Small improvements have been done on my JavaScript Minesweeper. The main goal was performance, I was using webkit and mozilla engine to render box shadows, but it made it utterly slow when done on a huge number. So I removed them and used pre-rendered stuff. Performance improvement? It is at least 10 times faster now! Yeah!
Try it: http://www.araxius.com/mines
At last I forced myself to do a simple coding that I wanted to do for a few years! A javascript Minesweeper! And it turned out good! You may try it at http://araxius.com/mines .
It currently works in Safari, Firefox and Google Chrome. It works in Opera, but the right-click and middle-click don’t work properly. I’m going to release a Cocoa version in a few days; it is going to be a completely free, but beautiful Minesweeper for Mac. Something I had wished since from the very first day of using MacOSX. And I am planning to release a XUL version too, so it will also be available for Windows and Linux.
It doesn’t save the records yet, but it will do it soon.
Try it here: http://araxius.com/mines
And don’t forget to give me feedback and help me improve it; Thanks. 
Suck and suuuuuuuck.
Suckin up all you can suckin up all you can suck and suck.
Workin up under my patience like a little tick.
Fat little parasite.
Suuuuuck me dry.
My blood is bruised and borrowed. You thieving bastards.
You have turned my blood cold and bitter,
Beat my compassion black and blue!
Hope this is what you wanted.
Hope this is what you had in mind.
’cause this is what you’re getting.
I hope you’re choking. I hope you choke on this.
I hope you’re choking. I hope you choke on thiiiiiiiiiiiis.
Taken all I can taken all I can, we can take. Taken all you can taken all you can, we can take.
Got nothing left to give to you.
Blood suckin parasitic little blood suckin parasitic little blood suckin parasitic little tick!
Take what you want and then go.
Hope this is what you wanted.
Hope this is what you had in mind.
’cause this is what you’re getting.
I hope, I hope, I hope you choke…
(Tool – Ticks and Leeches)
I have never denied, that I am not easy with the social interactions. I have always had problems in stating myself, in communicating with people, though I know that I am not an anti-social. But, when you put all your efforts in changing this, put all your plans aside to solve this problem, put all your hopes in someone, and then, you are rejected in a mood swing, and your oldest friends reject you, while you are doing whatever you can do, you may think society is like a whore. And a seductive whore, it tells you that you should embrace it,that you should lean on it, you should interact with it; and then, it leaves you alone, rejects you, humiliates you, and takes whatever you shared away, and makes you feel like you are the one to be blamed.
I’m tired of this shit.
Recently, I have been listening to Anita Lane works a lot. And as her works are really magnificent, I was curious about her personality, life and etc. And I searched and searched… and compared to other people who have played an important role in modern music, she is almost denied by the media. Wikipedia has a one line description:
“Anita Lane is an Australian singer and songwriter who directly influenced the early 1980s European post-punk landscape.”Such an important person in music, why don’t they mention her name, her role and so on more? According to Wikipedia (which strangely has only a few lines about her), she is the founding member of the band “Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds”, which is a brilliant band, and I believe is one of the few bands today that really does “Art”. Well, a lot of people believe that Nick Cave has been greatly influenced by Anita Lane (they have been together for a long time). And I think it is true, I see a lot of similarity between her works and Nick Cave’s, they have paved an almost similar path. but google, and you’ll see: Anita Lane gives 645′000 results and Nick Cave gives more than 4′000′000 results, why? I don’t get it. And search for her lyrics, I couldn’t find the lyrics of her second solo album! You can’t find her videos, searching for her images results in some poor quality and small and few images that are repeated here and there. Does anyone out there know why it is like this?
Listen to her “Sex O’clock” album, great, great composition, fabulous lyrics, she sings incredible, great technique, but not a vocal virtuoso, she sings the way she should sing. She has a unique voice, dark, sexy, and still intellectual.
When I heard her version of “Bella Ciao”, one of the things that attracted me was her unique translation, which is not noted anywhere. She sings the best translation of Bella Ciao I have ever heard; wasn’t it noteworthy? Even it is not mentioned in Wikipedia. In fact, I am going to add it now!
Working with XULRunner framework, one may need to remove the window decorations. Even in Mozilla development center, it is said that there is no easy cross-platform solution for it, as
hidechrome="true"
doesn’t work in MacOSX. They have suggested to open a new window forcing it to have no title-bar. But a combination of this suggestion and the XUL structure, gives us a pretty straightforward solution! Here it is:
Just add:
pref("toolkit.defaultChromeFeatures", "titlebar=no");
to your prefs.js ! You can find it in Resources>defaults>preferences folder. And don’t forget to add the
hidechrome="true"
to the <window> tag definition. That’s it! Good luck!
A few weeks ago, I got to know Mary. We got to know each other because of having a similar problem, well, not exactly similar, but somehow related. We live thousands of kilometers away from each other, our lives are quite different, and the only things we have had to share are a little about ourselves, and a lot of music. Believe it or not, I consider her a dear friend now. When I check my mailbox, I look up for her mails, and hearing good news from her makes me happy. And sometimes, when I listen to a song, I think “I should tell Mary about this song!” It is the power of music I think: All the differences are put aside, we have a similar taste in music, and that’s enough for being friends. Aren’t we, human being, strange?
I am a very hard to get person. I have always had communication problems, I have always had a few friends, and now that I think about it, I see that almost all my friends have had similar interests in music. And the ones that I could never like, loved the kind of songs I hate.
I just found out, that I have been unconsciously, simplifying everyone (including myself) to the music they love. Strange realization, it makes me wonder, as I think I haven’t been wrong doing such simplification.
Thank you Mary, for helping me realize this.
And I just remembered, that when me and Rozita got to know each other at first, we had some similar interests in music, and some very different; As time passed, we got closer and closer to each other, and it has been a while, that we have really similar tastes. Music is such a great projection of our “Selves”. And amazingly, it doesn’t only project our ego, it projects our id, and our super-ego too. We hardly can hide ourselves when it comes to music.
I just remembered Plato’s guidelines for music education. He believed that all teenagers should learn music, but it should be stopped when they become adults, he stated that it made adult souls weaker; but wasn’t this because he thought that a strong person hides his/her feelings? In fact, considering that in modern era, we insist on expressing ourselves, one may say that a modern Plato would have stated that we should practice music till the very end of our lives!
(Listening to Anita Lane’s Lost In Music)Yesterday, we faced a small problem on a webpage, when visited in Mozilla Firefox. This was a strange bug, I really didn’t expect such a bug from Firefox. Well, it is as follows:
<!-- something 1 -- something 2 <!-- some other stuff -->
This is not interpreted as a a complete commented code! The “something 2″ part is displayed! Seems like firefox interpreter closes comments when reaches –. From a programmer’s point of view, such a problem in interpreter, is a sign of a very novice parser. It really is strange…
Recently, Mozilla team are not performing like before, Firefox has become so slow and buggy. It is sad, as Firefox used to be a leading browser, it was what all web developers wished people to use instead of that dumb internet explorer. But the recent tests show that IE8 runs faster than FF! What are they doing in Mozilla these days? Just wondering…
Yes, J. D. Salinger has died yesterday. It’s sad, a week ago, I didn’t even know that he was alive. I remember when I was 19-20, and how I loved his writings. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters… such a great book, Catcher in the Rye, Frannie and Zooey… Wow… Such a pure person… So calmly wild…
iPad is released, and I don’t get what is new in this device. Seems like apple has lost it. a few years ago, apple started a revolutionary era, it really had something to say in a lot of aspects of computer industry. The most important one was of course user interface, but I believe if a programmer looks closely at small details of Mac OS X, he/she will see some really smart and beautiful fundamental things. The algorithms are chosen from really fast ones, and though the stability has been the cornerstone, there are a lot of places that I see they have traded it for speed. I like it.
Leopard was a shock, iPhone was amazing… but what does Snow Leopard offer? or iPad? I know, there are improvements, new usages, but, maybe its just me, but I expect much more from apple.
You know, I would admire them if they stop being revolutionary, and just try to stabilize and improve their existing products, but are they even doing so? I have a feeling that they are paving the path that Microsoft went through. Do you remember 15 years ago, when Bill Gates was an idol? Microsoft was praised like it was the only reason for human beings to be! Will we see people throwing cakes at Steve Jobs, as they did to Gates?
Why is computer world so lost? It doesn’t know where it is going to. Seems like there ain’t any horizons, goals and ideals for it to reach. (sigh…)