A Programming Game!

Max Power is the man — last night he sent me a link to this Light-Bot game.  I didn’t get around to playing it until just a little while ago, but I played it now, and it’s so awesome!

In the game, you program a robot to move around a grid (forward, left, right, and jumping) in order to light up the blue squares.  The first couple levels get you used to the concept of the game (how to move, how to jump properly and light up the squares), and it seems easy enough.

But when you get to level 10, the number of moves available really limits you.  If you had 100 slots, any level would be really easy — but you only have 12 slots in the main method and 8 in each of the 2 “functions” (misnomer — they don’t return anything…).  So you have to start re-using the methods and figuring out where you can put extraneous moves that will be useful in one case but ignored in the other.

After completing level 12 (the last level), there’s a little “Congrats, you should think about programming for real!” message and it tells you how many total moves you used — my first time throgh – 189.  Leave a comment with your number of moves (or complaining about a specific level that got you stuck).

One Epic Tennis Match

(If you don’t like tennis or don’t care about my personal life, save yourself a couple minutes and stop reading this entry…)

Freshman year I decided to try my hand at Intramural tennis.  This year, I decided to try again.  After losing 6-1 6-2 in my freshman outing, my goal for this year was to win a set.  Mission complete.

I met with my opponent at the State College High School tennis courts (nice courts!) at 8:30.  We warmed up for a little bit, each took a few practice serves, and the match began.

The first set started off with back-to-back breaks, followed by lots of holds.  Long story short – my hopes were high because I was looking and feeling good.  I made it to 6-6 and had a tie break which I rocked — first set to Danny: 7-6 (7-4)

The second set was much shakier – my General Tso’s chicken nuggets and entire lack of carbs were bad dinner decisions.  Anyhow, he got up 5-2 and ended up winning the set 6-4.

The third and final set was a roller-coaster.  Similar to the second set, I was still blowing it — got down 5-2.  With 3 match points on his racquet, there were two double faults and a second serve I destroyed.  Cue Danny’s Major Comeback (heck yes it’s capitalized!).  3 deuces preceded my win, but then I was able to hold and break yet again to make it 5-5.  At this point I made sure we had out 3rd set rules straightened out (no tiebreak – play until a 2 game lead).  I won the next game to make it 6-5.

That’s when disaster struck.  With my strings somewhat out of place (3 were really bunched together), I did my typical gently-kick-the-racquet-to-fix-the-strings to get it back to normal.  And I felt it immediately in the handle — one of the strings broke.  In all my life, with all the tennis I’ve played (4-5 times a week the majority of weeks this summer!), I have never broken a string.  Of course when I’m up 6-5 in the final set my string is going to break!

Luckily, I was somewhat prepared and had my one and a half year old WalMart Wilson racquet in my bag.  I pull it out (the first time in 2 months), and notice the difference immediately.  He easily hold serve to make it 6-6 and then breaks to take the 7-6 lead.  At this point in time, his beastly first serve has become only slight faster than his second (I’m standing on the baseline instead of 4 feet back), and I was able to break back and hold to make it 8-7.  Since his friend had been waiting about 2 hours for him at this point in time, he asked if I’d be all right with a tie break if he made it 8-8.  Sure thing – I’m pooped at this point anyways, and maybe that would be the motivation I’d need to win it outright.

I can’t break again, so it’s 8-8 and I absolutely blow it in the tie-break.  Bummer.

I really had a blast though!  It was by far one of the best matches I’ve played, and I really held my own!  Bryan (my opponent) told me that I should get involved with the tennis club, and I realized that that is a phenomenal idea!  So I joined the listserv and sent an email to the contact address, and hopefully I’ll hear back that it’s not too late for me to join!

Temporarily Abandoning Chrome

Google Chrome is great!  I blogged about it on day 1, and I’m still standing by it – it really is a great web browser!  However, the inability to scroll up with my touchpad (and the insane speed at which any scrolling takes place!) coupled with the lack of add-ons is causing me to shift back to Firefox 3 (at least temporarily).

Lucky for me, there’s a LifeHacker article about how to do everything that Google Chrome does (except increasing speed and multi-threading…) through Firefox extensions!   (I totally already had the Download StatusBar — one of my favorite extensions.)

And the one thing that I noticed about my Chrome usage — I was really growing to love the omnibar!  The whole “g”-tab-”search term” to search Google (and “w” for Wikipedia, etc) was really nice. But LifeHacker saved me there too!  Firefox has that (in a way) built in as well!  Right click on a search box on whatever page you want (say Google), go to “Add a Keyword for this Search…”, name it something useful, add the keyword (say “g” for Google), and voila!  Now typing “g Danny Iachini” in the AwesomeBar of Firefox3 will Google me!

Human Tetris?!

I’ve always been a big fan of Tetris.  And I can totally appreciate nerdy art.  Those two things combined make this video awesome: The Original Human TETRIS Performance by Guillaume Reymond.

Did you notice any mistakes?  No, not that the “player” was really bad at Tetris.. go watch 1:09-1:11 again.  That isn’t what would have happened to that one remaining white pixel…  Other than me being a perfectionist, it really was a great video!  And I love how the credits call all the people “pixels” – that would be so cool to put “Tetris Pixel” on my résumé!

The Reformat

The other day, I found an article on Digg about applications which supposedly make reformatting Windows easier.  It sounded cool enough, but wasn’t too big of a concern for me since my laptop was running fine.  

Sure enough though, my computer got infected really badly with some “XP Antivirus 2008″ trojan spyware(?!) last night (long story short – it took over my computer – frequent popups, irremovable tray icon, replaced the desktop and didn’t give me access to Desktop or Screensaver in Display Properties, and who knows what else…).  So the majority of my day was taken up with backing up my computer, reinstalling XP, and then getting everything back to (something close to) how I like it.  

Luckily, I was able to save a lot of research and frustration, because I was able to use the DriverMax program that the Digg article pointed me to!  I was able to pick which drivers I wanted to backup on the infected copy of XP, and then when the new copy was ready to go, I just let it go, putting back all the drivers I was using!  So major thanks to Digg and DriverMax!

Now my computer is super-fast and really clean!  Hopefully this time I learned my lesson and will backup useful files on a (somewhat) regular basis.  Any suggestions for a good deal on an external hard drive?

(Also – major thanks to Parker who was able to help me out through the pain which is reformatting!)

Google Chrome

The major buzz on the interwebs today is Google’s brand-spanking new web browser – Google Chrome.  Being the technology-lover that I am, I jumped on-board and installed it within the first 15 minutes of it being available. And since I haven’t had anything better to do, I’ve just been browsing the web all day, giving myself a good taste of just how it is.

The first major thing I noticed about the browser was how light-weight and quick it is.  From what I’ve been reading, instead of the browser running as one really bulky process, Chrome instead is a bunch of separate processes which are grouped together into a window via tabs.  One big benefit of this method is that if one tab breaks, only that one process must be terminated, instead of terminating the entire browser.  But the first thing that came to my mind when I heard about the separate processes was that it certainly had to use more CPU and/or memory resources.

<super-nerdy and totally skippable material>So I put together a test just now – I took the 10 tabs that I have open here in Google Chrome, and I opened each of them in Firefox 3.  According to my Windows Task Manager, Firefox.exe is using somewhere between 43 and 52% of my CPU (fluctuating very frequently) and 166,116 KB of Memory.  The sum of the 10 chrome.exe instances are using no more than 25% of the CPU (also fluctuating rather frequently… this video seems to be the reason, but I may have no idea what I’m talking about).  As for memory (where I foresaw the biggest problem), Firefox is using 171,384 KB as opposed to Chrome’s 10 processes totalling 189,880 KB.  If I did my math right (which I might not have, since the performance calculations in my Computer Architecture class always seemed flawed), that means that Chrome is using just over 10% more memory than Firefox.  Considering how much RAM I (and every other relatively new computer owner) have, I don’t think 1/100 of a Gigabyte of memory is really doing too much damage. </super-nerdy and totally skippable material>

Some things that I’m really liking about Chrome:

• It’s own Awesome Bar similar to Firefox 3 — You start typing and it lists 1) bookmarks which contain what you’ve typed in the address and/or title; 2) common searches in common search engines similar to what you’ve typed; 3) “recent pages in history containing” those words anywhere — take a look at those results to see a really cool feature – very well-organized history, snipets of the page surrounding your words, and a screenshot of the page.  SUCH a cool feature!  One other great aspect of this Omnibar (I know I read it was called that somewhere today…) is that you can start spelling a search engine (Google, IMDB, WikiPedia, M-W.com, etc.), and it will prompt you to “Press Tab to search [whichever search engine starts with that letter]“.  So I can type “i->Tab->Princess Bride” and voila, I’ve got the search results from IMDB.com!
• Everything is really smooth-looking.  Open a new tab and it slides open.  Close it and it slides away (like all the Mac and Vista eye candy — Steve Jobs probably can’t WAIT until it’s released for Macs).  But the smoothest thing is the ability to move tabs to their own windows.  Grab one of the tabs in the window and drop it anywhere other than the tab bar, and voila – a brand new window.  You can also drag tabs back into windows, re-order them, and (just like Firefox) drag a link to the tab bar in order to open that link at that location in the tab bar.  VERY cool stuff here.
• Every textarea is resize-able.  At the bottom-right corner of each, there are 6 dots arranged in a triangle that show that it can be resized.  Simply click and drag those dots to make the textarea larger or smaller.  (Note – these are the mutli-line input boxes – single-line boxes cannot be stretched out at this time.)
• The default homepage is really useful.  Open a new tab, and the page that opens contains the 9 pages you visit most (with screenshots, icons, and links), your bookmark toolbar displayed (which can be displayed any time by pressing Ctrl+B and hidden the same way), whichever searches you have accessed, and recent bookmarks.

These are just a few of the really awesome things that I have found so far in Google Chrome (and I’m sure there are many more to be released soon — this is just the very first beta release!).  There are, however, a few complaints that I’ve developed so far.

• The very first thing I noticed was that my touchpad scroll area doesn’t work as expected.  The biggest problem is that it only scrolls down, not doing anything when I attempt to scroll up.  That is a really huge problem in my books, because I very frequently scroll back up.  Also, it scrolls at least twice as far as it does in any other application I use.  
• One thing that isn’t necessarily a problem, but would be really handy – I would LOVE to be able to customize the default homepage.  I like the speed dial aspect, but I really don’t think the Google Chrome help page deserves to be on there.  I’d like to be able to pick and choose which I want to get instant access to.  (And I’d also like to add whichever other search tools I want.)
• I haven’t been able to find any sort of way to organize my bookmarks.  Firefox 3 has a fantastic tool allowing you to put things into a folder hierarchy as well as tagging each bookmark with whatever tags you desire.  You can force bookmarks into nested folders, but there isn’t an easy way to move them around and I haven’t seen any such thing as a tag (for being a very Web-2.0-centric browser, this really surprises me…).
• I haven’t found any add-ons.  In Firefox 3, you’ve got Extensions, Themes, and Plug-ins, and there is all sorts of user (and corporate) -created content for each.  Customizing a browser is something that I’ve come to require, so if I cannot get things like my RememberTheMilk for Gmail (blog entry coming soon!) extension, Foxmarks bookmark synchronization, and ways to customize the CSS on pages (either Stylish or GreaseMonkey), I will not be able to make Chrome my primary browser.

So far, I’m thoroughly enjoying a lot of aspects of Google Chrome, but without some obvious changes that are needed, it’s not quite as awesome a web browser as Firefox 3.  I’ll continue to play around with it and keep you posted.  If you take the time to try it out, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!