10 things I hate
10. Wii
According to some, the only console that brought some innovation to gaming overall. According to me, the biggest crap Nintendo has ever released. Wii is generally like communism - good in theory, sucks in practice. It could have revolutionised video gaming, it could have been the best console, it could have easily defeat its rivals. But it didn’t. I mean, it actually is the best-selling console on the market, and it reached the kind of customers no one has ever managed to reach before - casual gamers, but Nintendo have completely forgotten about the more important consumer base, the hard(er?)core gamers. Because nobody wants to play Mario all the fucking time.
9. Public transportation
I actually have to use public transport to get to and from school almost everyday. And of course, it has many advantages - it’s cheap, relatively ecological and environment-friendly, and often there are the bus lanes which are really in case of a huge traffic jam. But the list of drawbacks is much longer, unfortunately.
First of all, public transportation in Kraków (where I live) is free for people over 70. One could think “heh, how many 70-year-olds would actually use public transport?”. Surprisingly, the answer is: all of them. The buses and trams, quite crowded without the billion grannies using them, often are filled with people almost standing on each other’s head because of the lack of room to breathe.
Another group of annoying people travelling by the same buses as I do that are the stinking homeless garbage collectors. Oh man, if you happen to be on a crowded bus with a bum standing next to you, preventing yourself from throwing up will be a very tough job.
The last annoying thing in public transportation I’d like to point out are the screaming children. When one of them starts crying, and by chance there’s another one riding the same bus, he will probably start crying as well, and then the third one, and the fourth one… This can drive you mad. Even though I do always wear earphones when travelling by bus, to clarify that.
I’m gonna have to get a driving license as soon as I can.
8. Pi (π)
Not that I hate it, I just hate the ambiguity it brings to mathematics. While you can give the exact area of a rectangle, (in most cases) triangle or even most of polygons, while working on circle- or sphere-related calculations, the exact value of pi is never known. Whether you will substitute it with 3.14, 22/7 or 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510, you will never get the accurate result.
While the value of pi has been computed to more than a trillion (1012) digits, elementary applications, such as calculating the circumference of a circle, will rarely require more than a dozen decimal places. For example, a value truncated to 39 decimal places is sufficient to compute the circumference of any circle that fits in the observable universe to a precision comparable to the size of a hydrogen atom.
And even though the information I’ve found on Wikipedia (above) cheers me up, I never feel fully satisfied with my circumferences, because I know that pi’s expansion is infinite. That’s why I don’t use rounded corners on regua.biz.
Continue reading ‘10 things I hate’…
Happy anniversary, regua.biz
I’ve recently realised that 14th March, the day regua.biz was created, can’t actually be called “birthday” of the site, as it wasn’t born in the strict sense of this word. I’ve decided to call it “anniversary”. And so, let’s celebrate the 2nd anniversary of regua.biz’s creation! The only reason the site is still going is you, the readers. I’d like to thank all of you for your support and/or criticism, I hope you’ll still be enjoying regua.biz during the 3rd year it’s been online.
Many (seriously, many) things have changed over the last year. And I don’t mean the look or functionality of the site; I’m talking about the user preferences (note: yeah, this will be another statistic-based entry. If you don’t enjoy reading these, just skip it. Actual articles for regua.biz are on the way!).
Less than 30% of the site visitors were located in Poland. That’s quite a huge change, considering that last year it was over 95 per cent… Other countries that regua.biz has been viewed from include the United States (21%), United Kingdom (5%) and Germany (4%). The smallest number of visitors (strictly speaking, one guest) came from countries like Sudan, Mozambique, Kyrgyzstan, Antigua and Barbuda, Qatar and Barbados. Cheers to all Qatar readers!
The percentage of users browsing the Web with Firefox has slightly increased compared to the 2007 results. 65% of visitors use Mozilla’s browser, 23% have Internet Explorer, 6% use Opera and 4% are browsing with Safari. Surprisingly, I’ve got some views with the PlayStation 3’s browser - 0.06% to be exact - as well as iPhone (0.03%) and Wii (0.01%).
82% of the visitors use Microsoft Windows (84% of them is XP, 11% Vista), 11% have Mac OS and only 8% of the viewers use Linux. This is not surprising - Windows is still the most popular operating system, and as long as software developers don’t realise that there actually are other OS to develop applications for, this won’t change.
As to screen resolutions, 32% are 1024×768, 24% - 1280×1024. 1280×800 got over 17%, and 1680×1050 - less than 10%. I’m really glad to see 800×600 at 1.26%, that means that I can actually make new layouts a little bit wider without users complaining.
The top traffic source for regua.biz this year is… WordPress.org (thanks to ACP)! Far behind the leader there’s Google with 17% (and, strangely, Google.com with 5% - I’m wondering why Google Analytics doesn’t add them up).
The most popular keywords that brought people to the site were: regua (4.74%), taking the top place just as last year, “Cyanide and Happiness” with 3.49%, and many variations of phrases like “Ajax comments”, “Ajax WordPress” and “comment posting”, etc. I am really curious whether the people who google “regua” are actually trying to find me or they are people trying to plan their holidays in Portugal.
Now, continuing the tradition I’ve started a year ago, let’s get to the 14 March facts! (I’m pretty sure I’ll run out of these in a year or two, so if you know something interesting that happened exactly on 14/03, please let me know).
- On March 14th, Second Equirria were held in the ancient Rome.
- On 14 March 1804, Johann Strauß, Sr., the composer, was born.
- On 14 March 1889, Ferdinand von Zeppelin patented his Zeppelin (“navigable balloon”).
- By 14 March 1939 German troops had fully occupied the Czechoslovak provinces of Bohemia and Moravia.
- 14/03/1994 is the release date of Linux kernel version 1.0.0.
- 14 March 2005 is the date of the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon.
- On 14 March 2008 (yeah, that’s today) Xbox 360’s price was officially lowered by €50 in all European countries. Theoretically, at least.
Again, thanks to all of you for letting me keep the site running. May the Force be with you, As-Salāmu `Alaykum, and happy Easter everyone.
Oh, so Europe does actually exist!
Sources: Xbox 360 Fanboy, Silicon Republic
The American companies have always screwed Europe.
The UK citizens may not have experienced that much of screwing by the Americans, but I have never been given a chance to download songs from the iTunes Store, buy games at PlayStation Network or play games via Xbox Live. Yeah, even XBL is not officially available in Poland.
Thus, when I refer to “Europe” here, I generally mean “the UK”.
Microsoft is planning to boost the number of movies available for download on its Xbox Live Marketplace for Ireland [and the UK] from the present 30 or 40 films to up to 400 movies, in line with the US.
Over two years after the release of Xbox 360, someone has finally realised that people across the pond do use the Xbox Live Marketplace and they do want to be able to download the latest films.
More than a million of XBL subscribers live in the UK and Ireland, and I bet at least half a million all over the Europe. Of course, Microsoft is a US-based company, but how the hell could you forget where the Pilgrims came from?
People do watch the same movies here as the US-ers do (maybe except the French, but that’s a different story).
Obviously I’m glad that I’ll finally be able to rent a film other than the 300 from the XBLM, but isn’t that a bit too late?
From what I’ve seen during the past two years, Microsoft has been trying to make people understand they don’t need any CDs/DVDs/HD DVDs to watch their movies, all they need is a TV. And the 360, of course. Despite the spectacular success of their console all over the world, they - and many of the American companies - have been supporting one of the continents (guess which!) much more than the other ones.
I can understand delaying the releases of games that need to be translated, or even the retail ones as they have to be regionalised for the PAL system, but why the hell do we have to wait two weeks (often even longer) for a demo to come out in Europe? Is it more profitable to release the games in Europe a month later than in the US?
When we get the games, the Americans aren’t playing them anymore, because they got bored with them already.
The Xbox Live Marketplace has always been one of the major advantages of the 360. However, all the hyping reviews I’ve read before buying my 360 were probably written by Americans, because our Marketplace consists of three demos and four movies, two of which are the Dead or Alive Xtreme trailers.
Screwing Chechnya? Okay, I can live with that. Screwing Madagascar? That’s understandable. But screwing a whole continent?
Nah, Microsoft, you’d better get working on it. Because just as I’m not going to buy the Gold subscription to play on slowly working servers, I’m not going to use the Marketplace to watch 300 for the umpteenth time.
Dead or Alive trailers are fine, though.
OOP in PHP (part II)
Time to discover the hidden powers of the object oriented programming in PHP. Today I’ll describe the usage of serialisation, the secrets of overloading and - probably the most useful thing today - design patterns.
Serialisation
As you remember from the first part of the article, objects are completely different type of variables. You could easily write a string, number or even an array to a file… but what about objects? You can’t just write an object to a file, as PHP will try to convert it to a string, which is technically impossible, and will result in throwing an error. Yeah, I guess you can already suppose that there’s a solution.
Actually, all you have to do to serialise an object (i.e. make it writable to a file) is use one function: serialize(). As you can guess, using unserialize() function will allow you to have your object back once it has been saved to a file. Remember to define the object’s class before unserialising it, otherwise it will become useless.
Methods __sleep() and __wakeup() make serialisation in PHP5 even easier. They are called, respectively, before an object is serialised or unserialised. They are very useful e.g. for closing and reopening database connections, or saving additional information about the serialisation process. Remember that the __sleep() magic function has to return an array of all members that should be serialised.
class AutoStalker {
private $filename, $file;
public function __construct($filename) {
$this->filename = $filename;
$this->open();
}
public function prepare_for_stalking() {
$this->file = fopen($this->filename, 'a');
}
public function stalk($text) {
fwrite($this->file, $text."\n");
}
public function see_whos_been_stalked() {
return file_get_contents($this->filename);
}
public function __wakeup() {
$this->prepare_for_stalking();
}
public function __sleep() {
fclose($this->file);
return array('filename');
}
}
In the example above, I only serialise the file’s name, because we don’t need any additional information to open that file in the future.
Now, let’s see something more useful; how about using some PHP cookies?
Continue reading ‘OOP in PHP (part II)’…
Please wait, loading…
Loading. The inevitable part of any gamer’s life. There are many different ways of fighting it – some developers decide to limit the number of textures and objects to load, others try making two-dimensional backgrounds, and Sony doubles the internal memory of their PlayStation Portable. But why do some games need much more time to load than others with similar graphics? The answer is: code optimisation.
The wannabe developers often release games that require twice as much RAM or CPU power as they would if they were produced by, let’s say, Activision. They usually don’t optimise their code as much as the experienced developers would. Thus, you don’t see many games that take ages to load published on the 360, because it is extremely difficult to pack a game into one DVD disc and developers are forced to make their code as compact as possible.
PC gaming, however, isn’t limited by the capacity of a disc. Not only do the unexperienced developers fail to produce optimised games – it often happens to such giants as EA. Have you ever played Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on your computer? I could easily make myself a cup of tea while a new level was loading. There are THOUSANDS of other games with such a poor performance, but complaining about their efficiency is pointless; you will always hear the “get a better PC” argument as an answer. 
Of course, you can go to the shop and buy yourself a new graphic card, but wouldn’t it be better to spend this money on new games?
Obviously, it would. I don’t really like to see the new DirectX being implemented in computer games, I don’t really want my PC game to have outrageously great graphics, I don’t really want to be forced to change the game’s graphic details level to the minimum. I want my games to be working as fast as they were on the E3 demo when they were announced. And that’s why I value the next-gen consoles much more than the modern personal computers.
I do realise that this rant probably won’t convince the die-hard PC gamers to change their mind, but just think of how much cash you spend on new processors, graphic cards and RAM memory and how many games you could buy for it. In my opinion, PC gaming will eventually die, and now is the best time to abandon the sinking ship of hardware upgrades and join the gaming community with the brightest future.
Just get yourself a console.