Tyrian: Chapter 1 & 2

What happens when your parents go out to have a coffee, your brother goes to the movies and you’re left alone without electricity in your house while it’s raining? (It actually happened…) You tend to… take out that awesome Tequila bottle you’ve been keeping for a rainy day.

You pop it, and then, you have an awesome idea. Let’s take my mother’s laptop, which can handle pretty well for a couple of hours with its battery!!

Then, you realize it’s time to keep on writing that science fiction project based on that awesome game from your childhood. Hell, why not?

Ok. So, this is the Introduction, Prologue and the first revision of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. It’s not completely checked, so, strange words/grammatical errors/bullshit may pop out from nowhere as well. If you read it, I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did when I wrote it.

Tyrian: The Story by Gerardo Galíndez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 Mexico License.

Charming women

I love women. I mean, they’re simply a masterpiece. They’re specially cute when they try to do man-related stuff. I truly love them. They’re charming.

Heaven knows how, but as my Facebook account is kind of… fucked up, I had to find another way of having fun. So, I opened YouTube and I accidentaly found a video of this awesome girl shooting a shotgun. The 4chan effect kicked in, and I couldn’t stop watching.

The first video I watched. It’s great.

The type of woman I dream for a girlfriend.

Tyrian: The story

Tyrian is this awesome game I was addicted to when I was kid. About a year ago, I downloaded Tyrian 2000 from a fan page which looks just like an official page, as it’s been released as freeware.

The game was written completely in Pascal 14 years ago. The engine actually handles sprites, so it’s a piece of impresive work. Even though it’s relatively simple to work with sprites, 14 years ago there was no Sprite class or anything similar. They did a very good job, and it was well received.

Recently, I started writing science fiction. I can’t say if I’m good or not, but I do enjoy it a lot. I previously wrote another story, but I didn’t like it much so I left it. Perhaps I’ll write it again, one day. So far, I have written only a small introduction, a prologue and the first part of chapter one for the next part of Tyrian’s story.

Tyrian

As usual, the text is protected by the Creative Commons Attribution-Non commercial-Share alike license. Should you like the story and/or have any ideas, feel free to email me, at gerardo.galindez@gmail.com

Random thoughts

So, I’m sitting in front of my desk, my left leg is cramping (I had to hit Merriam Webster for that) as I’m practically sitting on it, in front of me, there are my Engineering Math’s notes, I have to study a couple of useless shit (really, it’s even less useful than knowing random trivia on Star Trek) and I haven’t started to study.

My poor blog was left alone for two months, more or less. Honestly, I haven’t had time, or what I should be saying, I haven’t had time to organize my time and do everything I want.

The Square Nine team was a mess. Almost no one has published anything in three months of existence. About a month ago, I desisted too. I’ll take it again, but certainly not now. In a week, perhaps.

Also, I’m not feeling quite well. I feel hungry all the time and I haven’t slept well (Am I pregnant?? Hell. I’m a guy. Phew…)  I just saw Isabel’s blog “Fue un café” and she wrote a very similar situation. So, she kind of served as inspiration for me to blog. Again.

I really miss this things. It’s unbelievably entertaining to blog, and when a good posts makes it past the huge wall of the blogosphere, after a storm of visitors, anyone feels invincible. I loved that feeling.

I’m in the need of help here. I really have to organize my life. My bedroom’s been a mess for over three weeks. My HDD is also a mess, in all Ubuntu, Windoze, and documents partitions. Also, my media library became a mess after I lent that disk to a random guy who managed very well to break it. That’s why I had to suspend my media library posts.

I don’t know why I’m actually writing this. I guess I really need to clear my mind, before starting again. If I’m succesfull in this week’s goal, restructuring completely this mess, then I’ll blog about it. I really want to. I miss it.

Hell. It’s easier to stop smoking than to keep organized. Time to move.

Thing #4. Team work

I enjoy going to school. I enjoy studying. I enjoy going to school. I enjoy studying. I enjoy going to school. I enjoy studying…

Ok, I don’t. I hate to waste time, and studying subjects that have little, to no relationship with my career makes me mad. Way mad. But I don’t have a choice, so I “try” to like it. Even though, I tend to complain too much about the way things develop. I guess it’s just that I hate lazy people with the idea “you’re the smart guy, so you do all the job”. I really, REALLY, FUCKIN’!!! hate it.

It happened (a few times but happened) during my first semester. It happened again during the second semester, a lot of times. Now, during the summer classes, it’s happening again. Thanks god, there were only a few activities that need to team up, and I worked with a friend, who gets the job done as it should be.

WordPress has no more customers

According to WordPress statics, our dearly beloved blogging service has been left without bloggers. What will happen now without them???

Proof of existence

Don’t worry, WordPress. Chuck Norris will certainly roundhouse kick each blogger’s ass in order for them to use you again. Which reminds me I should be writing a lot of posts instead of publishing senseless content. I saw it, and I immediatly felt the rush to do this. Sorry XD

A poetic, epiphany for a geek

It’s been a curios weekend. I feel extremely anxious and nervous due to the final exams. I know what will happen, but I don’t know yet what to do. It’s a pain in the ass.

Anyway, this post is about a two-stage religious experienice I had this weekend. I was kind of bored, angry, tired and some other things I won’t list here, so I decided that it would be a good choice to practice Java a bit. I launched Eclipse, and took my programming folder. To my surprise, I only had two classes left from the previous course: My actual final project, and the project of the systems engineers from Monterrey’s ITESM campus. As I didn’t know the second, I chose it as it sounded more interesting.

I started coding immediatly the class. Less than half an hour later, I had the basic scheme finished. It was kind of stupid to think that it costed me next to none effort, considering that only the basic scheme of my final project took me more than 5 hours. I felt happy, but at the same time I realized that our campus is the only one that offers a more-or-less complete plan studies, and it features some unique specializations.

Anyway, I really hate the ITESM marketing, so I’ll stop there. I wrote the code of the class, fought a little with an array of objects, and polished the interface. After testing it, I checked all the code, searching for errors. I found a very stupid one, I forgot to close a ‘case’ statement, so the next statements would be executed after finishing the one with the problem.

I opened space within the code to write the last command of the of my class. It was poetical. The last command I wrote was:

break;

Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 Overview.

I’ve just finished reading and incredibly mediocre post about Ubuntu Jaunty featured in WordPress frontpage. It contained a heavy amount of software, “helping” users to install software via command line in the way “sudo apt-get install (put your software here)”. Now that’s sad, as most people looking for information on installing something within Ubuntu will mostly be newbies, so it’s a quick way to scare them off. As I’m angry again, I decided to write this post to introduce the main new features of Ubuntu 9.04, in both the technical and the “mortal” way. May the force be with me… I hope I won’t end as that poor guy. So, here we go.

Ubuntu first impression.

The same installation since Edgy. Smart, easy and fast. As soon as you pop in the installation disk, the welcome screen guides you through. The installation (including tweaking original values) took me roughly 15 minutes, while an XP clean installation took more than 20. One of the main changes announced in the technical overview posted at Ubuntu Forums, was the increase of boot speed. Definitely, they accomplished it. It takes somewhere around a 25% less to boot, so it’s a noticeable change. Also, the graphic login screen has changed completely, it’s no longer the usual, beige + Ubuntu logo. It was replaced with a heavy coloured, dark screen.

As soon as the login is completed, GNOME 2.26 is loaded. The new stable version features major updates only. No new, shiny, bleeding edge software. Nothing noticeable here, as GNOME works very neatly and bug fixes rarely show up as it almost never fails. One thing I could see though, is that the CPU Scaling widget has been corrected. It no longer is randomly broken after each start.

The system introduces new features also, at system level, the “Computer Janitor” used to clean unorphaned packages, files and else consuming space in the disk. Another feature, is a new display panel (which I couldn’t use as my card is an nVidia, by the way) which helps with the connection of a monitor and/or TV. It was a daunting task to connect anything before, so it’s appreciated. Shame on me, as I won’t be able to use it for now.

Probably the most significant interface change in this version, is the new notification system. In previous Ubuntu version, an icon popped when an action was triggered. A rectangular icon popped up at the lower center of the screen each time the brightness or volume was adjusted, The network status was published as a cloud, Pidgin new messages were marked in Pidgin’s icons, and so on. Cannonical, decided it was way too decentralized, so they were bound to create a common place, were applications would publish their notifications. And again, it happened. They did it.

Notifications.

The new notification system is quite beautiful, yet useful. I only have a few regrets, which I’ll explain further. The new notifications idea model, as stated in Mark Shuttlworth’s blog, is to be a clean way to tell the user that something important is going on, without causing any clutter.

Notification system in action.

Ubuntu 9.04: Jaunty Jackalope

Ubuntu’s version 9.04 was released yesterday. Version 9.04 is coded “Jaunty Jackalope” and includes a series of major updates, as usual. According to the official Technical Overview, the updates included are mainly the last update of GNOME, updates in Kernel, boot performance, Ext4 inclusion and a new notification system.

I haven’t seen the system working in front of me, as the nearest thing to Jaunty I’ve been, is a couple of meters away from a CD-R with the ISO image burnt within. I planned a clean installation of Ubuntu, due to the fact that I’ve scarcely used Windows, or “Güindos Ve-esta” as JR an me named it some days ago. I thought that having a 50 GB partition for a system I don’t commonly use, is quite useless, so I’m formatting completely my disk. My thoughts end here. I’m installing Ubuntu. I’ll post a review as soon as I finish the system.

And now, the new logo of Ubuntu reflecting its philosophy: Free, gorgeous and ‘wow’ inspiring.

UPDATE: Read also the overview.

Ubuntu Logo

University

As I wrote in my about section, I’m studying Systems Engineering at ITESM. Although I commonly write in my blog about technology, Linux and many other stupid notes, after all this is my personal blog, a site dedicated completely to fulfill a simple task: To be torn apart as I want, saying whatever I want to say. Correct, incorrect, or anything else, without even taking into consideration if what I’m doing is morally or sociably acceptable.

So as that, I decided I wanted to write about some aspects of what is, and will be my career. These last days, I haven’t had much time to think in many stupid things of my life, but the feel that I should write about some general aspects of my university has passed from a vague idea to a serious wish.

I don’t know yet what will be my first post on this, but I’ll begin to plot some ideas. Right now, I’m only thinking in writing about everything related to university, but not limiting to a specific topic. I plan to write from stupid things like my irrational hate toward dominicans and other types of scum that usually wander around the CEM, to investigations I’ve done that took the shit out of me. Really, there have been a couple of projects that are plainly stupid, and are way too specific to find any useful information on the net.

I  I just hope to complete my MP3 tutorial before getting into this. I hate starting a lot of projects, and not finishing most of them, and it’s something I commonly do. Perhaps I’ll finish them both on the fly. Perhaps I should fuckin’ stop at once talking about the future and start working on everything I want to do. Time to get my hands dirty, again.

"The Red Thing", seen from far.

I couldn’t help it. I really had to post the red thing as the “artwork” for my beginning post. I mean, it’s the red thing… It’s part of the common life at the CEM.