Now that you know what news is, you know what this page has lots of... news!

I got it! I got accepted into the Master's Program in Computer Science at Brooklyn College! This thin little letter made a huge difference in my mood! Also saw my name posted on the bulletin board as teaching CIS29 (Compiler Construction class) next term. It's just one good news after another. Oh, and I got a rather nice grade on my Algorithm Analysis test!

Was wondering around my hard-drive and stumbled over a document I must have had since the time I was in high school. It's a nice little doc named: The Conscience of a Hacker. Kind of makes you think. This article was on this web-site since the beginning of time. I just never bothered to link to it from anywhere.

Slowly becoming used to this Microsoft Natural Keyboard; still a bit rusty on the arrow keys though. Also, the del, insert, pg-up, and pg-down keys are weirdly placed. I wish they kept arrow keys, and other control keys the same as in the classic keyboards, and only changed the arrangement for the letter keys. The keyboard is really nice when typing lot of text, but really sucks for anything else.

A Pepsi vending machine ate my dollar today. I decided that I won't let this go this time; it has to stop sometime. I written down the number on the vending machine, and tomorrow will call them and complain. They took my dollar, and I want it back. This is a matter of principle! They've left me thirsty!

Since I'm taking a Java class this semester (yeah, really!, no joke!) I have convinced the instructor to put a link on the class page to my Java Data Structures document.

Finally upto got upto speed with my home PC. Went back to Windows 95, installed everything I'm using, etc.  I got tons of software, and usually takes about a day or two to install all of it. Also got myself a Microsoft Natural Keyboard, maybe it will help ease my wrist pains. A brand new mouse pad kicks ass in Quake2, but considering that I'm still not used to this new keyboard, I suck nonetheless. Actually did an 'exec thresh.cfg' in quake2, and started playing with that configuration. It is much more suitable to this new keyboard than my old one (which used arrow keys). Arrow keys in this natural keyboard really suck. Anyway, that thresh.cfg changed other things as well, like my name!, so, I ended up playing as "Thresh" for like 30 minutes before the level ended, and the weirdo guy with name Thresh had the lowest score.

Come to think of it, I haven't been playing as Mr.Phreak for the past month. (I haven't been playing at all!) The last few days when I went back, I used the name "P100-28.8" just to make it seem that I'm not really bad, it's just that my hardware sucks. I didn't need it, since even after a month of no Quake2, I was still beating the crap out of people who's ping is 4x lower. (of course, I'm not taking about "good" players with low ping... I just think that if a person has 50 or so ping, they should win no matter what... but they loose to somebody who's ping in much much higher) I'll have to practice a bit with this new keyboard to get back on top.

Also got myself Garbage Version 2.0 CD. I like that band. This is yet another time an MP3 helped sell a CD. Other times include Metallica, Jewel, etc. Right now, I rarely buy a CD without first hearing a good portion of the songs through MP3s.

YaHoo Geocities is beginning to stink. For one, they've taken banner placement control away from me, and simply block away part of my page to have it displayed. Their servers are not reliable! I've had problems downloading files, accessing my page, and among other things, their new and improved shortcut URL thingie doesn't seem to be working. Am I asking for too much? I just want a decent FREE service. I can tolerate a reasonable amount of advertising (which doesn't force you to see it, and at the very least, lets the author of the page pick a place for it).

Anyway, I've decided that very soon (like in a few months), I'll be getting my own fast server, with a domain name and all. I'm also planning on offering 100% free, no advertising, reliable e-mail (for starters...) and maybe eventually work myself upto websites (advertising free of course). Giving away 10 or so megs is nothing in this 20 gig hard-drive age. And how does FREE telnet account into a UNIX machine sound?

For my compilers class, decided that I might do a simple LL(1) interpreter for the first part of the semester, then, do a compiler to compile to the language of that interpreter. This will free me from having to come up with an assembler. (I'm guessing an interpreter is easier to come up with... especially for something like BASIC)

UNPLUGGED: It has come to my attention that the server my web-site resides on is not reliable. I have had problems downloading some of the files from the files section, and my Java Data Structures tutorial stops downloading after about 40%. Even downloading the zip doesn't work! Anyway, as a simple solution, I'm willing to e-mail you ANY document found on this site. Simply drop me an e-mail (iparticle at NO SPAM yahoo dot com) telling me which file you're having problems downloading, and I'll be happy to e-mail it to you directly.

Note that I haven't tried using GetRight yet, and it's very likely that it will actually succeed in downloading everything.

Found out that IE5 supports PNG graphics format (a replacement for GIF), but Netscape 3 does not. That implies I won't be using it for a while (I need Netscape 3 support). Most of the times, JPEG offers better compression anyway.

It's incredibly strange how a Windows NT, Pentium2 450Mhz machine is MUCH slower than my lousy 486 running all DOS programs. Don't you just love progress?

This is me, in my Java class, right after an extremely easy quiz. (well, it was easy for me; but I did see some people walking out of the class without handing in anything...) Anyway, after this eventful morning, went over the Brooklyn Bridge, and into the Borders book store.

Noticed that the flags on the Brooklyn Bridge are brand new. The time when I saw them last was right after hurricane FLOYD. They were badly torn and looked awful. Today, however, they looked perfect. The color difference is huge: the old ones looked yellowish, the new ones are actually white.

Picked out a few computer books in the book store, but didn't buy anything because of greed. One book was on C++ (by the inventor himself), another on Advanced CORBA, and another on OO Design. I didn't particularly want to spend any money, especially considering I still haven't finished reading that Data Compression book I got last time. So, went home, and on the way there, spend about an equal amount on DVDs. Now that I think about it, I would have been better off getting the books.

Decided to setup a P.O. Box for my company. So, the next time I find some free time, will go and do that. Also have to start planning for the future, maybe even register a domain name... but I guess that could wait until I get a dedicated web server.

Made some interesting progress on printing out a binary tree (in text). So far, it doesn't exactly print the tree. It just prints a set of nodes, at correct tree depths. If it's a balanced tree, it's easy to figure out what goes where, but if it's not, it will be a pain. It is still useful in terms of quickly visualizing the tree structure. Right now, thinking of a way to align the child nodes in relation to their parent, however, this looks much more challenging.

The technique involves a simple modification to the breadth-first traversal (described in Java Data Structures 2nd Edition). You simply insert the node's depth onto the queue, and during printing, you write a new line character whenever the depth you read in from the queue is different from your current depth. You then set your current depth equal to the one you got from the queue, and continue. If I get it working the way I want it to work, I'll add a section on it to Java Data Structures.

It's a day after my birthday. I've taken quite a bit of pictures, most of which nobody will ever see. Got a lot of small (very small) gifts. Nicest gift was a relatively light jacket, of the style that I like.

Also got a lot of balloons filled with helium. When my cat saw them, it freaked out, and hasn't shown it's face for the entire evening.

I've actually later released about a dozen or so of these balloons onto the sky. Given the wind gusts, I've only saw them for like 2 seconds until they were blown out of sight. If they bring down some airplane, remember, those were NOT by balloons, and I didn't release them... right?

Got SlickEdit editor, since I'm considering abandoning Visual Studio for my editing needs. I found that it crashes quite often when put under heavy stress (something I do regularly).

It's finally my birthday, not that I enjoy this day, but it sure brings up a lot of thoughts. Like, amm... well, maybe it doesn't bring up any thoughts, and maybe that is what's troubling me: getting old, and loosing my creativity along with my super powers. Imagine getting up at 5 am in the morning (without an alarm), gluing on your dentures, and spending the rest of the day at some demeaning, repetitive, and pointless job, while your kids (and grandkids) are already pondering of a plan to put you in a retirement home. I admit it! I don't want to get old! If there was a way to stop this birthday counter (with the exception of death), I'd do it without a second thought!

Now, after that grim paragraph above, lets all just sing a song... Amm... damn it, I've forgot the words! I get more and more forgetful with age...

And now, for some pointless story which goes nowhere (just to complete the picture).

When I was young, dinosaurs roamed the earth. They were mighty beasts, and made good pets. Hunting was hard, since at that day and age, we didn't have potatoes. We had plenty of onions though. That brings us to computers. They were pretty cute, and powered by mice. Calculators being more powerful than a whole cave full of animal dun. Then again, cave-children didn't speak rude to their cave-parents, and everybody lived happily ever after.

How was that for a nowhere-going & meaningless story?

I've updated this news section today, but you can still view the OLD NEWS HERE!

Since I'm taking a Java class this semester (yeah, really!, no joke!) I have convinced the instructor to put a link on the class page to my Java Data Structures document.

Wow, redesigned this page quite a bit. Moved a lot of the main links to the left border to make them easily accessible. Also planning on making changes to the rest of the site, but for now, would like to test this new design with a wide variety of browsers, and make sure it works. This new design should take about 30 seconds to load over a 28.8 connection (In contrast to the old design, which took over a minute).

Also been doing some serious design work for the Compiler Construction class I'm teaching next semester. Actually, I already have a primitive lexer for the assembler working. The assembler is more or less for a Harvard Architecture with a few unique modifications. It will be powerful enough for any computable problem, yet simple enough to be implemented in a matter of few hours.

It's really amazing how much stuff they were able to fit onto one DVD in The Matrix. I've had the DVD for 3 days now, and I'm still finding new stuff on it.

Have to come up with a plausible idea for a simulation, study for a fairly serious test, and through all that, avoid going insane. That's more or less the plan for this week.