Two Apocalypses Down, One To Go

The forecasts for the beginning of this century were quite ominous. Firstly the Y2K bug, then the Rapture, and then the End of the World.

Does anyone know what the Y2K bug actually was? Basically, computers were not future proofed and so only stored 2 numbers of the year, so 91 or 99, and simply prefixed 19 whenever asked. So the thought was that when the clocks ticked over to the year 2000, all computers what see the time as 1900, but wait, computers weren't around then! And so the computer would have a melt-down, or explode, or attack humanity.

Microsoft actually released a patch to prevent this apocalypse so luckily we were all saved. It must also be noted that a 32 bit date system used in Unix systems will have the same effect as returning to epoc time, but that is due to happen 2038.

The most recent apocalypse happened 21st May 2011, at 6pm EDT. Missed that one? Me too. A large community of the Christian faith believed that the second coming of Jesus would occour that day. Apocalypse 2011 it seemed, was a slight miscalculation. So how did this date even come about?
Wikipedia has this to say:

In 1970, Camping dated the Great Flood to 4990 BC.^[26] Using this date, taking the statement in Genesis 7:4 ("Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth") to be a prediction of the end of the world, and combining it with 2 Peter 3:8 ("With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day"), Camping concluded that the end of the world would occur in 2011, 7000 years from 4990 BC.^[8] Camping takes the 17th day of the second month mentioned in Genesis 7:11 to be May 21, and hence predicts the rapture to occur on this date.

Sounds like reason enough for me, but nothing happened, so what now?

On May 23, 2011, Harold Camping stated that May 21 had been a "spiritual" Judgment Day and that the Rapture will occur on October 21, 2011, together with the destruction of the world.^[22]

So we are still awaiting the death and destruction all of man kind. Fan-fucking-tastic.

Next up, if we survive the physical rapture, is the Mayan worlds end prediction. These have been justified using mostly astrological alignments and the end of a calender created thousands of years ago.

Since this theory took off there have been numerous different theories on what will cause the end of the world. None of which have any real credit to them, as far as I am aware.

So that's my rant.
I posted a message on the  Apocalypse 2011 website and am hoping that it makes it past the moderation. I doubt it. Though I did leave a link to my blog and so if anyone has ended up here from there, feel free to leave a message. I will only remove content if the post is excessively vulgar, but it will still show that a post was made.

Cheers,
Milk

How To Kill A Computer

Here is a couple things everyone should know how to do from the command line.

To get the command line, click on the start button, then in the search bar type cmd and press enter.

To change the location.
Command: cd path
e.g.: cd C:\Windows\system32

Change your password without knowing the old one.
Location: C:\Windows\system32
Command is: net user user_name new_password
e.g.: net user Milk Password01

Only catch is you have to already be logged in. Good to change a friends password if they leave their computer on. Would be lols.

Format hard drive.
Warning: Don't run this!!!
Location: anywhere in any drive
Command: del drive *.* /s /q
e.g.: del C:\ *.* /s /q

This silently deletes every file in every folder on your directory without asking "Are you sure?"
Pretty dangerous couple of characters.

Works great if you are on a flash drive. Deletes all the hidden files and meta-data as well. So it is very efficient.

Get your IP address.
Location: anywhere
Command: ipconfig

Gives you a whole bunch of information, very handy for LANs and setting up your minecraft server.

Print a tree.
Location: anywhere
Command: tree

Lost a folder? Set the location to a starting point and use the tree command. This prints out everything in the folder and folders below that, so that you can find something. It's fantastic.

These are only a couple cool looking things you can use in command line. They are only a very small part of what you can do. But this should be enough to impress your friends. Everyone knows that command line pulls the chicks.

C Four, miGame, Part 5

So I was getting a bit frustrated at this AI, I made that I could beat every time... Had a look online at the solution Wikipedia was talking about. This. Shat my pants looking at the amount of information this things goes through. Some guy actually spend 40,000 hours calculating all the possible positions on the board and creating a txt file that holds all these and the transitions between them.

This is tl;dr.

4,531,985,219,092 different possible combinations of moves. That's quite a lot.

So this project seems to be a bit beyond what I was looking to do... I have a pretty average working AI now though. Wont release it just yet though. [Stop timer 201105061934]. Might work on this again later.

Random unrelated image:

I got a job making a website, which is great for University as I need work hours to graduate, but terrible for the guy who hired me because I have NO experience in html or css or php. Should be fun. Will have a play with this blogs design as well. I do quite like it how it is though. We will see.

Will end up something like this:

C Four, miGame, Part 2

I've noticed a lot of searches hitting my blog with my C Four program I made, here. So I'm going to go into a bit of depth about the game now. A lot of the searches say 'Program that proves Connect 4 is a draw'. This got me curious.

Wikipedia says "The game was solved mathematically by James D. Allen (Oct 1, 1988), and independently by Victor Allis (Oct 16, 1988). With perfect play, the first player can force a win by starting in the middle column. By starting in the two adjacent columns, the first player allows the second player to reach a draw; by starting with the four outer columns, the first player allows the second player to force a win."
It also has a couple links to freeware you can download that plays the perfect game. But I'd rather solve it myself.

Lulz

Initial thoughts: So we know the concept, get four in a row either diagonally, horizontally or vertically. The board is 7 long and 6 high. This means that we must use the middle column to get a diagonal or horizontal win. Also a diagonal or vertical win needs the two middle rows. As the board is filled row by row, it become immediately clear that middle board dominance is essential.

More lulz

Could do: I know how to model turn based games on a graph with nodes representing game state and then use logic to determine from what states a player can force a win. But that's boring and very time consuming to do by hand. See xkcd has done this for tic-tac-toe.

Will do: So what I'm going to do instead is alter my old version of C Four (get it? Connect Four but it's written in C so I called it C Four...) and create an AI that uses a depth first recursive search to find the optimum position for the next piece. I could have it build a graph at run time and then traverse the graph with each move made but computers are fast enough to handle what I'm trying to achieve here.
Basic: Make a program that looks at every possible move and picks the best one. 


What I will need:
Time. I'm back from University holidays and my memory is terrible so will have to go back and learn C.
Visual Studio or something similar to develop in. I'm posting at work so will download this to my flash drive and play with the idea from there.
Money. Not for this project but it's always good to have money, am I right?

Even more lulz

Akin to my original C Four program the game is going to be in ASCII. If I am able I will keep C Four as it is and simply add the option to verse a computer player or even watch a computer player verse another computer player. This is where the money is at.

[Connect Flour image. Sorry I lost this one. But it is funny]

If it works correctly we should see the two computer players play the exact same game every time. And hopefully player 1 will always win. That would be pretty cool.

I'm going back into hospital tomorrow for my kidney stones again, but workload from University has lessened so will work on it in my downtime.

Cheers,

A Picture Says a Thousand Words.

I'm Sick

So guys guess what. I found out I have kidney stones in my right kidney. Spent a few days in and out of hospital over the last few weeks for this. Worst pain I have ever felt in my life. Morphine and all the good stuff was administered. Basically, it is what it sounds like. I have formed rocks in my kidneys. My guess is that it was the 2+ Mothers a day I was drinking.



They are like V / Monster / Red Bull / Demon, (I don't know what other countries have), but they have the maximum legal limit of caffeine and all that good shit. Limit one 500 mL can per day. Felt great. Kept me going well.

Needless to say I had a range side-effects from the green including: chest pains, eye and arm twitching, and greenish coloured urine... I have since stopped having energy drinks...

Here is a picture of some kidney stones.



Not fun. Mine is 6mm, which means it's on the line of too big to pee out, so they are going to blast it with ultrasound to break it up so that I can pee it out. Beautiful. In the meantime they have put a stent in me.



So it has one curly end in my kidney and another curly end in my bladder. This was inserted through 'existing entry points'. That is to say, men, you do not ever want to have to get one of these... Luckily I was under general anaesthesia, or I would have died from fear.



Ultrasound blasting thing is 5th May and then getting the stent removed sometime after that. I'll keep you posted.

It's been 4 days since the stent was inserted and normal bodily function has resumed.

I have a whole bunch of boring university work going on at the moment as well so I'll have to wait until something exciting comes up before I have another decent software related post. Will probably put up one of the personas our group made for one of our projects later on. It looked pretty cool.

Oh and Portal 2 anyone???

Comes out in New Zealand TODAY on Xbox 360. Does anyone know if you can play split-screen local co-op on the Xbox? PLEASE let me know.
Cheers,
Milk

miTanks, Part 9

That's right! miTanks is back. After a very very long break I've got motivated to finish it. Or at least get it on the platform it was originally for. Haven't really had much commitment from Foo, which is both our faults really. I'm not the best teacher and he has little / no coding experience. And lobbing him with graphics was not the best move.

Sorry to everyone that doesn't have an Android, but you can still enjoy my struggle with xml and the Android graphics classes... And the PC version will still have the same look and feel as the Android version, with the obvious touch-screen exception.

Can't remember if I've said already or not but this is a fantastic, simple example of how to make a game on Android. The game is open source so I'm basing the majority of figuring out how to do graphics on this. For those of you know don't know software programming is basically: "Learn the basics; google the rest."

Image courtesy of xkcd.

I think I have a pretty good idea of what I need to do now. The tanks are going to look something like this:
 

And the turrets are just going to be a black smooth edged square, pointing at whatever angle they need to. The ground is either going to be a solid colour or each pixel will be 1 of three colours. This will depend on how much time it takes up to search and utilise a very very large 2D colour array.

I'll be using the sky square (not a box, it's 2D) Foo created earlier, because it is awesome. This will be the background of most of the levels. Might end up overlaying some objects like a building or something.

What else? Damage isn't quite right. The tank only takes damage if the very centre is hit. Not a major flaw but not very ascetically pleasing.

I'll get to work on this all tonight and post something on Monday(?) about what I have done.

Links to the other miTanks posts:
Part 1, The Plan
Part 2, Initial Concept
Part 3, Object Oriented Design + Update
Part 4, Sound Request + Update
Part 5, First Screenshots
Part 6, Ground Types
Part 7, Weapons + Ground Dynamics
Part 8, Initial Release

The last one contains the initial release for PC. Have a look at that if you haven't already. Just renamed all my posts... I had two part 4's AND 2 part 6's. That's just bad...

And as always suggestions are always appreciated.

Cheers,
Milk

miAlchemy

So Foo showed me this free game on Android called Alchemy. It's pretty simple. You start off with the four basic elements; earth, fire, water, and air. Then you drag one on another and make something else. e.g. earth + water = swamp, fire + air = energy, energy + swamp = life. There are 360 elements to unlock in the free version.

Being a coder I thought that it seemed pretty simple to make. So, I made miAlchemy (original, I know). Now it doesn't look as awesome as the Android one, and it's for computer instead. It's written in Python; like the last few projects I've put up here.

The way it figures out which elements exist allows for drop in add-ons. That way you can simply add a file into the elements folder and BAM! it's in the game. Images can be changed just as easily.

Mine also allows more then 2 things to be combined at a time. So something like: earth + air + fire + water = life, is possible.

My version has:
Earth
Air
Water
Fire
Alcohol

Put some suggestions in the comments and I'll add it to the game. If it's not obvious, let me know how to make it.

When I get some more elements into the game I'll package it up and release it for you guys.
If you want to do some 40x40 images would be good too.

100 Followers!!!

Awesome. Simply awesome. I would like to think my mum, for the cake, my brother and cousin for the story, myself for the epic content, all my followers for keeping me here, and all the little people I squashed to get where I am today.
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Here's a whole bunch of random images I enjoy. To celebrate. I will have some content related to the blog later on. I hope. When I get around to it... I'll do it tonight. I promise.