August 4th, 2009
Google Voice was holding a promotion where you could get 25 free calling cards. I thought I had missed it, but kept watch on my Google Voice page and suddenly the link appeared! I grabbed at the opportunity. That was only a few business days ago, and here they are, just arrived!
The cards can be printed with your Google number as well as your name and (optionally) your email address, mailing address, business, etc. I opted for my name, number, and school email. They are good quality cards, on good paper and bright colors. They’re not really blurry – that’s my cell phone camera at it’s finest. (I don’t currently own a working camera, but I need one!)
If you have a Google Voice account and didn’t hear of this offer, you may still be able to get in! Check your Google Voice page and look under your balance on the left bar. You can’t miss it, if it’s there for you. If not, the cards are from iPrint, so you may be able to order them there if you feel so inclined.
Tags: free, google voice
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August 3rd, 2009
I just finished with today’s Microsoft Student Partner training, all about Facebook, Twitter, and blogging and basically using these social networking platforms to broadcast Microsoft news and events.
My blog here has been set up for a while but as you can see from the posts before this one, I haven’t done a good job. Today begins a new era of this blog. From this day forward, I will actually write in this blog.
The title of this post was tongue-in-cheek. I am not completely devoted to Microsoft. Yes, I am hired as a Microsoft Student Partner, and yes this will be my blog from the standpoint of me as a Student Partner as well as me as a student. So whether you like it or not, you will find plenty of content here about new Microsoft things. But they will all be very exciting, I promise! Gone are the days of blue screens of death and 10-minute boot times. Microsoft is doing some very cool things across the board and I fully intend to give my honest opinion and recommend only the best.
I use Windows 7. I have an Apple iPod Touch. I keep up with the Linux Users’ Group mailing list and club events. I’m very diverse when it comes to technology. Why? I’m a computer science student, and computer science is not about what operating system you use, it’s about the computers. Underneath it all, these sparring operating systems and companies are joined by one thing: they operate computers. They compute. They think in binary, they have memory, processors and storage of some kind, and they can be programmed.
My programming language of choice is Java. I like it for many reasons, but this is one of them. Whether I choose to use Windows, Linux, or Mac, I can write Java. It’s a universal language. My code will (or should) run on any operating system. I really like that. (Okay, so I also really like C#/XNA, which of course is Microsoft-only)
Anyway, this is the first of (hopefully) many posts to come. I’ve got a lot to say, and I’ll say it all here. Stay tuned.
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July 16th, 2009
Here is a basic JOGL application:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Code Snippets/Tricks | 4 Comments »
March 31st, 2009
I just added the gnome-blog applet to my Ubuntu install, so this is a test that it’s working.
By the way, since I haven’t mentioned it here, I’m now using Ubuntu almost full-time.
I do need Vista for certain things though, such as XNA, so I plan to set up a dual boot on my 320gb drive pretty soon… Whenever I get time. Maybe this Saturday at the Linux Installfest…
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March 10th, 2009
(found here)
1) Beg, borrow, steal, buy, fabricate or otherwise obtain a rubber duck
(bathtub variety)
2) Place rubber duck on desk and inform it you are just going to go over some code with it, if that’s all right.
3) Explain to the duck what you code is supposed to do, and then go into detail and explain things line by line
4) At some point you will tell the duck what you are doing next and then realise that that is not in fact what you are actually doing. The duck will sit there serenely, happy in the knowledge that it has helped you on your way.
I am so going to get a rubber duck now…
-Ricky
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March 10th, 2009
Try adding punctuation to the following: that that is is that that is not is not is that it it is (wikipedia explanation here)
Then try understanding this sentence: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo (wikipedia explanation here)
Yep, pretty odd! 
-Ricky
Tags: english
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January 29th, 2009
I am currently using SDL_Delay function in my program, which sleeps for the specified number of milliseconds. But seeing as I’m trying to get rid of SDL, I have to find another cross-platform solution for implementing sleep. So I have to write a replacement function. I’m still figuring out what to call it, but here’s the essentials of a cross-platform sleep.
First of all, do NOT just do a tight while loop. It may appear to pause for that much time, but if you watch the CPU usage for your program, a while-loop like that will use 100% CPU. That is quite unfriendly to people like me with laptops. Not to mention, a 100% utilized CPU can heat up pretty quickly; especially when on a processor like the Pentium 4 (yuck).
So Windows has this handy function inside the all-mighty <Windows.h> file, Sleep(). It takes one argument of how many milliseconds to sleep. This argument can be 0, in which case it yields to another thread for some small amount of time. Or, according to the MSDN documentation, “A value of zero causes the thread to relinquish the remainder of its time slice to any other thread of equal priority that is ready to run. If there are no other threads of equal priority ready to run, the function returns immediately, and the thread continues execution.”
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686298(VS.85).aspx
Linux does something pretty different. Their sleep function is inside the include file <unistd.h>, which apparently is a file that contains “standard symbolic constants and types.” The function is usleep, and it takes the parameter of how many microseconds to sleep. That’s right, microseconds. As in, thousandths of milliseconds. So, take the number of milliseconds you want, multiply it by 1000, and give it to this function and your Linux processor will sleep that many milliseconds.
http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/usleep.html
Macs, well, I don’t really know. Nor care. I don’t feel confident enough that I can contort to their differences enough to get my program running on their machines. Meh.
-Ricky
Tags: C++, SDL, sleep
Posted in Code Snippets/Tricks | No Comments »
Google Voice was holding a promotion where you could get 25 free calling cards. I thought I had missed it, but kept watch on my Google Voice page and suddenly the link appeared! I grabbed at the opportunity. That was only a few business days ago, and here they are, just arrived!