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

With the release of the Quake III Arena Demo, it certainly is a holiday today. (well, the timing isn't important...) For the past couple of hours, enjoyed this game in all it's beauty; or just about as far as the demo lets me enjoy it.

Went on a trip around town to visit fun places during this holiday season. Found my way towards "tha tree," at a 47th Street place which doesn't need an introduction. People are swarming that place as though it's Christmas already, or as if they're hoping to find a present under that tree! It's crazy, it's loud and pushy, it's people with dozens of kids, strollers, etc., trying to clear the way for themselves to take a decent picture.

I came right up to the tree, and didn't see any boxes with presents! Damn it! I'm not angry though, it wasn't the only place I visited, so, it wasn't a total waste of a weekend. I also went over the Brooklyn Bridge. I never did it when it's totally dark, and I must say it's totally pointless. If you want to see Manhattan lights, then go over the bridge at night, if you want to see the bridge itself, NEVER go there at night; you won't see the bridge!

During this wonderful and relaxing trip, acquired a few interesting books. One of them, I've been meaning to get for a long while, but never found a reason to do so... it's Design Patterns, Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. It's a nice book that describes software design issues. Another book is Mastering Algorithms with Perl. The algorithms book seems very techy, at least I doubt I'll be bored with boring language specific explanations.

Also saw a movie entitled The End Of Days. It's the dumbest movie I've ever seen! It's supposed to be scary, but it's not. It's supposed to be action, but it's not. It's supposed to be about the end of the world, yet the world doesn't end, etc. Or maybe it's just me. I hate movies based on religious ideas, especially when they twist and bend the religion just to fit the theme of the movie; they all seem too fake. The Messenger: Story of Joan of Arc was a bit better, but also fairly dumb from my point of view. But at least the actress playing Joan looked really nice, unlike in The End Of Days, in which everybody looked like they've met the devil ;-)

On the bright side, I'm about to finish college (I got about a week of classes left!) Yahoo!!! So, according to the principle of injustice, it would be only fair if the world ended on new years eve... Hmm... How do you think it *might* end on the new years eve? Would a nuclear bomb explode because of a Y2K bug? A comet hit the earth? Would all technology just turn against humans? Would everything just break, and we all die for lack of technology? Or will it be like that dumb movie suggested... the devil will come down from the sky (or ground) and claim everybody? Whichever way happens, everybody's screwed together (so, at least you'll have the pleasure of watching your enemies die right beside you ;-) Now how did I get of to a subject like this? I guess my paranoia is catching up with me...

Christmas time... The wonderful time of the year. I wonder if John Carmack will release the Quake1 source during this holiday season as he had once mentioned in this .plan files... That would be a very cool holiday present. His latest game is incredible! I've actually came in 2nd a few times (on a server with dozens of people, most of whom have ping much lower than I do) I don't suck anymore (or at least I don't want to...)

While exploring my hard-drive of my newly bought computer, I discovered a full copy of Microsoft Works. This quickly brought to mind the semi-famous oxymoron. I got only two questions... Why put MS Works on my machine when it comes with MS Office 2000? And why call something "works" when it doesn't do any work according to the Physics book definition of work. Anyway, this oxymoronic product didn't work-out as it has planned, and was quickly eliminated from existence (from my machine, that is...)

It's not like I hate Microsoft, in fact, I like, and use most of their products. I just hate the bugs in their products, and the fact that they don't catch them before they get to me! Why should I, the user of their products, have to care whether a Microsoft program performs an illegal operation? (that it will be shut down?) Or that it was an "internal error"? Why do I have to see that blue screen of death? If their products don't work right, why should users suffer? I think their share-holders should be the ones to suffer!

I might have gotten carried away with bashing Microsoft, but I can't help it, after spending nearly two days trying unsuccessfully to make my plug-and-play hardware work under Windows 98 Second Edition. It won't give me an error, nor a reason, it simply won't boot! And the hilarious thing is that after down-grading back to Windows 98 (first edition) everything worked fine. Is this progress or what?

On a lighter note, while doing all those installations I got to read quite a bit about XML, and I think it's a rather cute technology. Oh, wait, not a technology, but an idea... Yeah, that was the word I was looking for. While too many times the articles mentioned not to write an XML parser and simply use one from Microsoft, I non-the-less, quickly became convinced that a personal XML parser would be a cool thing to have. I'm now nearly positive that the next release of MakeHTML (the long awaited version 3) will make heavy use of XML as it's input format.

On an educational point, been reading quite a bit about graph theory, and Dijkstra's algorithm. It's a cute algorithm to find the shortest path between nodes of a graph. If you think about it, it's kind of like a more elegant version of breadth-first search.

Today is my mother's birthday. So, Happy Birthday mom!

Acquired a few new items for myself. One of them is a LAN for my home, the other, a 35" TV. The LAN is incredible. I got two Fast Ethernet cards, one for my old machine, and one for the new. In addition, I got myself a four-port hub! I can play quake via this 100 mbps LAN at pings of 8 to 10! Unfortunately, this doesn't help my Internet connection. The TV hasn't yet been delivered, but it's a huge Sony Trinitron, with all the latest accessories. I can't wait to fire up my DVD and see some movies the way they "were meant to be seen."

Hoping to get a huge rest this upcoming week. I'll have a few days on which I get home very early, and at least one day of total rest. I might have to do lots of stuff on those days though. Like I plan on doing my Simulations project, and a few other small projects that have accumulated over the past few weeks.

I got a new computer!!! It's a Compaq, Celeron 500Mhz, 96Mb SDRAM, running at 100Mhz, a 13Gig Hard-Drive, A3D Sound, an Intel 810 Chipset, which proves to be a really really cool 3D graphics accelerator, and a 17" monitor! I already moved my old Voodoo2, just to play Quake2, but that chip from Intel doesn't even need the Voodoo2 to perform REALLY well with Quake3.

Also decided to get myself a new book. I've looked over Computability, Complexity, and Languages, Second Edition, Fundamentals of Theoretical Computer Science, by Martin D. Davis, Ron Sigal, and Elaine J. Weyuker. I think I love this book. It has everything!

Revolutionary ideas are hard to come by, they are the ones that prove everybody wrong, and make the originator a hero in the eyes of millions. Dreams are shuddered when these incredible ideas turn out to be incorrect.

I thought the time has come for a NP problem to be solved in polynomial time. I was wrong. Even though the new idea gave me an ability to solve most of the book's CNF examples in just seconds, it still would perform just as bad on carefully chosen inputs.

The idea is that of converting the CNF's conjunction of disjunctions into a disjunction of conjunctions. Once the first complete conjunction is found, you can stop the program, and report the conjunction as your answer. Surprisingly, this simple trick makes it very easy to solve the presented examples in most texts.

Tomorrow will venture out and attempt to get myself a new computer. Already picked out which one, and will hopefully get it. I'm very cautious about trying to be overly optimistic, since I was planning on getting it earlier, but events outside of my control intervened. So far, everything seems fine for tomorrow.

It will be a band new Intel Celeron 500Mhz, 96Mb SDRAM, 17" monitor, 13Gig Hard-drive, A3D sound, and everything else that gets bundled in. I plan on keeping my current system the same, with the exception of maybe yanking out the Voodoo2, in case the Celeron has crappy 3D hardware. So far, the 3D card doesn't look all that bad, compared to my 2 year old Voodoo2.

I wonder if these recent court proceedings mean that Microsoft will be shut own, or broken up into smaller companies. I also wonder if that happens, whether Microsoft Word will stop being compatible with Microsoft Windows! I think it's all a load of crap. Microsoft doesn't just cut out everybody else from the market, they also cut out themselves! Look at their three main operating systems: Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. The native file-systems of these systems are not compatible amongst themselves! Not to mention among other operating systems! I say: leave them alone, and let the market decide their fate.

Went to see a movie yesterday. House On Haunted Hill, or something like that. Very interesting. If I cared, I would vote the movie one of the best scary (& jumpy) movies in recent times. Much better than The Mummy, or The Haunting. I especially like those weird, left alone in the scary place, moments. Why can't these idiots just stay together, and NOT explore the basement?! Then again, if everybody had a brain, the movie wouldn't be as interesting.

Made dramatic changes to the main page of this site. The old page is still accessible via this link.

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.

Started writing a document on theoretical computer science. Begun with a discussion of Regular Languages, and quickly realized that I need to cover a bit more detail before moving onto languages in general. Will cover things like set theory, and general language concepts before going directly into regular or context-free languages. Will see what happens...

Went over the Brooklyn Bridge again. Took a few interesting pictures, including the one in the bottom of the page, of New York sky-line.

Got several new books today. One that seems extremely interesting is Programming Language Pragmatics by Michael L. Scott. It is about language design, and compiler implementation. I'm very thrilled about this book, it seems to have everything I will need for my Compiler Construction class (It has most of the theoretical material in it's first few chapters). I'm seriously considering making this book the required text for the class. An alternative would be to use Crafting a Compiler with C, by Fischer & LeBlank. The other book I got mostly for it's popularity (or lack of). It is C++ Programming Language, Third Edition, by Bjarne Stroustrup (The Creator of C++). It's funny that it actually does say "The Creator of C++" on the cover! I've heard horror stories about this book, and decided to check it out myself. I would think that a person who designed the language would be pretty good at describing it to others. Then again, I think I'd enjoy reading a very techy, system independent, programming language description, from the compiler writer's point of view.