OpenOffice 3.0 released

OpenOffice 3.0 has been released and as of speaking, their website is swamped, serving only error about users not being allowed to access a servlet for content:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /servlets/ContentHelmNoodle on this server.
Apache Server at download.openoffice.org Port 80

Hopefully this means they are more popular than ever and MS Office takes a dive in sales. One can always hope... :)

Qt 4.4.0 released

Trolltech has released Qt 4.4.0. I installed it and monkeyd around with it a bit, watched the demos (they're still impressive). Qt Graphics View and XQuery look very promising to me. More about them later.

If you are looking for a decent toolkit to build both Linux and Windows GUI applications, take a look at Qt. Especially as of late I've been developing a Windows GUI application, the WinAPI is horrible compared to Qt. If it was my call, I'd instantly switch the project to the Qt! One of the most important points of Qt is having consistent API, where function names mean something!

Example:
Q: What function do you call when you need to create a button in WinAPI?
A: CreateWindow()

All I can say is OMGLOLPLZ! :)

BatMUD Tools by Tumi sources released

Today I've released the sources of my once-famous BatMUD-game support web site. Sources are released under GPL v2 at the GoogleCode, here:
BatMUD Tools by Tumi.

Its been year and a half when I retired from BatMUD, where I had been playing since 1997, on and off. First character ended up as maintainer, a "wizard" there, called Tumi.

Second character was playing for fun only, and while playing, did the most comphrehensive site of tools ever available on BatMUD, which eventually made the official help and support site, obviously gone now.

While retiring, I predicted problems for MUDs and MMORPGs raise their ugly heads more and more aggressively and people get more and more lazy about their gameplay. Most of what I said I've perceived as true now, like the playerbase, which has gone WAY down since I quit.

Though, I'm happy to see couple individuals who've done good, hard work to replace the tools I used to provide. The map is now way better than it ever was at my time, the reincsim has, well, implemantation.. Better than nothing though.

I hope the sources inspire those who have done the hard work, and keep continue doing so. The others, the lazy motherfuckers, can still "¤¤"¤ dick. The number of downloads rocketed instantly as I posted the announcement, and I suppose most of those downloads belong to people who have no intention whatsoever to contribute to the community. Or, if they do, they won't respect the GPL2. Sigh..

Well, anyways, not my concerns anymore, I've released it. Contact me though if you wanna be participating member in that project and really start modifying the source code in the GoogleCode SVN.

My QtJourney begins

I'm set to learn Qt. I stumbled upon it while searching new perspective to my Netflix Prize solution. I found Icefox's Framework, which is coded with Qt.

I got interested in it. The simple makefiles, quick build process and, for now at least, decent looking framework in general. Works both in Windows and Linux apparently, neat. I've worked with GTK+ earlier, and while I liked it, I also hated it. Coding in C++ wannabe C, sigh. Autotools, sigh.

Lately, Nokia bought Trolltech, the main developing company of Qt and Qtopia. Knowing that Nokia has put a lot of balls and cash behind Symbian, it should be interesting if they will shift their focus to Qt and put all their weight behind it. Sooner or later (my guess is later), it will happen. Symbian is not a system that will live much longer, its such horrible system to code for.

I'm just starting my journey with Qt, but I have high expectations. I'll later comment how it went, and possibly share my wtf-ish pieces of code with you. Maybe I'll write up a tutorial from moving from GTK+ to Qt.

KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid

Perhaps not being a prime example of K.I.S.S, but I made my own Atom parser for the Blogspot feeds in Perl. Having my website under a webhotel, I do not have proper rights to install perl modules directly to Perl module repository, I often find myself fighting over an installation of CPAN module - despite the fact I have a "private" module repository myself. Most of the stuff install there pretty well, after having configured CPAN install properly, but Atom feedreader XML::Atom just did not build OK in my system. It derives a twenty-something subpackages and somewhere along the route, one of them just fails.

So I dug a little what kind of feed the Blogspot Atom feed really is. I found out its pretty simple one, if you just wanna regex through it fast and simple. So here is how it works:

1) Grab the feed with LWP::Simple
2) Run two regexes globally:

$feed =~ m%<published>(\d{4,4}\-\d{2,2}\-\d{2,2}).+?</published><updated>.+?</updated>%g;


$feed =~ m%<title type='text'>(.+?)</title><summary type='text'>(.+?)</summary><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='(.+?)' title='.+?'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='.+?postID=([0-9]+)' title='(\d+) Comments'/>%g;

3) ???
4) Profit!!

Not sure if this is any help to anyone, but works great for me! KISSes to everyone!

Monkeys do it better

While cleaning up my temporary bookmarks, I found this old link: Chimps Outscore College Students on Memory Test, Memory Test being this game. I scored constantly around 30, and was disappointed I couldn't go higher than 34 in few tries :(

Darwin Awards 2007

The Darwin Awards 2007 has been announced! Knock yourself out by reading the most stupid things humans can attempt.

New site design

My old site made with PHP3 got a bit broken when my web hotel upgraded its servers to the latest software, including PHP5. It resulted in very broken website where even navigation got busted. I admit that my old code from 2001 was crappy, and the site was due to be recoded for about six years already.

Being left with a broken site was finally the incentive to do something about it. I took an open source design to begin my work with from Open Source Web Designs, designed by Aaron Ganschow, to save time. Hopefully it pays off in the end, currently my new site design is as default as it can be.

I have grand plans about the content on the site. Many of the old stuff that used to be there have disappeared, but new content is slowly finding its way to there. I just have to check and re-check the code, and add the new layout in them. That will take some time, but eventually it pays off.

Check it out here: tanskanen.org.