Encounter with a House Centipede

It was almost pitch black, with a faint light streaming through the makeshift curtain--a white sheet hanging from the gated window. I awoke to the loud sounds of the toilet flushing. Oh my god who's in my apartment? It's still going.... Oh, they must be working on the building plumbing again. What the hell, it's like 3 or 4 am!

I drifted back to sleep. Dreams about shady businessmen out to rob me, and puppies.

I was slowly brought back to the waking world again when I felt an itch. It grew stronger, until I was finally pulled into consciousness. I felt its dozens of tiny legs tickling my neck. I rolled away and quickly jumped up from my mattress pad on the floor. There was an inch-long thing scurrying about where I was just laying. It was making figure eights and not seeming to be headed anywhere. Of course I wanted to get a better look at whatever it was that was just having relations with my neck, so I turned on the light. It quickly scampered into a hole in the wooden floor beside the heater. I should tell the super about that bug and that hole. Maybe I should buy some pesticide myself at the hardware store, and pour it into the hole. Argh, the store opens at 10am. Hmm, may as well look up what kind of bug it was.

And so I turned to trusty all-knowing Google and searched for various terms, "identify insects nyc", "black and white striped legs insects" (since it seemed to leave a leg behind which I picked from my neck). A pretty useful exterminator site was the first hit. After not being satisfied with the results, though, I figured I'd give up and leave it for another day. Since it came from a hole in the wood, maybe it was a carpenter ant?

I mindlessly threw the insect leg onto the floor, figuring I'd sweep it up later. After a minute or so, I saw the thing crawl back out of the hole and come towards me again! Did it detect its leg? It stopped at the edge of the mattress pad, in the shadow. And it just sat there. Now was my chance--I grabbed some paper towel and SMASH! Deaded it.

I picked up the carcass and examined it closely--looked like it had a lot of legs, most of which were detached. And a cucumber-shaped body. Reminded me of a centipede, so I searched Google Images. And yep, that was exactly right. After more searching I determined that these house centipedes actually hunt other insects and are not harmful to humans. Dammit!

Worth reading if you want to know more about house centipedes: This guy's page was also a Google search result. He seems to have had a long history with these house centipedes during his residence in NYC.

Oh yeah, and before lying down again, I noticed about 6 more legs just lying there in the middle of my mattress pad.

Opening Electric/Gas account with ConEdison

Since I'm moving to my own place for the first time, I'll write a series of posts about dealing with the various companies involved.
First thing was of course dealing with brokers and the apartment management, but I'll save the post about that for a bit later. (I have had a good experience with both so far.)

Dealing with ConEdison was extremely easy. Just called 1 800-75-CONED (1-800-752-6633) at which point I was directed to call 212-243-1900 since my cell phone area code is outside NYC.


So I called the second number, tried using the Express self-service phone option, but when I pressed 2 to open an account and 1 to say I was not a current account holder, I was redirected to the waiting queue again, and was put on hold for about 15-20 minutes (probably reasonable for 10am Saturday in early May). Then  the guy answered, didn't catch his name though. I told him I wanted to open a gas/electric account.


He took down my address, borough (Manhattan), phone number, and social security number. Asked about things like if I needed special consideration for always-on electrical equipment for health purposes. Asked if the electricity was already on, which it was. Asked for move-in date, which was May 3 this year. Asked if I wanted a 7% discount on this thing where I select a particular electric company; I didn't know what it was, even after asking him I was unclear, so I declined. Didn't provide my email address, since I asked about it and he said there would be some promotions sent along with regular notifications. He asked about direct billing, which I declined, since I will probably enroll in e-billing instead.


And that was that. Extremely simple, hassle-free setup of standard utilities with a large company.

Glasses from zennioptical.com

I just received my new glasses from zennioptical.com. It was $32.95 for one pair. It's a decent-looking frameless style, without any special add-ons like extra-thin lenses or anti-reflective coating. I got the standard Single Vision lens (as opposed to bifocals or progressive lenses), and the 1.57 Mid-Index lenses which were a free upgrade from the default 1.50. (The 1.57 lenses are a bit thinner and lighter.) The "extra strength" charge for astigmatism came out to $9. Shipping & Handling was $4.95.

So far they are great. When I first put them on I felt some dizziness as expected. The lenses were smaller than I am used to, so I seem to keep peeking past the lenses. But I'm quickly getting used to them, and for the first hour I have been extremely pleased with the value. Basically for a 2 week wait for the shipping, I got a 90% discount for a decent pair of glasses (that luckily fit me very well too).

Measuring the pupil distance (PD) was simple: get a friend to measure the distance between your pupils using a millimeter ruler, while you stare straight into the distance. My PD was 60 mm, which is pretty average.

Anyway, it feels great to finally get a new pair of glasses after years with my old pair. My left eye feels so good getting the boost it needs. I'm looking forward to not having headaches from having one weak lens.

Flattr

I'm really excited for the new micropayments service Flattr which I just registered for. It basically works on a voting system where you set a monthly allocation to pay, and your allocated money gets divided among the people you vote for. Anyone can sign up to get a Flattr button letting you vote for them. The catch is that in order to receive money via Flattr you must also have an account, which carries with it a monthly minimum contribution of 2 Euro (and currently a maximum of 20 Euro).

They're currently in beta, but I see this becoming a huge thing. It'll also be profitable for them--they currently take 10% of the revenues, and there are more than 5000 users already in the early public beta (judging based on my user ID). Once they go version 1.0 I see them growing exponentially.

Check it out at www.flattr.com!

Out with UDK, in with OGRE

After dicking around with the Unreal Development Kit, which was released for free a month ago, I've come to the conclusion that it's not what I want. There are a bunch of reasons for this. I'll list some pros first. In no particular order:

Unreal Pros:

• UnrealScript is pretty similar to C++ and Java. Not hard to pick up.
• Lots of nitty gritty stuff is handled for you. Things like rendering a level and letting you use the built-in UT character models is trivial.
• OK documentation for getting your project up and running initially.
• Powerful tools for doing animation and stuff inside the editor.
• Kismet (graphical flowchart programming tool) is awesome.
• Network support.
  

Unreal Cons:

• Unintuitive directory structures for projects. You need to put your code beside the Unreal Tournament code? Huh?
• Compiler for UnrealScript often crashes instead of giving a meaningful error, usually caused by malformed statements.
• It's really aimed toward FPS and other shooters, with network support. Other gametypes are certainly possible, but you have to rewrite a lot of the framework in unintuitive ways. For example, detecting a click still uses the "StartFire()" function even when your game has nothing to do with guns and firing.
• Poor API documentation. You're forced to dig through the code, and search on forums for help.
• No official support for a lot of popular 3d modeling programs. They support 3dsMax and Maya, but not Blender. A cool dude made a Blender exporter plugin in his spare time, but it's far from complete.
• If you make money from your game above $5k, you need to pay 25% royalties to Epic Games.
  

Summary:  It boils down to lack of support for modern free tools, and having a bunch of unintuitive API humps. I assume most users of UDK before Epic Games released it for free lurked the forums all the time to learn tricks to use Unreal Engine. That or they worked alongside Epic Games developers and so got special support while writing. Not to mention that they get the full Unreal Engine written in C++ if they can afford the license.

Now, why OGRE?

• Very intuitive if you know C++, have a basic understanding of graphics systems like OpenGL, and have worked with any sort of game engine before, like pygame.
• Great documentation and tutorials.
• Support for Blender.
• Use C++ directly. Meaning you can use Visual Studio or whatever full-featured IDE.
  
• Plugin system to integrate with other great tools, like CEGUI, a GUI manager.
• Just as easy as UDK to get your first project running, thanks to the Ogre AppWizard for Visual Studio. It does all the standard boilerplate for you for new projects.
• Open-source under LGPL with some (good for developer) exceptions. So I can look at the engine code and change it if necessary, as long as I provide the source code of changes along with my product. Starting version 1.7 which isn't out yet, it will be licensed under MIT license which is even less restrictive than LGPL. (Steve Streeting explains why he made the shift to MIT license.)
• Recently ported to iPhone and iTouch. Although, a tad late considering Android has been stepping up the competition considerably.
  

Also in a previous post I mentioned wanting to use Irrlicht. But I moved away from Irrlicht before even starting using it, so I can't compare OGRE and Irrlicht. However judging by Internet people's comments, OGRE is more powerful with higher learning curve, which I don't mind at all. Also it's been proven successful commercially with Torchlight, which is hugely motivational.

Set up SVN on hostmonster

Here's a very simple guide to getting SVN up and running on hostmonster.com.


Basically just run a script and it's all set up. Also comes with a script to quickly add new user accounts to SVN.

One thing you shouldn't do--don't change the versions from those in the script. I tried grabbing the latest SVN (1.6.6) and APR (1.3.9 or something) but they turned out to have broken dependencies. So just stick with what's there in the script, and it works great.

Gave away my baby

I just open sourced my past month's project, an Android app called "reddit is fun". The license is GPLv3. It's up on github now: http://github.com/talklittle/reddit-is-fun/tree

A month doesn't sound like a long time for a software project, but I spent quite a bit of time on it and it definitely felt like more than a month. Oh well. Now I gave it away, and I'm coming out of the project with much improved Android programming skills and a better understanding of the different open source licenses (Apache, GPL, MIT, BSD).

Now, time for school! And on the side, hopefully more fun programming projects for Android, PC, and whatever. Oh yeah, I'm signed up for a game development class this semester. Let's see if that helps me with any side projects.