Internet Censorship Steps Up To Bat

Right now, I am at a loss for words at my utter hatred towards AT&T. They have thrown the first punch in a series of certain blows towards a censored internet in America. This CANNOT be tolerated by the people of the US. They have started by blocking a few sub directories of the popular web-culture site 4chan, including /b/. Although I don’t frequent this website, I understand its importance to the web community, and also that any punch thrown in the spirit of internet censorship cannot be tolerated. My advice to anyone reading this is to immediately cancel any and all AT&T services citing this as a reason, and tell anyone else using AT&T to do the same as well. If we let them control the internet now, there may be a point where we never get unbiased information from the internet again.

Please Digg up this article to inform more of the evils that are occuring.

EDIT: AT&T has unblocked 4chan, and all is well (for now.) However, this could likely be a “test the waters” scenario, in case they ever plan on blocking sites in the future. Hopefully the splurge of internet activism that occurred will teach them their lesson.

Card Game Update 5

In this update, I made a new and better looking background, and also added in some basic rpg elements. Soon I’ll begin building the difficulty and adding a real challenge in to the game.

Importance of Fonts: In Relevance to Netbeans

I began using Netbeans around a year ago, and I fell in love with its GUI and all the features it had to offer out of the box. However, there is one thing that drastically reduces the quality of a would-be great IDE. The fonts. Here’s a small example of what the fonts in Netbeans are like in comparison to windows native applications.

The font above is what FixedSys Excelsior looks like in Netbeans, and the bottom what it looks like in WordPad. As you can see, there is a dramatic difference at this zoom level, and one that appears as a general fogginess and blurriness at normal size. This is something that I cannot look at for more than a few minutes without becoming frustrated as I squint at text to no avail. I think that fixing this issue should be the number one issue for the Netbeans development team, as programming constitutes looking at text for a long amount of time, and I don’t think anyone would want to look at that nightmare for hours on end.

I found an issue post on the Netbeans issue tracker, but sadly it hasn’t gotten any attention since earlier this February. Here’s a link to the issue in case anyone wants to help promote them to fix this as soon as possible.

EDIT: I found a temporary solution to the problem, which is to disable AA on fonts altogether until they correct the native font smoothing. This makes it more readable to me, and therefore I can use the IDE again. All you have to do to disable font smoothing in Netbeans is add ” -J-Dswing.aatext=false ” to the default options section of the etc/netbeans.conf file, and then it won’t smooth any fonts in the IDE at all. This makes the fonts slightly harsh compared to ClearType smoothing, but at least they aren’t blurred to the point of headache causing levels. Now that it’s been fixed, the fonts look like this:

Click on the image above to see the full resolution (because when it’s shrunk it looks just as bad.)

Card Game Update 4

So, I changed the look of the game a little for now, to be slightly more aesthetic (I think?) and I also added a simple hand scoring mechanism. Now I’m just thinking of which direction to move the game in, and what not, so the next update will probably not be for a few days.

Card Game Update 3

So, I overhauled my workload and really got a lot done on the game. Basically, the rules of the game are simple (although not fully implemented.) Each suit has its own method of flipping cards. Spades flip cards above, clubs below, diamonds to the right, and hearts to the left. You must form hands scored as in poker to win. So far the idea is still pretty up in the air, but it’s coming along.

Card Game Update 2

So I’m basically taking this in the direction of a card game with an RPG twist. The left side of the cards will be the player and the right side of them will be the enemy. As you level up you’ll get new abilities with which you activate by doing specific things to the grid of cards, etc. I haven’t fully realized all the rules yet, so that’s what I’ll be doing for the next day or so.

Card Game Update 1

So, I increased the aesthetics, and added a clickable and flippable property to the cards and what not. Overall, easy stuff, but fun to add. Here’s a small screenshot showing the new features.

The Lack of Updates

Well, I recently figured out that the reason I haven’t been able to program is due to the remark of someone I think of as a friend. They commented to me that I was wasting my time programming things unoriginal, and although I thought it hadn’t affected me, it had. Then, all of a sudden tonight, I realized that the reason I hadn’t programmed wasn’t due to the fact I didn’t want to start a big project or any other reason, it was that my friend has insulted my creativity and me as well. I resolved that conflict within myself, and now am feeling a lot better about my skills and my learning process is back into full speed. Here’s a screenshot of a small thing I’m working on at 4:30 AM due to my renewed vigor. I realized that learning to program is the first step, and I can’t expect to begin some creative venture in programming until my fundamentals are strong.

In this screenshot, I’ve just got a deck shuffler and displayer functioning using enums. This will allow scoring of hands and other useful things to be developed much faster and potentially with less bugs due to the simplicity of them. Overall, I am feeling very pleased with myself and my skills again. Although I am in no way a great programmer, I now am back on track for learning more, and am grateful that I came upon the reason for my lack of motivation.