Okay, this is not going to be an IT post per-se.

But.

MICROSOFT IS SHUTTING DOWN ACES?

The team that created Microsoft Flight Simulator?! (Train Sim too,but still.)

):

ESP looks interesting though.

Raytracing

As quoted from Wikipedia, "Ray tracing is a technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light through pixels in a image plane."

In essence, you generate a ray for each pixel from the view point, then send it out to the world and then check for any collisions. Once there is a collision, generate another ray recursively to track the reflected/refracted ray.

Works perfect for translucent and shiny objects (reflection/refraction). Photorealistic images too!

Looks fun :D

Remember the post about Wii Remote hacks?

Given the lack of a bluetooth adapter in my laptop (and my sis's old Mac which had Java 1.5,and couldn't be updated to 1.6 - which meant WiiRemoteJ wouldn't work) - I had the brain blast of writing a WiiRemote app in my handphone using WiiRemoteJ.

Unfortunately it appears that the PSM value (the tcp/ip equivalent would be ports,from what I've read) was limited in JSR-82(java implementation of bluetooth), which meant that the wiimote can't connect to J2ME apps.

And, while trying to compile the WiiRemoteJ jar in the project, it turns out that J2ME only implements a small subset of java.util - without iterators and a few other stuff I forgot, which meant that I couldn't compile.

So there goes wiimote for handphone ):

Am I the only guy who goes around typing ' or 1 = '1 into almost every input form I see?

Doubt so,but it's still a rare talent

PushPop - the programmer's candy of choice.

FlightGear is a open-source flightsimulator. Free as in speech.

Awesome thing is, it utilizes a property tree,which allows you to access/edit ANYTHING(well almost. I think) within the simulator (MSFS however, afaik, needs to go through simconnect/fsuipc).

Best part about FlightGear? Not only does it have a totally awesome property tree, it exposes that property tree through a HTTP interface and a Telnet interface. Which means that you can edit almost anything within the server through the internet/LAN. And it being telnet and all, all you gotta do is write a wrapper class for your development language and you're all set to do magic.

Grabbed the connection class off the CVS website (yeah yeah, get a CVS client I know), started messing bout with it. Awesome stuff.

Given enough time, I'm pretty sure that one can fly from point A to point B on a totally different computer using a client connected through the telnet interface. I've already written code to remotely control the throttle (which was as easy as fsgs.set("controls/engine/engine/throttle",input);)

I'm pretty sure that one can send joystick/keyboard commands. Either that or map a aileron/elevator position to given joystick input (ailerons are "/controls/aileron/aileron-position" I think). Or have an instructors panel to remotely set failures, control the plane etc. Possibilities are endless!

In other words - FlightGear : Awesomely fun toy for the computer geek flightsimmer.
Hell,it's plenty good for flightsimmers who cant afford MSFS.

EDIT : Messing about with this painfully reminds me of how horrible I am at Java GUI programming. ):

Google Analytics is kinda useful, but good luck trying to access the current user accessing your blog via javascript - I have no idea how to access the header template ):

Spend a good hour trying to set logged-in blogspot user as user-defined value bah.

Anyone knows how? xD