bheesham persaud

Mistakes can be cool too.

2012-01-25T22:29:00.002-05:00

"We're ghosts"

Well, mistakes can be cool too.

This is a screenshot of the output for my virtual whiteboard application. I was tinkering around with it and decided to move some things around. I also decided to try a different method for isolating the things that moved, but that didn't work. I'll try again later however.

I've moved back to the old method, but I've kept the changes in the code that I've moved around. I'll look for another method later.

And with that, I bid you all a farewell to go play some Super Smash Bros. Melee!

Looking for a game engine

2012-01-21T20:10:00.002-05:00

Well, I'm no longer looking for one.

I found one, and it's called Cube 2: Sauerbraten.
I played Cube a lot before, and Assault Cube, which was based on Cube a lot.
Cube 2 is the redesigned version.

I probably won't end up creating anything playable, but I will have fun trying.

EDIT

I'll probably end up using Crystal Space 3D for the engine, simply because it has Python scripting, and because a part of Cube 2 doesn't quite work for me, and I can't seem to figure it out.

Cleaned up

2012-01-19T05:22:00.002-05:00

Well, I just removed a ton of posts from the blog simply because they were either

old
had dead links
old

I guess you won't be seeing them anymore, unless there's a cached version of this site floating around somewhere on the interwebs.

SPWiki

2012-01-19T04:54:00.005-05:00

I started to make my own wiki script simply because I didn't like any of the other wiki scripts.

As of right now, the current features are:

WYSIWYG Editing
Revisions (though viewing them is another story)
Caching (works well)
Easy templating

A parser is to be added to that list soon, along with simple wiki syntax.

I'll start debugging it after I get a few more edits done.

Here's the link to the github page.

GTA West Regionals - FIRST Robotics

2012-01-19T04:49:00.000-05:00

NOTE: Seriously though, this post is long overdue. I forgot to hit publish when I wrote it and soon forgot about it.

This is long overdue.

Team 1325 - Inverse Paradox, had the best possible outcome we could have at the Greater Toronto Area West Regionals for FIRST Robotics.

We were a finalist.
If we were in the winning alliance, we would have had no money to move onto the next stage in the competition.
So really, coming in as a finalist is the best outcome for our team.

I've got to say that it's been a lot of hard work, blood, tears, kicking and screaming, late nights and long weekends, but it has all been worth it. It was definitely worth it when we were up in the stands just watching, hoping with our fingers crossed that someone would pick us, and when we were picked, that was quite possibly the greatest moment of it all. Knowing that the hard work paid off and we'd be able to compete a little bit more.

Seeing as how it's my last year on the team, as well as the exec's, this was amazing for us. We got to compete for even longer, even if it was only for an hour or two, it was a few of the best hours we've had.

My virtual whiteboard

2012-01-19T04:37:00.005-05:00

I wanted to be able to use my webcam as a virtual whiteboard. You know, for when I don't want to use pen and paper. I remembered a friend of mine used OpenCV for one of his projects, and looked into it some more. As it turns out, OpenCV pretty much what I needed.

To avoid hard work and such, I got a few other libraries for Python. I used VideoCapture, PIL (Python Imaging Library), pygame and of course OpenCV.

To save me from having to explain in detail how it works, take a look at this awesome flowchart:

Here are some examples of some outputs:

Just the green layer

The difference between the old and new frames (RGB)

I'm making a fair bit of progress.
All I have to do now is allow the user to specify the colour of the tool that they want to use, and then three lines of code later, I can isolate the tool.

Pretty cool huh?

I'm not sure if I'll release this project at all, but I guess we'll see.
Right now, it's pretty inefficient. It can only work when my laptop is plugged in. I'll see what I can do about that, because that could be a problem. But other than that it works fine.

No update in a while

2011-11-27T21:11:00.000-05:00

I don't think anyone really needs a blog. I don't seem to have the time to update blogs anymore, though I do code a lot more than I should.
Even though I'm in University now, I still seem to slack off a lot on school work, etc and tend to work on my own projects. This isn't something I regret at the moment, but future me will probably hate present/past me for doing this.

Anyways, so I got a new laptop sometime in August. The Dell XPS 15z. I really like it, though it does have it's imperfections.

Such as:

I can't play massive games on it, as the WASD keys get near unbearably hot. I played Crysis on this laptop and it ran fine. It's a fun game, though a few minutes I noticed that it wasn't pleasant to use the WASD keys anymore. But it's still a fun game to play, using the keys at that point won't kill you, just be sure to take your fingers off them every once in a while.
When I close the laptop screen down, I can push down on the back of the screen and it'll have an indent.
I can't seem to find a linux distro that works with this laptop.

Anyways, I guess I'll blog in a few days/weeks/months. We'll see when it happens.

New site, new look.

2011-08-01T22:21:00.000-04:00

A wise man once told me that it didn't matter if someone else was using the same template as you were, it just matters what you make out of it. That's what I plan to do.

I was looking for a WordPress template for my portfolio/blog/cv/etc, but I couldn't find a good one. Then I remembered about Vostok. I really liked it, and I think that I'll stick with it. I made a few good modifications to it, and will keep doing so until I feel that it's just right for me.

This is all for Persaud.in by the way. That's going to be my portfolio, etc. I'm not sure if I should use that blog or have it redirect to here. I'll find out soon enough, but I'd like for everything to look consistent, and I have no intentions of changing the template of this blog.

- Bheesham

Silly obstacles

2011-05-13T16:22:00.000-04:00

I know I haven't blogged in a while... but school's almost over.
Do you know what that means?
I don't either. So let's give it a meaning.

Portal 2, more coding and more blogging.

Portal 2: Because it's just awesome and because I can't stand everyone else around me telling me how good it is.

Coding: So even though school still has a month left, and my teachers just love piling more work onto me, I've come up with a few ways to make one or more (I forget) of my projects slightly more efficient.
And also, I've decided to start using mongodb, simply because it's so easy to use and set up.

Blogging: Meh.

I must construct additional pylons

2011-04-14T22:18:00.000-04:00

Well, it kind of sucks when you run into a limit you can't get around when doing a project.
And this is exactly what I've run into.

I need a Project Voldemort installation to be able to continue working on my current project, and I don't have it. I won't be able to get it for at least a few months.

So this sucks.
I guess I'll stop with this project and move onto one where I don't foresee myself being stopped due to software and hardware requirements.

This is just an update of what I've been doing.
Wait a second, no it's not. I just told you what problem I ran into.

What I've been working on is a bot that will attempt to download all .torrent files, and just that. I have that part done, however I need a database to store all of this information. A database that won't fail if one of the nodes decides to go down (for maintenance or any other reason).

Now, as you can imagine, there are a lot of .torrent files on the internet, meaning that I'll need a lot of database space.

I split the bot up into two parts. There are probably more to come, but I thought that this was logical, seeing as how it's how I would go about downloading all the torrents.

Bot 1- URL
I need URL's. And lots of them. This bot goes out to torrent sites and gets the information URL for each torrent in a category.
It can currently gather about 2000 torrents in a minute, and this is with it being limited.

I ran into one major problem with this bot, but luckily, while being bored at a religious event, I thought up of the solution.
The problem was that the bot was using only one MySQL connection, and because of this it was trying to execute too many things at once.
So, naturally, I gave each thread it's own connection. That solves that. And it does that quite nicely.

Bot 2- Download
Well, now that I have the URL's, now I need to download them. This bot parses the information page and downloads the .torrent file.
It handles gzip compression. I added a site that gzips the content, and wondered why I when I parsed the torrent file using bencode, I got gibberish. So, hence I added gzip compatibility.

This bot gets some false positives on 404's. I'll need to do a bit of research into why this happens, but I'm not too concerned about it right now because it gets more than 80% of the .torrent files downloaded.

Well. It downloads the .torrent files into memory and attempts to parse it. With this parsed information, I get the name, the time it was created, the files in the torrent, and all the other things your torrent client would get.
I just need a place to store this all now.
I've been thinking of just outputting .xml files and having another bot insert all of the .xmls into a database.

So, as previously stated. I'll wait for a few months then start this project back up again.
Until then, I'll start working on something else.

A link checker in Python.
I've always been fascinated by Link Checkers. Don't even ask me why, because I wouldn't know how to answer you.

Anyways, that is all.

What I decided

2011-02-17T23:43:00.000-05:00

This blog will serve more as a future note(s) for myself.

First note:
Arch Linux + LXDE = Great.
Hours of research done can prove this. Unless I decide to do a set up of Gentoo, it won't get much better.

Second note:
Make this blog seem more professional.

Just created something

2011-02-13T17:22:00.000-05:00

Just created a new website script using CodeIgniter.

It's pretty much a site that you get pets, and each view levels them up.

I'll edit this when the script is set up.

EDIT: I discontinued the project. And no links shall be posted.

A glance into the future.

2011-01-05T16:10:00.001-05:00

This serves more as a note to myself than it does a blog entry to you.

After each of my projects seem to have a solid set of code (and at least the BETA versions are done), I'll make them each a github project.

The new Google code looks sexy btw.

I'll also be going though all my posts and removing all the dumb labels / tags. Ones like "yea" should be removed.

Anyways, that's all.

More to come?

2011-01-05T01:31:00.000-05:00

I've started back coding in general.

But I'm mainly coding a modification for phpBB3 for a forum I usually use. And by usually, I mean lurk on every day.

Anyways, I want to finish the portfolio script before exams, which are at the end of this month (or around that time).

I'll be working on it again. Finally :)

Anyways, stay tuned, but don't hold your breath.

It takes a while... but it's worth it.

2010-11-13T00:44:00.000-05:00

It took me a while to transfer a few of my projects from my Google Code page to GitHub.
It was a suggestion from the former leader of robotics (now attending the University of Waterloo).

I'm starting to remember how to use Git seeing as how I haven't used it in almost one year or so.

I'm actually very happy right now. Now people will be able to discover my work easier. Which means better work for me. Which means better things for you!

- Bheesham

Screen Shots of my backups

2009-11-26T17:52:00.001-05:00

Ever wonder where I keep my backups of my sites?
Ever wonder how many backups i keep of my sites?
Ever wonder what's the meaning of life?

Wonder no more!

Here's a screen shot of my backups folder.

Don't ask about the abbreviations such as... FEDB... or GCFILES.

gc-Link Checker BETA v0.0.1

2009-11-08T12:25:00.001-05:00

The gc-Link Checker is now Officially Released!

Well… it’s still in it’s Beta versions… so you know that there… might be some more updates for it.

Go to the Wiki page… the you will be able to read up on stuff like… “How to install gc-Link Checker“, or… the Server Requirements.

Click here to go to the Wiki page.

Click here to download gc-Link Checker Beta v0.0.1.

[WCDDL] Adanced Blacklist

2009-10-25T13:53:00.001-04:00

Yep. I finally re-did it. It works (according to someone that tested it).

So yea. It's a really basic script. Doesn't allow you to edit though....

Updates will come later for it... maybe a lot later depending on how much time I have.

View it on Pastebin.

View it on File Empire.

O.. I'll add this to the gc-projects google code page later on. Not now becuase I still need to update somethings.

O, if you use this, then please link back to File Empire.

If you don't then I will reserve the right to NOT help you out if you ask... depending on how I feel.

gc-DDLAutoSubmitter Beta v0.0.1

2009-10-24T13:57:00.000-04:00

Well… I’m glad to say that gc-DDLAutoSubmitter is released.

Anyways… it is now Beta v0.0.1 . Over time more updates and stuff will come… though right now it’s kind of good. It serves it’s purpose, really customizable (if you know what you’re doing) and it’s light weight (really lightweight).

On the Wiki page, you’ll be able to read what exactly gc-DDLAutoSubmitter is, what are the requirements, how to install it, and most importantly… the features added / the changelog.

Click here to go to the Wiki page.

Click here to download gc-DDLAutoSubmitter beta v0.0.1.

Woah.... updates?

2009-10-19T17:01:00.001-04:00

Wow. I started Grade 11 this year... and might I just say that I get TONNES of homework.

SO I haven't been able to code much... but that doesn't mean that I haven't been coding. =D

Well, we all know what that Advanced blacklist MOD for WCDDL was a fail. So I totally re-made it. It works perfectly for me. I'm thinking of releasing it or not.

Also... there's this site I was coding for a friend. It's Newslators. It's basically a news site that people (you the users) submit content to. Then it's all listed by date and rating. It's still in development though.

Plus, I gave my website a new look (yesterday it was finalized). Check it out!.

I know I haven't been blogging much... and I'll try to blog as much as I can... I'm only human.

So yea... I've got some great ideas for things to code... and my brother is supposed to buy me a domain today. :) The website is going to be purely about programming... mainly around warez... but other stuff is welcomed. A friend suggested that I made my own DDL Script... it's not a bad idea.

Nothin's wrong with WCDDL or anything... I just want to see what would happen if there's another DDL script... because there aren't too much good ones.

Also... I might make my blog on the programming site that I'm going to set up in a few weeks (days hopefully)... so yea... not that anyone visits here anyways. Though all the times that I moved blogs it phailed....

Oh... and one more thing. I've apparently got an invite to Google Voice in my Inbox on my GMail account... but for some strange reason... it's not available in Canada. This kind of pisses me off. I'm seriously thinking of calling the Google HQ in Toronto and... tell them something. XD

Well... that would seem like a good update.

I'll finish with a joke.
Look in the mirror.

At school

2009-05-04T08:52:00.002-04:00

Well... I'm at school. It's kinda boring... and I need a proxy to update a MOD for WCDDL!

>_> Still first period and I have a Math... summative/culminating/dunno what next period....

BUT there is something good about this day... I don't know what it is yet, when I find it I'll blog about it.

O

The good thing.
I'm using Cain and Abel to see people's account info. Pretty cool. Their passwords and usernames are funny... and some are just fail.

My Uploads?

2009-04-23T17:04:00.002-04:00

Wow I uplaoded a lot to a hosting site called hotfiles.com
If you upload a file that is between 100-400MB, and it gets 1000 downloads then they will pay you $10.
So far i only got $0.03...
How much downloads is that?
Thats 3 downloads or so.
Check it out here
Please sign up through the referral... :)

Wow epic fail.

2009-04-16T19:50:00.003-04:00

So my blog didn't last long... wow. That was an epic fail of events.
Well... now what? <-- It's the question I ask myself everyday... and every 5 minutes.

I guess I can always use this blog... for now >_> (or maybe forever until the hosting stays free).
Lot's of fails happening in my life....

My blog is Semi-back!

2008-12-03T21:16:00.000-05:00

Well... I'm still interested in blogging BUT I still have my school work and running my own site to take care of... so I won't blog as much. Here I will blog about like... anything I want to I guess.

Well... stay tuned!