| New Music |
[May. 30th, 2005|08:18 pm] |
What I'm listening to (albums):
- Black Eyed Peas - Monkey Business
- Common - Be
- Hieroglyphics - Full Circle (ok, not new but new to me)
- Quasimoto - Further Adventures of Lord Quas
- The Frontline - Now U Know
- Sway And King Tech Present - Back 2 Basics
- Thievery Corporation - The Cosmic Game
- Zion I - True and Livin
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| Matrix Online |
[May. 5th, 2005|11:48 am] |
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Fun for about 10 hours solo, 20 hours if you have friends. Good live events schedule is hampered by the reliance on being high level for interacting with the movie character event NPCs. Was buggy, but patches are coming out at a decent rate. Not really worth $49.99 if you don't plan on having a group of regulars to play with. I may revisit this in six to 12 months to see what has changed. |
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| Psychonauts is fun! |
[May. 5th, 2005|11:42 am] |
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I recommend the new fine game Psychonauts by Double Fine. I have been playing it on the PC using a PSX1 gamepad (ala USB adapter) and it is great fun. The game has a nice humorous tone to it, and there are some amazing tricks they are pulling off in the engine such as arbitrary changeable gravity directions, dynamic scale changes, etc. The Agent Nine's Shooting Gallery and Fred Napoleon's mind are specifically notable for these two things. I recommend the game, as it is only $29.99 on the PC. |
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| spring break and stuff.. .and sick... :( |
[Mar. 27th, 2005|08:45 pm] |
so yeah, spring break was pretty cool in general, flew to new york city with my fiancee where my parents live (in manhattan) and checked out the company my dad is working at now (Primus Financial) and took a side trip down to washington dc to do the tourist thing. every trip has its crappy downsides for me, which i suppose is just life, but getting a nasty cough and head cold right before school starts up again is pretty crummy. i lost the nice new diesel bag my mother gave me for xmas, which was containing my electronics (mp3 player, gba sp, digital camera) and magazines, on the amtrak on the way down to dc. ugh. so i called and wrangled and through a sheer stroke of luck nobody stole it and i got it back via mail. the bag was waiting for me at my parents place in nyc when we got back a few days later, minus the mp3 player-- one of those flash type iriver ones, i think it fell out :(
anyway, so i'm feeling kinda lame health wise with a persistent cough and medicine head, but i guess i can't complain too much-- it isn't like i have cancer or something...
i was asked by my fiancee if i thought that maybe starting to take st. john's wort would help my depression problems because it has been helping her out with her stomach (anxiety related)... dunno... maybe i should give it a try, because lately i've been feeling apathetic about life in general then swinging all the way back to feeling generally normal... which is good, because i wouldn't want to swing all the way to manic-- i have a friend who has that and man, that's a raw deal..
feh. poopie. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 21st, 2005|01:11 pm] |
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So I got an ECS i848 motherboard and all my problems went away. Heheh. Anyway, now I just have to get a better cooler for my video card at some point; the Vantec Iceberq 4 isn't that great, so I was thinking of getting a VGA Silencer copper slot blower-- they have had great reviews. I'm getting some random white dots sometimes along polygon intersections, that I think are being caused by rounding/truncation errors in the floating point math. Fortunately it is rather seldom... Also randomly once in a blue moon the widgets in Trillian's IRC client come up all wrong, not properly rendering the skin it should be using and instead doing some mangled standard windows widgets thing. A simple reload of the program fixes it... O.o |
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| VIA and ATI -- They don't play nice =( |
[Jan. 14th, 2005|11:00 am] |
Apparently my VIA PT800 board (which I hadn't had any problems with before while using my GeForce4 Ti4400) has compatibility problems with the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. If I run the board at 8x AGP and fast writes enabled, the computer will lock up and/or reboot after playing 3D games for a random amount of time (sometimes it is right away, and sometimes it won't happen for 1 hr). Using the ATI driver feature SMARTGART in the control panel I solved this problem by disabling AGP (!!) and by turning Fast Writes off in the motherboard's BIOS configuration. Games aren't as slow as you might think, but it is discernable. I'm guessing it's about 20-30% slower, depending.
So, I decided to order a new motherboard; thus began my adventure in figuring out what would be best for me. I have two sticks of non-matching RAM (one Corsair XMS PC3200 CL2, and one Kingston PC3200 CL2.5). Currently I run them at "By SPD" and Memtest+ 1.40 says everything is cool (ran about 7 hr 45 min with no errors, booted off a CD I burned from the .iso on their site). I found out that there is a chipset that is single channel based off the popular dual channel Intel 865PE, called the 848P. Tom's Hardware had some benchmarks showing that it isn't that much slower than the 865PE or the 875P. The PT800 is also single channel, so I'm probably not going to be having anything slower, in fact it may be a little bit faster (we'll see).
I found out that motherboards based off this chipset (848P) can be pretty inexpensive, as it is designed to compete directly with VIA's PT800 offering. I went on eBay and got an ECS board for $51 shipped & tax incl. that is an unopened box with everything included (for comparison Outpost.com had it for $51 without shipping or tax!). Hopefully everything works out with that transaction. I was annoyed that Paypal had an outage last night for "maintenance" from whenever (I was trying at 11pm) until "2:00 am". I'm also hoping that ECS doesn't have a spectacularly horrible failure rate or anything like that. Barring that, the chipset drivers are all by Intel so they should be a lot better than the VIA ones (*crosses fingers*).
Bleh. All this to get my Radeon 9800 Pro to work-- it was a steal of a deal getting it from my old roommate used but after sinking all this extra money into it I'm wondering if I shouldn't have just waited and avoided this whole mess of troubleshooting. Oh well. |
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| Median Blur Complete |
[Dec. 5th, 2004|01:32 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  amused | ] |
So I've finished my median blur. Wheee. Some results here. |
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| Gaussian Blur Done |
[Dec. 5th, 2004|12:18 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  tired | ] |
Some results from my gaussian blur program can be found here. |
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| New Hip Hop Albums |
[Nov. 13th, 2004|05:15 pm] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Reflection Eternal - 2000 Seasons | ] |
Man... The new albums from hip hop groups, The Roots, De La Soul, and now solo Mos Def and Talib Kweli were all pretty disappointing. I listen back to a track like this one, where a classy downtempo beat set the vibe for some interesting top-of-the-head-and-consciousness lyrics, and wonder where it all went. I mean, I never really liked the Roots too much though, so I guess that's beside the point, but I expected more from De La Soul especially. I think there's a total of four tracks from the latter three worth saving... Bleh. |
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| Some Notes about using GLUI |
[Nov. 1st, 2004|01:01 am] |
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Make sure to use glutPostRedisplay() in all of your callback functions, as well as those functions that your menu items in GLUT call, etc. It seems that otherwise you will not be able to have any of these callback functions effectively do anything. I have no idea why this is! O_o |
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| For CS Majors everywhere, especially those doing OpenGL |
[Oct. 31st, 2004|07:35 pm] |
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I wrote this page up on my GEAR wiki section for CSU Hayward, after my experiences with Dev C++ and trying to use it for homework. It's a bit of a manifesto, and it talks about why I use it and not Visual Studio 6, .Net, 2003, or any other commercially made software that has an academic version that has strings attached to the lower price. (Heck you can't get lower than a price of ZERO, and you will never have to pay more to release commercial software compiled with Dev C++) |
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| Interesting Tidbit from http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Color |
[Oct. 29th, 2004|01:48 am] |
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"Different cultures have different terms for colors, and may also assign some color names to slightly different parts of the spectrum, or have a different color ontology: for instance, the Japanese color aoi can be interpreted as meaning something between the Western color terms of "blue" and "green": green is regarded as a shade of aoi." |
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| My last HW assignment for OpenGL |
[Oct. 25th, 2004|02:01 am] |
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You can check it out here and see cool graphing thingy I made using OpenGL and OpenGLUT. Right mouse button click brings up a menu of options. |
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