Blogs - grigorii.pechorin

Instead of sorting out my taxes ... I made a skybox!

• the green letters and symbols note which face is where - the sideways ones have a different orientation
• red letters (A-Q) are the indicies, it works as a triangle strip and uses degenerate triangles to jump (H,I,J,K) a limit of the API
• the black fractions are the texture coordinates
• the purple signs are the position coordinates at each vertex

I have solved a floating point round off error by dividing instead of multiplying. When calculating the unit vector I was multiplying a (non-unit) vector by 1 over it's length. I was doing this because I had a multiplication method available. It seems that the use of two floating point operations (instead of just the one) lead to rounding errors creeping into my calculations.

Weird

(this is my first - and probably only - attempt at a Starcraft 2 mission guide. it's been sitting on my desktop for awhile and leaves a lot up to the player's judgement)

1. select all your Probes and send them mining, then pick one out and have him warp an Assimilator and the two suggested Pylons. whenever you've got an Assimilator start collecting as you need
2. Hot Key your Nexus and remember to keep producing Probes and Pylons until you have the resources "just in time" for whatever you're building. Rally your Nexus on the minerals
3. select your Gateway and Rally to the spot that the evil Stalker will appear. Hot Key your Gateway and begin building Zealots
4. select and Hot Key your Forge. research Ground Weapons, Shields and Ground Armor as you can (do not queue these things as you'll want the resources to be available - start them `just in time`)
5. when the evil Stalker finishes talking you should have two Zealots. these two guys should take him easily with help from your Photon Cannon (if you only have one Zealot the evil Stalker will probably get through his shields but do no Hit Point damage)
6. when you've got three Zealots send them to the Robotics Facility (put the depleted shields guy in back) they should take it fine so Waypoint them back home
7. as soon as your Zealots are through the Stalker's (?) shields; waypoint a probe to build a Pylon behind the Robotics Facility. Hot Key the facility now (don't wait for it to power up) because you'll want to pump out Imortals as often as possible (up to a total of 10ish) but not at the expense of Dark Templar - start watching your Supply usage and remember to Rally to your base
8. when you have four Zealots take the Dark Templar Shrine and waypoint another Pylon behind it
9. Maar should be up and doing his emo prophesying by now. put your Immortal (with hardened shields) in his way with your Zealots and Photon Cannon ready to help once Maar is Aggro'ed
10. by the time you kick Maar, your base should be ready for the home stretch - train up a total of six Dark Templar while upgrading and adding Immortals. you'll porbably need a few more probes and maybe a second assimilator
11. [skip this step if you want the speed run] use your Dark Templar to whittle down the base to the east. do not engage anything until you absolutely have to - make the defenders chase you out of detection range and stick to the north so that you can wipe out the Nexus and probes. you'll probably end up with just the Photon Cannons, a few ground units, and the Void Ray defending the base. smash it with a force of about six Stalkers and whatever Dark Templar you have. send in a Probe to build a Pylon. if you go for this; you'll enjoy a force of about ten Immortals plus your remaining Zealots to defend your base. as long as you kite anybody who is getting hurt you should be pretty stable with just these guys against whoever
12. gather six (four will supposedly work) Dark Templar and wait for Maar to pass - then charge into the patio where th preservers are. you'll get hit byt the cannon and defenders but enough of your guys should hake it in. avoid Maar at all costs while doing these last steps
13. bring the south and east prisions down to their last few Hit Points. you can move your `extra` Dark Templar off to the south and have them Hold Position there if you want
14. with all of your Dark Templar; attack the north west prison from the south, waypoint half of the Dark Templar to follow up with attacking the East and then the South. waypoint the remainder of them to do it the other way around
15. when you pop the first cell (or any cell) Maar will respawn. since you only need one (or two) hits to break the other two cells Maar shouldn't be able to stop your guys

I watched - Youtube.com - after watched - Youtube.com - and I noticed something. One of these shows lots of destruction of US skylines. One shows people expressing self doubt and emotional insecurity - the other one just shows a guy getting mad. One of these shows the actual threat, and the other just discusses what is going to happen. One of these trailers shows characters who may or may not be getting along at the end of the movie - the other just shows characters threatening to be mad. One expresses different philosophical beliefs ... one tries to rewrite its own cannon for no apparent reason

Clearly one of these things is not like the other

I've hit an encouraging milestone in a personal project. Effectivley there's no need for innovation left in the project, it's just a matter of whacking it again and again in varying ways until the pieces settle correctly. I don't know if I should feel sad about being past the need for "inspiration" and now being in the realm of "perspiration" but all I can think is that I've won.

It's like when you've destroyed your opponent's workers and town halls. I can finish now. I can reach my goal. Only god and myself can stop me.

Wow; I really wish spellcheck was working

... which is great when you just want to run a piece of programming and not deal with setting up a program for the purpose of testing a lib.

sys.path.append('./jars/sqljdbc4.jar')

... that's it. Replace ./jars/sqljdbc4.jar with whatever the path to you jar is.

Oh ... you have to import sys. Yeah if you don't import sys there's really no reason.

I've been `working` with Maven recently and decided I'd try to make an archetype. It was not smooth sailing, until I used the archetype, archetype to see what it was supposed to look like ... then it was easier. It's just the second JMonkeyEngine tutorial. Tragically it's only available from a remote repository

archetypeGroupId=org.jmonkeyengine.archetypes
archetypeArtifactId=beginner02
archetypeVersion=3.0-NIGHTLY
remoteRepositories=https://dl.dropbox.com/u/15094498/dropbox-mvn-public

I'm now wondering how useful archetypes actually are when someone is trying to develop a product. They're not too hard to create, but I'm not sure how many times I'm going to have to re-create the same project. I suppose if I want to distribute a mod kit they'd be very useful. It's just that the heading of "use before reuse" makes me feel a bit uneasy.

This took me over 2 hours to get working right - so I'm posting my results

<Resource name="mail/Session"
	auth="Container"
	type="javax.mail.Session"
	mail.smtp.host="smtp.gmail.com"
	mail.smtp.port="465"
	mail.smtp.auth="true"
	mail.smtp.user="website's name@gmail.com"
	password="the password"
	mail.smtp.starttls.enable="true"
	mail.smtp.socketFactory.class="javax.net.ssl.SSLSocketFactory" />

It can be used like this:

final InitialContext initialContext = new InitialContext();
final Session session = (Session)(initialContext.lookup("java:comp/env").lookup("mail/Session"));

final MimeMessage mimeMessage = new MimeMessage(session);
mimeMessage.setSubject("Testing javamail plain");
mimeMessage.setContent("This is a one true tag", "text/plain");
mimeMessage.addRecipient(Message.RecipientType.TO, new InternetAddress("user@email.host"));

final Transport transport = session.getTransport();
transport.connect();
transport.sendMessage(mimeMessage, mimeMessage.getRecipients(Message.RecipientType.TO));
transport.close();

... suck. Nobody goes "Oh boy! I have the whole afternoon to do X" when X is a `distraction` However (across the course of a week) most people probably spend an afternoon's hours in total interacting with distractions.

I smell a new years resolution, something about making the most of the few hours in the day.

Update;
This has also been a great way to get way more done. If I'm distractable - I sort some laundry instead of poking around Wikipedia.

... is pondering whether or not this system has a "cloud" feature like ... Steam. If not, can I set a "saves" folder so that all of my saved games go off into my DropBox folder? I was able to edit KoTOR's config file and do this.

... just a thought. It's always nice to be able to do that sort of thing.