Apple WWDC Keynote Speech

I’ll keep this short and simple, as there’s going to be summaries a thousand times better on the internet.

Apple pretty much just finished their Keynote speech, and demoed a few of their up and coming products. OS X Leopoerd is one such demo. They ran through all the enhancements that in the new version. These are great news for a lot of Mac Users, but unfortunatly don’t impact me much.

I am, however excited about the announcement that Safari has been ported to Win32. They’ve also announced (unfortunatly), that Safari will come bundled with new installations of iTunes. As soon as I get home, I’m going to test out Safari.

And last, but not least, it appears that custom apps for the iPhone are going to be HTML/Javascript/AJAX apps that run inside Safari. This is kinda cool, but kinda lame too. Will the iPhone run Java applications? That would be really cool.

Anyways, that’s just a short and simple rundown, I suggest you watch the video, when it’s posted on the internet.

Bacon and Eggs: Not for the Faint of Heart

Well I reconfirmed my last experiment’s result in that bacon and eggs are the most difficult thing to cook. He was my last attempt, as taken from my old blog:

Background: An earlyriser is something they sell at our school, it consists of a bagle, cheese, bacon, and fried egg.  See image below:

Now, I tried to make one of these, but the egg gave me the most problems:

Yum Yum!

Once I got past that, I cracked open the pre-cooked bacon and a bagle and some kind of uber thick cheese:

After the bacon was done, I put it together a fried it for no reason:

And then put it in the nuke to melt the cheese. This is my final result:

I havn’t eaten it yet, so if I don’t post again, assume it’s from this.

That time I used pre-cooked bacon, but this morning I did the real deal. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, however, my eggs still sucked. I screwed up one by trying to open it and it going everywhere, so I pretty much scrambled that one, and I messed up flipping my other one, so it’s about a quarter to a half scrambled.

Moooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmm!!!

WAAAAH! :(

My sister left for summer work in another town 4 hours away today.

For those that don’t know, my sister and I are really close. We keep each other (mostly) sane. I’m going to go totally bonkers within a week.

Anyway, bye everybody! /me waves a bit slower than usual.

ZDLSharp Design Goals

Currently in the pipeline for ZDLSharp, is:

• Add DMFlags generator to the interface
• Finish adding current ZDL features (multiplayer)
• Do code cleanup and refactoring/debugging
• Implement file hashing system
• Start implementation of ZDLNet
• Redesign the interface

Things will pretty much happen in that order. Bio and I will be working hard on ZDLNet, to make it as smooth and user friendly as possible. We’re going to open the actual protocol. The main protocol is going to be a centralized TCP server, and use UDP for connection testing and file transfers between users.

BioHazard adds:

My pipeline is:

• Read up again on network programming.
• Set up project server and backend server.
• Write central server software.
• Write a GTKmm client for ZDLNet. (Yay Linux support!)

I’ll be writing the server software since I have a bunch of servers floating around.
I’m really looking forward to seriously working with Q on a project.

Whee I have hamsters!

I finally broke down and got myself a hamster. In fact, I got 2!

The one on the left is Morsel and the other is Tidbit.

I used to have a whole lot of hamsters when I was a kid so it’s nice to have them around again.

Yay I’m back!

Hey everyone! /me waves
Now that I’ve returned from wherever I was at, I’m free to do cool stuff again.

I’m going to help Q with his ZDLNet thing. Q is cool. Yeah.
Heh, I’m not much of a blog writer. Does it show?

Oh, Q wanted me to tell all of you that I ate a cookie yesterday. It was a cheap house-brand generic chocolate chip cookie. I actually had 4 of them. Yum.

Where Does This Put Us Now?

Well, the Sens played the Ducks tonight again, and pretty much they kicked our arses. We (Ottawa) had one good period, which was the first. After that, we kinda fell apart. Emery wasn’t too strong, tonight either. Letting 3 goals in, and the net posts saved 2 or 3. Not good!

Next game is wednesday night in Anaheim. If they win, they get the cup :(.

Them Damn Ducks

Last night was game 3 of the Stanley Cup Finals, and the good old boys pulled through. Ottawa ravaged Anaheim in a stellar 5-3 victory. It was probably the best hockey game I’ve ever seen in my life.

But can we do it again? We really seemed to get onto the Ducks and figure them out, or at least how to exploit them. For most of the game, however, it felt like Ottawa’s puck control was… crappy. Anaheim can skate fast, faster I would say than Ottawa. Ottawa gave up the puck too many times to Anaheim, so I’m wondering if Monday Night will be a repeat of tonight, or the last few games.

I must say, in a vallient attempt to score, Anaheim pulled their goalie, and Ottawa nearly scored on that empty net, but the Ducks were there to prevent that from happening.

One thing I did notice, is that the Ducks liked to keep two players in the neutral zone when the puck was in Ottawa’s end, just to catch it if anybody tries to take it to their end. Interesting strategy, but I don’t think the Sens are strong enough to stick two players that far away.

KDiZD

A doom project called “Knee Deep in ZDoom” was released recently, much to the anticipation of the ZDoom community.

At a large 23MB, it can be picked up from my server from data. To play, you also need the Doom IWAD (*not* free), as well as the ZDoom engine itself. The readme can be found here, ZDoom here, or if you like OpenGL, GZDoom here.

Have fun!

Aspartame

Intrigued by the fact that our fridge at work is stocked with Diet Coke and Coca-Cola Zero, with seemingly identical ingredients, it makes me wonder: What is the different?

Well it turns out, not a lot. Apparently, Zero uses less aspartame, and more of another sweetener than Diet. Upon reading the comments on this page, I stumbled across this page about the warnings of aspartame.

Aspartame converts to dangerous by-products that have no natural countermeasures. A dieter’s empty stomach accelerates these conversions and amplifies the damage. Components of aspartame go straight to the brain, damage that causes headaches, mental confusion, seizures and faulty balance. Lab rats and other test animals died of brain tumors.

Yeah, ok, so we know aspartame is bad for us. (And for the record, I won’t completely trust that page, it’s written very poorly). And it causes cancer. So why is it on the market? Well it almost didn’t. This wikipedia article (a good read), mentions that:

The head of the FDA, Jere E. Goyan, who had not approved legalization of aspartame, due to the brain cancer in rats issue, was fired on the first day Ronald Reagan was president of the U.S. (1981). Reagan hired Arthur Hayes MD (FDA Commissioner 1981-1983), who legalized aspartame a year later.

And…

In February 2007, Page to Pantry, a radio program on the public radio station KPFK 90.7FM in Los Angeles, reported that aspartame was refused approval by the FDA for eight years before finally being approved under the leadership of Arthur Hayes. Immediately after, Hayes left the FDA and went to work for the artificial sweetener industry. This so-called “Revolving-Door” policy seems to be very common in the food additive industry.

With a track record like this, why is it still on the market? Probably because it’s cheap, and companies make money off the fearmongering tactics they use (”0 Calories!”) to attract people trying to loose weight and cut back.

Also, take this into consideration:

They think that even a moderate spike in blood plasma phenylalanine levels from typical ingestion may have adverse consequences in long-term use. They are especially concerned that the phenylalanine can be concentrated in fetal brains to a potentially neurotoxic level.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions.