The incoming freshmen on CSH (which doesn’t necessarily mean first-year students – it means the people who are new to CSH altogether, which can include any given ‘year’) are required to complete a project as a whole. The project is essentially a fundraiser, with the proceeds going to a charity. Our project was a Texas Hold’em tournament – $5 buy-in, chip leader takes an iPod nano. That went down Friday night.

I was worried it would tank horribly. Murphy’s Law was wreaking havok on us to begin with. First, our tables fell through, so we got different tables. Then we realized that we didn’t have chairs either. Everything somehow managed to come together. Now all we needed was the people.

I was a poker dealer at the event. Doors opened at 6:30, event started at 7:00. People didn’t show up until 5 minutes before hand, but we actually filled. In 10 minutes. 120 people, 10 minutes. It was grand.

I’m still waiting for the official numbers, but if you take into account the fact that 120 people at $5 is $600, minus $180 for the iPod nano we gave, we’re somewhere around $420 in profit, all going to the Salvation Army.

Since video playback was put into iTunes, it was limited to just Quicktime files. While this was fine, it meant that for those of us who wanted to manage our DivX files (which you can play in QuickTime with the DivX codec), we were out of luck. However, thanks to something I discovered in QuickTime Pro, you can now import QT-playable DivX files into iTunes. Here’s how to do it.

1. Open your DivX file in QuickTime. You’ll know if you have a valid movie or not because, well, it will be playable in QuickTime.

2. Choose Save As from the File menu.

3. Choose “Save as a reference movie”. What this does is basically creates a file that wraps information about the DivX file (where it is, for example) into a QuickTime movie, but doesn’t actually include the movie file itself.

4. Drag into iTunes. Bingo!

In my RIT Theater Arts class, I had to write a short play that had the basic elements of a play’s story. It’s due today, so naturally, I didn’t start it until about 1 AM this morning. I finally finished it.

One of the reasons I didn’t start it was because I didn’t have a compelling story to write. I’ve been telling people about the assignment, and how I’d most likely do something that involved “crime-fighting cyborg ninjas from the future”. Well, somehow I put Steve Jobs as a ninja, and crafted the worst play of all time. 😀

Check out the script. A bunch of people on my floor are hoping to turn this into a short movie, so who knows – maybe that’ll come out of it.

Download the play script

In an interview with Robbie Bach from the Xbox division of Microsoft, a question was brought up about modding the Xbox 360, and what they were doing about it.

IDGNS: You’ve been very tough in prosecuting modders. Aren’t you falling into the same trap as the music industry has found itself in and not responding to expressions of consumer demand?

Bach: The tricky question is why people are modding. There are people who don’t want to pay for games so that’s not good for our business model. There’s a form of modding by people who want to hijack our hardware to do other things. Given that we lose money on the hardware that’s not a customer we’re excited about. There are some people who have done modding because they want to do some related things like play music. We have an Xbox 360 built with a lot of that functionality. Those type of customers will be excited about today’s product.

Well, that’s not hard to answer. People are modding because they want capabilities that Microsoft doesn’t have in the Xbox and, in some cases, will never have. From what I can tell, Microsoft seems to have curbed a lot of reasons why people will mod, but there’s still the one big reason that people will mod, that Microsoft will never, ever do.

Games on a hard drive.

It’d be suicide for their game income. Personally, I’m on a quest to rip games to my PS2’s hard drive simply because I’m too lazy to change discs. I still buy games, and will continue to buy games. However, the majority of people either rent from Blockbuster, borrow from friends, download off the Internets, or some other way of getting it which doesn’t include royalty income going to Microsoft, which is where they make their money. So, that won’t happen. But, people will still try and do it.

This is my new blog section, titled I Hate Java. In this section, I will point out why Java sucks hard, and why Sun sucks for making Java really awkward and separate from the many other languages in the world.

For today’s entry, I chose String pointers. Take this code, for example.

String first = "Java sucks";
String second = "Java sucks";

As you can tell, both variables first and second have the same contents. If you were to run a line like:

boolean isEqualTo = first.equals(second);
boolean shouldNotbeEqualTo = first == seconds;

Then, you’d get isEqualTo to be true. Then, if you look at shouldNotBeEqualTo, you should get false. BUT YOU DON’T. You get true! What???

As it turns out, for Java purposes, if Java detects that you create two strings using the shorthand, where your value is enclosed in quotation marks, it notices that the two are the same string, and as such, actually does something so stupid as to point them at the same address in memory.

I hate Java.

I’ve been trying to get the GUI set up for the most part. Right now, I’m stuck trying to integrate the Apple-supplied scroller code properly. I’m still working on it. Notice the OMG WTF repeating – that’s just dummy text so that the scroller actually shows. Once I get it to clip the area properly, I’ll adjust the slider’s position, which shouldn’t be too hard.

Yeah, I know its been three hours since I posted. However in that time frame, I grabbed some food and did some other stuff. Here’s what I have.

I now have an actual Dashboard widget that loads in Dashboard without problems. However, it doesn’t do anything yet. It does display the background and its name.

At CSH, we have decreed that the weekend of October 1st and 2nd will be a huge programming binge. Basically, everyone is required to complete some kind of major project in order to stay in house. My project will be the official CSH Dashboard Widget. It will be a Dashboard interface to CSH’s three major projects – Drink, which is essentially a vending machine on the network that you can get drinks from; SOAP, or Shower-Oriented Audio Player – a sound system that lets you play music in the showers; and the Members Directory, a listing of everybody who is still a floor member.

Here is a mockup of what it will look like.

I’m off to go read some documentation on how to make widgets. 🙂

Gallery 2 has now been installed. You can check it out by clicking on the photos button at the top of the screen – I’m integrating the templates for Gallery into the site design, so pardon the brokedness. My goal is to have it look like one big thing, not two individual web apps.