Beautify your web with Stylish

I have recently found a beautiful Firefox extension that allows you download and use skin/theme files for different websites you browse. There are similar tools out there, but this one is really easy to use and hence deserved some advertising.

First of all, go get the extension here.

After you install the extension and restart your browser, go to http://userstyles.org/ and start installing some themes. I will give you a hand here. Go to this web page and click on the Install with Stylish button under the How To Install box. Now, go to Facebook and see the change for yourself!!

Here is a list of all Dark, shiny, blue transparency themes, in case you like the above theme for Facebook:
Facebook
Youtube
Wikipedia

The Internet is just better now!

edit: if you want to install a different theme for a website that you already themed, then you must first uninstall or disable the existing theme(s) from the addons dialog of Firefox.

edit 2: The google themes are not working properly, so I removed them from the above lists. But in case you want to give them a shot, here they are:
Google, iGoogle, etc.
GMail

Let me know, if you find anything nice for the google applications.

The best game I have recently played.

The company of myself

For all my CA320 and CGT551 students, as well as all game addicts out there. This is a nice little flash game with a very nice idea (now that is my cup of tea [sorry for bastardizing English a bit]). You play the role of a lonely hermit trying to find his way through platforms. But somehow, you are actually wandering in his memory as he tells his story to his psychiatrist. The story is lovely in its own right. But what is really catchy in this little gem is the gameplay. You can play each level many times. Well, no big surprise here. But, everytime you replay a level, you will be replaying it synchronously with your past selves. Confusing? Go play it. It deserves a try by all means.

Some really nice applications for Windows users

I am no more a Windows user but I have recently read this page which I believe may be a good starting point for switching from "illegality" to "freedom". Here is a list of 61 free applications for Windows which can easily replace the commercial ones. So for your own good, stop cracking commercial software and switch to free software. And while you have started to do that, stop using Windows and embrace pure freedom with Linux ;)

http://lifehacker.com/5412886/61-free-apps-were-most-thankful-for

Problems with Ubuntu

Unfortunately, I am having some serious driver problems with Ubuntu on my desktop. I recently upgraded to Biostar TA790GX-128mb motherboard. The board is nice on paper, HD3300 integrated graphics card, nice integrated sound card, AM3 and AM2+ support, All kinds of video output jacks blah blah... However, ATI's proprietary driver for the integrated graphics card is horrible. It can barely handle compiz with a lot of stuttering. The overall desktop becomes extremely sluggish and irritating.

Not only that, but my noname wireless card, which used to work very nicely under Ubuntu, started to behave weirdly after upgrading to Karmic. Technically speaking, I have a 4mbit connection. I used to download at speeds around 400kb/s before karmic. Now, after Karmic, the internet speed is limited to 60kb/s, i.e. 0.5 mbit/s. I don't know why or how Ubuntu developers limited my connection to 0.5 mbit/s. It is "annoying" in the nicest of words. I tried in vain to fix it, nothing works.

If you have any hints on how to fix any of my head aches, please let me know.

Another looong break

I know, I know... I am supposed to post regularly, but I just can't do it. Lots of courses to teach, lots of research to be done and besides the graduate program takes a lot of my time.

Anyway, I just wanted to announce a new event. We started a new event in Izmir. We call it Oyun Mutfagi (Game Kitchen). Every Wednesday we (will) meet somewhere around Alsancak and design a computer game. Of course the aim is not to design a full-fledged professional best seller. More like new and novel ideas that can be turned into games or game components.

The first week was a great success in my opinion. We designed a short game for two players, where the players play the role of a tank/robot which tries to capture a flag in the middle of a map and bring it back to their base. Sounds familiar, right? But indeed, there are some very nice twists we have added. The full design will be published on the blog. Oops, yes we have a blog for that as well. Go to oyunmutfagi.blogspot.com for details. Gorkem Pacaci, my assistant for computer game courses at both undergrad and grad level, is organising the event and preparing the web site. So all praise goes to him.

Well, if you are interested in attending one of the sessions, please go to the blog and wait for the next announcement.

A long break

It has been a while since I last posted here. Well, it was the holiday season as you know, and I was a bit tired and this and that. Anyways, a new term starts in 10 days and with this term we start the Game Development Master Programme as well. For now, we have 3 students only. But in the future I am sure the numbers will improve.

I am teaching two of the four courses we offer this term. One is about Direct3D (and I am a bit scared of it) and the other is a more generic introduction to computer games course. The former will be practised in C++ but the latter will be in Java.

I am expecting some nice and novel games to be created this term. Well, time will tell.

Gedit Latex Plugin

Did you know that Gedit, the ultimate Gnome text editor, has a Latex plugin? Yes, you can now install this plugin easily and Gedit turns into a Latex IDE. It will give you syntax highlighting, code completion, compiling into DVI, PS or PDF, etc. All from within Gedit. This is highly recommended for all Texers.

If you already upgraded to Jaunty, all you have to do is open up your console and type in:
sudo aptitude install gedit-latex-plugin

If not, you need to follow the guidelines described in the following page:
Gedit Latex Plugin.

Gedit is now just perfect!

Dropbox for synchronizing files among different computers

Dropbox is a wonderful web service that allows you to synchronise your files among all of your computers. The web site offers a program to install to your computers, and it creates a folder named Dropbox in all computers. You can then move any file you want into this folder and it will automatically be detected and synchronised with the web service. The next time you use another of your computers, the file will be synchronised with that computer as well. All of your changes to the existing files in this folder will also be synchronised among all computers. Moreover, you can access all of your files using their web interface. So, even if you are using a friends computer, you can still download any of your files. Now, isn't this awesome? And it all comes for free. Dropbox offers you 2gb of web space for free, but you can register to their advanced service for a small fee if you need more space.

You can also use the following link to register, which will immediately give you (and me) 250mb more space. This is even better than directly going to their web site for registration. Seriously guys, this is one offer that you don't want to miss:
Click here to register for free.

Jaunty Jackalope Day!

Today is the day Canonical releases the next version of their GNU-Linux operating system Ubuntu: Jaunty Jackalope. I have been using Jaunty for some time. The beta and release candidate versions were quite stable and faster than the previous versions for me.

An important improvement in this release is the shorter boot time. Of course, do not expect anything under 30 secs. But it is definitely booting faster than Intrepid. With this new version we also receive the latest version of GNOME and finally: Open Office 3. Obviously, almost all Ubuntu users already switched to OOo3, but Ubuntu was slow to realize the change as official.

By the way, there are three new themes for Metacity and in my opinion they are the best themes ever included in a Ubuntu release.

Once again: two thumbs up for Ubuntu!

Ubuntu 9.04's New Themes

Well, here we go again... it appears the Canonical just uploaded some new and very nice desktop themes for the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) operating system, in order to please their devoted users.

read more | digg story

Extra Repositories for Ubuntu 8.10

I found the following page today, which gives an excellent list of the most used extra repositories for Ubuntu.

I' Been to Ubuntu: Extra Repositories for Ubuntu 8.10 You Might Want

Make Me A Sandwich

More Screensavers in Ubuntu

In order to get more screensavers in Ubuntu, including my favorite Substrate, just type the following in gnome terminal:

sudo apt-get install xscreensaver-data-extra


Design Requirements

CS100 is history!

CS100 finals are past and grades are given. Unfortunately, we had an eventful final. The final rooms were changed by Exam Coordination Office without telling me about it. So, me and the students went to the previously assigned rooms, while the proctors and a bunch of the students went to the correct rooms. Only after 15 minutes into the exam, I could learn about this change and redirected all students to the new rooms. We started the exam 30 minutes late, but the rest of the day was problem free.

I am not very pleased with the results of the final. Considering that all the possible multiple choice and short essay questions were published on the web beforehand, I was expecting a higher average. It appears, some students are willing to take the course for a second (or third?) time. Maybe they just like to be in my class, who knows? :)

To all who got a passing mark: BIG CONGRATULATIONS! You worked hard and deserved every point of it. I hope the things you learned in this course will help you in your life. I would love to help you in the future whenever you have a problem about computers in general. So, don't hesitate to drop by my office next term. Yes, I will have an office in the university next term. Don't forget to check my web page to hear about it.

Take care, and have a happy and relaxing holiday!

End of the Term

Well, the first term is over. It is now time for the final exams. I hope everybody (AKA students) is happy at this point. I wish you all an efficient and productive preparation period. Good luck in the finals!

A Familiar Conversation

"Advancement" of Civilization

This picture pretty much sums it up (unfortunately):

"Best" Free Windows Software of 2008

To all of you who are still a prisoner in the clutches of Microsoft: this page has some exciting free software titles that could somehow make your Windows shine!

last.fm and Rhythmbox

I am guessing that most of you geeks out there already know this simple trick, but for the less Web 2.0 aware community out there: last.fm is the ultimate online music experience! Just sign up with them for free and start listening to the best music on the planet. What makes this creme de la creme is its absolutely easy integration with Rhythmbox (default music player in Ubuntu). Once you sign up for an account at last.fm, open Rhythmbox, go to Edit/Plugins and choose and configure the last.fm plugin. That's it! You can now start listening to your favorite music from within Rhythmbox. You can search based on artists and tags or you can join one of the groups. Your search results will be immediately turned into a radio that you can listen to. And cheer up, all of this for free! [Assuming you are being nice and using Linux, that is]

I started working on Zindan

I finally gave start to my first Java Roguelike: Zindan. With my currently bloated schedule, I don't know how much time I will be able to spare to work on this project, but I had to start it at some point. Considering that in the next term I will be teaching an IE course, I may fast drift away from the world of programming unless I hone my skills frequently with this kind of toy projects.

Well, actually this is not 'planned' to be a toy project, but a real, very playable roguelike at the end. I have been playing roguelikes for years by now. Clearly, the beauty of a roguelike is not the interface but the inner game mechanics. How items interact with each other, how creatures behave, how players survive in unexpected ways are the key elements of success for a roguelike. Therefore, my goal will be to produce a very flexible game core which allows even unexpected actions to be realized both by the player and the NPCs. Ofcourse, this is not a simple task. And even I don't know how I am going to do that. But in time, each piece will fall into place and things will be more clear. My first goal is to create the skeleton of the project, including all base classes for creatures and items, IO classes and level generators.

This is going to be one hell of a quest to complete!

Fixing Wireless Transmission Rate in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex

Yet another problem I had with Intrepid was extremely bad performance from my wireless PCI card. Confusingly, the wireless card is recognized by default and no special handling seems to be necessary to use it. It connects to my router perfectly fine and I can browse the web. However, the performance is terrible. The same card, when dualbooted into XP, gives me excellent signal reception and maximum browsing speeds. In Intrepid, browsing is a real PIA most of the time.

Apparently, the problem is a faulty transmission rate assignment by iwconfig. If you observe extremely bad browsing performance, open the terminal and type

iwconfig

You will most probably see something very similar to the following:

wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:"Burkay"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:12:BF:67:8C:75
Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=27 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2352 B
Power Management:off
Link Quality=69/100 Signal level:-63 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Here, wlan0 is the name of your wireless device, and Bit Rate is the maximum transmission speed your card can realize. However, unless you have an ancient system and a prehistoric network, your card can support at least 54 Mb/s. You can see that at the moment the card seems to support only 1 Mb/s, an obvious trouble. In order to fix this problem, you simply have to force iwconfig to use 54 Mb/s as the bit rate. To do this, first open /etc/network/interfaces in gedit:

sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

Now add the following line to the end of the file:

pre-up iwconfig wlan0 rate 54M

If your card has a different name than wlan0 then don't forget to fix the above line by using the proper name. This makes sure that after the next restart your wireless interface will be forced to run at 54 Mb/s. At least this fixed my card and now, once again, I can browse at full speed.

Fixing Mouse Mapping in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex

So far Intrepid is behaving wonderfully both in my desktop PC and my laptop. However, there are minor annoyances similar to all the previous versions. One issue that really bothered me was not being able to re-map the buttons on my mouse. If you have a 2 or 3 button mouse, that may not be a big problem for you. Intrepid handles your mouse as good as you may want. However, I am using an Intellimouse Explorer 2.0, which has 2 side buttons on the left. Moreover, the scroll wheel can be tilted left and right to do horizontal scrolling. What really bugs me with this mouse is that the middle mouse click is normally assigned to the wheel. In other words you must click the wheel for a middle mouse click. Well, this is what many other companies do. But, Microsoft decided to make the wheel as unclickable as possible. You really need to exert some force on the wheel to be able to click. But this unreasonable force usually results in the mouse cursor moving somewhere else before I can realize the click. Long story short, I normally assign one of the side buttons as the middle mouse click, which is way more easier to click when compared to the wheel. In versions before Intrepid, you can easily do this by altering the xorg.conf file. However, starting with Intrepid, the input devices are handled by the HAL and not XOrg. This means, your xorg.conf tricks are not worth a buck anymore. Fortunately, a not so-popular but easy to apply solution exists. All you have to do is to create a file named .xmodmap in your home directory. Now, open this file with gedit:

gedit .xmodmap

and type the following into your file:

pointer = 1 8 3 4 5 6 7 2 9

Then, save, exit and restart. As you can guess easily, this makes button 2 behave like button 8, and button 8 behave like button 2. Button 2 is my wheel click and button 8 is my first left side button. So, after this change the left side button click corresponds to a middle click. Bingo!