all things me

It would be so nice if on Windows XP one could choose which boxes in the task bar (with the clock and the Start button and things) get grouped together when there’s too little space.

My FireFox (1.0) went bonkers. One of the themes had some sort of a bug in it, and the browser view broke completely. Menus showed black text on black background, no styles anywhere. I wasn’t able to uninstall the theme because the Theme dialog was all white (With Uninstall, Use, Update texts at the bottom, though). I uninstalled Firefox, re-installed but the uninstall hadn’t apparently deleted the theme files (nor extensions etc., luckily). Then I realized there’s this mysterious Safe Mode below the regular FF. Ah, things in place, at last. I uninstalled most of the themes (most didn’t work anyway because I’d just updated from 1.0PR — or more like installed yet another FF. I realized I had 0.92 and 1.0PR still left, I thought the new versions install over the old ones). When I restarted FF the theme had gone back to default. Phew. Because the uninstall wouldn’t destroy all the files, I didn’t have to re-download loads of extensions (well, some, a few)… Lucky me.

I recently finished playing Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Boy, had it changed since its early days. I have the first PoP on Gameboy (the “black-and-white” (more like grey and green) version, even) and I’ve also played it on PC.

But the Sands of Time blew me away with its graphics — almost. Beautiful scenery, nice movie clips. But the enemies were a bit clumsy (especially the harem girls).

I love the Prince’s acrobatics. Running along walls (no, it’s not really possible in real life), jumping from flag poles… Sister got tired of the wall-to-wall jump never going the way it should be, but I didn’t have such difficulties. At first I thought that when I had found an effective way to attack, that’d work through the rest of the game. Luckily, that wasn’t the case.

Some fights started to feel hopeless and I probably would’ve given in and tried a cheat if there was one. Luckily again, there wasn’t. Usually I got stuck in a difficult fight when it was late and I’d been playing for a long time but the next day (or the next time I played), with fresh eyes, fresh mind, and better reaction time, I eventually kicked the sand creatures’ butts and felt really really good about it. So, lots of sighs of relief and cries of excitement are expected.

The Prince receives a useful set of special abilities with a dagger he finds at a palace. Rewinding time is most useful, and most used, I’d imagine. Slowing time (super-freeze?) was something I managed to get going only by accident and I never used it. There was a difficult situation where my sister had to use it; strangely, I never got stuck in that place. I tried to help my sister, but it wasn’t as easy on her computer as it was on mine.
A bit like this jump I thought was very easy in Splinter Cell but Dad, whose computer runs a “little” faster than mine, had serious trouble with it (me too, as I tried to help him). Praise the slow machine!

Then there’s the puzzles. Almost every step you take is one. There’s never a straight-forward way from point A to point B (unless you place your points a really short distance away, you cheat ).

The music is a delight. The soundtrack is entirely Stuart Chatwood’s doing. The tracks are a mix of oriental strings, disco pop (I don’t know!), and quite heavy-ish guitar rock at times. I especially like the short introductory music that plays when you fall in the prison. That should’ve gone on for longer.

What annoys me is the way the camera works. Its course is somewhat limited and when you roll the camera “too far” it comes back to an awkward angle along with a swoosh sound. Also, the camera may change place suddenly, and because the directions are relative to the camera’s angle, you end up going back and forth if you’re not careful and take it slowly. Camera angles also make it difficult to determine which button you should press to jump to the right direction. Not a nice feature when you’re dangling from a stalagmite (dripstone) that will break apart fast.

On the second round (which is on-going) the game was easy-peasy at the beginning because I’d learnt all the tips and tricks I would learn later if it was my first round. The enemies probably didn’t even realize what hit ’em! But still, I got stuck again.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the next part, Warrior Within. I hear it’s got so amazing graphics, that it’d be worth even to just *watch* someone play it. [Pelit]

Game’s website (displays the newest, there’s a subpage for Sands of Time)

I celebrated too early. It was this morning that there was really snow. Everything was white and still is (pretty much) — at least outside the city centre.

Last night, 8 pm — 2 am, I drew a GUI picture series of a search function. It’s for the ‘introduction to application design’ course. There’s a zoo database which we’ve designed through 3 group projects so far. (It’s going to develop step by step, but we aren’t going to program it. This is just a course on designing.) It was a lot of fun. It would’ve been more fun to design the basic layout for the interface (I would’ve done an html page with frames and forms and then taken a screen shot of it) but it wasn’t my turn — last week I drew use case diagrams and context diagrams, wrote use cases based on Alistair Cockburn’s template…

If you know a program for *drawing* windows (not an MS Visual Basic type of thing that codes the interface), I’d be very interested in hearing about it.

I renamed a file ‘readme’ to ‘README’ so it would be more visible in the file listing of a website (with no index page). Though it was visible in the file listing on the command line (ls), it disappeared from the file listing of the web folder. I was puzzled for a while and then changed ‘README’ to ‘README.txt’, and — acrabadabra — it appeared as text under the file listing!

Extremely wow.

Is it just me, or does ‘fingering’ (unix command: finger username) sound like harassment?

I’m writing a unification-based parser grammar and am faced with a problem with adjectives. Professor proposed a model where adjectives of a same “type” (size, colour, etc etc) should be restricted in a way that they can’t modify the same word. Is this a good rule? Seems so, it would be a bit silly to talk about “rough smooth surface” (or “smooth rough”) but is it absolutely wrong? What about the game title “Little Big Adventure”? On the other hand, that’s creative writing and the parser will be working in a relatively restricted domain (not meaning ‘restricted by relations’, well… in a way). Also, the parser is supposed to be “permissive” and last summer I had to throw my perfectionism in the trash bin and allow plural subjects and predicates to mix freely
Well, the *biggest* problem is probably how I am going to restrict the adjectives if it comes to that…

I’ve been making the parser more permissive by allowing nouns to be articleless (and of course, sometimes they’re supposed to be). Hmmm… what to tackle next?

I don’t know what I did, or was it wrong before but I just hadn’t noticed (that’d be odd, I’ve been goggling at this new layout for sooooo looooong), but suddenly the footer went nuts. It came right after the content going over and under (that’s what it looked like) the menu. And not at the bottom of the page like it should. Bad footer!

A List Apart’s article Creating Liquid Layouts with Negative Margins came to the rescue.

Heheh. Yesterday the internet provider sent a post telling that they’ll remove all posts that are more than 14 days old from the users’ Trash folders. Today they sent a clarification that no, they cannot delete the posts that are downloaded to Outlook or other mail program. Heheh, the evil Elisa leprechaun runs around every night destroying people’s mails… (Elisa is the name of the company)

For a moment I was panicking. The database connection didn’t work on my or my hostess’s site (so the problem was with the server) and it seemed to go on forever. I updated my index page already, telling about problems, but then suddenly everything works. Phew.

Now, what was I supposed to write before I was cruelly denied access.

First of all, my sister spotted a silly sight while playing Splinter Cell:

That handsome chap there is Sam Fisher — the one in black. There’s a slaughter house at one point in the game, and one of the soldiers my sister (or Sam Fisher) shot, froze with his hands still holding the gun. Also the grimace is awfully funny but you probably can’t see it well. You can see the other corner of the mouth being darker and thus being drawn downward. (speak of the devil: Splinter Cell music just started playing on Winamp)

I saw two episodes of Dr. Phil this week. He’s supposed to be some really popular tv “shrink” but I don’t know… He sounds exactly like the guidance counsellor, Mr. Mackey, in South Park!! Hoookay? Sorry, it’s more like “m’kay” with Mr. Mackey but “hookay” with Dr. Phil. They sound the same, nevertheless.

I wanted to show the last update on my Booklog, but I’d removed the date of the post from my static pages. Well, running php from a post is not possible on WP. I found a wonderful plugin by Mark.

Also, “installed” Customizable post listings plugin (from Coffee2Code; wonderful site and wonderful name!!) and put a list of 5 most recently updated posts (including static pages, which is actually really good) and 5 most recently commented posts (currently there are only 2 though… ) on the menu.

Finally I found out what the amazing intro song of Splinter Cell is: Name of the Game by Crystal Method. The title of this post is partly from it, excluded the bad language (m*****f***er, fill in the blanks if you want to).

Some updates. A friend of mine, Fritz, told me he had problems with the fancy JavaScript pop-up window thingamabob on LGM (my alien collection). So, I added normal links, too. The pictures will open in the frame and if you have a smart browser like Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox they’ll also resize if the pictures are too big.

Alas, I read in an article my Grandma sent me that Stephen King is retiring. I can’t see nothing on this on the official site, nothing apparent at least.