Jared’s Blog

Yay. I got my schedule for my Senior year. Here it is:

In other news, I got all of my school-related grades back.
Everything worked out like I wanted.
Other than my ACT grade (34) which I posted below, I got a 5 on the AP Physics B exam, a 700 on the SAT Subject Test in Physics (added onto my 740 on Math Level IC from last year), and lastly, straight As and A+s on my report card this year, for the first time.

I recently made two new games. My first one is a simple BlackJack game (my first C# program.)
The source for it, along with the source of some of my other projects, is here.

Another game I designed along with my friend is a networked version of Tic Tac Toe.
I’m not sure if it works over the Internet, but it definitely works over LAN, since that’s what I designed it for. If you’re going to try it out, make sure you disable any firewalls you may have on the executable or on port 4000. If you want to test it over the Internet (rather than over LAN), make sure you also forward port 4000 through your router.
Because of the way I wrote it and since it uses TCP/IP, there are two versions of it. There is a server version and a client version.
Here is the server, and here is the client. In order to use it for a multiplayer game (there is also a single-player mode using an Artificial Intelligence bot), one player should run the server first, then the other player should run the client.
The executables for each are in the folder “bin\Release”.

I took the ACT on April 12th; here are my scores:

I’m not going to take the SAT since these scores were so good and I don’t want to take any chances with the SAT.
(By the way, this is not showing off… It’s just because a lot of people have been asking me about my ACT grade and breakdown, and this is the easiest way to let everyone know.)

A year or two ago I made a font of my handwriting and I made a blog post about it, but nothing that I wrote on that post actually works anymore because the link and directions are too old.  So I deleted that post and I’m just reposting it here.  Download it here.  By the way, you will need to use somewhere around font size 26 to get a normal size.  I could fix it, but I’m too lazy.

If you have any questions about how to install it, just ask me, I guess…

I just noticed I never really told anyone about this, except for a few people… so now I’m telling you…

Last year in Visual Basic class (in school) we had to make Pong and then turn it into Breakout. If you don’t know what Breakout is, it’s where you bounce the ball off of your paddle and around the window and the goal is to get rid of all of the blocks at the top by hitting them all with the ball. I wrote this from scratch in Visual Basic 6.0. The only thing that makes this game not cool was the fact that it was written in VB… Haha. You can download my version of the game here. You probably already have it, but if it triggers an error when you try to open it, you most likely need the VB6 Runtime files. You can actually play this game in Linux if you install the VB6 Runtime files in WINE, and then run JBreakout.exe in WINE afterwards… but for some reason, last time I tried (on my old laptop), the game runs in slow motion in Linux. Maybe it will work better for you…

I forgot to make a post about this…

I got a new laptop. I coincidentally got it in the mail on the day of LILUG in January, which I think was the 8th. It is definitely by far the best computer I’ve ever had, so far… It’s a MacBook Pro.

• 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 2GB 667MHz RAM
• nVidia GeForce 8600M GT (128MB VRAM)
• 15.4″ Matte Widescreen LCD - 1440×900
• 160GB 5400RPM HDD
• Atheros AR5418 - 802.11a/b/g/n

Unfortunately, Apple made a newer version 1 or 2 months afterwards that includes a few better features, like double the VRAM, 200GB HDD, and a 2.4GHz CPU instead… but it doesn’t really matter for me that much, since I don’t really game that much… and I don’t use up that much harddrive space since I only have 1GB of music, a few gigs of photos and videos… And the better CPU isn’t really that much of a difference for me since I don’t do much that actually needs a great CPU anyway; mine is already much better than I really need.

I have almost everything working perfectly with Linux. The iSight camera works perfectly and the quality is great. By default, the touchpad was extremely sensitive, but I wrote up my own xorg.conf file for the synaptics touchpad and now it’s pretty easy to use, although not as perfect as in OS X. There is basically only one problem. As stated above, this laptop has an atheros card and a dual core processor. Atheros cards in linux use a driver called Madwifi. Unfortunately, there is a bug in madwifi that only occurs with SMP (dual-core) CPUs, which causes me to lose my connection to my router after a few hours of usage, and I cannot reconnect (to ANY network) unless I reboot. I have been speaking to one of the developers, mentor, in the IRC channel (#madwifi@irc.freenode.net). I have been supplying him with some helpful logs and error messages of what is going on when I experience the problem. They are working on fixing that. Once they fix that, I can finally say that everything is working perfectly in Linux.

Ok… so… finally… the report card.
A LOT better than last year… except for that B+ in English11H.
If you’re wondering what happened there, it’s probably because my teacher complains that I am sleepy in class, even though I only fell asleep twice this entire year… and it was only for about 20-30 seconds. I was so close to straight As… Ahhhhh!

Ok… I got my schedule in the mail finally.

http://box.jaredbinder.com:443/schedule11.jpg

Not terrible… English first period… And then C++/Java Programming, and then Digital Electronics.

I just have to make sure I don’t fall asleep during English 1st period - Maybe I’ll go to sleep earlier than I did last year.

http://box.jaredbinder.com:443/classes.jpg - My classes for next year

Yeah…. those aren’t in the order of the periods that they’ll be in and everything… just a random list of the classes. Hopefully I don’t have a class in which I actually have to think next year for first period… (like I do this year… Chemistry). I better have like C++ and Java, or Digital Electronics, or maybe Gym.

Ahh… I want my schedule already!

Am I the only one that finds this amusing?
Well I thought it was funny so I copied it from a Lost DVD and submitted it to YouTube.
The original file is here, and will probably be less blurry, but you may need VLC Media Player in order to view it.