe not cure the problem of utter stupidity. It’s indeed an interesting proposition, though, and unless you have a good reason to otherwise, it might be wise to click on a few hyperlinks in that paragraph above to venture forth into the unknown and perhaps find out more.
It’s been a little while since I’ve actually made such a humongous change to the actual structure of the site, which kind of shows in the changes to the code, which, if you’ll kindly hit Ctrl-U (Assuming you are, of course, using Firefox), will notice to be more semantic than my usual methods of coding. There’s still a long way to go, of course; I need to change quite a few more CSS classes in the site stylesheet before I’d consider this particular update updated. As it is, I’m through for the weekend, and for the night.
It seems that I still have an Economics tutorial unfinished, alas. I wasn’t exactly planning on trading stocks and shares anyhow.
Anyway, you’ll notice that the sidebar content for some of the pages has changed slightly. Expect more changes to take place as I brainstorm all sorts of different widgets to be placed into positions that might seem aesthetic. Though perhaps not to the average user. More importantly, however, I’ve decided to license this entire site, including all of the works in the gallery under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, which may prove shocking in retrospect, considering this website is a portfolio of sorts, and I doubt people usually think royalty-free and proprietary works go in the same sentence. I am, however, an avid advocate of anything that has to do with the phrase open-source, and as such, such a statement proclaiming it so isn’t really anything new to me, plus it makes the index page look so much sexier.
Besides, all my works on deviantART and Flickr were already being uploaded with the same licensing terms, so I guess this shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Except for Zazzle, of course, but only because they don’t have an option to make it so.
You’ll also notice the addition of a few more icons to the site, which I had previously put forth into vectors but failed to decide on their usage. They are now being used, so look around and rejoice at black-and-white bite-sized icons.
Now I have to focus on the next task at hand: updating my other sites to fit in with this newfound love for web standards. I can already taste the hot dogs I’ll be polishing off while working on it, which has gotten rather bad in the past few days, or weeks, actually. It seems that my solution to these sugar-induced comas of pure madness aren’t exactly working out.
No, I haven’t been working on ReBorn or Hard Life as of late; school’s literally ripping my guts out through every open orifice that my tortured soul provides.
It pains me grea...
» Written on February 9, 2007 at 6:44 AM «
The way I’ve been procrastinating over publishing my thoughts on servers distant recently. Not to mention my recent binge on sustenance.
I’m currently in the process of reading up on Blogger’s labels, and hopefully I’ll get a working implementation of it up on the sidebar soon; this new ‘widget’ stuff that Blogger has seemed to embrace seems slightly confusing. I can only hope it’ll be by this weekend; if it persists, I may not be able to keep up with its paces. By the time I’m done, though, it’ll be much easier to sift through all of the crap that resides on my personal little space of Sitesled’s servers.
Another modification to this site which I am considering is changing the units from pixels to em units, which may seem slightly over-ambitious to some. I am, however, aware of the benefits that such a modification would bring to this site in terms of standards and usability, and I hope to be able to make the transition as smoothly and as painlessly as possible, the latter being probably impractical, in all senses of the word.
Much has happened in the world of the Intarweb since my recent extended absence; we’ll touch on that later. Right now, though, it’s school that will dominate this particular section of postage. If you’re allergic to such flavour, you may want to scroll down. Really quick.
I’ve just had a rush of four, almost non-intermittent tests for the past week, spanning all manner of academic subjects and skills. I wouldn’t be complaining about this if it weren’t for the fact that two of these tests merely proved themselves to be outstanding examples of how our educational system here has almost completely failed in its implementation of, well, education. And that’s not even taking into account the fact that one of the tests was organized by a tutor who thought that it would, somehow, be beneficial to already-overworked and sans-paid students.
I did try to study for them, really, I did. I didn’t even touch the computer for the past few days, my only contact with technology being my Sony PSP acting as a music haven of sorts, and my XDA as a communications tool. Somehow, though, it’s never enough, and in the end, remedials will ensue, something which I have managed to opt out of through last year’s results, but will probably will ensnared into again this year.
I really don’t understand the point of remedials. We stay back about 2 or 3 hours doing nothing, while waiting for the session to start. When it does, it’s basically a session to test your endurance at listening to a droning man or woman ineffectively attempt to “go through” or “debrief” a certain tutorial worksheet that you may or may not have done. Do tell; if I have indeed achieved a 100% success rate in completing said tutorial, why would I need a debrief of it? If I didn’t understand it, how the fuck did I manage to complete it? On the other hand, if I didn’t attempt the tutorial at all, what the hell is the point of going through it and leaving me to wonder about the mysteries of life?
The concept of remedials is not so much as stupid as it is shocking in my society. What a true learning session should be like, in my opinion, would involve active participation from students, and I don’t mean badgering a tutor with fucking stupid questions throughout a session; a remedial should be conducted in a way that allows everyone to understand and take in the concepts that the tutor wants to convey in the first place. A tutorial shouldn’t be a re-iteration of what you already fucking know, it should be something that you can immediately relate to, without any prior knowledge or instruction. When I view good tutorials on CSS and HTML on the web, I can immediately understand them, even if I have no prior knowledge of what CSS and HTML are. When I go over my lecture notes for hours on end, I end up concluding that it’s a complete fucking waste of time, even if I exert every last ounce of mental capacity with the sole intention of comprehending the information within. Is this a mere coincidence, attributed to my background with computers? I think not.
You can probably tell by now that I chose to opt out of a certain remedial session today.
Last.fm has recently gotten itself a spanking new update to its interface, and I must say, I pretty much like it. It’s much more streamlined now, meaning it’s easier to find songs and such and to play them immediately, without a plethora of links to navigate around with before getting to the actual stream.
In other news, Steve Jobs has publicly called for a rethinking of DRM policies, which could spell the end of this much-ridiculed and annoying protection protocol. I personally advocate the complete and utter destruction of any DRM-like protection on software/hardware of any sort, and such a development is encouraging, to say the least. Now, if only the same could be said for Trusted Computing, I’d be a happy man.
I’ve recently taken to installing all sorts of crap on my Pocket PC, which has resulted in, uh, unforeseen consequences, one of which includes a dreaded reset loop, in which my PDA continues to soft reset itself continuously until the battery dies out, and soft-resetting it manually does nothing to avail the situation. So far, I’ve been unable to determine exactly which application I installed is causing this little problem, but the problem isn’t exactly critical at the moment, since it doesn’t seem to happen with any sort of frequency, though it is worrying. I’ve found that removing and replacing the battery temporarily cuts the loop short, but short of hard-resetting the thing, I haven’t found a better way to get around this yet.
No artwork for this post, I’m afraid (I do seem to be posting at least one picture with one post for the past few entries, don’t I?), but I’m working on a couple of things at the moment, along with meeting deadlines for school-related rubbish, so I hope it’s understandable.
Technology is in...
» Written on February 2, 2007 at 9:49 PM «
The world wouldn’t be able to function without it. It would, however, probably survive the advent of Windows Vista.
I’m not exactly sure about my own acquisition of Vista, as I’ve mentioned before. It seems like wherever you turn, you can find a million reasons as to why you should, and shouldn’t get yourself a copy of that vaulted software, until you end up not even caring. Honestly, with all the fanboys and anti-fanboys around the block these days, it’s hard to find yourself being objective about something anymore. Even Tycho has reservations about his own pertinent upgrade.
I’ll probably be getting it ‘because everyone else is’, though I might consider using Ubuntu as my primary OS instead, with Vista being relegated to something that I’ll use for kicks. Honestly, I really don’t see the point in it; it doesn’t offer me anything that I require other than improved aesthetics. It doesn’t give me better font management, it doesn’t give me better colour management, it doesn’t even make the shell skinning process any easier than it was in XP. I mean, Aero looks nice, but I know it’ll get old on me real fast, and I’d like the ability to be able to swap shells at will, if you know what I mean. Granted, XP never exactly had a very user-friendly skinning engine, but at least I know it works.
I haven’t exactly been using my O2 XDA II to its fullest potential ever since I got it a few years ago. Well, just yesterday, all that has changed. After browsing around a few sites, I was surprised to see the abundance of applications and enhancements available for my Pocket PC’s outdated operating system. I had, in fact, considered installing something like NetBSD over its Microsoft counterpart, but decided against it, for the horrors that could perhaps come with such a decision. I have, however, managed to get Blender onto my little thingamajig, which is probably an achievement that few would dare accomplish. Amazing what PDAs can do these days; even CAD isn’t out of the question for a tiny XScale processor.
You’ll note, of course, that I also have a new T-shirt design up on my store. The story behind the design is really quite amusing, actually; it spawned out of watching my friend vandalize his tabletop during a lecture and tagging off with the trademark of a phrase. It stuck in my head, and I promptly spit it out in Illustrator. It’s also my new Pocket PC wallpaper, which is amazing in itself, as I’ve been using the default wallpaper and theme ever since I first got it. I know I suck.
I really like the fresh look to it, the way it seems so Web 2.0, yet retains the feel of a communist propaganda poster. It’s also worth noting that it’s the first time I used Scriptographer, specifically to enhance the look of the little bubble box right there, though I did do some manual adjustment of anchor points after the script had worked its initial magic. I think I’ll be using a lot more of such interesting tools in the future.
I know the right column on this blog is in serious need of an update, what with my extensions to my extended life and all, but also because I’m about to embrace Blogger‘s label functions. You can already see some of them at the bottom of this post. Hopefully they’ll make my posts much more organized and easier to browse through than being merely arranged by random, arbitrary dates.
And I’m planning to add a Google search field as well. Will they ever find a place that they can’t permeate with their unbelievably awesome search functions?
One wonders. And I still have a Maths test tomorrow to study for; Physics didn’t exactly go along very nicely as I had planned. Even with the win over Thailand. So much for good omens.