Welcome to the Home page

I have been doing a lot of C++ programming with SDL and OpenGL lately and I have been trying to update my page on programming as well. I have added a lot of useful information and have a lot more that I still need to put up.

OpenGL is incredibly easy to use, and for the most part so is C++. I have also been using SDL as well which has it's own advantages, including it's ease of use as well. Some of the basics of OpenGL and SDL are on the C++ Programming page. A lot of the programming basics for C++ I haven't finished yet, but I have them written down on paper. I will update those soon. I'm going to put a list of references for books on the subject as well. I have already put these books on my project web Here .

I have moved the posts on this page regading how to use it's features to This Page to keep things a little cleaner. Not that this imformation is of any use to anyone until I build the "Comments" capability. Which I hope to get done soon, right now I am fairly occupied with other things. I am working on a C++ project and have a lot of coding examples and instructions on the use of C++, SDL, and OpenGL. Of course this is mostly just for my own reference, hopefully somebody somewhere will find it useful. I will post an update when I get those new notes posted.

I just recently got a Sansa Fuze 8gb portable music player. When searching for a new player I had several things I was concerned with:
   1) Price, I wanted something that didn't cost $250 that would eventually just burn out
   2) Expandability, I wanted a MicroSD slot so I can buy unlimited storage in the form of SD cards.
   3) Supported formats, I wanted a player that supported the major formats of MP3 and WMA but I also wanted variable bitrate OGG Vorbis, and lossless FLAC formats.
   4) Protocol format, I use primarily linux and so I wanted a simple MSC connection for direct access to the player.
The player so far has turned out to be fantastic, with a very fast interface and controls that mimic the iPod but uses a rotary input instead of touch. The controls are very smooth and aside from the slight notches in the rotary control you almost don't notice that it is rotary. The rotary also functions much like a D-pad with top, bottom, left, and right buttons. Then there is also a "home" button.

The player has a built in equalizer that is fully customizable and has all of the common presets. The player has menus to access Music, Videos, Podcasts, Pictures, FM Radio, Voice Recording, and a feature called slotRadio. There is no real "now playing" playlist that you can scroll through, which is a little unfortunate but you can always add songs to the GoList which is basically a built-in playlist that you can modify on the player. You can easily rate the songs, view the songs file information, and delete the song if it turns out to be a song you don't like and want to remove from the player without having access to a computer.

There are a couple different view modes while music is playing, the standard album cover with artist and track name with the current position. But it also has a spectrum visualization, a album cover only setting, and basic information that will show the next song before it reverts back to the original setting. The FM Radio features a recording feature so you can record programs on the radio, a nice little extra feature.

Integration in Linux was flawless, when set to MSC mode it is detected and mounted automatically and available without any configuration in Amarok aside from telling it which folders contain music and podcasts. Copying files to the Sansa was very fast and the OGG Vorbis format worked flawlessly, I have yet to try FLAC though. The only drawback in supported formats so far has been that it does not read the m4a format used on the iPod. However, using m4a is like using wma from Microsoft in my opinion anyway. I prefer Ogg Vobis and am converting my entire collection into that format to get rid of the problems I have with using multiple different formats.

I have misplaced my MicroSD card so I have not had the chance to test the integration of the MicroSD slot.

So I went to the grand opening for the Airsoft of Kalamazoo outdoor field, to see what the place was like so that I might have a place to locally play Airsoft. It turned out to be a fantastic day, with 6-7 hours or playing. There was around 30+ people the entire day so the teams were large and there were even a few games where the teams were split into three. The building was fairly large, with 2 floors, and the outdoor field was a little larger than the building. There was a lot of cover but at times there wasn't enough outdoors. Indoors, there were many little structures built to hide behind but the building was originally used for paintball. Where the little cracks made it fairly impossible to get shot through in paintball, it's fairly easy to get hit in airsoft.

The upper floor is fairly easy to defend since there are only 2 ways to get upstairs, with proper cover on those 2 entrances it is very difficult to assault. The downstairs has lots of cover but as the same time there are so many places to get shot from that you can't stay in one place very long. The downstairs is also separated in half by a large wall with 3 doorways, causing a kind of funnel between the two sides which is a good thing to prevent sniping from across the inside of the building. The upstairs has a small hole referred to as the sniper tower, the hole is less than a square foot providing very good cover for a sniper. It is however somewhat unfortunate that this sniper tower has complete coverage of the outdoor field. The only obstacles for the sniper are bunkers outdoors.

Probably the only real big problem I saw with this place was that there were only 2 ways to get outside, one way had no cover at all and the other had a large board that 3 or 4 people could hide behind all at once. This always led to a stalemate outdoors where noone wanted to move because there was not enough cover to really move that much when there was a sizeable force outside. Many people would get shot just trying to get outside to the nearest cover, but a few fast runners got away with it.

I highly recommend Airsoft of Kalamazoo to anyone who enjoys this sport, stop by sometime and give it a try. There is nowhere else that you can play on a field like this anywhere else in Kalamazoo. Airsoft of Kalamazoo also has a membership you can join, for $25 you get a KZOO Crew card and get special discounts and features not available to others, check it out.

Oh my goodness I miss playing planetside! I want to renew my subscription and start playing again but I am holding out hoping for the official announcement of Planetside 2. There has been rumors floating a round for a while now about a hint towards Planetside 2, however there is not much evidence so far to support that it is truly being worked on other than a couple posts by smedley and apparently a domain registration of planetside2.com by sony. There are many mixed feeling about the original planetside, and suite a few of the negative things I have read don't make a lot of sense to me. For example, some people complain that it doesn't have enough rpg elements. It's not and RPG! It's an FPS! I have not seen any mmofps that compares to the quality and scale of Planetside. Back in the day of Planetside, it was common to have an entire continent (now planets) completely locked from the massive amount of players in the battles. There are three empires, and I have never known the exact number, but over 100 players from each empire can be on a continent at once. So that's at least 300 people battling it out, it was one of the most amazing games to ever play. Anyone that spent a lot of time playing this game is sure to have some fabulous stories, look it up sometime and you'll find stories that I could not even begin to describe. Yet reading through these old stories of playing Planetside I think to myself, "Yeah, I remember when things like that happened". When those continents got locked, there would be sometimes 50 or more people waiting in the queue to enter that continent. Others would go off to other continents to try to penetrate continents owned by other empires. The empires were fantastic too, each with their own philosophy and weapons and vehicles.

I miss Planetside, more than any other game I have ever played. I started thinking about how much I miss the game when I turned on Rhythmbox and the music from Planetside was already o nthe playlist. The music was so incredibly good, in my opinion, that every time I hear it I want to play. Just to hear the music and be in the heat of battle side by side with my 100 other comrades protecting the back door of the base, launching bombing runs on enemy positions, sneaking into enemy bases and backhacking the enemy empires, raiding any one of the over 100 bases if my count is correct...I will have to make a new Planetside page in the game web eventually.

The AC Theory notes are available Here , or from the web menu, go to Construction Trades, and then select AC Theory from one of the 3 places I have a link on that page.

Welcome to my new website that I have worked long and hard on. Well...not really, I've been working on it for a little over a week and it has turned out fantabulous. Better than fantastic, and better than fabulous.
There are so many features of my new website design I don't even know where to begin. Most of the content from the TWiki site that I was using has been translated using some special shell scripts I developed so that my website is actually one website now. Not my website that I built, and the twiki site mashed together with horrid links going all over to things that didn't exist.

I have created my very own TWiki style site, using most of the same text formatting rules for ease of translation and so I don't have to learn a new system. Although I have introduced new features that didn't exist before. However I have also had to remove other features until I can develop ways to implement them. But for now most of the necessary features work.

Most of the features I implemented are things that you cannot see. Mostly special tags that allow the creation of LATEX equations using mimetex, and image tags that automatically look in relative directories for the image. If the image doesn't exist yet I can simply click the image location and it will allow me to upload a image ad renames it to the filename it needs to be in the proper location. I have also created an automated gallery that will construct itself based on a simple comma separated list. Even this "blog" entry is a new tag that I developed allowing me to post updates and the new items automatically are opened and all others are closed with only the title visible. Similar to the home page on my original site but all automatic.

I am very happy with how the website as turned out, only a few small things need to be worked on right now. The indexing for the Home web doesn't work, but should be a simple one liner fix I suspect. I have fixed the indexing problem. I need to go through the icons provided from TWiki and make my own icons, which will just happen over time. Comments do not work yet, not that I suspect anyone to make comments, but it will be there anyway. Comments will be on a per page basis, a footer will be added at the bottom of every page displaying comments in a hideaway section just like these blogs. I need a new name for blog, I have always disliked that word and the virulent mass of bloggers on the blogosphere. So I need something unique for my website. The bullet lists and number lists currently only have one level, but thats also a quick fix I may do right after this post.

I still need to translate the content from my original website to this one. I will have to do each page manually as the html is too complex to write a script for. The plus side to this new site is that once complete, all the editing is done in plain text files with very simple formatting options. I'll post some more blogs on each feature below this one.