february

Feb 28 2020

resurgence

justin scawful • 28 february 2020

i'm noticing my mood improving in the last week. i had a bit of a funk going on before i visited nicole like i said in my last post and i'm bouncing back even harder. i've been working more on the zelda hack and my low level programming skills lately. i'm reading more about the 65816 assembler and studying the hyrule magic source code while doing some general maintenance on the overworld maps in oracle of secrets. zarby released his second beta of zscream which is currently a well equipped dungeon editor. i also have the updated version of hyrule magic with MathOnNapkins refactoring and slight improvements. i believe i'll continue using that version of hyrule magic because of the quality of life changes in overworld editing like scrolling and better highlighting on objects, however it does cause corruption when i try to save over dungeons with the amount of room headers i have right now so i'll have to use the more stable v0.962 release of hyrule magic that floats around primarily or i can experiment with the zscream dungeon editor.

i've gotta get back on top of working on the zeniea source code. it's been awhile since my last commit and i haven't finished implementing the video upload feature. encapsulating the upload process in its own class is just a bit of a chore and reminds me why i'm not always the biggest fan of object oriented programming despite a lot of the advantages it brings. with school it's a bit harder to sit down and work on projects that are already started because it does require a bit of brain power to retrace my steps in the development process versus the stuff i'm doing with rom hacking which is just learning information and using graphical programs i'm familiar with. in a lot of ways low level memory management can be simpler than the high level system building of the zen3mp engine or a c++ video game. this is what i've been thinking a lot about in the back of my head, where i want to go in my programming career. embedded systems aren't very sexy compared to a graphical entity like a video game or website but they offer a level of intrigue that i don't think these high level methods of abstraction provide.

calculus has been going the best out of all my classes so far which is really ironic considering how much i was initially dreading having to take it. it's what i'm interested in the most forsure. my biology professor is a real pain in the ass and doesnt give us a real study guide so i have no idea how to prepare for her tests. i got a 68 on the first test and i'm waiting on my grade on the second exam that i just took yesterday and i don't have high hopes. my speech class isn't awful inherently but the teacher is super unorganized with the icampus portal which makes staying on top of assignments that are due a mess.

observations

justin scawful • 21 february 2020

been a bit since my last post as i was in new jersey for the weekend visiting nicole. i flew in the night of valentines day and as i landed and nicole was driving towards me in philly she hit a huge pothole and got a flat tire. i told her not to worry and ended up just getting an uber late at night. really nice girl named noelle who i talked about music with for like an hour. just touching on big artists and different genres in a very organic way that i enjoyed. then nicole and i spent saturday morning getting her tire replaced and spending some time with her family before they left for disneyland.

so we had the rest of the time to ourselves but she had to work sunday for like 8 hours which sucked but i just stayed home and played her piano while enjoying a few beers. so it wasn't all bad. her mom has many animals that we had to take care of, two roosters and a hen, like six birds, a cat and a dog. i would wake up at 7am to feed the chickens and the birds. the one rooster fabio is very feisty and would peck at my legs.

it was a great way to refresh myself as i was feeling a bit demotivated in the beginning of the semester and now i've got more energy to get things done in school. after my week with nicole i went from a very high place to the low ground of starting a new semester in the cold winter which wasn't the best for motivation and productivity.

healing

justin scawful • 10 february 2020

so i decided to change the halext.org homepage back to the classic purple gradient style. this is the old/new layout that i implemented and while it's not bad i didn't really like it after some time had passed. ironically enough i'm the one who wanted a comfortable sense of security of the past and put it back despite my own writing on that page. i went out of my way to restore some of the original TomKTW Ben Drowned pages from his site. i don't take any credit for them other than fixing them up to work again. it took some digging to get all the old images and music up.

i was inspired because i started a playthrough of majora's mask and watched through the old jadusable videos. originally i started playing the 3ds remake which i hadn't played since 2015 so it's actually been 5 years since my last playthrough and even longer since i beat the original. however after getting the goron mask i watched a video about the differences between the remake and the original which made me decide to drop the remake and play the original on my gamecube with the collector's edition. it was just too much for me to justify playing it this way after so long. it's way too streamlined and easy in the remake and many changes are completely unnecessary.

i ended having to play through the entire first dungeon again but i already prefer the feeling of deku link in the original with his faster speed and ability to spin onto the water hop and increase his acceleration. for some reason the crusty graphics don't bother me either since i think the low res textures add to the atmosphere. the cleaned up 3ds graphics and style look good for ocarina of time and it's lighter atmosphere at times but majora's mask doesn't really need all that color and brightness.

my intention with the redesign was to go for a portfolio look but really i think it would be kind of dumb to do that with a domain like "halext.org" and i should leave it to its dank hacker vibes for eternity. down the road i could get a domain for a portfolio that is a bit more professional. it's not like domains are expensive.

continuity

justin scawful • 6 february 2020

figured i should get started on february blogging. it's been awhile since my last update and not a lot has changed substantially since then. i've been diving into c++ a lot heavier with more smaller form exercises to familiarize myself with deeper parts of the standard libraries that i haven't worked with. i'm really enjoying all the nice bells and whistles compared to the c style libraries. vectors especially are really nice as well as the iostream is much easier to work with for formatting. as much as i like some of the c style idioms when it comes to pointers and procedural design it is nice for my pea brain to work with classes and references instead.

i started working on an video upload feature for zeniea and it's going well so far. a lot of what i've done is really just thinking about how to abstract my image upload class into a more general upload class that can be used for multiple file types and then making it so the video displays properly on the timeline if it's included. i got it to display the video fine and the column in the database is sold i just know need to link the timeline post form to this new upload class and make sure the process is smooth in terms of error reporting for the user. i also need to make some sort of indication on the timeline as to whether or not an image or video has been uploaded already which will most likely require javascript.