Initial ColourCode Success

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am working on a Ruby generic syntax highlighter. Well today it had its first measure of success by producing this HTML:
It is buggy as can be seen from the mess up near the end, and write now I haven't chosen the best colours nor a complete correct language definition for Ruby or any other language, but the major part is done.

Books

I got two new books today, Practical C++ Programming and Code Complete 2/e
. Both are supposed to be really good, so lets see what knowledge I gain from it

Long time no write

Well I have been quite busy/tired/bored to write these past few days, so today I willed myself to write. The Christmas holidays have begun and I am getting a little more time on the computer.
It was my birthday on the 22nd and so now I am officially 16 as reflected in the sidebar.
I have also been planning a lot of projects. They are a code-to-html syntax highlighter in Ruby, a JS toolkit, a Ajaxified To Do Note application and a blog system. I am also planning to do a Space Invaders clone in C++ using SDL and a Game Of Life program for some fun.
The toolkit and syntax highlighter are on the way to completion in a few days and the to do is designed. Hope to get it finished by February.
Anyway Merry Christmas to everyone.

Ambigram Lucerne

An ambigram of 'Lucerne' in Switzerland, one of the best cities I have been to.

Awesome and Definition don't go together

I have often really hated how science just kills the magnificence of some things by a definition. Check this one out for instance, its about our hands.

The hands are the two intricate, prehensile, multi-fingered body parts normally located at the end of each arm of a human or other primate.

Hands are one of the coolest things ever produced by Evolution, we can barely imagine the complexity and trial and error required to create it and they call it a prehensile(no idea what it means) multi fingered body part :|

There are scores of such definitions and I wish someday someone changes them.

Nero No More

I thought I knew the limit of bad software written by proprietary and dumb companies for proprietary and dumb operating systems. But right now when all I want to do is sleep, I have discovered a new limit, it goes way past infinity. I need to write a LARGE BOLD rant to show how much I hate stupid crappy pathetic sissy Nero. But not write now, must ... go ... to ... sleep.

Stupid people doing Stupid things

Everyone living in India must have heard about Dalits in Maharashtra causing a lot of trouble and damage to its citizens and property. Apparently a desecration of the late Dr Baba Ambedkar's statue in Kanpur has sparked of the violence. Since yesterday they have been making Mumbai's suburbs close down, breaking windows of shops and vehicles and generally harassing people. But violence escalated to new hieghts some time ago with the torching of two trains, one a mumbai local and the other the Deccan Queen, a link between Mumbai-Pune. I marvel at the idiocy and illiteracy of the people who are reduced to such low levels. I mean, if someone annoyed you by damaging your leader's statue why don't you crappy people just find that guy and kill HIM. And that guy's not even in Maharashtra. If you do not have the basic civic sense to not hurt other people, if you are so stupid that you do not know tolerance and non violence, if you fail to understand the value of money and time, don't go about begging for reservations in IITs and other institutions, you are not worthy of them. I wish I could get my hands on one of you and strangle you. And cut the crap, its about time the issue died down.
I don't use ultra profane words or you would have a shit load of them here.

Ambigram Nikhil Marathe

This is my full name in a rotational ambigram. Its really cool how the k splits into a a and t on the other side. Needed a fair bit of work and could be made better. The only problem spot was the 'k' to 'at' part. The rest of my name is an extremely straight stroked typeface. I also liked the way the L and M joined gracefully with the extra bit acting like a serif for the M.
Next I should try to preserve the case.

Glowpad

Glowpad is a small Python/Pygame program to read in a file and generate a word/pattern with randomly coloured squares which morph to white. I basically wrote it after seeing the cool effect that appears at the end of one of the Sony ads(the robot one) where the same effect happens with the word feel. So I hacked this program in just half an hour.

To run the program, extract it to any place on your computer. you NEED to have Python and Pygame installed before you can run it. After you install them just run the program by executing

python glowpad.py 

. Two patterns FEEL and LINUX are included. So to apply the effect on Linux use

python glowpad.py linux

.
To create your own patterns just create a new file in any editor. Make the pattern you want using an uppercase B. The colours are chosen randomly. You can add padding or whatever you want around the characters. The only thing Glowpad makes sense of is an uppercase B, any other character is ignored. So this is an example. Just save the file and run it as shown above

##############################
-B----BBBBB-BBBBB-B---B-B---B-
-B------B---B---B-B---B--BBB--
-B------B---B---B-B---B---B---
-B------B---B---B-B---B--BBB--
-BBBB-BBBBB-B---B-BBBBB-B---B-
##############################

DOWNLOAD:http://22bits.exofire.net/downloads/glowpad.tar.gz

Ambigram Harry Potter

Harry Potter both ways. Directly rendered in Inkscape with no pre-planning.

What the blog tagline means

If you are wondering why my tagline is a wierd string of numbers, they are all extremely important to the world, except the second, which is only important for a few in the world.

• 42 - The Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything
• 22 - My birthday
• 3.14 - Pi
• 2.718 - e
  
• 1.618 - The Golden Ratio
• 0 - Defying quite a number of laws of mathematics

Ambi Nikhil Revised

This is a way better version of my name, My friends said the K wasn't easy to read in the first and looked like nifkil, so this one is with the name split over two levels . This not only makes it readable it gives a tightness to the word, and doesn't leave excess whitespace

Ambigram Shreyas

Another friend, not the best ambigram, can be done loads better.

Ambigram Konqi

The KDE Mascot, good ain't it?

Ambigram Alok

Another friend. Sorry for the bad PNG quality somehow Inkscape's export isn't very good. Also the O is quite bad. Alok is a really hard name and the ambigram could really use some improvement.

Ambigram Nikhil

I realised that I had never posted about my own ambigram. This is one of my oldest, probably a year old, and can be made a lot better by using the calligraphy tool in Inkscape. But for now this will do.

Ambigram Mridul

Ambigram of a friend's name.

Beryl Screenshots

Here are some screenshots of my computer running Beryl.
The customary Cube:


Windows can be made to look like a negative(Konqueror here) and so can the complete desktopHave too many windows and don't want to Alt+Tab, get a view of all the windows on all desktops or on current desktop depending on which screen edge you take the mouse too(configurable)

Transparency. The Konqueror window on top is partially transparent(Alt + mouse scroll) and shows the blogger window beneath

Beryl is AMAZING!

I have got Beryl working with AIGLX and all its cool effects on an i845 and 256mb ram with almost no difference in performance than non beryl. This is absolutely amazing. The beryl devs are really great. Compiz used to be really slow. Now I can finally have all this eye candy on all the time.

Learning

I have decided to take a break from creating software to learning some new things for a few days. So I have started learning Ruby, advanced JavaScript which I didn't know before, especially DOM scripting and Ajax. And I am also reading Beginning Algorithms which is a really good book for an introduction to algorithms in a easy to understand concrete way. That said I am starting to like Ruby and feel the same enjoyment that is felt when coding in Python. I have not entirely abandoned projects though. They are on the drawing board and in the design process.
School begins from tomorrow after three weeks of Diwali vacations and we have lots of exams coming up which will severely curtail my computer time. I will be freed only in the second week of December when preparations for the school Sports Day begins and studies take a backseat.
This is the last day of enjoyment so I go of to enjoy...

Barcelona vs Chelsea

I stayed up yesterday night to watch the match, and the sleep lost was well worth it. A quick goal by Deco had me worried that Chelsea would lose, but a stunner from Lampard solved that problem. Gudjohnsen struck back at his old team, but a 93rd minute goal by Drogba(he is now scored 5 goals in 4 matches) put the match on a draw, enough to ensure chelsea goes clear and a small chance of Barca getting eliminated at this stage. Anyway the referee was REALLY bad, they should bring someone more tolerant of fouls instead of handing out cards(11 yellow).

KDE Ambigram

Here is a simple KDE ambigram I made in Inkscape. KDE is a perfect word for ambigramming. Not only is it a rotational ambigram, but a flip one too as well as a mirror ambigram. How cool is that!

LaserMania:It is done

Lasermania is complete! I frantically coded the evening day before yesterday and yesterday morning in a 'flow' state and now Lasermania is working properly with no known bugs right now (though I am sure more will emerge). The mirrors reflect fine, its fast and responsive and about the only thing left is designing fun and interesting levels for it. The first 4 are done but I am trying to think of harder ones. I hope to put it up for download in about a week with an exe for windows users, because this is something I CAN show in school, but only if it can be made into an exe.

Now that I don't have any knew projects its time to start brainstorming for ideas. Also I am hoping to start a new well designed site again on HostMatrix so that my CSS skills don't rust.

Celebrating 10 years of KDE

Recently KDE celebrated 10 years of its existence. And they have been an amazing and fruitful 10 years in which the linux desktop scene has changed radically. KDE has been the major reason for this. In 10 years it has come from a clunky looking blocky desktop to an elegant piece of software which makes proprietary desktops sweat. KDE has been untainted by bureaucracy and controversies, has a good record as far as open source software is concerned and is expected to gather even more accolades with KDE 4. Lets hope it does happen. Three cheers for the KDE team and good luck for KDE 4.

KDE 3.5.5

KDE 3.5.5 is expected to be released tommorrow atleast from what it says in the release announcement which is as of now unpublished and which i got from another blog. The news is already on LXer so lets hope it does happen tommorrow. It will be good if it can boot even faster than right now

Technorati Tags: kde 3.5.5, kde, linux, free desktop

LaserMania development

Lasermania finally has something to see moving. Its this game where you have to arrange specific mirrors in proper places to guide a photon from emitter to reciever. Its written in pygame/python. In the screenshot you can see the photon(red dot) to the right. The emitter now fires a photon, drag and drop works(almost), only the mirror logic is left.

Yesterday I had a really bad half and hour when for some reason the very bad thought of leaving school/college after 12th came in my head. After studying there for 5 years, having so many good friends, people you like, a large campus to have fun in, the countless hours spent playing football or doing lots of cool stuff in the labs, it all suddenly came back to me and stayed with me until I slept. And somehow I don't think this is the last time its gonna happen. There is so much that I need to put down here, but I don't think there is any language which can describe everything I want to say. I better stop, before the post starts reminding me of it all over again. Such things happen to me when I suddenly hear or see something which has a really deep connection to some special day at school.

Technorati Tags: school miss

My Blog is gone

For some reason my blog on xmgfree.com is gone, along with my posts. So this is my new blogspace.

So I haven't posted in a really, really long time. This is because I have been busy and never got much interested in posting what I was up to. So anyway in programming my newest game is on the path to completion. Its written in Python/Pygame and is a puzzle where you arrange various mirrors to guide a photon of light from the emitter to the reciever. Right now I am facing some drag problems, but they should be smoothed out and the game should be ready in a few weeks. I have been reading two new books, 'Discrete Mathematics' and 'Maths and Physics for Programmers', the later being really good.
On a sidenote Akademy 2006 is in full swing in Dublin and I am once again unhappy that I couldn't be there.
The non computer-related part of my life is going on just fine. I am totally loving 11th standard, the subjects are much more interesting than they used to before, and the sheer exhilaration you get from solving a particularly difficult problem is just awesome!