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An updated version of this page is available at http://moonjihad.useperl.net/. However, I'll try to update this one as well, so people will not have to update their bookmarks as well as the usual annoyances of changing URLs. Until then, stay tuned(stay tuned afterwards too!).

Yesterday, when taking the bus, I noticed somebody acting quite oddly. He was probably under the influence of some drug, seeing as he was looking everywhere nervously, seemed to have trouble standing still on the seat and, for no reason at all, stood up for about five seconds, looked around and then sit back.

And yesterday, I worked on something. Here is a screenshot :

Yes, an extra set of songs for StepMania! I only have one set of steps for each song, though.

You have probably noticed the little robot near the news header. This is the new mood meter. Basically you can now know which mood I was in when I wrote the news. It's entirely pointless and it's only purpose is to add cute Puzzle Bobble characters. Woohoo!

As for the kanji below, remember that the kanjis used as examples were chosen. There are also kanjis which make no sense, such as 馬鹿, 馬 meaning horse and 鹿 meaning deer. You might think it's some kind of mythical creature. WRONG! The word is ばか(baka, fool, idiot). There are also some like 天の川(heaven's river), which actually means the Milky Way.

For the next two weeks, I will be having a lot of exams, seeing as it is the end of the semester. This means a drop in the frequency of updates(as if it was not happening already) and a freeze of all projects. But after these two weeks, it will be the holidays, so expect things to go much faster.

On an unrelated note, kanjis are really neat. For example, きょだい is written 巨大 in kanji. 巨 means gigantic, large and 大 means large, big. As you might have guessed, 巨大 means huge, very large. Another example of this is さんぎょう, written 産業. 産 means products and 業 means business, vocation. It means industry. Nice, eh? The only downside of kanji are the sheer number of these. To be considered to have reached a basic level of literacy, one must know the nearly 2000 常用漢字(kanjis for daily use), including some very complex kanjis having over 10 strokes(歯 for example, which means tooth, cog). In case you were wondering, 漢字(kanji) is written using the kanjis 漢(Chinese) and 字(character, word). Now, I only have to learn all of the 常用漢字(among tons of other things).

On another unrelated topic, I have had this great idea for bot navigation. Instead of having simplistic navigation ala Botman, which requires far too many waypoints, I will instead allow the creation of complex paths(non-linear paths between waypoints), which will drastically lower the number of waypoints on maps, thus allowing for path weight modifications to be updated dynamically. Also, I think it would be possible to make path-to-path paths. Another thing, why limit waypoints to being points? Why not surfaces or volumes? I am going to write something about this soon.

On yet another unrelated topic, what will you do with your Christmas money(if you get money at xmas, that is)? I am wondering what I am going to do with mine. Should I :

• Buy more RAM
• Buy a GF4
• Buy a GF2MX
• Buy a scanner
• Buy a webcam
• Buy a book or two
• Buy novelty items, such as a cup a noodles mug and junk at thinkgeek
• Use the money to make an arcade-like controller(like the X-Arcade for example)
• Buy alcohol
• Use the money as party money
• Save the money for later

Yesterday was 3December. Did you attend? I would've attended the online broadcast, but the sysadmins at the cegep are being fairly conservative on their bandwith use. Since today is december 4th, Maya Personnal edition 4.5 CDs are now available to buy(for 19.99$ at their shop). Woohoo! Apparently it now saves standard Maya files now. I might grab a copy, but only if they got rid of the silly "MAYA PERSONAL EDITION - NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE" watermarks on the viewports present in an earlier version I had downloaded. I can understand about having watermarks on rendered output, but on the viewports? The bright text on the gray viewport background got the best of me really soon. The high contrast that existed between the text and the background made doing any "work" on the viewports really painful. I played with it for 5 minutes(no kidding), then uninstalled it, never to reinstall it again. I really hope that they removed that annoying background or at least made it much more subtle.

Now if Softimage would come with Softimage Personal Edition, I would be happy. But it is not going to happen, seeing as they are not targeting the hobbyist market.

I just noticed that 3D Studio MAX does not accept foreign characters in the text object. The help says : You can enter Windows extended characters (such as letters with accents, non-English characters, and so on) in the Text object's Text field. To enter an extended character, hold down the ALT key, and use the number pad to enter the character's numeric value. For example, if you hold down the ALT key and enter 0233 on the number pad, the Text object includes an e with an acute accent. Some characters, such as this one, require you to enter a leading zero. You must use the number pad. The numbers above the alphabetic letters won't work. Why not support MBCS or Unicode directly? And how the (insert expletive here) am I supposed to enter U+65E5?

I finally found a solution to get foreign text in 3D Studio MAX.

1. Create a RTF file in wordpad containing the Japanese text
2. Import this file into Illustrator
3. Trace the outlines of the text in Illustrator
4. Save the file as a .AI(Adobe Illustrator) file
5. Import the file in 3D Studio MAX

Obviously this approach is really crummy, but it works. And deciding to put the text in bold, changing the font or splitting lines requires you to do the whole process again. Boo!

I have started playing PPP and EZ2(since SM now somewhat supports these games). Seeing as I do not own the sensors for these games, I use autoplay and simulate whatever motion the player is supposed to do. EZ2 is hard(but it might be because the only song I have is minus 1)!

However, I like PPP a lot. It's really fun! However, the songs sure do get very hard! Aiee!

I saw the ad for these yesterday. I wonder what these taste like? Glico should make these available in North America everywhere. I want some Mousse Pocky^TM right now. Oh yeah, I want whatever Zetima makes too.

I read the W3C ruby documentation and noticed that it was for XHTML. Argh! That means no ruby for a while(ruby annotation is the technique where little kana characters are written above kanjis used to give the pronunciation; its also known as ふりがな).

So I decided to have lots of fun this afternoon. After nearly four hours of dictionary fun, I stopped. After eating supper, I decided to relax a little.

You might not have noticed it, but this page has drastically changed internally. If you are using Mozilla, you can use an alternate stylesheet for this page(sorry IE users, but there is no such option in IE). Go in View > Use style for this. The next major update on this website might be the transition to XHTML 1.1, but for now I am going to stick with HTML 4.01 Strict and stylesheets.

Also, I now use a small Perl script to rebuild this webpage(I ditched the old vim script). If you are interested in using it for your webpage or something else(its fairly generic), go grab it in the Meta section. However, do not expect a display of world class Perl skills, seeing as I started learning Perl last afternoon.

By the way, I would like to remind users of IE that this page, while being readable, looks better with Mozilla. Also, using Mozilla will make your life better and make you a HAPPY MAEN!!!1111 YUSD!!!11 But seriously, you should use it.