zed0's blag

Net

2010-09-26T17:56:00.004+01:00

While I was bored a few days ago I thought I'd have a look at how terminal based GUI applications work, as I was wanting to see the nitty gritty of it I decided that it would be more educational to work directly with ANSI codes.

The project I ended up with was writing a terminal based version of the game Netwalk, probably best known from Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection. This was inspired by playing around with the box drawing characters, making a grid and thinking, "hey, that looks like Net!"

Thus, I have created a fairly simple version of the game, the source is on my GitHub page. If you want to try playing it then you can download it from there and compile it with g++. Alternatively if you have an account on codd (the Warwick compsoc server) then you can run it directly from /home/zed0/programming/net/netgame .

The game seems to run without issue through PuTTY, on the condition that you are using UTF-8. The only other configuration I've tried it with is Cygwin, which compiles and runs fine, however, assuming you're using the default Cygwin terminal, you'll need to change the font to one which has the box drawing characters.

As this was made in the space of a few hours there are quite a lot of improvements to be made.
My current todo list includes:
Adjusting the drawing methods so that it only updates the bits of the screen it needs to.
Adding wrapping as the game is fairly trivial without it.
Writing a better map generation algorithm.

On that last point I haven't really got many ideas. Writing an algorithm to generate a tree which takes up the entire map is fairly trivial, however I have no idea how to ensure that the map has a unique solution which would be desirable. If any mathsy people know how to do this then please comment.

Feel free to suggest other features or report bugs. Multiplayer has been suggested, which I may, at some point, try to implement.

WPA Enterprise networks on rooted Android 1.6

2010-06-05T23:38:00.003+01:00

So I spent a while in DCS (Department of Computer Science) today trying to get my phone to connect to the network.

For some reason on the Cyanogen ROM I'm using at the moment (I don't know about the official 1.6 build) wireless certificates were failing to install properly. They appear to install fine, however the drop down for certificates still shows no entries when one tries to connect to a network.

The easiest solution (at least for users with root access) to this appears to be to transfer the certificates to ones SD card and then edit the file /data/misc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf to add a new network.
Assuming one is connecting to the wifi in DCS this looks something like this:


network={
    ssid="dcs_wl"
    key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
    group=CCMP TKIP
    eap=TLS
    identity="csuxxx"
    ca_cert="/sdcard/root.der"
    private_key="/sdcard/csuxxx.p12"
    private_key_passwd="blah123BLAH"
    priority=11
}

If one tries to connect beforehand then there will already be an entry for dcs_wl that can be edited.

Voila, it now connects automatically.

From what Chris Sinjakli has said, he found connecting to the network significantly easier so it may well be that more recent ROMs don't have this problem.

Easter Lego

2010-05-23T23:54:00.005+01:00

During the Easter holidays I found myself rather bored at points, thus, given the amount of Lego in my room, I did the only logical thing:

My mecha, complete with ominous shadow.

As usual sorry about the quality of the pictures, I'm terrible at keeping my hand steady for them.

Close up of the gun thing.

Close up of the claw thing.

Close up of the cockpit.

The only picture to come out not incredibly blurred.

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I started making this, it looks rather more like it's from Bioshock than intended. I also didn't expect it to be this yellow, but then realised I didn't have enough dark grey pieces.

I have actually made quite a few Lego models over the last couple of years, I'll probably blog about them too before too long.

Minamicon Pictures

2010-04-21T12:32:00.004+01:00

I went to Minami Con in Southampton last weekend which was a nice break before my term of horror.
Here are a few photos (sorry about the quality, I can't keep my hand steady while taking shots):

Nikki's great dark Zelda cosplay.

No idea what this is from, I just really liked the detail on the clothing.

One of my favourite cosplays of the entire con, a self designed witch.

I can't remember which series this is from but I recall being told it was some sort of space pope, whatever it's from the hat was fantastic.

I think this is from Utena, though having never seen it it's hard to say.

This is pretty self explanatory, if you don't know who KOS-MOS is then play Xenosaga.

Lastly a picture of Claire abusing P Chan.

If you want more pictures then there are quite a few here on Facebook.

Tethering on Debian

2010-04-13T03:11:00.006+01:00

Rooting an android phone allows one to use several methods of tethering (using the phone's internet on another device) including USB, bluetooth and wifi.
I have only tried wifi tethering and USB tethering so far but I imagine I will get round to trying bluetooth sometime.

Wifi tethering is simple, if your phone is rooted then you can simply get android-wifi-tether , open the application and touch the icon in the centre of the screen, this will create a wireless access point which you can then connect to with your laptop. I had no problems at all with this using Debian lenny. There are various options for access control and encryption and it works fairly well. The main downside to this method is that it uses a horrific amount of power, meaning I usually need my phone plugged in anyway.

USB tethering is provided with CyanogenMod and many other popular roms and is in most respects better than wifi tethering if you have a USB cable. To start tethering just turn on USB tethering in Settings > Wireless controls > Internet tethering. Connect the laptop via USB cable and depending on what OS you are using it may just work or it may take some setup.
I haven't tried Windows XP but I believe that you can just install either the android SDK or a separate RNDIS driver, apparently later versions of windows come with this.
I have heard many people say that it just works with Ubuntu, however with Debian I couldn't find any packaged drivers but found that the RNDIS drivers from SynCE worked fine
Download http://downloads.sourceforge.net/synce/usb-rndis-lite-0.11.tar.gz

tar -xvzf usb-rndis-lite-0.11.tar.gz
cd usb-rndis-lite-0.11/
make
sudo ./clean.sh
sudo make install

I found that network-manager picked it up immediately, though if you don't use network-manager you may need to do:

ifup rndis0

I'm looking forward to trying this out for a longer duration on my 7 hour train trip back to Warwick on Wednesday.

Installing Debian on a G1 (HTC Dream)

2010-04-09T03:32:00.007+01:00

I bought a G1 in November having heard good reviews of them from the few people I knew who owned one and pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to type on the keyboard, which was the main problem I had had with iPhones.

Anyway, I haven't really done much messing with it until the last couple of weeks when I discovered myself very bored while at home for the Easter break. Having heard it was possible a while ago I started off by rooting the phone and installing CyanogenMod (instructions here for those of you who want to try it), a replacement for the default Android installation, adding a features that haven't been pushed down the line by vendors yet and a few extras such as the ability to store apps on the SD card, USB tethering and various Unix commands.

Having rooted the phone I was curious as to what I could now do and found it mentioned that it was possible to install Debian in a chroot since it already supports ARM EABI. I partially followed this post by saurik but came across several issues and shortcuts due to using CyanogenMod.

Here are some brief instructions to get Debian working on CyanogenMod:

Making a Debian image
To avoid having to partition my SD card (I use it for various other things) I created a mountable image as follows (assuming you are running Debian on your computer too), to avoid confusion I also add an sdcard directory here that the sdcard will later be mounted in:

apt-get install debootstrap
dd if=/dev/zero of=debian.img seek=749999999 bs=1 count=1
mke2fs -F debian.img
mkdir debian
mount -o loop debian.img debian debootstrap --verbose --arch armel --foreign lenny debian http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian
mkdir debian/sdcard
umount debian

As CyanogenMod comes with the Linux filesystem drivers and busybox you don't need to worry about adding them which means a large portion of saurik's instructions can be skipped.

Mounting the Image
Mounting the loop device caused some problems but I eventually found that it was looking for the loop devices at /dev/block/loop* rather than /dev/loop* which was fixed by adding a few ifs to the start of the mounting script.

#!/system/bin/sh
if [ ! -e /dev/loop0 ]
then
ln /dev/block/loop0 /dev/loop0
fi
if [ ! -e /dev/loop1 ]
then
ln /dev/block/loop1 /dev/loop1
fi
if [ ! -e /dev/loop2 ]
then
ln /dev/block/loop2 /dev/loop2
fi
if [ ! -e /dev/loop3 ]
then
ln /dev/block/loop3 /dev/loop3
fi
if [ ! -e /dev/loop4 ]
then
ln /dev/block/loop4 /dev/loop4
fi
if [ ! -e /dev/loop5 ]
then
ln /dev/block/loop5 /dev/loop5
fi
if [ ! -e /dev/loop6 ]
then
ln /dev/block/loop6 /dev/loop6
fi
if [ ! -e /dev/loop7 ]
then
ln /dev/block/loop7 /dev/loop7
fi
mount -o loop,noatime -t ext2 /sdcard/debian/debian.img /data/local/debian/mnt
busybox mount -o bind /sdcard /data/local/debian/mnt/sdcard
export PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/bin:$PATH
export TERM=linux
export HOME=/root
export USER=root
busybox mount -t proc none /data/local/debian/mnt/proc
busybox mount -t sysfs sysfs /data/local/debian/mnt/sys
busybox mount -t devpts devpts /data/local/debian/mnt/dev/pts
if [ ! -e /data/local/debian/installed ]
then
busybox chroot /data/local/debian/mnt/ /debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage
touch /data/local/debian/installed
fi

I saved this script as mountdeb.sh and the debian.img file in a folder called "debian" at the root of the SD card and mounted it on my G1 again.
I used a terminal emulator (search Market for Terminal Emulator by ZTA Technologies). First to enable things like tab completion and command history I changed the initial command (done through the menu in the Terminal) to:

su -c "busybox sh"

which nicely drops you in busybox as root instead of the poor implementation of sh that android comes with by default.

Running:

/sdcard/debian/mountdeb.sh
chroot /data/local/debian/mnt/ /bin/bash

drops you into bash in your shiny new Debian installation from which you can use apt-get to install whatever you feel like.

Automating the Installation
Since I didn't want to have to type the above into the phone every time I wanted to use Debian on my phone and I also much preferred being able to use ConnectBot to access it I automated starting it as follows:

First I installed the dropbear ssh server onto the Debian install:

apt-get install dropbear

This allowed me to either ssh to localhost from the phone or ssh in from my computer, which I was quite glad of after typing on the small keyboard for a while. Next to automate it.

Cyanogenmod provides facilities for auto running scripts using /etc/init.d/ however these all get run before android mounts /sdcard which means that we can't run our script at this point unless we mount /sdcard ourselves (which does work but it means that none of the applications on the phone will be able to access /sdcard (I think there may be a way to change this by messing around with permissions but I haven't tried it yet)).

Since init.d ran things to early I found an autorun application called Phone Prioritizer (available here (put the .apk in the attached zip on your SD card and open it with the package installer. Unfortunately you have to register on the XDA forums to get it), not on Market for some reason) which allows a script to be executed once the system has started up (Broadcast the BOOT_COMPLETED intent), it also had some options for running cron like scripts but I disabled these for the moment. To start the Debian chroot I edited /sdcard/phonePrioritizer/afterboot.txt (the file it checks after booting) to read:

busybox sh /sdcard/debian/mountdeb.sh
busybox chroot /data/local/debian/mnt/ /usr/sbin/dropbear

Rebooting the phone I found I could immediately ssh in using ConnectBot on the phone. Some simple certificate setup later and I didn't even need to type in a password from the phone to itself. :)

If anyone tries to follow these instructions let me know if you have any problems.

Brief update

2006-11-16T14:46:00.001Z

Over the next week or so I'm planning to make a few posts about my trip to Canada over the summer, especially if I can find all of the pictures.
At the moment I've got a maths exam though so I'm going to have to you all with a picture and write about it later.leave

(click to enlarge)

Edit: So, I rather forgot to do this, but here are the photos that I meant to post back when I wrote this post: http://zed0.uwcs.co.uk/Misc/Canada/

Resurrection

2006-11-05T15:50:00.000Z

Yep, I'm starting up my blog again with news from me at uni.

Warwick is pretty cool so far, work is pretty good and at a level where you can do pretty much as much or as little as you like, though naturally you need to do more for decent grades.

I've joined waaaay to many societies and sports clubs:

Juggling
Sci Fi
Climbing
Computing
Mountaineering
Video Game Design
Assassin's Guild
Snow Sports
Student Cinema
(in no particular order)

Juggling is really fun, despite my crappiness at juggling, I tend to do diabolo or poi there instead.
There was a society trip to Leeds yesterday to a juggling convention which was awesome, especially the shows at the end. Thoguh I did somehow manage to spend a ridiculous ammount of money on a new diabolo and poi, though they're pretty nice and should do me for a while.

Also heres a picture of me doing poi at 3 in the morning on top of a 12 foot sculpture wearing a toga.... don't ask.

(right click and view image to see full size)

Sci Fi club, however geeky it may be is pretty fun too, as the name suggests it is mainly to do with sci fi, but it isn't actually movies rather than board games and pen and paper role playing games.

Climbing is great fun especially since theres an awesome wall in our sports centre, which at £40 for the year is pretty good.

Computing, or compsoc as its known is another geeky one, also fun, though I haven't been along to many of their events, the exception being their 49 hour LAN party (note I didn't stay in there the entire 49 hours like some did).

Mountaineering is good in that it gets me out walking some more (since my last post I've done barely any walking and I was disgraced the other day to find that me feet were aching after a 15 mile walk), there was a trip to Snowdonia two weeks ago which was great fun, we did some nice walks and scrambles as well as a lot of table traversing (climbing over and under tables without touching the floor) in the evenings. There is another trip, this time to Ambleside (in the lake district), next weekend which I am looking foreward to imensely.

Video Game Design is just what it sounds like, and also gives me an excuse to pla my DS with otuer people from time to time.

Assassin's Guild is rather odd and apparently originated in Cambridge. Basically you sign up to a game over a few weeks, you get given a target who is someone else who has signed up, and you have to kill them in a novel way i.e. dropping a (polystyrene) fridge on their head, shooting them with a water pistol or setting up elaborate water traps. Unfortunatley I ahven;t managed to sign up for any games of this yet, but it should be fun.

Snow Sports is mostly a reason to go skiing, though they do a lot of socials too, I didn't make it into the Christmas trip to France, but I'm probalby going somewhere with Warwick Mountains instead anyhow.

Student Cinema is what it sounds like, they take over a huge lecture theatre and then project a film every night. So far I've been too busy with work and other societies to go and see anything but I'm hoping to go and see Brick (an awesome film) late tonight after our lamb roast.

Well, thats what I've been up to since I got to Uni, more details will probably follow.

Stay Alive
Zed0

...But I would walk five hundred miles...

2006-05-29T21:20:00.000+01:00

...ok well maybe only one hundred...

Well I am glad to say that I managed it in a time of 33 hours and 59 minutes. I got to the last checkpoint at 7:20 (33 hours and 20 mins) with 3.2 miles to go over a hill and was wondering whether I would managed to finish in under 34 hours, I got in to the school at the end just as the church bell was chiming. =)

I was going to go for a Marvin like approach to this post (i.e. "The first twenty miles were the worst. The second twenty, they were the worst too. After that I went into a bit of a decline...") but I changed my mind at about 80 miles round the route when I got into a checkpoint where they happened to be playing "I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)" as I left and it stayed in my head for a while and I decided it would make a good title.
You can listen to the whole song on the Proclaimer's site here (Track 4 under "The Best Of...") although unfortunatley you have to have Real Player (or Windows Media Player Classic).

Anyway, onto the actual walk. I promise I will get photos up when they are developed (I wasn't the one taking the photos) and I will then scan my certificate too.
The start was fairly easy and pretty fast, I did 8.12 miles in an hour and 50 minutes, ariving at the first checkpoint 10 minutes before they were allowed to let people through. From then on it got a bit slower although until the fourth check point at thirty miles it was reasonably fast going. After that the route went over Windy Gile among other bumps along the Cheviot ridge which slowed things down a little bit, however props to the mountain rescue who were on checkpoint duty there between 6 in the evening and 6 in the morning (on a bloody windy and cold ridge). I got down off the hills and into the next checkpoint just as it got dark and I spent a good twenty minutes there equiping myself with a torch and easting cheese pastys. Then we went up over a marilyn which my dad was very annoyed he had not yet been over and the Marshals walk skirted around (however he took some time to go up it as he was sweeping the route). It got light eventually and I got to my preakfast point which was great. Just after breakfast I slowed to a crawl but eventually sped up about five miles later just in time to avoid getting lost where the route description was rather vauge.
The 10th last to the 3rd last miles weren't great as they were pretty much entirely on roads. =(
I did survive though and manage to do over 4 miles an hour at the end to get into the finish in a pretty good time.

My mum also drove around the route and walked along with me or some stretchs which was nice and gave me someone to talk to (though I talked to random other walkers that I happened to be walking by).
I was the only 18 year old to take part (the average entrant is about 50) although there were a couple of other guys below twenty (one of him had his 19th birthday two days beforehand).

Anyhow I'm glad its over and I've no idea how I got talked into doing something so stupid.

Its a long way to Tipperary

2006-05-26T09:50:00.000+01:00

Yeah, well the title doesn't have a lot to do with the post but anyhow. This time tomorrow I should be starting on the stroll I'm going on. I'm hoping it won't take too long, I'm looking at around 36 hours (30 hours walking, 6 hours stopping at checkpoints etc). The weather isn't looking great, I suspect I'll be pretty wet by the end, not that I'll really notice it at that point.
My dad completed this walk in 28 hours a few weeks ago under tougher conditions but he has done 22 of them before...

I have now seen up to the end of season 2 of LOST, which as I predicted leaves a lot of questions, although you can answer a few of them by looking at the Hanso Foundation site. There are a few interesting sites and e-mail addresses connected to it (doing WHOIS etc) but so far they haven't yielde anything of interest.

In other news: finishing work on Wednesday, not seen X3 yet.

It Takes a Lot of Balls...

2006-05-15T09:17:00.000+01:00

To make something like this:

From the first Animusic DVD. Pipe Dream has been voted one of the 50 greatest animation projects ever (by 3D World). A group of percussion instruments perform music by way of metal balls that fly out from pipes.
More details here.

In other news programing the DS is strange, lots of odd settings.

iDeaS

2006-05-11T09:34:00.000+01:00

Having recieved my GBA Movie Player and got someone in Edinburgh to flash my DS I'm finally ready to start developing code for the Nintendo DS. I spent last night getting a development enviroment set up and doing a couple of demo programs, I'm happy now that I can take something a bit bigger so I'm hoping to do something a bit more complex than "Hello World" next, I'll probably mess about with some sprite based games before heading towards 3D stuff.
So, any ideas for games?
BTW iDeaS is an emulator for the DS.
Also I've got a Game Boy emulator on my DS no so I can play old school games such as one of my favourite games of all time:

In other news:
E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) looks interesting so far, Revolution (I refuse to use its new name) games look pretty neat, if, like the XBox 360, it has a VGA converter cable I may even have to get one for myself.
NWN2 trailer i out, just a pre-rendered cinematic though, looks rather different to the in-game graphics I've seen.

The Bunkhouse

2006-05-02T16:03:00.000+01:00

This past weekend I have been down in the Breacons (South Wales) on our annual family friend get together. We meet up with a load of my parent's friends from CUYHA (Cambridge University Youth Hostel Association), which most of the people they have kept in contact since university were members of. So for the past 11 years a bunkhouse (a building with some beds and cooking facilities) has been rented and everyone has bundled in for a weekend of walking, playing football badly, pontoon (that looks odd when you write it out) and reminicing. Rather dissapointingly this year there were no actual games of pontoon and only one game of football, despite the great pitch we had (meaning it was roughly flat and reasonably sized).
I also did two twenty mile walks in preperation for the hundred mile walk I'm planning to do at the end of the month. My dad did the marshals walk for the 100 (about a month prior to the actual walk a few of the better walkers go round to check the route description is accurate and it isn't too too hard) and said it was one of the easiest walks he'd ever done. While this sounds promising he also said that there was a lot of walking along roads which doesn't appeal to me a lot, walking along a road after 20 miles is bad enough let alone 5 miles after 80 miles of walking.

In other news I will also be finishing my job as a spy at the end of the month and I am planning to head to Canada for a couple of months after I go to Holyrood Palace to get my Duke of Edinburgh's award on the 6th July.

GIMPing around

2006-04-21T00:17:00.000+01:00

It may seem like cheating a bit to pretty much copy/paste a tutorial I wrote for another site on a wave thing I made using GIMP (google people, don't be too scared of the results), although the end result isn't as good as I missed out several of the tweaks I did.
Anyhow, have a shot, just for sniggles and gits

Note that this is a tutorial for GIMP so you may have trouble following it with Photoshop or any other image editor. And images that are too small to read you can right click and view image for a larger version. Anyhow, here you go:

I followed this tutorial for a while, but changed several things to get this:

However I have forgotten how I made that and annoyingly the product I got while making this tutorial doesn't look anything like so good but it should be possible to make it look not too bad with a few adjustments.
Hope you enjoy it.

Note I used a 1024x768 canvas but I have scaled the images down.

Sky:

First use Filters>Render>Solid Noise...:

You may want to then adjust the contrast a bit, depending on what your image is looking like, here is what I used:

Then use Filters>Light Effects>Lighting Effects...

(all options not shown are at their default values)
Giving something like this:

Because of the way the clouds rendered mine is upside down so I reflected it both ways to get it where I wanted:

Wave:

Make a new layer on top of that one and use Filters>Render:Solid Noise... again:

Then Filters>Distorts>Wind...:

Giving this:

Twirl it using Filters>Distorts>Whirl and Pinch...

You should get something that looks vaugely like a wave:

Use Paths or the lasso tool and clear a wave shape:

At this point duplicate the layer.
Using the top layer colourise the image (Layer>Colours>Colourise...):

Then you are ready to use Filters>Light Effects>Lighting Effects... again, make sure you enable bump mapping and that it bump maps with the current layer:

Your wave should look nice and shiny:

Copy the Background layer (the sky) and place it between the coloured wave andthe grey one, then set the Mode of each layer like below:

Right click on the top sky layer (the one set to Overlay) and click Merge Down:

Then Merge the top layer down (so you only have one Wave layer)

Use the Eraser on the tip of the wave with some grunge brush, you may want to smudge it a little too:

Then create a New layer and use a grunge brush to paint some spray on the crest of the wave (I found that a reasonably light grey worked better than white):

Sun:

You'll probably want to get this in the right position for the lighting of your wave, thats why we've left it 'til last, anyway use Filters>Light Effects>GFlare... to get a good sun:

You're done and with any luck you should have something looking considerably better than this:

Just for Jezi

2006-04-12T14:26:00.000+01:00

I thought I'd post the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game:

Moved here to save on load time.

Au Revoir

2006-03-31T09:33:00.000+01:00

Well I failed to post again on Monday and I'm afraid this post will also be a little short.

I'm going off to France Skiing for 9 days this afternoon (something like 15 hour train journey from Leuchars, to London, through the tunnel and across France to Val Thorens. I'm not sure whether there will be any internet access there although I do have my trusty Backtrack Live CD to crack into any wireless networks that may be floating about.

The skiing will hopefully be good, I need to try out my snow-blades more, although for the majority of the time I will be on skis. I've not been there before so I hope the snow is still decent.

For anyone who is interested I've been developing that graphy thing, it is now here (moved from my normal webspace to somewhere that can handle with php). You can now upload a .obj file (can be saved from most 3d modelling programs) and view it in wire frame, sudo-render or a combination of the two.

Well until Mondey after next Au Revoir

Too Much time on my hands....

2006-03-09T14:33:00.000Z

...
That was Keir's comment when I showed him something I had been working on over the last week. Inspired by Canvascape by Benjamin Joffe I have had a go at deeloping a 3d graph plotter using Javascript and the new canvas tags. It is in no way finished but you can look at what I've done here. Currently you have to move the graph about using the boxes below (note that instead of clicking loads you can click once and then hold down enter), I am currently working on mouse support. Then I'll probably have a look at rendering surfaces.
You also need to have a browser which supports the canvas tags (currently Firefox 1.5, Opera 9 and Safari 1.3 I believe)
This is also vaugely related to some work my mum is doing on e-learning but I'm not sure whether it will get used or not.
Oh, and apparently theres some javascript you can't put on you blog.

In other news: I went for a nice walk at the weekend, 23 miles up and down hills in the North of England in the snow.

Total Geekery

2006-02-21T10:26:00.000Z

I'm posting this from my mobile phone of all things. I discovered Opera Mini in the last few days and have been using it ocassionally to check e-mails and blogs etc.
Opera with its ery nice small screen rendering is also in the works for the Nintendo DS (here) which should be good if it gets released in the UK, currently its only scheduled to come out in Japan but I know I'd buy it, even if just for the novelty.
*changes off phone due to lack of battery*
On that note there is also a new version of the DS coming out, the DS Lite, trying to tap into the iPod marked and going for the all white look, I believe there will also be a black version coming out as with recent iPods and an ice blue version which looks quite nice. 3d models of them here (click on the pictures below to go to a model of each you can move around as you like) and pictures here (click on the arrows to view other images).
Looking nice about the DS lite: Longer stylus, adjustable screen lighting, possibly less painful corners.
Not so nice: Different charger socket, GBA games stick out, Start and select buttons are in different positions.
Also on the subject of the DS if anyone wants it my Mariokart friend code is 004358-517180.

In other news I'm up to episode 11 of season 2 of "Lost" and should be watching 12 tonight, 13 and 14 too if 13 has arrived.

Lost

2006-02-14T12:12:00.000Z

Well, I gave in at last and "aquired" series 1 of "Lost" and watched all 24 episodes in 4 days (a lot of late nights).
I have to say that I have been intrigued by it since I saw the trailer at the cinema and would probably have watched it on TV when it came out if I had a TV.
I thoughly enjoyed it and will get the second season too, it may not be up to the hype but its still damn good.
The hype is pretty damn stunning though. I'm not sure whether ABC or fans have set them up but there are relitively realistic sites for Driveshaft (Charile's band) and Oceanic Airlines which I think is possibly bit much.
If you haven't sseen to the last episode of season 1 then there may be spoilers below.

Polar bears. So far there have been at least 2, I think that they came with the French Chick and Co when they came over for their science expedition, looking at how animals cope in different enviroments isn't that uncommon, even if it was meant to be somewhere else they were going. They may even have been taking them to Antartica for experiments as that is apparently fairly close.

The Hatch. My first thoughts were that it was some sort of submarine which had run aground and then been covered, not too inconiveable considering where the "Black Rock" was. This was kind of discredited when I saw how far down the ladder went inside the hatch, possibly something to do with the "monster".

The Monster. I'm fairly sure that it isn't an actual monster, whatever it is sounds mechanical to me. I think that whatever it is is underground too, it tried to drag Lock down into that hole. When the trees get ripped out of the ground I think they're being pushed up out of the ground instead of pulled, they don't look like there is a lot of strain on the top of them and when they are moving around in some of the shots there doesn't seem to be anything at the top of them.

The Others. I think that, tying into the last two items that they have some sort of system of tunnels and are controling the monster. It would explain how they got to the black fire without leaving footprints (although that could just have been the tide) and would explain how they seem to appear and dissappear all over the place without warning. I also think that the others may well have been the people in the boat who took Walt.

Other theories etc are welcomed.

Oh, and this was the first time I've used the Draft function on blogger, due to having a lunch break.

And they called it "Firefox"

2006-02-09T11:12:00.000Z

If any of you have seen the beta of Internet Exploder 7 then you will, I should hope, recognise it as a complete rip off of Firefox.

If you have ever used Firefox you will recognise the tabs, the search box, the RSS symbol. Not only are they present, they are all in almost the exact same place and work in the same way. I assume that Microsoft realised the competition had features that it didn't and copied the code line for line (Firefox being open source).

However this update is undoubtedly an improvement, although I won't be switching to it.
The nicer updates which caught my eye were:
The inclusion of PNG alpha transparency (finally) which has annoyed me for ages and ages due to having to make all my tranparent images GIFs just because there were so many people using IE.
Closer W3C compliance, although I don't know how closely it complies.
The other main updates can be found here.

Building

2006-02-07T11:41:00.001Z

I've been building several areas for the Neverwinter Nights server I play on. You can script functions to do pretty much anything and what I've discovered is thatits really easy, I'm not sure if I just have a knack for it or if it really is that easy but I've been making a load of scripts to do various things and so far not come up against a hitch.

I've also had fun making the areas, its amazing what you can do with a few buildings and some trees to make it look like an elfie city.

Anyhow, yeah I'm a geek, I've managed to combine programing and online persistant worlds into one blog post.

Hmm, this seems a bit short for a post, though I suppose its just lack of pictures.
Therefore here is a pic someone else took of one of the areas.
(click for full size)

More Pictures

2006-02-03T15:48:00.000Z

Well I seem to have had quite a few pictures lately what with one thing and another so heres another one I vectorized in GIMP, the original image is here. The pic is from Easter year before last thus the short hair, though it might actually have looked better with long hair.

Apart from that I haven't been doing a lot. Works pretty much the same. I've been walking at the weekends in training for a hundred mile walk in May. My dad is getting back home from France (where he has been reasearching for the last 4 months) on Sunday.

And New Year

2006-01-12T10:54:00.000Z

This new year I did, for the first time ever, do what is apparently the traditional thing to do in St.Andrews and New Year: Go out on the town with a few mates and then go down to Fountain Square (that place in St.Andrew outside Costa (and my office) where there isn't actually a fountain). I have to say that I quite enjoyed the atmosphere down there at midnight, everyone seemed to be cheerful, although that could have just been the ammount of weed in the air.
I also met Will Gilbertson, deserter of blogs who was the last person I expected to see there.

I've redesigned my desktop a bitty:

EDIT: Why the hell doesn't Blogger allow comments by default?

Christmas

2005-12-24T19:54:00.000Z

Happy Christmas Everyone

This years card I designed:

On other topics:
Google has really annoyed me with the way blogger works, I have managed to get my blog almost completely w3c valid xhtml 1.0 strict (this probalby won't mean anything to anyone but Kier) apart from the small javascript component, though I don't mind giving that a miss too much. What annoys me is that the code Blogger uses for comments makes the code non-valid by using <BR> instead of <br />
for example, thus I can't put the little logo up as it would show on the comment pages too which are (because of this) not valid xhtml 1.0 strict.

Been listening to The Silent Force by Within Temptation, so far I'm liking it, a nice vocal and not too heavy music

Happy Christmas everyone.

"Am I out of my mind or yours?" - Me

Peer Pressure

2005-12-15T11:55:00.000Z

Ok, I'm giving into the pressures of James and Niki:
I don't have a lot to say here as my life is remarkably free of drama, just a few bits and bobs.

I have built myself a new computer, took about a month longer than it should of due to the fact that in the original order of the parts they sent a PCI-E instead of AGP version of the graphics card I wanted, I sent this back and ordered an AGP version, just after nVidia decided to stop producing AGP GeForce 6800's after a couple of weeks of trying to order from places that claimed they still had some in stock. None of them did so I eventually went to (horror of horrors) E-Bay where I got the card I wanted fairly cheap and so far its worked beautifully.
I now have a shiney new computer dual booting WinXP and Ubuntu 5.10 (you better be happy Keir).
I am going to finish this post here due to the fact I have to go out and do the family shopping which my mum has press ganged me into doing for her during my lunch break.

Stay alive.

Fourty Two

2005-09-15T12:04:00.000+01:00

Hello everyone, if anyone actually reads this.

Its almost that time of year again (INTERNATIONAL TALK LIKE A Pirate DAY!!!) so that means that I have now had the blog for about a year, with less than 12 posts that is pretty pathetic.

live update: I now have a job in a small company in St.Andrews called Fluid Gravity (its jsut above Costa) doing fluid simulaitons and things, can't talk about it too much due to the fact that i've signed the official secrets act O_O

i passed my Driving test in June when I also turned 18 so now I am ferrying the rest of my family aobut the place.

I got straight A's in my exams which I am rather chuffed with given that I thought I had failed Physics and got a C in Mechanics
THis earns me a place at Warwick university in a years time, so I will be off there when the time comes

random stuff:
My laptop got knocked off a bench, through no fault of my own, yesterday and is now held together with duck tape (though still working)

The paper chase: has anyone heard of it? It was a big string of clues in various books and journals in Cambridge universiy libary. I am currently setting up a similar thing on the web (yes, I know there are a load of them out there) so keep a look out for clues.

find my alter ego

PK4LIFE

2005-02-06T21:04:00.000Z

Due to popular demand and the fact that I said i would after my prelims were over I'm gonna post so here we go:

prelims went alright overall, I thought I failed both maths and physics, I was right about physics which I did abysmally in but I was surprised when Dr Waterston threw my paper down with an A circled on it. I did reasonably in our mechanics paper and though we haven't had our papers back I thought that Tech Studies went really well.

the main point of my post is, as it says in the title, PK or Parkour or, if you have seen Jump: London or Jump: Britan, Free-running, if you have not heard of any of these it is basically throwing yourself around a city or other enviroment, running around, and pulling off tricks. go to www.screwgravity.com for more info.
I only recently looked at Parkour, not having seen either of the aforementioned tv programs due to lack of a tv, because someone posted it on one of the forums I check , however after seeing this I looked up all the websites on it I could, found out that some people were meeting ro do some parkour in Edinburgh on Satuarday so I went along because it looked really fun and lo' and behold it was, everyone was real friendly and helped you get into the sport. I can now say that I am truley addicted to PK, I will be going again next satuarday for the session at a gym where I hope to achive a wallflip.
oh and watch this flash video, its got to be the best thing I have ever seen done with flash, not just because is has PK in it but just because it is really well done.
"La Liberte" (sorry its in an exe file but thats how I got it)

I also have a new E-mail address: LordZed0@gmail.com (w00t 1 gig storage, I've already used up 11% of it)

oh and I hope you get well soon Niki, don't worry about things too much

Ping... Pong.... Ping..... Pong..... Ping.... 3D Pong!

2004-11-16T21:28:00.000Z

Here we are again, yes Miss Crazy I know I hardly ever post.

I have now passed my Driving theory test (33 out of 35 on multi choice and 61 out of 75 on Hazard perception) and I am going to start having driving lessons on the 25th so that I know what the standards are for passing the final test as I have no idea how good I will have to be to pass.

I have finally got an offer from a university after all the hassal with millions upon millions of forms to fill in. Warrick is offering me ABB including maths which I think that I can probably achive without too much difficulty although I may have to start working a little more at home because at the moment I do next to nothing.

I hope no one had any difficulty finding this blog now the location has changed. The reason for the change is that if I have it here I can make the rest of my webpage (not yet complete) with my blog integrated and still be able to update it fairly easily through the blogger system which very kindly allows you to use your own space.

here is a 3D version of the ancient video game classic "Pong" for you all to play (WARNING: it is extrememly adictive)

Go here for 3D Pong

EDIT: changed to a link as it was taking too much time loading and wasn't formatting properly for IE users

2004-11-02T19:59:00.000Z

wow, almost a month since I last posted, I've been way too busy, I finished my UCAS and hoped that it would all be over but no, now I get a form from some of the Unis asking things that was already on my UCAS form and other stupid questions that could easily either be asked at an interview or found out on the internet or from the school. Then I had a form to fill out for Year in Industry which I don't reccon I'll get into but I thought I'd take a shot at anyhow and now I have to revise for my driving theory test on Satuarday, I hope to hell that the screens that I sit my test on are better than that of my laptop becasue on this I can barely make out that pedestirean that I'm supposed to be able to see 200 metres up the road or see whether that lorry is moving or stopped.
I can now see reems and reems more forms coming my way when everyone else applies and those universitys that haven't yet done anything will get their asses in gear and decide its time to reply

On the plus side I have been for an Interview at Warwick which I thouhgt went fairly well, I was also very impressed by Warwick's campus and facilities
I combined this with a visit down to London to see Sonja, Rebecca and Arun which I thouroughly enjoyed (no snide comments please Dave)

oh and if any of you are getting frustrated at windows and want to upgrade to a more bug free version you can get Windows RG here

Stay Alive
Zed0

Stop dying on me!

2004-10-04T20:33:00.001+01:00

I know I haven't posted for a long time but thats no excuse for you all to start dropping dead. First it was Mike with his "Oh.. I think I'll get up and walk about a bit more and then drop down dead again." Now it is Kier who for some dubious reason (which I'm sure that Davus and Mr.T are making sound a lot worse than it actually is) has died although I hear that ninewells have done a good job ressurecting him although all the rites seem to be taking a while.

I'm now wondering who is going to drop dead next.

Will it be Robert which will mean that I don't have to get my ass in gear and write him a profile? (any suggestions for it would be appreciated although I don't want any controversy over it despite the fact that he clearly used to participate in the type of rituals used to make small children's teddy bears stand up and strangle them) I'm also slightly worried that he used to keep an axe under his bed.

Will it be Davus so that I can finally throw away my contact lenses which have a special layer in the middle that do not allow light of wavelengths between 620-585 nm to pass through them?
Or will it be Connor so I can nab his physics project, which is vastly superior to mine, and get a deccent grade for AH physics which for some reason seems to be one hell of a lot harder than Higher

anyhow I'll take your bets on who the next victim will be.
you may have noticed that I have omited Mr.T from my list, this is because I cannot belive that such a happy camper could possibly be extinguished in its prime, no he will have to go at least one step further (either that or give the profits from his little production company, Dramatic Gasp who seem set to make quite a name for themselves in time, to me in his will).
I'll leave you to ponder which of them is the most doomed.

Stay Alive (you damn well better)
Zed0

dyelsxia mtaetrs not?

2004-09-21T17:34:00.000+01:00

I know that few people out there like reading copy and paste type things, I was going to post about my stay in London at the weekend but the post I had written out over a double period of computing got completely swallowed although due to more recent events I am kind of glad about it. I would still like to say to Rebecca, Arun and especially Sonja that I'm missing you.

Aynawy hrees the mian cpoy and ptase msesgae wihch I actlauly fnuod qiute inetresnitg:
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at
Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a
wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be
in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed
it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed
erveylteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Amzanig huh?
yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt !.!.!

Stay Alive
Zed0

Arrr, me hearties!

2004-09-17T20:46:00.000+01:00

Hello there everyone, I don't have time for much of a blog since I'm going down to London to see Sonja, Rebbeca and Arun but at the moment I have to say Arrrrr!

International Talk Like a Pirate Day

Have fun on Sunday everyone, I just need to remember to sayt Ahoy to everyone in London though I doubt I'llbe sinking any ships

Stay alive
Zed0

Well what have we here?

2004-09-08T21:56:00.000+01:00

Watch this
can anyone work out how they fold that shirt so fast? if so please tell me because I could really use knowing how to do that when I'm worknig at Oxfam. would it work with a long sleved shirt?
I haven't posted for a while because my life is altogether too boring, not much to report, loads of people have been off last 2 days becasue of open days in Glasgow and I was off on the highly aclaimed Peer Tutoring day on Monday, they tried to convince me to do scribing though I'm fairly sure my hand writing would have been worse that the tutoree.

There you are, told you I'd get a blog up by 10 today, I hope that Sonja and Rebbeca had a good day back at school.

Stay Alive
Zed0

Crazes

2004-09-01T22:12:00.000+01:00

Sorry about the late posting of this but our internet went down for no apparent reason earlier for a couple of hours.

I was wondering what everyone thinks is going to be the next big craze for the primary schools? I remember that the three biggest ones, I'm sure that there were others, we had were Pogs (you know the small disks of card that you stacked up in a pile and then tried to flip over as many as you could), Tamagochis (the electronic pets) and Yoyos (for those of you with leaky memories: the things that went up and down the strings).
I was at my cousin's in England and it was apparent to me that Pokemon cards had struck a lot harder there in the primary schools than it hit us.

I think that the next big craze will be little working pocket robots whose parts you can swap with your friends in the hope of building the ultimate robot

See if you can come up with something a little more imagianative, I don't have much time to think of anything but when I do I'll post it.

OW

2004-08-30T20:42:00.000+01:00

I've just gone back to my standard routine of going to Tae Kwon Do class every week but after having been away for the summer with no one but my sister hitting me I've found that getting hit hurts! I expected to go back and find while getting hit isn't the most convenient thing to happen its no major set back but it seems that many of the people in my class have been going to other classes else where and keeping their strength up so that they can pound the living daylights out of me now I get back. Anyhow I'm now back in front of my laptop bored with large bruises all over and generally feeling depressed and sore.

Stay alive
Zed0

2004-08-28T10:21:00.000+01:00

This is what you get when you go to random sites that get posted on forums:

If you haven't been sick yet you are a less dizy man than I(or possibly a less dizy woman than I).

For more random stuff go to eBaum's World

Thanks to everyone who has been good enough to grace this site with their pressence, oh alright alright, thanks to Davus too for providing half the comments so far.
Stay alive
Zed0

Summer in Norway

2004-08-27T22:36:00.000+01:00

Alright, heres my first real post:

I went to Norway this summer and I was dreading what the weather would be like because of reports from people I know who live there and I was being given reports of the temperature scale like this(fortuneately it was sunny all the time though):

+15°C This is the warmest it gets in Norway, so let's start here; The Spanish
put on winter coats, hats and mittens. Norwegians sunbathe.

+10°C
The French desperately try to start the central
heating in their homes.
Norwegians plant flowers in their garden.

+5°C
Italian cars don't start.
Norwegians cruise around in convertibles with the
top down.

0°C
Water freezes.
The water in the Oslo Fjord thickens slightly.

-5°C
People in California nearly perish from the cold.
Last barbecue of the season in Norway.

-10°C
The British run up the heat in their houses to max.
Norwegians put on a long-sleeved sweater.

-20°C
Australians leave for home, shellshocked.
Norwegians realise that summer has turned to autumn.

-30°C
Greeks die of cold by the thousands and disappear
from the face of the earth.
Norwegians start to dry their laundry indoors.

-40°C
Paris cracks and crumbles into pieces from the cold.
Norwegians stand patiently in line to buy hot dogs.

-50°C
Polar bears evacuate the North Pole.
The Norwegian army postpones their winter manouvres,
waiting for real winter weather.

-60°C
Santa Claus moves south.
Norwegians are frustrated, as they can no longer
store moonshine outdoors.

-70°C
The Norwegian army commences their winter manouvres

-183°C
Microbes in food die.
Norwegian cows complain that the hands of the
milkers feel cold.

-273°C
All atomic movement ceases.
Norwegians agree: "Shit, today it really feels cold
outside!"

-300°C
Hell freezes over.
Norway wins the Eurovision Song Contest."

So... Uh... Yeah

2004-08-27T19:13:00.000+01:00

Just getting this started, creating the blog took wayyy longer than the 3 minutes it said it would