• Home: Takes the cursor to the beginning of the current line.
• End: Takes the cursor to the end of the current line (after the last character in the line).
• Ctrl + Home: Takes the cursor to the very beginning of the active text field/document.
• Ctrl + End: Takes the cursor to the very end of the active text field/document.
• Shift + Home/End/Right/Left/Up/Down: Selects all the text between the initial cursor position and the final cursor position.
• Ctrl + A: Selects everything in the active text field.

All coders and pretty much everyone who types a lot of text in your everyday life, for the love of God, drill these shortcuts into your minds! I promise your productivity will increase at least by 30%.  Here are a few examples of usages:

1. Example 1 (Ctrl + A): Say you want to post a rather long status update in Facebook and twitter. Type out your message, hit Ctrl + A, then Ctrl + C. Then hit the post button in Facebook, go to Twitter, click on the “What’s New” text box, press Ctrl + V and post it.
2. Example 2 (Shift + Home): Say you’ve written a complex printf() statement in C to display some information and you have to repeat the same output with a few changes about 5 times. Here’s what you do: Type out the first printf() statement. Your cursor will be at the end of the line right. Now press Shift + Home. The cursor will move to the beginning of the line because of the Home key, but it will also select all the text along the way because of the Shift key. Now copy and paste it as many times as you want. You have thus successfully avoided moving your hand to the mouse, moving the cursor and selecting the text by mouse movement. You’ve achieved all that in just 2 keystrokes: Shift + Home, without taking your hand off the keyboard. Note that you can use Shift with the arrow keys to select text letter by letter.

Aside from these shortcuts, I implore you to familiarize yourself with the keyboard shortcuts of the programs you use the most. It will drastically reduce the time needed to perform simple but repetitive actions. Just use Google, because as they say, Google is your friend! And if you don’t listen, then this

Ciao!

Legend:

(?) – Still needs confirmation, some info missing.

And the list begins:

1. Structured vs. Object oriented programming: Structured programming is task-centric where as object oriented programming is object-centric. For example, in structured approach, when a task is to be performed, we first think of subroutines and then the data structures. In OO approach, we first think of the objects needed to perform the task, then we design the details of the objects and their behaviour. C is a structured language, C++ is an object oriented language.
2. (?) Default values for data types in C++: When variables are declared and not initialized, what are their values? I believe number types will be set to 0, but it might depend on the compiler. For example, C-Free 4 gave garbage values to int, float and char variables. But when run multiple times, the value for int kept changing but the values for float and char remained the same. Confirm.
3. (?) String Mutability: Need to explore string mutability, even by using pointers. For example, when I have a char pointer, can I still use it when I change the string length?Also need to explore String class capabilities.
4. Static variables and functions: Figure out 1.Where static variables can be a.declared b.initialized and experiment on their scope.

The basic gameplay is the same as SkyRoads, you have to reach the end of a road by jumping and moving on differently setup platforms. There are different types of platforms, ones which make you go faster, slow you down, lava blocks which burn you on contact and bumpy blocks which make you hop when you touch them. There are also a few extras like shooting lasers and backward mode. The visuals are very nice. The ship and all the other effects are simple polygons, but they still manage to look fantastic. The best part about the game, though, is the sound track. I can’t describe it in words. Tasty Static is freeware, so just head over to the website and download the game. Did I mention it comes for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems? This game is truly a gem, and it inspires me to see such amazing work in the freeware domain.

Samsung Infuse 4G, HTC Inspire 4G and Apple iPhone 4.

I used the internet to quickly compare the phones and had to suggest Samsung Infuse 4G. Here’s my response:

• Between Samsung Infuse 4G and HTC Inspire 4G, go for Samsung Infuse (click me). Except maybe for looks, or the UI. HTC has Sense UI where as Samsung has TouchWiz UI. I personally like TouchWiz. Check some YouTube videos to get a better idea.
• Between Samsung Infuse 4G and iPhone 4, go with Samsung Infuse 4G (click me). The pros outweigh the cons in my opinion. But since you already have the iPad, having an iPhone will give you a more integrated and simple experience. But think about Bluetooth file transfer. On an iPhone, you can’t transfer files through Bluetooth to other brand phones, only to an iPhone.
• Between HTC Inspire 4G and iPhone 4, go with whatever you like, according to your preferences (click me).

All in all, if you ask me, you should disregard the HTC Inspire 4G altogether. Samsung Infuse 4G is the overall winner, but if you want the Apple experience, go with the iPhone. Just remember that Samsung Infuse will come with Froyo (Android 2.2), not the latest Gingerbread (Android 2.3). But apparently, Gingerbread for Infuse 4G is on its way, so it shouldn’t be an issue.

Remember that I have not checked detailed reviews of each phone. If you REALLY want to know your phone before you buy it, you should read through detailed reviews:
• Detailed review of Samsung Infuse 4G
• Detailed review of HTC Inspire 4G
• Detailed review of iPhone 4

Look for reviews on YouTube if you don’t feel like reading. Let me know what you’ve decided

PS: btw, in those comparisons, disregard the “More Apps Available” factor, because it honestly shouldn’t make a difference to you between Apple’s 350K apps vs Android’s 270K apps. The important and most useful apps are covered in both the platforms. If you ask me, Apple probably has more

redundant and useless apps which actually cost money

.

Judging from FF6’s release notes, most of the changes are under the hood:

The latest version of Firefox has the following changes:

• The address bar now highlights the domain of the website you’re visiting
• Streamlined the look of the site identity block
• Added support for the latest draft version of WebSockets with a prefixed API
• Added support for EventSource / server-sent events
• Added support for window.matchMedia
• Added Scratchpad, an interactive JavaScript prototyping environment
• Added a new Web Developer menu item and moved development-related items into it
• Improved usability of the Web Console
• Improved the discoverability of Firefox Sync
• Reduced browser startup time when using Panorama
• Fixed several stability issues
• Fixed several security issues

I’m used to seeing major changes or overhauls with an increase in version number by 1. Oh well. I hope by the time FF reaches it’s double digit version, it’ll be different from FF6.

You can download Firefox 6 from the official website, if your browser hasn’t already prompted you about the update. One word of caution though. Remember when some of your add-ons were rendered useless with the update from 3.6 to 4? I don’t expect more add-ons to be unsupported, because versions 4, 5 and 6 are similar, but watch out. Until next time.

I’d have liked if the desktops started acting more like those in smart phones, i.e, widgetized/realtime functionality. Just check any smartphone interface, be it HTC’s Sense or Samsung’s TouchWiz, or even Symbian’s Widgeted interface. They use that space on the screen so efficiently. They either provide useful realtime information in a very readable manner (like time and date, news feeds, facebook updates…), or provide easy access to most used tasks in one click (or touch). Why hasn’t Windows done anything like that? Sure they have Gadgets, but they are little more than trinkets which are satisfied with being the auxiliary components instead of seizing the desktop.

In this department, the Linux community has made a lot of progress. Of course, I have no idea about the iOS, mainly because I’ve never seen one in my life. Take Gnome for instance. It offers so many widgets and multiple taskbars for us to customize. We can populate the bars with useful trinkets like dictionary, quick search, multimedia controls, clipboard, copy stack, volume controls, and what not. Ubuntu, in particular, has integrated social network into it’s operating system.

How cool is that? And why hasn’t Windows have something like that already? And then there is KDE. It has made so many radical changes in it’s UI that the learning curve is rather steep. But it offers so much promise and it implements the added functionality I’ve been craving for. KDE is headed in the right direction, and I really wanted to experience it.

To that end I installed openSUSE on my computer, but I guess I was too used to the look of the old explorer paradigm. I found the Gnome/Windows explorers more agreeable. In the end, I removed it because I was simply not using it too often.

I was looking for a Windows alternative to KDE’s Folder View widget, which essentially displays the contents of a selected folder in a nice panel on the desktop. This was so that I can remove clutter on my desktop and have easy access to all my frequently used locations, not to mention clear up desktop space for a more unrestricted and complete Rainmeter setup (more on this some other time). And guess what I found from the official makers of KDE: the KDE for Windows package! It enables one to run KDE applications in Windows alongside Windows Explorer and native Windows applications. What’s more, it allows us to use the KDE desktop over the Windows desktop (replaces the desktop area, not the taskbar).

I was pretty excited, and installed the required packages. Alas, it’s not perfect. The apps crash randomly, and messing around with the desktop widgets also crashes certain processes. It’s not as seamless as KDE on openSUSE, but it’s still something. The Folder View widget works, and it’s probably the only reason I downloaded this. But opening a folder opens it in the KDE explorer, not Windows explorer.

Oh well, it’s a start. Lot’s of exploring to do still. I’ll write again when I have made progress. And since KDE for Windows isn’t in it’s final stages of development, let’s hope time fixes all the bugs.

On an other note, one other way to improve your desktop functionality (especially in terms of realtime information) is Rainmeter. Even if it has a slightly steep learning curve, it is just phenomenal. Take the Omnimo skin suite, for instance. It turns your desktop to a full on Windows Phone 7 desktop, with loads of functionality.

The only problem is handling the desktop icons. You’ll have to find a way to deal with them. More on Rainmeter later. This post is more of a record than an article. My next article will explore what the ideal and prodictive desktop is supposed to be, and how we can achieve something close with what is available freely. Until next time.

Remember my post about Stereoscopic 3D? I have processed more such photos on the occasion of my family trip to Leh, Ladakh. Use your typical red-blue 3D glasses to view:

If I had known they’d turn out so great, I would have made time to take more, which would really shine in 3D. To see how 3D works and how one might make 3D photos, refer to my post about stereoscopic vision. And I compel you to use Google and Youtube for really good tutorials. Until next time folks.

One of the reasons has something to do with how inconvenient I find making a new post using WordPress. While the editor is good, I don’t have a quick option for logging into my account from my blog. I have to go to the WordPress homepage to log in. That, and I’m lazy as hell, so I need things to look easy for me to do them.

While cleaning up my PC the other day, I was uninstalling Windows Live Essentials. I got curious and checked out what it has to offer and Windows Live Writer grabbed my attention. It’s simple and fits in with the whole Windows 7 look and feel. It also offers the ribbon toolbar, which I quite favor. How good it is remains to be seen, as this is still the first post I’m making with it. Let’s see how it turns out.

If anyone knows how I can log into my WordPress account directly from my blog, it might help me. Of course, I’ll be using Live Writer for some time now, but still I’d like to know. My first guess is a theme, or a widget. see you folks

EDIT:

Ganesh Dhamodkar of Blog of Reflections had this to say:

Add the “Meta” widget somewhere in your blog and you will be able to log in directly from your blog

Thanks for the tip bro

Here is a little something I developed in Pyglet. I’ve made many trials and errors and a lot of my experimental work is not published or properly materialized, except this. I know it’s not complete and it still has a few hitches here and there (nothing that crashes the game though, I hope), but it’s the most solid chunk of work I’ve bothered to keep. Now I present to you…

Ship Showdown!

Download Source Code (Dropbox Link)

Mirror (Media Fire)

1. You will need Python installed to run the game.

2. Extract and run the file “Ship Showdown.py”

Screenshots

I know going through other people’s code is a bit tedious, but if anyone want to take it apart, learn, experiment, modify, adapt, feel free to do so

And with that I bid adieu!

Note: Though you will find instructions, this is by no means a tutorial and was never meant to be. It’s only a descriptive guide to help explain the process better.

So basically…

What is 3D?

3D stands for 3 Dimensions. Now what are dimensions? In the world of mathematics, physical space can be represented in up to 3 dimensions.

An example of a 1-dimensional figure would be a straight line. All measurements are limited to only one constraint: length.

The only measurement is the length. Even a dot can be a 1D image (though, a dot is defined as a figure with zero dimensions... math is funny, eh?)

A square, a triangle or anything you can draw on a paper is 2-dimensional, meaning those figures can be represented with the help of length and width.

Anything you can draw on a paper qualifies as a 2D image.

Now, a cube, a cone, a pyramid, a pizza, the Taj Mahal, even you, are 3-dimensional. These objects can be represented in 3 dimensions namely length, width and depth.

Most real objects are 3D.

Most of what you see in a book, on the computer screen and in the movies is 2D. Sure, you can make out the depth of the objects shown on the screen, but that’s because your mind simply concludes that there’s depth, based on what it already knows, even though it doesn’t feel the depth.

You can tell that the cylinder is behind the cube even though you can't "feel" it.

What is depth?

Now how does your mind perceive “depth”? Well, it’s simple. When you view something with both your eyes, what do you see? You see just one picture, or that’s what you think. In reality, you see two different pictures, one with each eye. Try it out, look at an object by closing your eyes alternately. You’ll realize that you’re seeing the object from two slightly different angles. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the key to 3D. When your eyes send their signals to the brain, it merges them together and calculates the depth in the image.

This is how your mind sees two images as one, perceiving depth. Observe the slight variation in how each eye sees the image.

Now we know that the brain processes two separate images into one to get the sense of depth. How is this knowledge used to replicate depth through 2D media (computer screen for example)? Let’s explore that.

Replication

We have one main point to take away from the previous explanation: depth can only be simulated by feeding the brain two different views of the same scene. This is the reason we don’t feel depth when we watch something on the computer screen: both our eyes see the same image.

To simulate the sense of depth one has to find a way to view two different images at the same time through different eyes. Let’s discuss the process with a 3D picture, because I actually made a few B)

So my aim is to make this scene 3D:

I take two pictures from slightly different angles. Each picture is how each of my eye sees it separately:

These two pictures represent the target as seen by the right and left eyes.

Now I superimpose (combine) them:

Both images super-imposed.

But when I look at this pic, I can see both the views with both the eyes. How do I make it so that one image reaches one eye and the other image reaches the other eye separately? The answer is that I use some form of filtering.

One simple thing I can do is, I use colour filtering. It means that I will colourize each picture with a different colour like this:

Both images are colourized.

Now I’ll superimpose them again:

I superimposed the two coloured images, this is the result.

OK, now the pic is ready. How do I see the pic? with these (or similar):

Notice the colours. The left frame (from our point of view) has a red filter and the right frame has a cyan filter (have you noticed that they’re contrast colours?). Now when I look at the pic with these glasses on, my left eye will only see the red-colourized part of the pic and my right eye will only see the cyan-colourized part; mission accomplished! I get to enjoy the depth in the picture!

You can make a crude version of these “glasses”. You’ll need:

1. Red and cyan sketch pens
2. A colourless transparent sheet of paper or plastic (like a CD jewel case)

Just take your transparent material and colour them with the sketch pens, and you’re done Of course, you might not find the exact shade of colours, so you might still see double-images when you view the pic, but you will feel some depth.

Showtime!

This is how 3D movies are made. The movie is shot with two cameras with filters covering the lenses. They combine the two reels and publish the movie. You are given “3D glasses” which are nothing but filters, which separate the two images projected on the screen and send them to the respective eyes.

Of course, there’s another more refined form of filtering than the red-cyan / yellow-blue filters: the polarized lens filtering. These glasses have dark lenses and kinda feel like shades. These type of glasses are what you probably used when watching a 3D movie, not the old coloured ones. The advantage is obvious: no colour distortion. When you use coloured filtering, a lot of colour detail is lost, but with polarized lenses, you get the full spectrum. Polarized lenses are basically filters too and they involve some concepts of optics which I will not be explaining in this post.

Check out the pictures in this page to get a good idea of how 3D movies work. (Maybe it’s explained better there than here ;_;)

There are also other methods to simulate depth (like Chromadepth). Hopefully, someone will come up with a solution which lets us enjoy 3D in everyday television and computing

nVidia 3D Vision

nVidia has come up with a wonderful technology called nVidia 3D Vision. The concept is basically the same, but it applies it to 3D games and the result is amazing. Now that’s what I call innovation! Well, not exactly, it’s pretty obvious once you see it, but it’s about time someone implemented it!

Note that nVidia 3D vision has two forms: nVidia 3D Vision and nVidia 3D Vision Discover. 3D Vision Discover just lets us experience 3D, but in a crude way (using red-cyan glasses). The real thing uses shutter glasses and requires a 120Hz LCD monitor. Though, I’ve come across posts that claim it’s not a strict requirement. I enjoy my games using the red-cyan glasses since I don’t have an LCD monitor (let alone a 120Hz one!). There’s a rather annoying limitation: 3D vision only works in Windows Vista and above, not in XP. There might be some mods out there which enable 3D vision in XP, but I haven’t found them. If you know, drop a comment and I’ll add it here

If you happen to make or acquire 3D glasses but the colours don’t match with 3D vision defaults, you will still see double-images and it kind of hurts your eyes. I did a search in Google and found this registry hack which allows you to define the anaglyph colours. Here’s what you do. Open notepad and paste the following into the document:

==Start copy from below==

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global

\Stereo3D]
@=”"

“LeftAnaglyphFilter”=dword:ffff0000
“RightAnaglyphFilter”=dword:ff00ffff

“StereoGamma”=dword:3f800000

==End copy above==

Change the bolded parts in the lines:

“LeftAnaglyphFilter”=dword:ffff0000” and
“RightAnaglyphFilter”=dword:ff00ffff“

to represent your desired colours in hex code. Don’t get confused if you don’t know what that is. Head over to this site and you can generate the hex codes for any colour. Of course, there are many other sites like this, just use google

After you’re done, save the file as “3dVision_color_mod.reg”. Run the file and accept the prompt, you’re done. If you didn’t backup the original colour codes, you can use the text above, it’s the default setting.

Conclusion

If you ever acquire a set of 3D glasses, just do a google image search for “3D image” and you’ll get loads of fun pics to look at. Always remember that Google and Wikipedia are your friends (here’s the Wiki page about anaglyph images). Having explained this, I now have a question to all of you: can a person with only one eye experience simulated 3D? Rack your brains, until my next post >:)

That’s it for today, see you next time!

PS: Why did I use “colour” instead of “color”? Well, that’s the spelling I knew from childhood and that’s what I’m used to. It’s correct according to British English. I do use “color”, but only when I’m coding