Coders Edge

Please no cold calls from so-called headhunters who do not have a job but just want to mark down the contact and probably collect a bounty. I don't know.

There is a tell that the false ones do: when you ask them, robot voice (it really is too) to say who they are they ask again if it is [your name] (or at least my name, maybe I am the only guy who ever has this happen to him?)

I guess they could say something like," you know. [my first name], I was reading your blog, Coders Edge, and your ruminations on Robotics engineering when it was actually really run by actual engineers." Oh, how I could have fun if they were my English student and I was an English professor at a school. I'd run it through them, that lance of my fussy fuss. Thankfully for them I am not such a professor, nor are they my students.

fork and merge

consider the following fantasy fork-n-merge

SuperTuxWebKart

it's not a video game it's a cube collective. I can see it now: the spawn of ten thousand websites idea of mine can go like this: every single little square of a graphic that shows up as the face of a building on any of the supertuxkart levels could each be a feed from a website, and a full browser. How? Well, it would be a browswer in that it would show a current snap of the forward face of that page, probably don't want a full simubot dork-enabled dork-snot snark-inserter there too (though I am sure that some sadist is thinking about it right now and cutting code to do it even as I am here imagining the horrer of such a person who would do such a thing.

There is a city at night level that will give you a good idea of what I mean. You should put yourself into artists-view (I won't make it easy for you, if you don't know how to do it and you can't figure it out by websearching it yourself, you prob aren't reallying going to fork and merge these two items.

Fedora 20

Started Fedup after winging through their guide on how to do it without screwing it up. Well, It's been more than 20 times since I started using the RedHat logo'd Linux. I remember when doing rpm upgrades required downloading the files manually and then running them from a command line. There was no yum.

A bud of mine is recommending that folks run Mint, which I have not looked into. But I can tell you that on his stystem it is kickity, in the menus bounce open without hesitatin. And if you don't use it as a game system, then, well, you dont' have the super graphics card. But then, well , the experience is not the same. the newer browswers take advantage of the graphics. I recommend the best card that you understand is better. I mean like don't go buy the most expensive one because it never is a good deal for a poor guy to buy the newest of the newest. The prices always have a fall very quickly and you can get last months stuff at a much better deal. Leave it to the millionaires and government buyers, who have more money or access to it then normal people ever do. They buy the thing at the huge price and pay it because it is all a tax write off. Or, in the case of the government procurement of the item, and it ends up at someone's house (yes, it has happened, even though it is very illegal, the money that a government guy spends never is his money.

Simple things can be charged a lot for. And government is good at ignoring the gouge. But, the reason for the gouge is that hte profits that are made are always looted by the locals. So, when you see it, the huge graft, when you are a green bean gov guy, you might be outraged by it. But really, if it isn't wasted here, it will be wasted somewhere else. So it makes sense to just let them spend their budget on what they want, who they are funding are friends. It's a local grift for local people. Have you been to the new fitness center? Did you know that there are two golf courses for every Air Base in the world? Well, maybe that is something that people 'know' but they have no real facts to back it up. It's somethign I heard a captain saying once. He didn't offer me any actual source for his observation. It seemed like it must be true and I used to believe that it probably is. But in journalism "probably is" doesn't cut it. I am not a journalist and still I know that repeating false hood is a common as a chikadee in a frozen fallen over bush burried in an early Winter blizzard. It might make a good intro into a discussion about falsehood and the corporate news.

And so, when you go out to buy new technology, spec it out. Get to know what the new things are, what the old things were, what you have now. there is always a new type of whatever-it-is. And the new things are often very worth it to get after they have been proven. But making a computer fast and a system cutting edge one needs to ask 'what are we really doing here?'

Maybe the thing that is slowing you done is a bug. If you took sometime to debug the program, you might solve it and find a faster solution wiht what you have. And some bugs it doesn't matter how fast your system is , or how much memory, becuase the bug is 'use all the memory until there is none left' in its effect. Or use all the processor power that you can. Or it might be a block on a call to a subprocess that is blocked.

I've loaded too many langauges. It's slowing me down. I don't ever use these. I ought to uninstall most of them. It really would make the upgrade much faster.

at Urge Central you will find an image collage.

Dec 3, 2013

Bootstrap js

This very easy to use framework makes layout a breeze! here is a link to a sample page utilzing the bootstrap framework. Well, it isn't much, and the links don't do anything. It is just to show how easy bootstrap is to use.

Here is another bootstrap page, with some animated graphics.

Supertuxkart 0.8.1!

Supertuxkart 0.8.1! It's not much different from the 0.8. Some of the items are different, like the turbo powerups are blue now. That's cool. It was very easy to build it just by following their directions. I was playing the game almost as soon as it was done compiling. One hitch: when you run it with out installing it you need to be in the correct directory in order for it to work. Basically at the root of the build.

I haven't learned how to build a track for the game, but I do sometimes change the graphics. I have all of the new graphics here, so I used some of it for one of the levels. It's not hard to do it. I copied it and renamed it, and put references to it where it needed to be so now I have two 'museum' levels, one with my special graphics.

I did discover some cool stuff to do with Supertuxkart 0.8.1 (which has just been released, by the way). There is an 'artist's mode' that I did not know existed. Also, by using this mode, I can have the kart consume as many power ups as I would like. I't is sort of an ultimate cheat level. the game is rich in the way that it works. Some of the levels are far more detailed than others. All of them are far too short.

I love the idea of taking elevation data and crafting tracks like that. It seems as though that shouldn't be too hard to generate. I actually thought of that idea over 15 years ago by telling my friends that I knew that, someday, we would play with tracks that were just the same as what is in the real world. I am sure I am not the first one to think of this idea.

Some of the levels being more detailed, I decided to go and explore in places where the game, when you don't play in 'artist's mode, won't let you go otherwise. I also shut off an 'invisible wall' on one track by just removing the file in question that was the invisible wall (I don't like invisible walls). The wall was no longer there. And then, well, then it was obvious to me why the wall had been there in the first place. The reason: because without it if one gets too close to the edge one falls right off and over it. The old version: you smack into the invisible wall. You don't careen over.

I played the new soccer level (by myself) which was cute. I went to artist level on the city at night level. There is a cool thing with all of the buildings being really really tall. You can fly off to the tops of them and land on them. It makes me think we would make a race track that only goes along the tops of buildings. There would be no railings. Falling is always a posibility.

I modded the skyline level, calling that Railtrail Skyline. It would be cool to have a level that would be a skyline/city at night level where one would race along the streets, but then also race all the way along the sky, and then get back by hopping down the buildings one at a time. Is there any way to 'merge levels' so to speak? If you put the skyline level way up high above the city at night level you could just copy all the files together, I am guess, if the invisible wall was so easy to remove. It must be just as easy to add new things just by adding them. Of course, if the models intersect, it might be a little bit confusing to play the game, if not impossible.

And as far as artist mode goes, why switch back? The new Supertux level is significantly harder (thank the upgrade for that, I suppose) that I can not, and have not, won a single race in the Supertux mode. If you crash and die even once it leaves you way far behind. Commonly the other karts are dogging behind you at the end of 8 or so laps even in on a large track, which doesn't often happen in the 'expert' level.

I guess they changed the axis orientation of the tracks so that the coordinates of the old versions of tracks are 90 degrees askew of the old game (it might be some other value, say 180). And so on some of hte levels the karts are in places where the game checks for it, and it finds that the kart is in a bad place, and it doesn't start the game. It actually kicks you out of the game all the way! Kind of annoying. Anywho, the 'artist' level takes away that annoyance, and you can still play the game without a hitch (and fly around, and barrage the opponents with an endless and carpel tunnel inducing endless stream. It's really kind of cool They all bounce and arch off and do their thing, and it makes kind of a pretty sound. Or how about endless powerups? Don't do it! You'll hurt your thumb. I suppose map it to a keyboard key and just leave a piece of lead on it and the barrage will just keep going.

So in Artist mode I play the level with the problem with the karts being in bad starting locations. Some of them end up underneath the track. So throughout the game play they constantly die and are regenerated over and over. They progress backwards as their kart is placed further back everytime they die. Little flying hawk rises from the road and then the kart dies again. If it ever found a place that was not below the track it might have a chance and not die again

Also interesting is that when the kart starts too high it falls from the sky at the start.

There is a lot more that can be done with this software than just a racing game. The formats for the save models do not seem to have a readily available way to translate them into something that blender can use. There is a blitz3D company that will sell you an 80 dollar tool. That isn't really a lot of money to be able to have a starting point with which to create a new track. But, I suppose, open source and all that, the stuff is probably not provided by the developers of the game because they would really like the formats that they use to be unencumbered. They can provide the xport tool and not the import one. That will spawn people to use the software available. People to whom 70 dollars is a lot of money.

task chairs

I am still loving the chair. I have been much more productive since I got it. I am not sure if it is due to the chair or just bad weather.

Fedora 20

My latest Resume. some demos.

my antique mirror

 Software Metal
 If it can't be broke
 you won't be either