hermiene.net

Some nights typing '*hug*' just doesn't cut it.

— Randall Munroe, xkcd, Far Away (352)

2003

So Max Payne 2 is very very cool. First of all, it kept all that was good from Max Payne 1, enhanced some features that needed enhancing, and added a bunch of stuff seamlessly into the gameplay. Truly a worthy sequel.

The most notable new feature in this game is the physics engine. When I first fired up the game I wasn't aware that there even was a physics system; imagine my surprise when I sent the first enemy flying into a pile of boxes, shelves, mops, buckets and whatnot ^-^. The ragdolls are a bit easy to send sky high, but it's definitely not as bad as in the DX:IW demo.

The bullet time system differs from Max Payne 1 in two respects (or three, if you count the post-processing effects). The only way to accumulate bullet time in Max Payne 1 was to kill enemies; in Max Payne 2, the bullet time meter fills up automatically, as well as getting bumped up a certain amount when you kill enemies. The more enemies you kill, the more yellow the bullet time meter gets, while constantly going towards white again. The more yellow it is, the slower time moves, giving you the upper hand. When it's maxed out yellow and you reload, time slows down even further and Max does a low 360 degree spin counter-clockwise while the camera does a 360 degree spin clockwise with the focus on Max. It looks extremely cool, and it is, in fact, a pretty effective way to dodge bullets. Here's a clickable picture:

Payne doing a 360 spin.

When the last enemy in a certain group dies, the camera does a triumphant slowmotion move around the enemy; on special occasions, the camera moves on a fixed path. This is one of the good things they kept from Max Payne 1. On rare occasions does the camera move in an unorderly fashion (such as sticking very close to walls or clipping through stuff), but that's unavoidable.

The enemies' banter is still funny as hell; the obvious connection between 'Max' the name and 'maximum' the word and 'Payne' the name and 'pain' the word is still being exploited, though not as extensively as in Max Payne 1.

Though the enemies are easy to gun down (and pretty clumsy with grenades), they surprised me at one point in the game. They'd dressed up a mop with the generic dress that they wear and surrounded it with explosives. Trigger-happy as I am, I bursted into the room, guns blazing, only to realize my mistake too late; I was blown to bits. Here's a picture of Mr Mopman:

Mopman.

There are now episodic TV shows showing one episode on virtually every TV screen you see. Among others, Lords and Ladies is back. Another TV show, called Dick Justice, directly parodies Max Payne. Remember the utterly unsuitable grimace on Payne's face in MP1? Justice does a parody on it.

Payne's nightmares are finally not annoying. In MP1 you had to walk along floating labyrinth-ish blood paths with the risk of falling to your death; in MP2's nightmares, you can't die. Neither do you have to do repetitive and useless running around. If you pay attention, Max' dreams subtly reflects some of the various things he's seen throughout the game (such as TV shows, people talking etc.). Also, the dreams contain several weirdities, like this one (it's hard to tell from the picture, but there are post-processing effects being done here):

Weird.

The story is still communicated by watercolor pictures and speech bubbles, which is another nice (or rather, essential) port from MP1. (Admit it: It wouldn't be Max Payne without the watercolors.)

If you finish the game on the Dead on Arrival difficulty setting, you get an alternative ending. See, now you just have to try it.

I've used (and independently devised) the Fahrner Image Replacement technique (FIR for short, named after Todd Fahrner), but I didn't discover the correct term for it until now. It's pretty simple. Say you want a heading as an image while still preserving the stylized text the image shows in plain text form. This is the old HTML way:

<h1><img src="img/header.png" alt="The history of England" height="50" width="150"></h1>

That would certainly display the alt value for people using a text-only browser like the Links browser or Lynx, but search robots index alt values differently than pure HTML text. That image is a presentational feature, and should be kept in CSS. It's fairly easily done:

<h1><span>The history of England</span></h1>

Apply CSS:

h1 {
  background-image: url(pics/header.png);
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  height: 50px;
}

h1 span {
  display: none;
}

Of course, this method isn't bullet-proof. stopdesign.com's article on FIR (where I discovered the term) covers much, and provides links for further reading and alternative methods (such as LIR).

The redesign is moving along at a reasonable pace.

I'm not very pleased after playing the Deus Ex: Invisible War demo.

The interface looks too much like a console interface would look. It's got big fonts that really obscure your view, whereas DX1 has nice, small fonts that doesn't clutter up a thing. The fact that conversation texts appear as they speak doesn't help either.

DX1 has a nice, sleek interface where you can click tabs at the top of your screen to switch between different views (such as Inventory, Skills, Goals/Notes, et cetera). This is replaced in the DX:IW demo with a distinct key for each window, and no way to switch between them without first clicking Back and then hitting the key for the specific window you wanted.

They decided to merge the lockpick and multitool into, well, the multitool. That was highly annoying. In addition to this, the multitool now looks like a magic wand, emitting orange light onto metal door locks to pick it.

Breaking crates and other objects looks very, very unnatural; just a speck of dust and some small chunks of debris. But I believe they'll fix this in the final game.

What I loved about Deus Ex 1 was the freedom you had. Not only because of the pseudo non-linear story line, but the fact that you could carry your weapons everywhere you went, even into bars. This time around though, the bar in the demo (the Greasel Pit bar) has a "weapon lock" system; they won't let you in unless they use a sort of projection beam to disable your weapons. It had been much more plausible had they ordered you to deposit all your weaponry in their storage room or something.

They didn't do it all wrong. The news bulletins are now read by announcers, which is kind of fun.

The HTML tags <blink> and <marquee>, as you probably know, should never be used.

"Note. If blinking content (e.g., a headline that appears and disappears at regular intervals) is used, provide a mechanism for stopping the blinking. In CSS, 'text-decoration: blink' will cause content to blink and will allow users to stop the effect by turning off style sheets or overriding the rule in a user style sheet. Do not use the BLINK and MARQUEE elements. These elements are not part of any W3C specification for HTML (i.e., they are non-standard elements)."

Source: www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WD-WCAG10-TECHS-20000615/css-techniques.html

CSS1, CSS2 and CSS2.1 currently have blink included as a value for the text-decoration property. CSS3 will probably include this as well. This is what CSS1 says about text-decoration: blink;:

"UAs must recognize the keyword 'blink', but are not required to support the blink effect."

Source: www.w3.org/TR/CSS1#text-decoration

CSS2:

"Conforming user agents are not required to support this value."

Source: www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/text.html#lining-striking-props

CSS2.1:

Conforming user agents may simply not blink the text. Note that not blinking the text is one technique to satisfy checkpoint 3.3 of WAI-UAAG."

Source: www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/text.html#lining-striking-props

CSS3:

"Conforming user agents MAY simply not blink the text."

Source: www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-css3-text-20030514/#text-decoration

So far, I like CSS2.1's statement best. I've not really made up my mind about whether or not CSS3 should include blink; on one hand, it follows the philosophy of separating style from content; on the other hand, it's a usability issue. Blinking text is simply annoying. On the gripping hand, people can enable their user style sheets and override it by doing text-decoration: none;. So I'm honestly not sure.

In addition to this, CSS3 currently has a marquee property. Whether this is a good thing is also debatable. At least it seems to be well thought out.

I'm kind of proud of myself when it comes to web design. I've never fallen victim to the common mistakes of making web pages. I've never used frames. Frames are evil; I've never used the <font> tag (it should go without saying that <font> sucks big time); I've never used tables for layout. My navigation bar is in fact a <table>, but I like to call it a table of links. I mean to make this into a list of links with the upcoming redesign, though. Done. I've never tried to hide my source code. Hiding your source is stupid. I forgot to mention that I actually used to abuse <blockquote> just for its left margin on the news items. Not anymore, of course.

In addition to not doing the stuff above, I write clean and structured code which is (in theory) highly accessible. But you already know that.

Changed the font from Verdana to Trebuchet MS. This, and my recent dive into CSS Zen Garden, has inspired me to redesign the site. The great thing about having a personal web site, as opposed to working on a project for someone else (maybe a corporate web site), is that you don't have to worry about deadlines for your projects or the shortcomings of browsers.

Incidentally, I'm now using outline and <q> for the tagline; IE handles neither. So to hell with you, IE. And for you poor saps still using the wretched thing: Upgrade. I suggest Opera or Mozilla. It'll really make your lives a whole lot easier (for reasons already explained).

The density of people yelling "Harry Potter!" at me has increased. I made a graph:

-1+1.15^x

The x-axis is the number of months since my last haircut. The y-axis is the number of people per day yelling "Harry Potter!" at me. I guess this means I have to get a haircut soon.

The Matrix Revolutions was excellent. I thought the movie was going to tie up all the loose ends, but in fact it just posed more questions than it answered. This is ingenious, though. Smith is even cooler than before. Seraph is an ass-kicker. The special effects are better (if it really matters). This movie is (once again) mind-blowing.

I seriously want to strangle IE. My reasons for wanting that are listed here, in no particular order:

  1. It doesn't do tabbed browsing.
  2. The support for 24- and 32-bit alpha transparent PNG images is non-existent without the PNG hack for IE.
  3. It doesn't support <link> very well. It understands linking of style sheets using <link>, but not common relationships like next, previous, contents, help, first, last, glossary, author etc.
  4. It doesn't add quotation marks before and after <q>, rendering, among other things, the tagline incomplete. Some people are pragmatic, and would work around this by manually placing quotation marks around quotations. I won't. A quote is a quote, and belongs in a <q> element. IE is the only browser I've found that doesn't support this.
  5. It silently ignores <abbr>, the tag for marking up abbreviations. Thankfully we've got <acronym>; bless verbosity.
  6. Not a very big deal really, but it interprets dotted as dashed.
  7. It supports the illegal CSS properties scroll-bar-*. They are illegal because they're not prefixed with -vendor-. (Refer to the W3C scroll-bar page.) I also don't believe they ever should be legal; it should be up to the end user to style his own scrollbars using something like Style XP or Windows Blinds.
  8. It misinterprets alt on images as title and thus displays a tool tip when you hover your mouse over an image with alternate text.
  9. It doesn't do :before or :after. (Id est, generated content.)
  10. outline doesn't work.
  11. The only values for list-style-type it understands are square, circle, disc, decimal, lower-roman, upper-roman, lower-alpha and upper-alpha.

Please think of our children. Don't use IE. Use Opera or Mozilla or something else that's relatively standards compliant.

Yes. I'm a geek. Get over it.

Mark Pilgrim has convinced me to switch to HTML 4.01 Strict. Should I later decide to go back to XHTML, it should only take about 30 minutes or so to redo the thing to make it valid.

I seriously want to marry CSS.

With CSS you, yes you, you, the reader, the user, you can override any styles with your custom user style sheet. You can specify general rules for how headers, paragraphs, lists etc. should be rendered across a plethora of web sites. But you can also specify rules that apply to specific sites only. Like, say, my site. On my <body>, I've got the attribute and value id="havard-no-ip-info". With CSS, you can use descendant selectors (or any other contextual selector) to define styles which apply to my site only:

body#havard-no-ip-info {
  background: red;
  color: purple;
  font-family: "comic sans ms", gautami, raavi, sans-serif;
  line-height: 5.2;
}

body#havard-no-ip-info hr {
  background: #000;
  color: #000;
  border: 0;
  height: 5px;
}

body#havard-no-ip-info h1 {
  display: none;
}

The values used here are purely for demonstration; please don't rape my site by using the Comic Sans MS font.

CSS3 is going to be really great.

The new nth-child() selector, for instance, is going to greatly simplify the selection of even and odd numbered table rows. Currently, I assign a class to every even numbered table row, <tr class="even">, and to every odd numbered table row, <tr class="odd"> and style it with CSS, producing this:

A test table used to describe the selection of even and odd numbered rows.
Header 1 Header 2 Header 3
Row 1 Cell 1 Cell 2 Cell 3
Row 2 Cell 1 Cell 2 Cell 3
Row 3 Cell 1 Cell 2 Cell 3
Row 4 Cell 1 Cell 2 Cell 3
Row 5 Cell 1 Cell 2 Cell 3

The problem arises if I've got a very large table and need to put in an extra row in the middle of the table somewhere. Doing that means I have to change the class for x <tr>s downward in the table. That's very tedious and boring work, not to mention a big waste of time (unless you're inserting an even number of new rows, of course). This is where CSS3 comes and saves the day. Using the nth-child() pseudo-class, I could do tr:nth-child(even) (which is equivalent to tr:nth-child(2n)) and tr:nth-child(odd) (which is equivalent to tr:nth-child(2n+1)).

The border module looks extremely interesting; the border-radius property will allow me to add borders with round corners and border-image will allow me to add separate images for all the sides and corners of a box.

CSS3 will truly take the concept of separating presentation from content and structure one huge step forward.

I added a very subtle image to the background. Do you see it?

MSIE doesn't understand a:link:active or a:visited:active. It gets a:active though. Just so you know.

You may have noticed that for every instance of an HTML element or a CSS property in code examples, I've added links to the respective W3C spec section for easy reference. At one point in the Archived News page I have several links separated by nothing else than white space. This is annoying, because this is the only instance where my site contradicts W3C's WAI guidelines (specifically, checkpoint 10.5). As such, I cannot state that my web site is Bobby AAA Approved. I will, however, claim that it is "Håvard Pretty Damned Accessible Web Site Approved".

A picture of a really nice car.

Nice car, right? Not in MSIE 6.0. If you're using MSIE 6.0 you should see big, ugly chunks of silver pixels. Those silver pixels should be transparent. Why is MSIE always slacking behind? I don't know, but I hope they can provide full PNG support soon. I want my 24-bit alpha transparent PNG images now, damn it! (Hidden message: Use Opera.)

I found a very cool math problem in my math book today. It looks scary, but it's not. I use the quadratic formula in there, so check my Graphs & Functions page for a refresher, if you need it.

$$(x^2 + 3x)(\sqrt{x + 1} - 4) = 0$$

Find values of \(x\).

First of all, let's figure out what \(x\) can't be. We know that it's illegal to take the square root of a negative number, so \(x > -1\). As you can see, there are two factors in this equation, and they equal \(0\), which means that one of them (or both) have to be zero. So we check them both:

$$\begin{align*}x^2 &+ 3x \\ x_1 &= 0 \\ x_2 &= -3\end{align*}$$

\(-3\) is a false answer, since \(x\) has to be greater than \(-1\). We check the second factor:

$$\begin{align*}\sqrt{x + 1} - 4 &= 0\\ \sqrt{x + 1} &= 4 \\ x + 1 &= 16 \\ x &= 15\end{align*}$$

Now we just have to insert the two values \(0\) and \(15\) into the original equation, and see which of them yields \(0\) as an answer. You can do that for yourself. :-)

Got into the CSS groove, fiddled around with it, and voilà; a new design. If you're using e.g. Opera, you can change back to the old design by clicking View → Style → "The classic stylesheet". In Mozilla, it's View → Use Style → "The classic stylesheet". However, this does not work in MSIE. How frustrating.

I noticed that MSIE didn't interpret the CSS declaration font-size: small; which I used for making my navigation bar small. Instead of going the HTML way and implementing <small> for each and every cell in the table, I used 80% instead of small in CSS. This is one of the millions of other reasons why we should use anything but MSIE. Preferably Opera.

In other news, Even André has (yet again) remade his web site. This time around he's dropped the table layout in favor of CSS and <div>s, and his page validates as XHTML 1.1. Even, I'm very proud of you. :-)

I now use SSI to turn off "self-links" in the navigation bar. Contrary to using CSS, SSI makes it look good in text-only browsers as well as visual ones.

People who claim that the Internet is either completely shitty or the savior of humanity are completely wrong. Yes, the Internet is full of poorly designed web sites, ugly proprietary scripts, non-standard-compliant web pages and WYSIWYGed HTML documents. But the Internet is also a wonderful tool; it's an all-accessible library full of useful information. The trick is to avoid or ignore all the shitty sites.

Working on a quotes page. I'll link to it as soon as I have about 30-40 of them.

Big changes. There used to be a navigation bar in each and every page, with the respective <a> tags removed so that you could tell which page you're on by looking at the navigation bar. Having one navbar per page means that if one change is done to the links on one page, that same change will have to be done on all the pages (if I want the navbar to look consistent, that is). Not anymore. The navbar is now inserted using SSI and the current link is turned off using CSS. Now done automatically with SSI. This means that all my pages have been renamed .shtml and all external links to my pages have been broken. Until I can figure out how to make an operative 404 page, I've made pseudo-404 pages, in the form of the .html equivalents of the .shtml files. A little messy in the directory, but it will do for the time being. That's all gone. All requests for .html files will automatically be rewritten to the .shtml equivalents using mod_rewrite.

I'm back from England. You know, the strange little country where they drive on the left (wrong) side of the road...? Alex and I went to Alton Towers, a huge amusement park. I believe it's the 3rd largest park in the world, but I'm not sure about that. It is colossal, anyhow. I rode Oblivion, a vertical drop roller coaster. It didn't look like it was an exact 90 degree drop, but very close. When on the ride, though, it actually felt like more than 90 degrees. I also tried Nemesis, a roller coaster with an outside loop. It's fast, and it sometimes feels like you're going to hit the ground (but you're not, of course). Definitely worth trying. Also, try Air. You're lying on your stomach the whole ride, so it feels like you're flying. The roller coaster does a corkscrew move, very enjoyable. Those are the three most intense rides in the park, but if you're still hungry for more, you might try Submission and Enterprise.

I went to London, too. There, I went rock climbing on artificial climbing walls inside a castle (actually, make that The Castle) and to the London Science Museum. I greatly enjoyed the mathematics section; it's got 3D figures of platonic solids, "wire"-frame models (the lines being colored strings connected to "vertices"), a mechanical counting machine, old measuring equipment, etc. I also went to the iMax theater and saw Reloaded. Man, that was fun.

When the subject is brought up, many people ask me why I've made the decision not to drink. I haven't made that decision. I simply haven't made the decision to drink, which effectively means that I haven't made any decision at all. You see, before I make the decision to drink, you have to provide me with a good argument that (either alone or together with other arguments for drinking) will outweigh all the counter-arguments. For example: Just because I don't buy rockets from NASA every week doesn't mean that I've made the decision to boycott them. It simply means that I don't see any reason for me to buy one.

I've had the misfortune of reading an article about HTML and CSS in the Norwegian computer magazine PC Pro, issue #4 2003. First of all, it's riddled with typos (which I will not bother to correct since it's in Norwegian), but there are also inconsistencies and flat-out errors in the CSS and HTML code examples. There are a lot of inconsistent uses of spacing, semi-colons and capitalizations which I will also not bother to point out. One rather stupid mistake they make, though, is that they write "Veranda" instead of "Verdana" throughout the article (both in the normal text and the examples). The text in [brackets] are comments by me.

Example #1:

<style type="text/css">
   h1 {font-family: sans-serif; font-size: x-large; color=red}
</style>

["color=red" is obviously completely wrong.]

Example #2:

H1 {font-family:"Brush Script"}

Example #3:

<link type="text/css" rel=stylesheet" href="/stilark.css">

[Missing the quotation mark in front of stylesheet.]

Example #4:

<style type="text/css">
   body {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%}
</style>

Example #5:

<style type="text/css">
   body {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
   h1 {h6 {margin-left: -8%; }
   h2, {h3, h4, h5, h6 {margin-left: -4%;}
</style>

[h2, {h3... Wrong, wrong, wrong.]

Example #6:

   em { font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;}
   strong <text-transform: uppercase; font-weight: bold;}

[strong <text-transform... No hope.]

Example #7:

   h1 {font-size: 200%; }
   h2 {font-size: 150%;}
   h3 {font-size: 120%;}

Example #8:

   body {font-family: Veranda, sans-serif;}
   h1, h2 {font-family: Garamond, "Times New Roman", serif;}

Example #9:

div.box {border: solid; border-width: thin; width: 50%}

Example #10:

<div class = "box">
Denne teksten får en boks med tynne linjer rundt seg
</div>

[The text means "this text is encapsulated in a box with a thin border".]

Example #11:

body {

   color: silver;
   background: olive;
}

strong: {color: red}

:link {color: rgb (0, 0, 153);}
:visited {color: rgb (153, 0, 153;}
:active {color: rbg (255, 0, 102;}
:hover {color: rgb (0, 96, 255;}

[strong: {color: red... is wrong. Notice that on the three last pseudo-classes, the rgb value is missing the last parenthesis. The :active selector has misspelt rgb into rbg.]

The ironic thing is that throughout the article, they describe how important it is with correct syntax in CSS (and it certainly is). But they completely fail to show it.

Tomorrow, I'm flying to England to meet my good friend Alex Spurling, and will be away for yet another week. We're going to Alton Towers, a large amusement park. I'm really looking forward to riding Oblivion! :-D

I learned about contextual selectors in CSS today. You can apply a specific style to any nested element in the HTML. Notice the different images for different levels of nesting in my unsorted list items? Instead of cluttering my HTML with classes (like I used to do), I ask CSS to apply a style to <li>s which is nested inside an <ul> for a "level 1" list item. Similarly for "level 2" items; I ask it to look for <li>s nested inside two <ul>s. Code:

ul li { /* The level 3 list item image. */
  list-style-image: url(pics/li/lev1.png);
}

ul ul li { /* The level 2 list item image. */
  list-style-image: url(pics/li/lev2.png);
}

ul ul ul li { /* The level 3 list item image. */
  list-style-image: url(pics/li/lev3.png);
}

CSS should be cherished and loved by everyone.

I have converted all my HTML 4.01 Transitional documents to XHTML 1.1. This has resulted in a much cleaner source, and a more unified look across the site. Also, it'll make maintaining the site much easier for me. The only disadvantage with this is that when you want to jump to a specific date in the news, you have to add an n before the date. This is because in XHTML, you aren't allowed to start <a id="..."s with a numeral. So if you wanted this news item, you'd add #n11062003 #n2003-06-11 (later changed to ISO 8601) to the end of the URL.

StatBar 0wnz j00 (the first and last time you'll ever see me writing leet-speak (probably)).

The fact that \((a + b)^2 = a^2 + 2ab + b^2\) is much easier understood with this picture, and as such, the Graphs & Functions page has been updated accordingly (with comments):

A picture visualizing the mathematical expression (a+b)^2 = a^2+2ab+b^2.

I learned how to find the x values of a second degree function that lacks a constant in a much easier way than using that bitchy quadratic formula. Search for the text string "85 sounds more like it". My explanation is just below that on my Graphs & Functions page.

The Matrix: Reloaded was even better than I had hoped. If you haven't seen it already, I suggest you do. Pronto. What I loved about this movie (apart from all the cool action scenes and all the cool talking) was the humor. It was elegant and it reminded me of certain events in the original Matrix movie.

The day I've been waiting for has finally arrived. The Norwegian premier of The Matrix: Reloaded (yes, we are a little slow up north). I am looking soooo forward to this. It will be good. I know it.

The Matrix has me.

The Matrix has me.

After days of blood, sweat and countless hours of browsing the net, tracing lost mods and frustration over those not found (oh, and not to mention the poorly designed web pages for some of these mods), I release the Half-Life singleplayer modification links. Perhaps there still are some excellent mods looming around on the net; when I'm no longer sick and tired of Half-Life, I might decide to track them down. In the meantime, these mods should provide you with several hours of entertainment. They did for me. Boy, did they ever...

I'm still playing those Half-Life mods, but it turned out to be a little more than I thought. I was thinking of just releasing the links now and add links as I finish more mods, but I soon rejected that thought; I want to do one major update. Be patient. It's gonna be massive...

While you're waiting for those awesome links, you might want to play around with a kinetics simulation program, a particle simulation program and a water simulation program.

I fixed the PNG trouble on the Graphs & Functions essay. It seems that all the images lost their transparency when I ran them through pngrewrite. What puzzles me, though, is that they displayed properly in Opera, with transparency, when there wasn't any transparency on the images... So I decided not to pngrewrite them. Annoying. Still, PNGs are small.

Fixed an idiotic bug on the Test page and an insane error in the Graphs & Functions essay. See if you can find them.

I have learned how to derive the quadratic formula, and have updated the essay on Graphs & Functions accordingly. There seems to be a problem with displaying the PNG images in MSIE, though. I'm still trying to resolve that. Hopefully, the majority of you people are smart enough to avoid MSIE altogether, and use e.g. Opera instead.

Even was so kind as to make some list item images for me! I'm utterly pleased. :-D

Still playing those mods. I've finished three of them, but there's a few more I'd like to play before I update the links. They're actually turning into small reviews. Small... semi-reviews.

I'm utterly pleased; my ISP has increased the speed of my Internet to 4 Mbit/sec for this weekend (only). (It applies to all customers, of course.) I'm not really sure why they do it, but it's probably for publicity. Heck, I don't care! As long as I get my oh-so-sweet 4 Mbit/sec Internet, I'm happy. Urge to download... rising!

Still playing Half-Life. Expect the mod links in the time span of 12th May to 16th May. Maybe earlier.

Alf Otto has launched his personal page today. Finally. It was loooong overdue. :-)

I've been bitten by the Half-Life bug, meaning that I'm going to play the original Half-Life (with the High Definition pack applied), Half-Life: Opposing Force, Half-Life: Blue Shift, and various excellent single-player mods for Half-Life. (In that order.) Once I've finished those mods, I'll make a Half-Life mod section on the Links page.

I've made all header elements use the Palatino Linotype font. It looks nice in symbiosis with Verdana. :-)

I searched acronymfinder.com for NSF, and it turned up five rather interesting matches (the text enclosed in parenthesis was not written by me):

  • Norges Sjakkforbund (Norwegian Chess Association)
  • Norges Standardiseringsforbund
  • Norsk Speider Forbund (Norwegian Scout Association)
  • Norway, Sweden, Finland (in order, left to right)

And, surprisingly, it turned up with the match I actually wanted to see:

  • Northwest Secessionist Forces (Deus-Ex game)

I was extremely fascinated by a small, but very cozy math problem today. Many thanks to Even for helping me figure it out. A little tweaked, the problem goes as follows:

Three guys, Alex, John and Jacob, have their own hard drives. The sum of all their space is \(230 GB\). Alex has \(10 GB\) more than John, and Jacob has twice as much as Alex. What did each of them have?

We want someone to have \(x\) gigabytes. The obvious choice is John, since both Alex and Jacob refer to him. So:

Alex: \(x + 10\)
John: \(x\)
Jacob: \(2(x + 10)\)

Next, we sum them up, and equal them to \(230\):

\(x + 10 + x + 2(x + 10) = 230\)
\(x + 10 + x + 2x + 20 = 230\)

We rearrange them...

\(4 x = 230 - 20 - 10\)
\(4x = 200\)
\(x = 50\)

There you go. John has \(50\) gigabytes of sweet hard drive space. Unless you are completely incompetent, you should be able to figure out how much space Alex and Jacob had.

I'm playing through Deus Ex for the 7th time now, and I'm still noticing tid-bits of funny/interesting information; this game is so amazingly rich in details. I'm playing it on Realistic this time (before, I've only played it on the Easy level).

I have made a new and improved Links page, after collecting a bunch of links, and sorting out those not worth placing there.

I have also managed to make a right margin, in addition to the left. I discovered this was not possible in HTML. The attribute for a 20 pixel left margin in HTML is leftmargin="20", so I figured the attribute for a 20 pixel right margin had to be rightmargin="20"; but no. Though it was possible with CSS:

body {
  margin-left: 20px;
  margin-right: 20px;
}

Hurray!

Also, my computer page is dangerously nearing completion. I just have to dig up the specs for my two oldest computers.

I have removed the links to the (few) files on my files page, because of a small overload on the server. This is only temporary, though.

It's been a while since I updated the site, but there's a logical explanation; I have been on a LAN party for the past four days.

I've replaced the URL I used as a title with a real title on all the pages, and I'm currently working on a page devoted to my computer. I'm hoping to finish it real soon. I also made an alpha transparent picture of myself.

Right on time! My new parts arrived today, and I'm pleased to announce that everything is in working order. A minor dissatisfaction, perhaps, that I had to reinstall my copy of Windows. But then again, it was getting old, and was full of spyware and what not. I'll get working on that computer page maybe tomorrow, or on Monday. We'll see.

I have ordered some parts for my computer, and boy, is it about time this rig gets upgraded. My processor is of this writing an AMD Duron 850 MHz, and I have 256 MB SDRAM. My graphics card is a GeForce 4 Ti 4200, I've got a Creative Labs Audigy 1.0 sound card and 240 (more like 222) GB of yummy disk space to use for various distractions, so of course I'll be keeping those. Now, I will be buying a new motherboard, a new processor, and more RAM. The motherboard will be socket 478, Asus, with Intel Hyper-Threading and 3x DIMM slots for 1023 NOK (about 140 USD). The processor is an Intel P4 2.4 GHz with 533 FSB and 512 L2 Cache, and the price is 1668 NOK (about 228.50 USD). I've also ordered Apacer 512 MB DDR RAM PC-333 for 676 NOK (about 92.60 USD). And to top it off, I've ordered a Chieftec miditower case, black, with 4 x 5.25" external, 2 x 3.5" external and 4 x 3.5" internal bays, thumbscrews and a door with hinges. I'm buying it all from PSData, which is situated in Arendal, Norway, a good 4-5 hour drive from where I live. It takes approximately two days to transport the items, from the day I order the merchandise, and this is pretty good. Oh, I look forward to this...

In other irrelevant news; lately, I've found myself gazing at distant objects which are contrasted against the sky, for no particular reason. When looking at trees, for example, I can often make out the single branches. Oh, I love my new glasses. Everything is so crystal clear!

Website-wise, I've inserted a left margin of 20 pixels. I'm thinking of making a page for my computer. When I get my new parts.

I discovered to my delight that the word 'coherent' can be Norwegian-ified to 'koherent'. I have been wondering about this for some time.

I had an interesting discussion today with my class about whether or not homosexuality is a mental disorder. It began with me and Even, peacefully and quietly walking down the road, chatting about the subject in a calm and relaxed fashion (I might add that I enjoyed the conversation with Even. He didn't get all fired up about it, compared to other immature people who engage in mindless flame wars). Now, when we couldn't agree on it, we brought the question up with the rest of the class, and about 3/4s of them claimed that homosexuality is a mental disorder, while I (and of course most of the girls) claimed that it is not. I will now try to explain why it is not. (And for the record, I am not a homosexual.)

First of all, it isn't a disorder, hence it is not a mental disorder. For something to be a disorder, it has to harm the person "infected" by it, or disable that person from functioning normally in society. Now, homosexuals aren't harming themselves, neither are they a disfunction to society. They are perfectly able to do their jobs, to go shopping, to interact with other people, etc. And they're not harming themselves, in fact, I'd say that they are enjoying themselves!

"But they can't reproduce, and hence, they're harming humanity as a whole!" There is a fine balance. If everyone is heterosexual, the Earth will soon be overpopulated, but if everyone is a homosexual, there will be no more reproduction, but that still doesn't make it any more of a mental disorder. Homosexuals aren't confused in any way, they are perfectly aware of this biological fact.

Phew. That was two hours well wasted. I changed all the text inside my HTML tags from uppercase to lowercase. This has nothing to do with the appearance of the site, just the source code. No reason why I'm saying this in a news post. I just wanted to vent, as it was very tedious and repetitive work. Never again.

In more happy news, I came across a very handy tool, a replacement for Notepad; MetaPad, which is far superior. You can (almost) tweak it to your heart's content, which is always a big plus. Head over there, you might find it worth your time.

Things I hope to get done soon:

  • take pictures of my cube, octahedron and icosahedron origami figures (from STL's Origami Polyhedra page)
  • finish my essay on graphs & functions (which is in fact beginning to shape up)
  • make more cool stuff for my web page.

April Fool's day; the only day of the year when reading news posts on various web sites can actually be fun. So here's my contribution.

I'm going to convert all the images (erhm... make that "the few images") I have to GIF, use the Comic Sans MS font, and get a .tk domain. -_-

Oh yeah! My host decided to host the E-mail account I've always wanted. You can use any of the two you'd like, though I'd prefer you use the new one, which is pho@dataportalen.com now havard.skjaeveland@gmail.com. I have updated the About me page to reflect this new fact. See, I take care of the pages around here.

I have made a totally irrelevant web page today; the Test Page (now dead). This should only be relevant to you if you're me or insane. Or both.

I got around to see Men in Black II today. Finally: A Sequel That Didn't Suck. Pretty much everything about this movie was superb; very nice CG, the acting was not bad, and it didn't overly rely on the prequel to carry on its good name. A few good elements were ported from MiB, but as I said, they didn't overly do so. They struck a very nice balance.

On my mental to-do list for the weekend, is finishing up the essay on graphs & functions. I've been slacking.

Random rant: Some web site authors (no names mentioned) invariably write "resume" when referring to their resumé.

I have changed the background color of all the pages. Hopefully, this background will make the text more readable than the white one.

I've made a cube, an octahedron and an icosahedron following the instructions on STL's Origami Polyhedra page. I've yet to photograph them. I tried, but the picture was very unclear, since they are so small. Let me just read the manual for the camera, and see if I can figure something out.

I've been busy. I've totally revamped the navigation bar, and two new pages have been made; the Archived News page and the Colophon page, where various more or less interesting facts about my web site resides. Also, there is a small sub-section of this page where I try to detail each of the pages here. Scroll to the very bottom. Of course, this no longer applies since this post has since been moved to the archive.

All my HTML documents returned VALID from the W3C MarkUp Validation Service. They are now officially HTML 4.01 Transitional documents. Oh, happy day!

My essay on graphs & functions is coming along very nicely. There was much more to cover on it than I had originally expected, so it might be delayed. Fear not, for those who wait for something good, don't wait in vain. ;-)

I discovered today a Norwegian word that is spelled exactly the same way as the English one; irreversible. Wow.

I also stumbled upon this utterly cool program called MathGV, which I will use to make the images for my graphs & functions essay. It is a program for making graphs, both Cartesian, polar and 3D Cartesian. Completely amazing. Its features are of tremendous proportions, and hence, I won't write them here. Go and read them for yourself, ya lazy bum! And download that program. Now. The only negative thing I can say about their web site is that they use GIFs and Comic Sans MS.

Two new mp3.com artists made it to pho's List of Honor; Raymond Wave and Paul Spaeth.

I put my navigation bar into a table, which makes them align better, and I made them small. I removed the elma page. Too stale and unprofessional. Yuck. My recs are still on the Files page though. (Files page is gone.)

Happy news, no more GIFs on my page, only PNG (and JPG where appropriate; basically, use PNG for computer generated pictures and JPG for naturalistic pictures, like a photograph). Here is why PNG is so great. Be sure to download pngrewrite and pngcrush, two nifty programs that'll reduce the size of the PNG files even more. They're in a ZIP bundle on STL's download page.

The graphs & functions essay is moving along. Perhaps 4-5 more days?

I removed the link to Uy's document, because it'll give people the wrong impression of me, and (mainly) because his views on the matter completely differs from my own. I'll elaborate about it in the About Me page when I find the time. Now, the file itself is still there, but the link is gone. If anyone really wants it though, they'll have to figure out the address for themselves.

I specified a font for all my pages today. Yay! It's called Palatino Linotype, and I'm quite happy with it. See, I told you I'd fix up some esthetics. ;-)

My web site is hosted by dataportalen.com ("dataportalen" means "the computer portal"), and I've added a small notation to the bottom of each page to recognize this fact. And I'm seriously thinking about making a background image for my site. And overhaul it a bit with respects to graphics esthetics.

I'm thinking of making a lengthy essay on graphs & functions. Expect it... shortly.

I added a little news item search "system" today. Using my elite HTML skills, I made it so that you are able to jump to whichever news item you wish. Nifty! Just add #ddmmyyyy after the .shtml in the address bar. If you wanted the news item from 10.03.2003, the full URL would be http://www.dataportalen.com/pho/full-archive.php#10032003. Go ahead, try! If no news item exists for the particular date you're looking for, nothing will happen. I doubt it will be very useful, but it's still there. (Uhh, that's the way it used to be. Now you have to add n (for "news update") before the date; n10032003. This because of XHTML.) Since I've switched to ISO 8601, it's now #2003-03-10. In other words, #YYYY-MM-DD.

In shameful pity, I hereby remove my ASCII table, and point you to R. Harvey's web site. Here, you may download ASCIIcat; an invaluable tool, as it comprises many useful features.

On a funny note, Even and I discussed today what numbers higher than Googolplex should be called. For those who don't know what a Googol is, fear not, for I shall explain it. A Googol is 10100, which is the number one with 100 zeros succeeding it. Googolplex is 10Googol, which is the number one with Googol zeros succeeding it. So:

10100 = Googol

10Googol = Googolplex

But what next? Beware, the following were just invented for fun by me and Even, and probably aren't real at all.

10Googolplex = Googel

10Googel = Googelplex

10Googelplex = Googul

10Googul = Googulplex

10Googulplex = Googyl

Just keep substituting that one letter. Tada! :-)

Yey-ah! Vacation for ONE WHOLE WEEK! The time for pure, undisturbed DX-mapping is nigh!

In other news, I'm planning on upgrading my system (which at the time of this writing is an AMD Duron 850 MHz with 256 MB SDRAM). I'm going to buy an Intel P4 2.4, 512 MB DDR RAM and a new motherboard (haven't decided specs or brand yet).

I've also got some elma updates:

  • 13. Hill Legend: 00:21:95 - 00:21:59
  • 24. Ramp Frenzy: 01:37:65 - 01:25:63
  • 27. Shelf Life: 00:57:73 - 00:55:70
  • 35. Labyrinth Pro: 04:36:88 - 04:32:24
  • 37. Jaws: 01:40:59 - 01:36:27

Random rant: Why, oh why do I see Comic Sans MS almost everywhere I turn? What do people see in it? Are they simply too lazy to browse through fonts? Probably. Gah, Comic Sans MS sucks...

Damn, System Shock 2 is scary! I beat the game about a year ago, and now I'm playing through it my second time. It still gives me the creeps... To all of you who still haven't tried it. Try it! I dare you!

Improved some records in elma:

  • 05. Uphill Battle: 00:28:59 - 00:28:25
  • 22. Slalom: 00:50:45 - 00:47:90
  • 32. Steep Corner: 00:48:44 - 00:47:82
  • 42. Enduro: 01:22:00 - 01:04:86
  • 44. Freefall: 00:38:40 - 00:36:65
  • 51. Tricks Abound: --:--:-- - 02:00:96
  • 53. Hooked: 00:25:40 - 00:19:17

Additionally, I've added the .rec files for my Elma records to the Files page. (Files page is gone.) Extract them to your elma rec folder, go into the game, and hit the replay button. Bah, why explain it? :)

A friend of mine asked me to host a document of his, describing how he became a Christian. Note that his view does not in any way represent my own view on the matter, but he has been my friend for about 15 (!) years now so hosting this little document is the least I can do. The file is located in the Files section. The document is in Norwegian. (Scrap that. I later realized that I didn't want the document there anymore because his views completely differ from my own.)

I've made an ASCII table today. (Now obsolete.) Maybe not the most interesting thing for most people, but maybe some can use it as a reference. I made it in MS Excel, and used the Terminal font, therefore only a few of the high ASCII characters display properly. If anyone knows of a "true ASCII" font of some kind, I would really appreciate it if you'd mail me, either attaching the font, or telling me where I might download it. Thanks in advance.

I noticed two major flaws; I didn't tell you my real name and my nick name, and I forgot to mention what a good host I have hosting my site. Thanks a lot, http://www.dataportalen.com/!

I also added links to each question and answer in the summary section of the About me page, and updated the links page a bit.

My site is up. Please, enjoy! For anyone (everyone) not using the European date format, I use [dd.mm.yyyy] when dating my news items (or anything else). I've switched to ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD). Please forgive me for the lack of worthy content. The site just went up. :-) If anyone wants to make a suggestion on how to improve my web page, they are welcome to do so at havard.skjaeveland@gmail.com.

There are 100 posts for 2003.