Synaptic Sugar

I’ve published a new release of my game, Alpha Shooter, which is available on SourceForge.net. I hadn’t published a stable release in a long time, but although development has slowed down for many reasons, it has certainly not stopped. This game is a personal project I’m working on in my spare time (contributions are welcome), and it does not contain much for now as far as environment, objectives or things to do are concerned; however, it’ll grow with time, and there’s a lot going on under the hood, as you can see from the project website.

This new release includes some long-awaited features:

• Microsoft Windows is now supported. Alpha Shooter now works on Windows (in addition to Linux and Mac OS X as before) and a pre-compiled executable is available among the project downloads;
• Quaternion-based rotations, which take the place of the old rotation matrix composition; it is now also possible to rotate around the camera Z axis while flying;
• Auto-leveling feature levels the camera at the press of a key;
• Mouse rotations have been fixed, particularly progressive mouse mode;
• The game has switched to GPL version 3 from version 2 (yes, that means it’s free/open source software).

Try it out, you have no excuses now.

Edited on September 30 at 8:32 PM to add: I’m currently rewriting Alpha Shooter to obtain a (more) reusable game engine and rebuild the game on it. A future release will include many more features and will surely offer much more game content and fun, stay tuned.

Summer calls for light reading. Why not spend some time with some classics then, and relax? Here are some examples of what I’m (re)reading these days.

UNIX Network Programming: the sockets networking API, third edition, by Richard Stevens, Bill Fenner, Andrew Rudoff - an introductory, and yet in-depth, explanation of network programming from A to Z. A must read for network programmers;

3D Computer Graphics, third edition, by Alan Watts - a path of learning through 3D graphics from point coordinates in 3D space to rendering to lighting;

Thinking in C++, Volume 1 and Volume 2, second edition, by Bruce Eckel (also available online free of charge, along with others) - a clear and complete tutorial through the intricacies of the C++ language, up to the most advanced topics;

Dragonlance: The Second Generation, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman - for when you’ve had enough relaxation, and decide to embark on fantastic journeys in the realm of fantasy fiction.

But better hurry, it won’t be summer for much longer.

The Italian Corte dei Conti (the organism that administers justice in matters of state accounting and public administration) has publicly shown appreciation two days ago for the proposal for a popular law brought forward by comedian Beppe Grillo with the support of thousands of readers of his highly popular blog. The request asks that a new law be passed to “clean up the parliament“, focusing around three main points:

1. No citizens previously convicted or awaiting trial may be allowed a seat in parliament (and thus may not use parliamentary immunity to escape judgment and punishment for any crime). There are currently at least 25 parliamentarians in Italy who have been found guilty, up to the last degree of judgment, of crimes such as corruption and abusing their power;
2. Citizens may serve in parliament for no more than two terms, and the rule should be valid retroactively. Many of people currently seating in the Italian parliament have been there for more than twenty years;
3. Candidates to the parliament must be elected directly by the people through explicit direct preference, rather than by political parties. This also discourages internal scheming and exchanges.

In order for the request to be accepted, at least 50,000 authenticated signatures must be gathered, and September 8 has been chosen as the date to gather them in the main Italian squares and known as the V-Day, according to Beppe Grillo “halfway between the D-Day and V for Vendetta” (the V also stands for a curse word in Italian, and was chosen as the official word addressed to the current Italian politicians).

It’s also possible to join the V-Day by signing up on a special page on Beppe Grillo’s blog, and receive organizational material to help spread the word. A law like this has never been seen in Italy, and it is surely the first time that such a large-scale democratic operation achieves such a wide success (at the time of writing, there are more than 90,000 people who signed up to V-Day). It is definitely a law that Italy needs, and that many other countries would certainly benefit from.

To celebrate the spam comment number 1000, which will arrive on this blog soon, but you won’t see thanks to the power of the anti-spam Wordpress plug-in Akismet, I thought I’d look into how professional spammers and regular users reach Synaptic Sugar from search engines. It turns out that what “normal” people look for is more interesting than what spammers look for; here’s thus a list of some of the most remarkable search keyphrases that were actually used in a search engine and somehow eventually led here. No information linking to the personal identity of users will be posted (and I don’t possess any at all, I can only see the search phrases), therefore if you’re reading this and you recognize one or more of the search strings as yours, don’t worry: I don’t know who you are and your secret is safe here. I’ll comment on each keyphrase or group thereof, also in an effort to help potential future searchers.

This post comes in two different versions in regards to content, not merely language: the English version will list some of the English keyphrases while the Italian version will list some of the Italian ones, so if you understand both languages you won’t miss out on one half of the post.

butter substances for banana bread
tasty radish
See my previous posts "Banana bread" and "A tasty radish pie" for recipes for banana bread and a radish pie, respectively (as you can infer from the titles).

interroband
The actual name of the typographical mark is “Interrobang”, I wrote about it in "Interrobang‽". See a comment under that post for a suggestion on what an “Interroband” might instead be.

how long will the batteries last in a toto fixture
ring of fire cash toilet
I don’t know if the second search was looking for the song by Johnny Cash “The Ring of Fire”, or for my post about bidets, incidentally named "The ring of fire". The post also says something about the Toto fixtures, but I don’t know how long the batteries last. I thought you could connect them to the main power grid; it would be uncomfortable to run out of batteries while you’re using them.

bruscolini italy murder
bruscolini recipe
I don’t know what you’re up to, but the blog you’re looking for might be a different one.

sourceforge electrical wiring mind control
usb smoke generator
I do not know of such gadgets; I would like to have one of each, write me if you have one and we’ll discuss details.

intelligent robot vacuum cleaner
little round vacuums advertised on tv that run by themselves
electrolux trilobite technical features
battery vacuum parsley
I wrote about these in my previous post "I, vacuum cleaner" and concluded I’m better off with a traditional upright vacuum cleaner. I don’t know how the parsley fits in there though — maybe someone can tell me more about it.

the reasonable man adapts himself to the world. the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. all progress therefore depends upon the unreasonable man.
yeah…. did you get the memo? yeah i got it and the problem is i just forgot this one time…
These are two quotes, respectively by George Bernard Shaw and from the 1999 movie “Office Space“. I particularly like the first one, and have used it in several occasions. The movie is just funny, you should watch it.

jesus inkblot
I am entirely unsure about what this refers to. I tried a search myself, but came up with nothing much; I can only assume it may refer to one of those instances in which people see Jesus of the Virgin Mary in the most unlikely of places, such as on a sandwich or in an underpass, so maybe also in ink blots. I’m sorry though, I haven’t seen any Jesus in ink blots, so I can’t help (unless He was hidden with steganography, see post "Stegowhat?").

toothpaste sugar
toothpaste used by dentists
denham’s dandy dental detergent
denham’s dentifrice
denham’s dentifrice denham’s dandy dental detergent denham’s dentifrice dentifrice dentifrice!
fahrenheit 451 what is the significance of denham s dentifrice commercial
fahrenheit 451 significance of denham s dentifrice
dental toothpaste used by dentists
I extensively quoted this bit from Fahrenheit 451 in my previous post "The toothpaste most used by dentists". The significance of the Denham Dentifrice episode in the book expresses how publicity fills all available spaces and literally bombards people with commercial slogans, effectively brainwashing them and preventing all kinds of communication and rational thought. As an extension, it’s the action of the dystopian societies pictured in works like Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, for which independently thinking individuals are dangerous and they must be stopped with all means; an effective way to do so is thus to flood their brains with petty little things like commercial advertisements and gossip, not letting them think about things that really matter. I like to note how most of Bradbury’s and Orwell’s works were written now over 50 years ago, yet can you spot anything familiar?

most words used by dentist
I’m not sure, but I vote for “teeth” as the most used word.

yesterday s jokes
Don’t bother looking, they’re old and tired by now.

FreePOPs is a finalist in the SourceForge.net 2007 Community Choice Awards in the Best Project for Communications category! You can vote until July 30 to show your support and help it grow!

FreePOPs is a useful software that allows you to access your webmail accounts directly from any e-mail client program (Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, Evolution, or any others at your choice), so that you can check mail on many webmail accounts at the same time, keep a local copy of your e-mail on your computer, avoid having to login to each webmail everytime you want to read an old e-mail or receive your mail even from a location that only allows Web (HTTP) access to the outside world (ie. blocks POP and IMAP variations). Additionally, FreePOPs can easily be extended through user-made plug-ins to support more e-mail domains (if the more than 2000 domains already supported aren’t enough) and acquire extra functions: it can gather RSS feeds directly in your mailbox, check for the latest changes in the development of some software you’re interested in, or anything else you can write a LUA plug-in for.

Better yet, I’m one of its original authors. FreePOPs is today included in most of the main Linux distributions and is also available on Windows, Mac OS X and BeOS. It’s small, unobtrusive and most importantly open source and free of charge (that means you can freely use it and its source code is available for inspection if you want to make sure it can be trusted).

So vote now, and help open source projects grow by showing open source developers your support and encouragement and by stating with your vote that you appreciate their work. Vote for FreePOPs today! (SourceForge.net account required to vote, registration is free)