Projects Comments turned off

WARNING: Suelake.com = not me

By Nils on May 28th, 2011

Recently it has come to my attention that someone has bought Mike’s old expired domain www.suelake.com and put up some new site there, looking like a copycat-clone of the original Suelake.com. A copy-paste text there implies that ‘nils@suelake.com’ is my new MSN address. This is not true and please, do not fall for any scamming and bullshit activities by the person behind this email address. I couldn’t care less who it is this time, but text is just to notify y’all that Suelake.com isn’t my website anymore. Its also impossible that you’ll ever see someone else running Suelake.com again in the future, as nobody outside our ‘circle of trust’ has the emulator software that was developed and used back then.

I have disabled comments for this blog post as I’m just done with Suelake.com and Habbo in general. Thank you for your understanding.

Life, Tech 1,370 comments

iPhone 4

By Nils on December 13th, 2010

Howdy howdy, long time no read. Well, no recent material. Apple-time.

Isn't she loveely

As some of you know I’m still on my prepaid Samsung U600 which I’ve had for two years now. Wanted to get a HTC Desire HD but ultimately decided to go for the Apple iPhone 4 because I love my iPod touch and iOS etc etc, plus I wanted to merge it all into one device. So, iPhone 4 it was, 16 GB model. Last week (Wednesday) I ordered it with a Vodafone contract online, received it Saturday. All nice and shiny, popped in SIM-card and powered it on.

wat

Yeah, that kinda was the screen I saw. Shutdown the iPhone, removed SIM-card, cleaned it with a soft cloth, etc. Retried, same issue. Spent half a day trying to get it working. As according to the instructions that came from where I ordered the iPhone, it should display a ‘UNLOCK’-prompt asking for the SIM PIN lock, ‘0000′. Well, not for me! Weird stuff, I started thinking that the SIM-card would be faulty etc. Until Jordan asked me to check the serial number + model number, turned out to be a T-Mobile Germany locked model. What is this shit! Turned out to be even weirder, because after looking up the serial number on www.appleserialnumberinfo.com, the model number for that serial number was a different one than the one printed at the back of the box. So the phone seems to be the simlocked German T-Mobile 16 GB version, and… that isn’t going to work with my Vodafone NL SIM. It was so frustrating because I finally had my iPhone 4 but the only thing I could do was touching it, telling it how beautiful it is. Switching it on and off, making it vibrate by switching the ’silent mode’-switch, licking it. Dialing 911, tears in my eyes. Bad times. :(

So, today (Monday) I called up the website where I purchased it and explained the situation. They were like ‘huh but according to the serial number it’s a unlocked iPhone’ etc. And I was like ‘whatever, the serial number is dodgy too and whatever and whatever’. So they told me to RMA it and that’s what I just did and my contract has already started etc, almost Holidays, etc. Let’s hope this gets sorted out fast, can’t wait. :)

Update 14 Dec 2010: today they received my phone and tested it with another Vodafone SIM and it worked. Don’t ask me why and how and what, but they are sending it back with a new SIM card so it should be here tomorrow. :D

Life, Tech 1,007 comments

Finally… new interwebs

By Nils on August 25th, 2010

Today we finally got a new internet connection in our lovely house. The previous package was 1.5 Mb/s (Megabit) down, 0.5 Mb/s up, dating back to 2004. A few months ago this was downgraded (for no good reason) to 1 Mb/s download speed, 110 kb/s max, meaning a gigabyte would take more than two hours to download.

We now have ‘digital TV and telephony’, with a new internet connection equipped with 20 Mb/s download and 4 Mb/s upload speed, this is the speed advertised and it can vary. We also have a new router now so my struggles with portforwarding are over. Previously this  required disconnecting all devices, deleting them in the administration panel, disconnecting the DSL line, connecting the device that I wanted to have the public IP (my MacBook Pro for example), then reconnecting and hoping it received my public IP. Then I could portforward and host a webserver. After a power on/off of the router everything was gone and I had to do it all over again.

These issues led to alot of frustration in the past and I had to resort to LogMeIn Hamachi when I wanted to host something on my computer, let alone downloading movies, games, music and gaming online. When one person in our house was downloading/gaming online, it was practically impossible to play online or even browse the web. Drama. :(

Bless...

Fortunately this is all over now, so I can finally start adding some music to my collection, try out some new games (Steam!) and host stuff at my computer. If you are on my MSN list: expect to see links to my webserver in convos more often haha. I use MAMP on my MacBook Pro for Apache/MySQL/PHP btw.

On a side note, yesterday I reinstalled Windows 7 on my desktop. It got kinda messy since I started using my Mac, the Mac made me reckless with computers because I just can’t mess my Mac up. So, for the first time in 3 years I’ve seen viruses on my own computer and I was like ‘meh, just reinstall the damn thing’. :)

Life, Tech 6,762 comments

Chuck Norris & Programming

By Nils on August 10th, 2010

Today I stumbled on some Chuck Norris programming jokes. Would like to share ‘em with you guys. Some of them had me crack up quite a bit.

  • “Chuck Norris doesn’t need a debugger, he just stares down the bug until the code confesses.”
  • “All arrays Chuck Norris declares are of infinite size, because Chuck Norris knows no bounds.”
  • “Chuck Norris doesn’t need try-catch, exceptions are too afraid to raise.”
  • “Chuck Norris can’t test for equality because he has no equal.”
  • “Chuck Norris doesn’t need to use AJAX because pages are too afraid to postback anyways.“
  • “Chuck Norris never has to “sudo” any command. In fact, unbeknownst to everyone, UNIX aliases “sudo” to “chucknorris_mode”
  • “Chuck Norris protocol design method has no status, requests or responses, only commands.” and “Chuck Norris programs do not accept input.”
  • “Chuck Norris never gets “data-truncated” error. Instead, his run-time environment logs “variable-extended”.”
  • “Chuck Norris doesn’t use web standards as the web will conform to him.”
  • “No one has ever pair-programmed with Chuck Norris and lived to tell the tale”
  • “Chuck Norris can retrieve anything from /dev/null”
  • “Chuck Norris types with 2 fingers. He points them at the keyboard and the keyboard does the rest.”
  • However… “Chuck Norris doesn’t use a computer because a computer does everything slower than Chuck Norris”

The man himself

Chuck does more than coding. Infact, he does everything, including, but not limited to:

  • “When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the Earth down. “
  • “Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.”
  • “Chuck Norris’ tears can cure cancer. Too bad he never cries.”
  • “Chuck Norris counted to infinity. Twice.”
  • “Chuck Norris does not believe in God. God believes in Chuck Norris.”

I’m risking my life by making fun of Chuck Norris, so if you got any cool facts to add: fill out the form & bang on reply and we’ll meet in Hell. Chuck please spare us. :(

Sources
Top 50 Chuck Norris Facts
Chuck Norris Programming Facts

Projects 2,244 comments

Tunar + Tunar Discussion Environment

By Nils on July 31st, 2010

Wow, I just remembered I still have a blog! And that I haven’t posted since June 17th! Time for some updates… :D

Me
I’ve graduated from Dutch ’secondary school’ / ‘high school’ and I’ll be studying computer science in September. I also went for a 8 days summer vacation with friends to Sunny Beach, Bulgaria. Great stuff. My MacBook Pro is doing great aswell and I might buy an iPhone 4 in September. On to the projects…

Tunar PHP framework
Jordan and me always wanted to write a decent framework in PHP, but it never really worked out between us two because of conflicts over system design. So, I started on my own, ‘Tunar-niggus’. Its a very barebony MVC framework with the usual View and Controller stuff, URL routing, input validation, but I skipped the ‘Model’ part in MVC. I never liked the bloated autoquery (SQL database) generators in framework such as CakePHP, so I didn’t went with that approach. However, UPDATE and INSERT queries are built on the fly (SQLDatabase->update()) and this works great. It also returns generated IDs for easy insertion of records. You still have to write your own SELECT queries, but I’ve always liked the freedom this gave you into using JOINs or functions such as MAX() etc. It also has caching wrappers for APC or a custom, lastresort, filecache. (serialize() / unserialize() approach)

Forum software
I’m developing this framework at the same time as I’m developing forum software from scratch, dubbed Tunar Discussion Environment (TDE for short). Forum software has always been challenging me. There are alot of solutions out of there, but there’s always room for improving and… unique features!
“You shouldn’t write your own forum software, there are timetested solutions available on the net!”
Well, yes, there sure are. You have vBulletin, Invision Power Board and even free products such as phpBB and MyBB. Still, they are not what I am looking for. And more important, I love designing, creating and testing new stuff, so why not develop my own software? A great example of how this can work out is shown at FOK!forum, the largest Dutch forum and one of the largest forums on the net. It runs on custom, nowhere-else-used forum software called Replique, written in PHP aswell. It is closed source and developed by a Dutch guy, who also uses it for his blog. Replique is vastly different from other forum systems, in features, namings, usage and all that stuff. And Replique is what inspired me to develop my own forum software, meaning I’m also incorporating a few of it’s ‘unique features’. ;)

On to the progress…

  • Breadcrumbing, can be hyperlinks (like index > [forumname] -> [topicname])
  • Event codes, all notification messages have event/error codes like TDE_FORUMNOTFOUND and TDE_SESSION_EXPIRED, show up with their numerical representation to users
  • Sessions, users can login and logout to their account, sessions are stored in the database and can be logged out remotely. Users can also attach a label/location to their sessions, such as ‘laptop’, ‘work’, etc. Sessions can optionally be locked to IPs, so they will invalidate automatically when used from a different IP than the address the session was started with
  • User registration with email activation link
  • Reset password with email reset link
  • Forums and other frequently requested objects are cached for a while to eliminate the majority of the database queries
  • Forum index with categories, forums, subforums, last posttime, amount of topics/posts etc
  • Browse subforums + topics in forum, showing with title, poster, posticon, locked topics, stickied topics, etc
  • Create topics in forums where you have posting rights
  • Browsing topics and posting replies, postcount increments if the forum is configured this way (ability to have ‘Spamzilla’ forums)
  • Topics and post have posticons, and moderators can set a ‘moderation note’ for a topic, like ‘Don’t post Facebook links to the people that you might know from Harry’s post, it will lead to a ban!’
  • Basic BBcode implementation ([b], [i], [img], [url], [s], [center], etc), to be expanded with smilies and things such [quote]
  • Edit your posts and calculate procentual difference between text
  • View posthistory and profiles of users
  • Session manager so users can see their open sessions, reset/delete/log them out, etc

In Tunar, application/business logic is completely separated from the presentation (HTML for example). So, Tunar is easy to skin/layout/template/theme. The default layout is, to complete my adoration for Replique… the default layout of FOK!forum, it’s dubbed ‘baggerlayout’ and soon it will be gone due to FOK! switching to a new type of layout. So, I’m having Bart replicate their current baggerlayout as much as possible. On first sight, Tunar Discussion Environment looks alot like a FOK! clone, hahaha. :P

Screenshots

Description below the image. If you can’t see the full image (I need a new WordPress theme…), then rightclick -> View Image, or whatever your browser wants you to do. ‘Iceberg’ is the name of my testing forum by the way.

Database

Forum index, categories and their forums

Login

Registration of new user

Browsing a forum

Browsing a topic (no real layout yet)

Adding a reply, also no real layout yet

Remember, these are just screenies of the current state in the current FOK! baggerlayout replica. It’s about the logic behind it…

Code

Three snippets of current code. The URL routing system works like: http://site.com/user/profile/1337… will route to a call to UserController::profile(1337) No need to write URL routing mappings (but I might make something to override this).

UserController class

TopicController class

ForumController class

Plans
Tunar-niggus, the PHP framework, will probably be released under the GPL when it’s more mature. The forum software will be either used privately or sold in some way.

Wow, long post. Enjoy & leave your thoughts! :)

Life 1,124 comments

I think I’ll just leave this here…

By Nils on June 17th, 2010

HALLON BLOG MTE NILS NOU IK BEN GWN GESLAAGT HOOR , VET IEDEAAL , MOOIEN CIJVERLIJST DENK IK NOU IK SPREKE EJ NGO WLE GREOTJENS EN ENE POODT VAN DE HONT JAMES

:)

Gaming 1,231 comments

Team Fortress 2: out for Mac and Free-to-Play weekend

By Nils on June 11th, 2010

Yesterday was the big day: Valve released their highly successful classbased multiplayer game for Apple’s Mac. Ofcourse we are talking about Team Fortress 2, originally released back in 2007. I started playing it since April 2010 or something and I love it, let my 50+ hours on record vouch for that. Valve has ported the Source engine to OS X using OpenGL, and Portal, Half-Life 2 + episodes are already released & playable. CounterStrike: Source is still in beta and other new Valve games will be released simultaneously on Mac and PC. Read all about the Mac release here.

The developers also brought some new updates! Among them are the new menu layout, offline training modes and, if you play on a Mac before 14th, a free pair of earbuds (iPod style) to wear as a hat on your player. Cool thing with TF2 is that your ‘loadout’ (weapons, hats, achievements, items) are persistent and available on all servers that you play on. So, you can now immediately recognize ‘us’ Mac players by the white earbuds! Isn’t that neat?!

Segregration is a bitch! Oh well, these earbuds are still nice

Ofcourse I still prefer my Windows 7 desktop (with 20″ screen) over the MacBook for gaming, but it’s great to know that I can also play it at my notebook now. I’ll have to connect a USB mouse though, as playing a FPS online with the Trackpad is not cutting it. Well, I’m already replaying HL2 at the Mac – with the trackpad, and that goes surprisingly well!

Heh Niggus what is this TF2 stuff all about? I have never heard of it?
Shame on you! TF2 is my favorite online FPS and it has it’s own distinct art style, humor, classes, etc. Also if you’ve never really liked games like Battlefield 2 / Call of Duty, then you might love TF2. Infact, I do! You can try it out for FREE this weekend, and you can also purchase it with a 50% discount. Click here to get started!

TF2 (like other Valve games) comes with the Source SDK, which includes Hammer, the map editor. I’ll have a crack at that later. Anyway, happy TF2′ing. This game is awesome. :)

Life, Tech 2,908 comments

So I herd you liek MacBooks…

By Nils on May 19th, 2010

Hey guys, guess where I’m typing this new post on! ;)

17 May was the big day, my final exams started and when I came home, I was silently hoping that UPS would stop by to deliver my ordered MacBook Pro 13″ 2010, which I had ordered roughly two weeks earlier. And yes, they did!

The UPS guy brought me two packages:

  • INCASE 13″ Neoprene MacBook Pro sleeve (gray)
  • MacBook Pro 13″ box

So I immediately started unboxing the whole stuff as I had waited for it so long. I promised to make pictures but I don’t have a camera… (except for my Samsung U600 which doesn’t make good pics) When I get my hands on my dads cam I’ll make some pictures.

First impressions: this thing is awesome. You just open the box, take out the laptop and press the little power button on the right. You’ll hear some ‘zoooooom’ sounds, 15 seconds of booting and then the Setup Assistant starts up with a cool video. Within 10 minutes from unboxing I was already connected to WiFi. I am fairly new to OS X, Apple’s operating system, so it was all very exciting and stuff. :)

Things that you notice when you pickup the laptop is how solid it feels, there are no screws, removable parts or whatever on it. The display is a GORGEOUS glossy 13.3″ widescreen LED display (1280 x 800 native), the screen is really bright and colors look vivid thanks to the glossyness. Even the keyboard is backlit and automatically dims itself to the environment thanks to the built-in ambient light censor, which is next to the built in iSight webcam. On the left side of the notebook there’s a:

  • MagSafe power connector where you connect the power cord to, it’s magnetic so when someone trips over the power cord, it just snaps out. Prevents getting your laptop pulled from teh table!
  • Ethernet port
  • Firewire 800 port
  • Mini Display Port for connecting the laptop to an external display
  • 2x USB 2.0
  • SD card slot
  • Audio in / out for connecting line in / headphones / external sound system
  • A very cool button, when you push it, leds show up on the side of the notebook showing how much battery juice there is left

Right side is very sleek and only has:

  • Slotloading DVD drive (burning + doublelayer) that Apple calls a ‘SuperDrive’
  • Something for connecting a laptop lock to

The keyboard is, as I said, backlit and types awesome. I did some coding on it and was surprised by how pleasant this is. However, probably my favorite feature of this machine is the Trackpad. It’s a large glassy area below the keyboard, where you can put your finger on to move the mouse cursor, perform clicking and multi-touch gestures such as rotating, zooming, scrolling, swiping etc. Similar to the iPhone / iPod touch. Cool thing: when you put four fingers on the Trackpad and swipe up, you go to desktop. Swipe back, and the windows restore to their position. Very handy! :)

When you close the lid of the laptop, the illuminated Apple logo on the top fades out, and when you put the notebook in SleepMode (it wakes really fast by the way!), a small other led flashes on the side of the laptop. That’s awesome! :D

Then, OS X. Probably the main reason that made me buy this notebook. This OS is epic, it’s based on UNIX (FreeBSD), so it has alot of similarities. It looks gorgeous GUI-wise, with sparkling icons, animations etc. It’s also very easy in use, for example, installing/removing apps is as simple as downloading it, dragging the icon to the ‘Applications’ folder on the Dock = app installed! Removing an app = drag it’s icon to the trashcan and it will remove it + associated data.

This laptop is really snappy by the way, it feels snappier than my Windows 7 desktop (freshly installed), which is odd, as my desktop is obviously better-specced.

Main things that make me love this notebook so much:

  • Mac OS X, I really start to love this operating system. It’s so seamless and snappy and easy to use, everything explains itself lol
  • The display, it’s really shiny, vivid & bright. In combination with OS X’s Spaces + Expose (swipe @ trackpad), you have virtually unlimited space for windows etc. When I need more screen estate (Photoshop?) -> hook it up to external display
  • Trackpad, I haven’t connected a mouse so far and I doubt that I’ll need/want it!
  • Battery, I’ve been using it all over the house with all kinds of stuff (videos/word processing/ playing Portal in Steam) and it lasts me like 6 hours on one single charge. I think that most energy was consumed because of me playing Portal lol
  • The hardware. The notebook just looks so sexy with it’s aluminium and illuminated Apple logo, sleek solid industrial design, black bezel around the screen and backlit keyboard, Sleep indicator, battery status button and so on <3

Guys, I REALLY love this thing. I haven’t touched my Windows PC since Monday haha. I hope to write some more about it soon, but I’m currently studying for my History finals that take place Friday (21th). Until then: cya and thanks for reading! :D

Life, Tech 1,368 comments

Waiting for my MacBook Pro…

By Nils on May 10th, 2010

Well, I did it! 30th of April I placed my order for the new MacBook Pro 13″ in Apple’s online Store.

The line-up was refreshed the 13th of April, with better batteries and GPUs. The more expensive 15″ and 17″ models have got Core i5 and Core i7 dualcore CPUs now, while the 13″ range sticked with Core 2 Duo and got a little speed bump. All models now have 4 GB DDR3 memory by default.

My order
My order was for the 13″ model, since I need a portable notebook – and I really wanted a Mac. The price diff between a 13″ and a 15″ is 500 – 600 euros, which was outside my budget. So it was either getting the 13″ MacBook Pro or no MBP at all. A 15″ would have been great too, but this is why I went with the 13″:

  • I don’t need a beefed up CPU/GPU, this notebook isn’t for gaming/video editing etc
  • 500-600 euros for 26% more pixels (1280 x 800 vs 1440 x 900) isn’t worth it for me
  • I don’t even have 500 – 600 euros extra to spend! ;)

That’s why I ordered the 13″ model, but I increased the HDD size to 320 GB (instead of the stock 250 GB). This costed 39 euros or so and I couldn’t resist that!

<3

Dutch keyboard layout (NLD)
I noticed that when you buy a Apple notebook here in The Netherlands or order a default configuration online, you get a ‘Dutch keyboard layout’. Sounds fine eh? Well, it isn’t! Even though Dutch is our national language, all Dutchies here use the ‘USA/English’ layout. Differences are the enter, shift, tilde (~) keys and a few more. Even all laptop retailers here sell their laptops with USA/English layouts, but Apple doesn’t. To get the usual USA/English layout, you have to order a custom configuration (CTO / BTO) online. This also means that it will be built in Shanghai (China), so it takes a week or so before it ships.

So, my custom configuration consisted out of:

  • MacBook Pro 13″ 2.4 GHz / 4 GB DDR3 / NVIDIA 320M
  • 320 GB HDD instead of 250 GB
  • USA/English keyboard layout instead of Dutch

Sleeve & spendings
Next to the notebook I also ordered a sleeve for 13″ MacBook Pros (Incase Neoprene sleeve, €39 euros). I got a student discount of 12%, so my total spending were €1085 euros. I’m fully aware that you can get a PC (Windows) laptop with better hardware specs for 50% of the money, but I wanted a Mac so badly after running it in dualboot / VMware and seeing it in the store etc. Mac OS X runs better on lower-specced hardware than PC laptops, because both the hardware and software (OS) are made by Apple. So the hardware is finetuned for the software and vice-versa. What I get now is a…

  • Super portable, lightweight aluminium unibody Apple notebook with a 13.3″ LED-lighted screen
  • Mac OS X, Apple’s operation system. I’ll dualboot it with Windows 7 though for when I need Visual Studio
  • 10-hours battery (according to Apple, convert to real-world values… 7 – 8 hours, that’s ALOT)
  • Multi-touch trackpad which is awesome, I have used it in the Apple Store and was amazed how awesome this is. Haven’t got a mouse with it, might connect a USB mouse for games
  • Notebook sleeve (Incase Neoprene 13″)

Usage
This will be my first notebook (and first Mac) and I’ll be taking it to college (comp science) and where not. As I said, the order was placed the 30th. My bank payment was processed May 3rd and it shipped from Shanghai the 7th. The online Order Status says that it will arrive 21 – 22 May, but I expect that it will be sooner. Valve’s Steam (online gaming platform) will come to the Mac 12th of May, so when I finally get the laptop I’ll be sure to install Team Fortress 2 etc on it!

I can’t wait to receive the laptop and I’ll surely post more info on it when I get it. Heck, I’ll even make some pictures for you guys! :) I’d also like to thank all of you that have donated to me in the past weeks, these donations have greatly helped me in making this purchase. This notebook will be used for a long time before I pass it on to my brother/sister, so really: thanks guys! :D

* Nils resumes F5′ing at the Order Status page

Projects 138 comments

Short Suelake.com Tribute Video

By Nils on April 29th, 2010

A short tribute video to Suelake.com, showing you some features that alot of the users have never seen.

The song in the video is ‘Still Alive’ by Jonathan Coulton. However, this is the version used as the ‘credits song’ of Portal, a game by Valve.

Enjoy, oh and there’s more stuff at the Suelake.com Gallery page too! ;)