Posts Tagged ‘Karl’

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If war had fog

I imagine it would work something like this:

Also Karl remembers maths v. better than me, and he fixed lots of bugs.

(You can drag stuff around)

When Google is not available, I ask Karl

I don’t know if you’ve ever used a web browser before, but a common UI convention is to display a box at the top of the window, into which you type an address – or URL. It let’s the browser know what you want to retrieve, and soon you are browsing away like a professional.
With certain websites, Chrome asks if I’d like to preform a website-specific search using a query typed directly into his very own address bar – something I find very cool and also reasonably useful.
Firefox, too, but who cares about him?

Anyway, It caught my interest and when that happens there is one friend I turn to most of all. I asked Google about the situation, and he told me about Open Search description documents. I listened carefully, impressed by his knowledge and references – and guess what? They are super easy to make!

Also there are related plugins available for wordpress. Now you can search the GC from within your address bar! I think the future was yesterday.

Speaking of plugins, I installed another one that does syntax highlighting using Geshi, similar to codepaste classic nano touch.

the Altered Effect businesscard

Umm.. I submit that they look better in real life, which may even be true. The black side has shininess on it, in the shape of a portion of the altered effect logo. The gloss scratches off relatively easily, but whatevs.
The text on the black side is almost unnoticeable from most angles. Not what I intended, but I’m actually pretty cool with it.

I really like the weight and texture of the cards. They feel almost plastic-like. They came 7 days early, and I have ~950 of them. I am basically swimming in a sea of identical business cards right now.

Also, I’ve installed Portal on my media server and set it up with the wireless xbox360 receiver. When people come over, we can play portal on the TV now with the XBox360 controller – in addition to Left 4 Dead, and N+.

Brad out.

Sometimes I forget to duck

I opened my eyes to Chris Evans. In time to witness the final fight scene, it wasn’t at all a sudden awakening. I wish I had slept right through.
I saw Push for the second time on Monday night. I was pretty tired, and I didn’t even like the movie the first time I saw it.
Don’t let that discourage you if you’re looking forward to seeing it. My taste probably differs from your own, though you should defer to mine.
But man, that out of place half an hour – it cured my tiredness for some time to come.

I’ve been cutting up and formatting the new Aquaflora website design lately. I also designed a banner for a guy, though it wasn’t BradGill™ enough, so he decided to design one himself.

Species.com banner

Some other images I’ve recently been playing with:


bradicon002bradicon001

There’s a section off to the right that I haven’t included, and the advertisements have been pasted from “Bradicon classic“. Whoever did that has absolutely no regard for style. Speaking of Bradicon, I think we should launch Codepaste 2 soon. We’ve tested the code right out of that guy, or at least left it to sit untouched for the last however many days. That’s basically testing, right?

Tomorrow’s post, unless Karl decides to write it: A random story from Australia or New Zealand? Some random project or picture I dig up? Something about HTML/CSS/JS or PHP? You decide, or I’ll decide for you.

Your friend,
Brad

Some stuff is fun

Karl will remember this one.

I don’t know how it started, though I suspect it was with Luke. Maybe he asked a question, or requested assistance from Karl or from me. However it began, it ended with the the three of us solving our way through the OSIX challenges. It actually worked out very well because at least one of us was well-suited for each level.

Level 12, the second last, was my favourite. It was called the Evil Professor, and if I recall it with any accuracy, we were provided with the specs for an instruction set and a binary file that, when executed on the fictional machine built for that instruction set, would print for you the key to complete the challenge.

If you are at all like me, then reading that made you think: wow, we could have so much fun with that and also summarize it using a run-on sentence! If you’re not, you probably thought something a bit different.

But since I am both like myself and half psychic, those thoughts filled my mind, and also I was not wrong.

I decided that not only did I want to fully simulate a machine based on that instruction set, but I also wanted a fancy debug environment. I wanted to see the contents of RAM, each of the registers, the PC, a history of instructions executed (in ASM), and basically just as much as was completely unnecessary. I wanted to be able to step through the code.

And so I set about misusing PHP. There was a lot of converting between binary and hex and decimal and back again.
I’ve only once since made so much use of pack and unpack.

Before its completion, Karl and I were working on it together – he was fixing bugs as I introduced them.

With PHP as well, I wrote an assembler so that we could easily assemble our own ASM files for execution. Maybe no one will agree, but it was pretty cool and also fun.

The end.

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