Adrian Hayter’s Blog

3 months ago I wrote about how Yahoo would never be taken over by Microsoft. Now at the end of a lengthy process involving many offers, threats, and attempts at hostile takeovers, Microsoft have eventually given in.

In case any of you weren’t aware, I use Yahoo Search as my main search engine after I became disillusioned with Google’s “PageRank” system and their general way of going about business. After about 6 months with Yahoo, I can definitely say that I see no obvious advantages to using Google as a search engine. I find all the same info I need in the same time I would have taken if I did use the big G.

People say that Google is more useful because it has more pages saved, but what they forget is that a lot of those pages will be useless dead ends, and some won’t even be properly entered into the online search (I’ve had enough problems finding things on my own sites to know this is the case). when it comes to actual useful content, both Google and Yahoo come out top.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’ve started playing around with the zsh shell, and I like it a lot more than bash. A few weeks ago I participated in the “history meme” where I used this command in zsh:

cat ~/.histfile|awk '{a[$1]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head

to print out my top 10 used commands.

A slightly shorter command in zsh is:

history 1|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head

which works for anyone, even if they have their history file in a different location. The command “history 1″ prints all commands in the history from the 1st one.

Everyone, whether they are new to Linux or a guru forgets to put “sudo” in front of system commands once in a while. I often forget when I want to edit a file in /etc or need to use apt-get. Typing out the command again can be long-winded, as can pressing up to get the command again, and then reverse tabbing to the beginning of the line to type “sudo “. zsh gives an easier way:

sudo !!

Adding “!!” after anything will simply put whatever you type before the !! at the beginning of the last used command, and then execute it. It’s much faster. Additionally, just executing “!!” on the command line will execute the last command, without any prefix. You can use !! to prefix any command you want.

Finally, if you use a lot of terminals at once (like myself) it will be useful to share the history across them. Usually only the most recently opened terminal saves history. Adding these to your .zshrc file will enable all instances of zsh to store history, and update their history every time a command is executed.

setopt EXTENDED_HISTORY
setopt SHARE_HISTORY
setopt APPEND_HISTORY
setopt INC_APPEND_HISTORY

Popularity: 2% [?]

Seems like a lot of Linux bloggers have been doing this recently so I thought I’d follow suit! The following command (in bash) will print the top ten commands in your shell history:

history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head

Of course, since I use zsh instead of bash, I had to make a few changes:

cat ~/.histfile|awk '{a[$1]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head

And my results:

88 ls
70 cd
64 sudo
64 petris
36 plato
30 vim
29 cat
26 echo
20 wine
20 make

ls, cd, and sudo are pretty standard commands that are used so it’s not surprising they come first. I clearly play petris (a tetris clone) way too often. “plato” is a custom command to connect me to my university servers. vim, cat, and echo are also pretty standard commands. I have recently begun using wine a lot to play PC games, and make to compile a load of programs :D

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’ve recently discovered quite an interesting real time game on the internet, and one that is blog related. “BlogShares” takes information regarding incoming and outgoing links from a lot of blogs on the internet, and then calculates their “net worth” (excuse the pun). Users can then buy shares in any number of blogs, and sell them if the blog starts doing badly (i.e. less links are found going to it). I thought this was quite a clever idea so I registered, and low and behold found The Atheist Blogger (my other blog) on there…and doing rather well.

I told the system that I owned the blog, proved it with some html on the main page, and was given 1000 shares that were being reserved for the owner. These shares (thanks to the massive amount of people visiting and linking to my blog) were worth $15,000,000 each at the time, so I’ve now got a nice net worth of $15 billion. I’m unfortunately not majority owner of the “company”. That honour goes to a fellow by the name of “The Undertaker”, who has a net worth of $2,248,152,639,818,087.00. Yes, I worked it out…that’s 1000 trillion (or a quadrillion).

Anyway, it’s quite a fun game, and since it’s in real time you only need to spend a few minutes on it every day trading stocks…that is, until you start earning big!

Popularity: 3% [?]

3 weeks ago, we were given an assignment to work on in small groups. The assignment was to make a game for the Xbox 360 in XNA Game Studio Express, which could either be 2D or 3D. The possibilities were endless, and so me and my partner Conrad decided to go all out and port one of the most popular 2D games (Tetris) to a 3D environment.

When our lecturer first heard about this, he was concerned that it might be a bit too much work for 3 weeks, and that we should start out small, perhaps trying to make 2D Tetris, and then if we thought we could port it across, start to make it in 3D. Fuck that we thought, and started planning a 3D game engine.

Of course, being lazy students, we didn’t do much but plan for the first 1.5 weeks, and then realised we had so much to do in very little time. So we started out by building an environment, which had a rotatable platform, and an array of booleans that would act as the movable area for the blocks. We then decided that even if Tetris 3D was even possible to play in 3D, it would be the hardest game ever…and so we did what any irrational programmer would do…make it harder. We renamed out project “3D Psychedelic Techno Tetris”, applied a spinning background with awful clashing colours, and added the aptly named “Logical Song” by German techno band Scooter…on and infinite loop.

Programming went better than we had ever expected, and we soon had a fully playable game that used a multitude of clever and intuitive methods to move and detect blocks. Without intending to do so, we had inadvertently created the first fully operational 3D Tetris Engine, which could be easily modified, and content (such as new bricks) easily plugged in. Since everything in controlled by a series of constants and calculations, you can easily change the size of the platform, the shapes of the blocks, and even the way the camera moves around the grid, and the game will work out how to make it playable. As so many people have claimed for so many different products: “It just works”.

So I guess I should get down to features:

- Blocks spawn at the top of the environment and move down until they either hit the platform or another block.
- Blocks can be rotated about the X, Y, and Z axis.
- A “shadow” block predicts where the block will come to rest if you were to do nothing further to it.
- Lines and columns that are “complete” will disappear and blocks above will move down to fill the gaps.
- The next block is displayed in the top right corner, and score / level system components are kept track at the bottom.
- The camera can be moved 360 degree around the platform, as well as up above the platform for a birds-eye view, and down the bottom for a normal tetris view.

Some pictures:

The game when you have just started. The first brick is floating above the platform, whilst the shadow brick predicts where it will fall. Both the current brick and the next brick are the same, and examples of the new types of brick we created in the game for the 3D version. Other than the standard bricks, there are 5 extra bricks to make the game more challenging.

An alternate view is gained by rotating the camera.

An example of how things can rapidly build up if you don’t play well enough.

What happens if you really mess up…

I should point out that all images above were prepared by myself in the game, and I am really not as bad at this game as it appears. I am in fact the current world champion at 3D Tetris, with a score of 3800 at level 8, and I welcome anyone who reckons they can score more than me.

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A date for every gamers diary: 7th September

A day when the most incredible, most sophisticated, most complex game in the entire history of gaming will be released. Spore has been in development since early 2000, and 8 years of work can really be felt in all the video demos that have been released. Will Wright has used procedural generating, and taken it to a whole new level. He has made his career off of so called “God games”, but I think Spore will be the ultimate achievement. You actually play God to an entire universe of life, creating, maintaining, and destroying.

All I need now is a time machine so I can actually play it…

Popularity: 3% [?]

Since my favourite atheist quotes became such a success through StumbleUpon (even making it to one of their featured pages), I decided to create a new blog devoted entirely to atheism.

This blog is called “The Atheist Blogger” and can be found at http://atheistblogger.com or http://theatheistblogger.com.

Hopefully I will be able to make this site a successful blog about atheism!

Popularity: 3% [?]

Ever since the news came that Microsoft were offering to buy out Yahoo, I was waiting for the day when Yahoo would turn round and say (albeit quite politely) “fuck off”. Although that day has yet to come, it seems that the outcome of the proposal will be negative (for Microsoft obviously).

A lot of people said they were a match made in heaven, especially in the battle to take down Google, but they obviously failed to realise that a buyout of Yahoo worth $44.6bn is akin to going to a Ferrari car dealership and trying to get a top range model for a few thousand. Yahoo have a massive presence on the web, maybe not in terms of searching, but they have a whole range of services available, including mail, stock exchange, news, weather, and many many more. A deal worth $44.6bn is, in all fairness, an insult to a company like Yahoo, who are one of the oldest companies on the web.

So, assuming Yahoo reject the offer (which is the current likelihood), what will the next move be? Well, the offer has already increased the share price of Yahoo, possibly due to the large percentage of people who thought they would accept, and on the other side of the court, Microsoft’s shares have dropped by a staggering 12%, a drop that is thought to have been caused by the amount of Microsoft supporters who rejected the initial bid, saying that the company offered too much money.

Essentially, we have Yahoo on one side wanting more for their company, and Microsoft on the other, with most of their supporters saying they should have offered less. I can’t see a viable business solution any time soon, so it’s probably accurate to say that Yahoo won’t be going anywhere with Microsoft yet.

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Yesterday, Chris Boulton (the project leader of MyBB) posted the first part of a “Complete Overview” series of blogs on the new ACP. It is very detailed, and contains a load of screenshots of the new features.

Check it out at the Official MyBB Blog

Popularity: 6% [?]

If you are a Firefox user, you will undoubtedly know that Google has paid Mozilla for precedence in both the Search Box, and the Location Bar Search. Google is the default search engine used if you just type a bunch of keywords in the Location Bar instead of a URL. Firefox takes those keywords, sends them to Google, and if the top result has a high enough page rank, it sends you to the page itself (much like I’m feeling lucky).

Since I’ve switched to Yahoo as my main search engine, mainly due to Google’s recent privacy scandals and coupled with the research which tends towards Yahoo results as being more reliable (Google bombing anyone?), I’ve been trying to look for a way of switching the default search engine to Yahoo. After a bit of searching, I found the answer:

1) Type about:config in a new tab.

2) Filter the configuration variables by “keyword.URL“, there should be one result by the same name.

3) Change the value of keyword.URL from the Google URL (should be: http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=) to: http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&p=

Bingo, typing keywords into the location bar will now make Firefox search using Yahoo.

Note: You can add other “attributes” to the search URL, as long as &p= is left at the end, since this is where Firefox adds the search keywords.

Popularity: 3% [?]