Status Update

I've installed Ubuntu through the Windows Installer, and I'm mighty impressed. I'm currently trying to switch it to a native install, but that isn't going very fast. (is currently running smart defrag and disk cleanup simultaneously)

Anyway, I've been planning a relaunch/rebranding/whatever you want to call it of Aetus Designs lately. I intend to move the focus away from the community to content. I will mostly likely be switching from SMF+SimplePortal to Wordpress+BBPress. I'm not sure of any of that though, so we'll just have to see what happens.

:(

Basically my computer's totally messed up.

Apparently, the registry was corrupted. I managed to fix that by replacing it with an old version (and struggling for the whole of yesterday). Now the problem is, nothing works. All the data is there, but no application I installed works, and it seems Windows doesn't even know they exist (probably because the registry doesn't match up or something).

So yeah, trying to uninstall every program manually and then reinstall it.

Just more of a incentive to switch to Linux I guess, I've wanted to switch since forever but the only reason holding me back was having all my programs on Windows. Now that's outta the way, I'm going to switch really, really soon. In fact, as soon as I finish downloading Ubuntu, which will take another 12 hours, so maybe a couple of days.

I couldn't get Photoshop CS2 to work on WINE last time, maybe it'll work this time. If it doesn't, well, I've heard a lot about Krita. And maybe I'll just settle down with the GIMP.

Also been trying to get into 3D recently, I don't like Blender, but Wings 3D + K3D seems nice. If only there were more tutorials....

So yeah, that's all for now.

Been Busy

So yeah, I've had exams. They'll be getting over tomorrow.

I've also been busy trying to resurrect activity on Aetus Designs. The community has been going slow lately, but other stats are getting better and better. We got around 7000 pageviews in December, along with ~2500 unique visitors. I'm hoping it gets better this month, but I've got my fingers crossed.

Aetus Designs also went ad free recently. Actually that was today, but whatever.

I also wrote a short introductory tutorial to the color theory today.

Also, Darkness Graphics listed my site in a list of tutorial sites. I'm flattered. :)

Short post, I know, but I really don't have anything else to say.

More coming soon.

Recursive Functions In Ruby

I was glancing through the Wikipedia entry for the programming language Lua, when something about recursive functions caught my eye. There was a code snippet that looked like this.

function factorial(n)
if n == 0 then
return 1
else
return n * factorial(n - 1)
end
end

The first thing that crossed my mind was- wouldn't that result in a infinite loop? Well, apparently not since retuning 1 would stop further execution.

For those who don't know, factorial is basically somewhat a mathematical function generally represented by a '!' symbol.

For example, 5! = 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 (* 1) = 120

Now, for some theory. A recursive function is basically one that calls itself. Pretty nifty, eh? It can result in much shorter code. However, it is essential that the function doesn't pass itself the same parameters it receives, since that would basically result in an infinite loop.

So I quickly knocked this up in irb(which is why there's all that weird punctuation).

>> def factorial(n)
>> if(n==0)
>> return 1
>> else
?> return n * factorial(n-1)
>> end
>> end
=> nil
>> factorial(5)
=> 120

Notice how much recursing helps shorten the amount of code needed. If you still can't appreciate the beauty of recursive functions, try writing a factorial function in ruby without any recursion.

Ruby Web Crawler

http://github.com/celebrus/smfffdir/tree

I started that sometime back, just as a experiment. Basically, you add URLs to crawl in one file, run the main script and it crawls all of those, gets their titles and stores both the URL and title in another file. I don't think I'll be doing anything more to it, basically all I need now is to get the search thing done.

You might find the source code interesting. It's not very well organized and all, but it may help you see how to use open-uri if you don't know how.

My first working shoes(ruby) script

Basically it calculates the length of a string you enter.
You can get a exe here. It will download shoes for you if you don't have it already.

Ruby Dice Rolling Script v2

Moving towards a shoes based GUI now. It calculates how much time executing the script took. That would help with showing a progress bar and stuff.