Welcome to Browser Load of Coolness. This site is the product of Pizzasgood. Pizzaswho, you ask? Well, the short answer is that I'm a hyperactive 22 year old guy who likes a little bit of everything. I program, draw, snowboard, read, bike, camp, build computers, and make websites. I can even cook chicken cordon bleu in a campfire (yummy). This place is where I put any cool stuff I make, do, or find. It's also kind of a portfolio. If you feel like hiring me to do something, feel free to drop me a line. I could always use a little more dough. :)

Finally writing my forum software. I named it "Gourd" for some reason, not really sure why. I don't really have much to say about it yet. PHP and MySQL. It will have the basic stuff you expect in a forum. One thing I am doing, the lack of which has bugged me about phpBB, is setting it up so that posts can be moved into other threads. phpBB only lets you split them out of threads. Well, in the 2.x series anyway. I don't remember if 3.x added that feature or not. I'm also adding support for changing the owner of a post/thread. Those are features that generally wouldn't be used much, but could be useful under some circumstances.

I'll integrate this news system into it as well. That way "comments" could be made as just another part of the system - news posts would just be specialized threads, which the main page of my site would pull out and render a bit differently.


In other news, I finally got around to installing and playing around with ImageMagick the other day. Fun stuff. I'm going to use it to build a wall paper setting program to use in CheesyRamHog. I use ROX-Filer as my preferred filemanager and desktop-icon system. It has its own wallpaper deal, which works pretty well when you only have one monitor. It is pretty useless when you have two via Xinerama, especially when they have different resolutions. Why? It views them both as one large funky-sized screen - which is pretty much what it is, so I can't fault ROX-Filer for this. But it means that if I want to have a different image on each screen, I have to merge the two images into one by hand. So, being the lazy bum I am, I decided it would be nicer to make a small program that uses ImageMagick to do it for me. While it's at it it can also provide options to scale them in different manners. And that allows me to achieve another benefit over the normal ROX-Filer based system: ImageMagick has (limited) support for seam carving. Basically, it's an algorithm for resizing images by removing the least important pixels, rather than distorting the entire image. Sometimes it works beautifully - if there is a lot of empty space, it resizes the image by just taking bits of that out, and you preserve the full detail. Other times it fails miserably - especially if it decides the least important pixels are inside somebody's face. But for small adjustments to make an image fit your monitor's aspect ratio, it generally does a good job on many images. So it having it as another option will be wonderful.

Hoo-ha! I am now officially graduated, with a BS in Computer Engineering. Next goal: Become a self employed software developer. I'm going to get started on that tomorrow. (Well, I've been doing part of it (contract work) since I was a freshman, but tomorrow I'm going to start working on my first piece of commercial software that I intend to sell.)

Getting some code written tomorrow will be refreshing, because I've spent the last week living out of a suitcase as I worked on getting my car running, gave up (not worth the cost), rented a U-haul, trucked my stuff up to the mountains of TN where my family now lives, and started unpacking. Today I assembled my new computer desk and got all my gear set up. Still not completely unpacked - I have five boxes left filled with books, magazines, comics, and papers (notes from classes that I saved, financial documents, etc.). Need to get a bookcase or something for them. Need to go track down a "new" car as well. Fortunately as a self employed software developer who lives with his family I don't need a vehicle immediately. But it would be really nice to have one so that I don't have to keep bumming rides from people. Asking my younger sister if I can borrow her car does not help my self esteem much. ;)

Sure feels good to finally be on the verge of being able to Get Stuff Done. No more professors and homework assignments and exams in my way. Just me and my keyboard. Oooooh yeah....

I was talking to my dad today. He asked if I had been out partying in anticipation of graduation. HA! I wish. I don't know about other majors, but the end of your final semester is a tremendously busy time for engineering students. In your final semester you tend to be taking a lot of project based classes. So at the end of the semester you are scrambling to finish all of the final projects. Or writing the final reports about the projects. Or giving presentations on the projects. Or maybe even studying for those finals that are next week. Don't want to forget about those... Then there is all the other junk: packing, trying to coordinate with your family to get moved out within the absurd deadlines the university sets before they start trying to fine you for all you're worth (fortunately graduating seniors get a couple extra days), getting your car dusted off and street legal after not using it for four years, making posters about your senior design project to replace the ancient ones lining the hallways, finding time to go buy your cap and gown, etc.

Parties happen AFTER graduation. Before graduation, going to sleep at the end of the day is party enough.

Anyway, I forced some space into my schedule today and last Friday so I could wrap up version 0.6 of Retrovol, which fixes some bugs and finally implements balance control. Yay!

That was able to happen today because I stayed up until 3:30 AM last night writing 16 pages of documentation for my senior design project so that I didn't have to do it today (and there is still more to be done - I haven't even started on the appendices yet).

With that I am signing off to go get dinner and then return to the grind. Got a final in the morning that needs studying for.

Not much to report. Busy, as usual. :)

It doesn't look like I'm going to get around to doing anymore major work on CheesyRamHog until after sometime after graduation. I'll still be compiling more programs as needed (the other day I finally got around to doing Mplayer, which I had sorely missed). But I don't have the time and energy to do any more on the build system for now. With graduation getting close, there are too many other things that need to be done.

As for Retrovol, the balance stuff is implemented in SVN, but I wanted to improve some handling of mixer names before I made a formal release, which I haven't had a chance to do yet. (Well, I had a few chances, but I chose to use them to get caught up on the anime and comics I read, which I had been neglecting for the last month and a half.) Hopefully I'll get that dealt with sometime in the coming week.

Speaking of comics, last night I finished reading Gunnerkrigg Court (up until the current strip), which I started the night before. Three letters: wow. (And only two of them are unique letters!)

Tonight I released Retrovol 0.5.

Still need to add balance support. I'll start on that this weekend.