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 21 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. :)

I've been working on Retrovol on and off for the last several months. I finally have it finished enough to tag a version and make a release, so I did.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=376904

In other news, I'm obviously still alive. Chilling out in the mountains over Christmas Break (which sadly ends a week from Sunday). Managed to pull off straight A's last semester, which was nice. I intend to do some more work on this site sometime in the next couple months, to prepare it for hosting more of my projects now that I'm phasing out of Puppy-specific development. With the bulk of Retrovol off my shoulders, maybe I'll feel more inclined. But right now I'm just kicking back and doing whatever I feel like, other than a little bit of studying up on my Japanese (I'm taking JAP-2001 this spring, and it's been about two years since my last Japanese class so I'm pretty rusty).

Pizzasgood, over and out.

Well, it's looking like I'll never get around to finishing up that picture, so I've gone ahead and uploaded what I've got so far to the Art Page. (If I had more time and motivation I'd clean up the lines a little, make my ride's innards glow more, have some flames blowing out the edges, and add some stuff in the background. And maybe add some shading everything so it looks less flat.

But I'd rather do other stuff. Like work on my anti-spam-bot, or play VO.


Which reminds me, I never mentioned Vendetta Online here. It's a twitch-based space-fighting online game. They have a native Linux version. The game costs $10 a month unless you buy in bulk, which is about 30% cheaper. But it's pretty fun, so I've been subscribing for the last couple months. They aren't the most realistic space game out there (there are velocity caps, and if you turn off your turbo you actually slow down...) but fun none the less. Runs great in Puppy Linux, assuming you can get your graphics card running properly, which generally isn't very hard. (BTW, if you are anything like me, you will be happy to realize that one of the F keys, I think F7, lets you resize the stupidly large HUD. It looks much more serious after that.)

They do have a free trial too, good for eight hours in-game. Eight hours is plenty of time to get a feel for the game. So if you're looking for a good Linux game to play and willing to subscribe, check it out.

(In case you are one of those poor souls who uses Windows or Mac, I feel obligated to let you know that they do have versions of this for those OSes. Also, they have a Linux AMD64 version too, besides the IA32 version.)

At long last I've finally finished Multiuser Puppy. I also documented the process for the sake of anybody who wants to go through the same process on another version of Puppy, or otherwise know what I did in great detail.

Haven't touched the drawing as I was busy finishing off the above. Maybe I'll work on it some more tonight. I need to get it done in the near future as it's a bit of a seasonal image...

Randomly decided to write some haiku today, so I now have a haiku section.

As for the drawing I promised, I'm working on it. Just got too busy for a while, between all my stuff breaking as fast as I could fix it and college finally getting into full swing. And I'm very nearly done with Multiuser Puppy (it's going slow too, for the afore mentioned reasons). I intend to have that banged out within a week or so, other than the inevitable bug-fixes.

Speaking of college, after doing a couple homework assignments in my audio engineering class, I decided they would be a lot easier to do in MathCAD. But I don't have MathCAD, and am not willing to pay for it, and not willing to go all the way out to the computer labs either. And even if I were willing to pay, they don't have a Linux version. And I don't know of any open source equivalents.

So I figure I'll just write my own. It would be extremely basic, because I have no need (nor understanding of) all the really fancy complex stuff that MathCAD can do. So I'm not doing a clone or anything. I'm not even going to implement units. I just intend to handle basic math (+ - * / log exp ln sqrt etc.) and complex numbers. So it would be like a blackboard combined with a scientific calculator. I probably won't touch arrays and graphs, but I'll think about it. They'd certainly be useful to me.

I'm considering using Python at the moment, partly to give me an excuse to learn it and partly because I suspect that it would just be a good choice for this sort of thing. Plus that way it should be pretty portable. And it will of course be open source. My goal is to basically just start the ball rolling. Bang out a basic application that can handle what I need, and try to keep the code friendly so that other people who need a bunch of fancier mathematics can pick up where I leave off and add whatever they need.

Oh, and in keeping with my tradition of using odd names, I'm going to call this program Math-o-Lantern. I figure I ought to be pretty safe trademark-wise this way, and it gives me lots of interesting logo possibilities.


Well, that's all for now. Need to go get that beauty sleep. Otherwise I'm liable to get shot (might be mistaken for a zombie or something!).

I entered a contest on the Basic4GL forums a while back. (Basic4GL is a version of BASIC specifically designed for 3D programming with OpenGL, but it also has a number of functions for 2D stuff as well.) I hadn't used B4GL in about five years, so I decided to keep it simple and just do a basic 2D game where you control some laser turrets and some mirrors, and have to bounce the laser beam off the mirrors to hit some zombies.

It turned out okay, but I discovered that I'm not very good at designing levels for it, so the levels aren't very hard. I added a basic level editor to let other people make their own levels though. Mostly I was just doing it for fun anyway, and it was. Haven't worked on a game in several years, so it was a nice change of pace. I thought of a lot of ways to make the game a lot more fun, but I don't like coding in BASIC enough to actually implement them. So I decided to release this into the Public Domain, so that anybody can fiddle with it to their heart's content.

Download ZombieZap.zip (You need to have Basic4GL installed to run this. Also, B4GL needs to be set to run in windowed mode, not full-screen, because full-screen hides the mouse and I didn't realize that in time to add my own mouse pointer code...)

Note: Although Basic4GL is a Windows program, it runs just fine on Linux with Wine (just set it to use windowed-mode rather than full-screen). I used Linux for the entire development of this. Otherwise, I wouldn't have bothered.