The Great Phone Debate

I've been in far too many discussions about what smartphone people should jump to.  I've seen people argue for everything from iPhones to Blackberries (Right when they were dying).  It's always interesting to see why people choose the phones they do, but I do think that each phone (iPhone, Android, Windows Phones, etc.) serve their own purposes.  So with the announcements of the new iPhones, Android phones, and Windows phones, I figured I would make a short guide based on my observations for this.  As a couple of notes: I have owned multiple iPhones, Android phones, and of course the classic flip phones.  I've used Windows phones and Blackberries that friends have, and have of course looked into each of these based on my needs.

Standing out in a World of Code

This is an interesting question that I've been asked a whole lot recently.  A lot of people want to know how they can make their code stand out for jobs, and what it takes to do so.  The interesting thing is, you don't have to be a fantastic coder to do so.  In fact, standing out is pretty simple in the world of software development, you just have to know yourself fairly well.  So for today's post, I want to go over a few ways that can help you stand out, whether it's at your school, a job interview, or just online in general, here are my top three tips for standing out in today's world of code!

Is C++ a Relevant Language?

This has been a nagging question to me for a few years now, and is part of the reason I stopped coding as much a few years ago, only to pick it back up again over the past two years: Just how useful is it to learn a programming language like C++?  No, I'm not talking about python wrappers for it, or C#, or something "similar" like Java (and no, they are not similar like you may think).  I'm talking about low level C++, down to the metal, with just you and your compiler (IDE optionally too).  Had you asked me 2 years ago, I probably would have said C++ is just for gaming.  Ask me now, and I'll tell you it is still one of the most relevant languages out there.  Let's go over a few things about why C++ is a big deal, and why you should learn it if you don't know it.

Setup for 3DS Homebrew

Well, it's finally here!  The 3DS homebrew scene is live and ready to start.  With everything out in the open, I thought I'd do a quick tutorial on how to install everything to your 3DS, and what you can and can't do with it.

Setting up your 3DS

The first thing you will need is a 3DS (duh), an SD Card, internet access on your 3DS, and the game "Cubic Ninja".  This can either be a physical cartridge, or the version off of the Nintendo eShop (Japan only) [This has been taken down as of now].  Once you have this, go to the main menu of Cubic Ninja, select "Create", then select "QR code", and finally select "Scan QR Code".  This should open up a view from your 3DS' camera, and allow you to scan a QR code with it.

Once there, go to http://www.smealum.net/ninjhax/ and select your 3DS version, click submit, and it should present you with a nice QR code you can scan.  Scan this with your 3DS and you should see a screen like this pop up:

Don't forget to make sure that your 3DS has an internet connection as well to download part of the exploit.  Now you can choose to either run a homebrew application, or install it to the save file of the game.  This allows you to not have to worry about using the QR code in the future or needing an internet connection, so I highly recommend doing this, as it can be uninstalled later if you so choose.  Once this is done, you are all set and can begin using homebrew applications!

Running Homebrew

To run homebrew applications, you simply need to put the a boot.3dsx file on the root directory of your SD card, and then when you launch NinjHax, it will run your application.  My recommendation is to download a homebrew launcher and just leave that as the file, so that you can launch other homebrew applications with it.  It's a pretty simple process, but if you have questions, feel free to post them below.

To add other homebrew applications to the homebrew launcher, simply create a folder called "3ds", and place folders contain the boot.3dsx files of homebrew applications within there.  If you wish to make icons for your games, simply place them in an application's directory as "icon.bin" files.  You can use the SMDH tool included with devkitPro to make them, or look into my application over at https://github.com/gemisis/SMDH-Creator (Windows only).

When it comes to what you can run, please be aware that this does NOT run pirated games.  It ONLY runs homebrew applications.  We do NOT support piracy and will NOT be adding support in.

Deleting Homebrew

Should you ever wish to delete the homebrew save file on Cubic Ninja, all you have to do is hold L+R+X+Y on the main menu, and it will prompt you to delete the game's save data.  Click yes, and poof!  All of the homebrew stuff will be gone.  This can also be used to update the launcher in the future, as you can just delete it, and then reinstall it.

Creating Homebrew

Creating homebrew is a bit trickier, and requires knowledge of C.  As of right now, most of the tools are available from https://www.github.com/smealum/ctrulib.  There is also a quick install tutorial there, though I may add one on here in the future if a need arrives.  Using the libraries is a topic for another post, so I'll try to go over making a simple application at another time.

I hope this all seems pretty straight forward!  If you have can questions or comments, post them below!  Happy homebrewing!

Cooking up Hash Tables

Originally I was thinking I should rename this post, but I've decided to go ahead and keep the name since I find it kind of funny. That said, hash tables are super cool, and a really important data structure that I believe you should absolutely know.  Even Googlers says they are one of the most important data structures around.  So how exactly do you implement a simple hash table?  Let's go ahead and explore this!

A Shady Browser

Before I begin, this is yet another post inspired by Michael C. Johnson, so I just want to give another shout-out to him!  Most of the code from this is just re-purposed code from http://www.learningwebgl.com/ as well due to laziness, so shout out to them too!

With all of this talk about shaders, I started thinking about the best way to demonstrate shaders through my blog.  I think they're pretty neat to mess with, and are very important to understand how to use due to the fact that they play such a huge role in 3D graphics today.

Fading with Shaders

This is a fun little post I thought I could do really quick.  While I'm still getting the hang of using shaders and such, recently I thought of something that I thought was kind of clever to do with shaders.  This is a quick post about what the problem was and how I solved it.  Shout out to Michael C. Johnson for suggesting to blog about this!

The Current World of Virtual Reality

For the past few months I've spent some time with the Oculus Rift, and have gotten to learn the basic ins and outs of how to make virtual reality applications, where the market for it is going, and some of the challenges that come along with it.  It's been quite a fun experience, and while I am no means an expert now, I feel pretty comfortable with my ability to use these technologies and develop applications for them should I ever need to.  While I plan to slowly add-on new features to Project Virtua as needed, there is not much more to do on it as of now, and so I've decided to start looking into other realms of technology to mess with.  This post is a quick summary of some of the things I've learned, as well as some of my views on where this technology should go.  While I won't be super active on these technologies, I will still post some things about them, so don't count me out completely.  Specifically, I have a few games I would like to code for it that I plan to start sometime over the summer if I can muster up the free time!

Project Virtua Demo - Using Just the Rift

This is a quick tutorial on how to get a simple Oculus Rift demo up and running with Project Virtua.  The library is designed to be quick and easy to use, with little to no extra work on the developer or users end.  We will also be using the MiddleMan library included with Project Virtua to create the basic window scene and handle the model rendering for our basic floor, though I will not cover their usage in this tutorial (see the Github code at the end for that, it's pretty easy to use).

Hack it! - A TV Show Idea

This was an idea for a TV show I had right before falling asleep one night. Unfortunately I don't have the ability to execute such a show, so I figured I'd share the idea online for those who do since I think it has a lot of potential.  If you are interested in picking it up, feel free to, though I'd love to help out where I can if possible, as well as some credit!

Project Virtua - Create the Future

With the very recent announcement that Facebook has bought Oculus VR, I've already seen quite a few people who are absolutely horrified at this.  Minecraft with official Oculus Rift support has been canceled, I received a few messages of people who were worried, and I myself was very concerned after hearing this news.

But then, I thought about what I had read.

Facebook, a company whose CEO talks all the time about a connected world, a company who Microsoft has a large stake in, a company with easily over one billion users, has acquired Oculus VR, a company that wants to bring virtual reality to the masses, a company that has re-ignited the virtual reality future of the 90's, a company that has incredible visions of the future.

Think about what a company like Facebook could do for the Oculus Rift.  They have the money to let them further develop their technology.  They have the users to bring even more awareness to the Oculus Rift (something that my parents had not heard of until this past January).   But there is one key thing that Facebook could potentially bring to the table: Microsoft.  Why does Microsoft matter?  Because they have the Kinect.  The Microsoft Kinect is the last missing piece to the puzzle of virtual reality.  It is the key item to solving a large portion of the needs for Oculus VR, such as the issue of body-tracking, or the getting rid of a controller since you can't see it anyways.  It is an incredibly important part of making sure that virtual reality does not become another gimmicky controller.

There's also another side: Mark Zuckerberg's desire to connect the world.  This is a huge deal, and even those who just want the Oculus Rift for gaming should care.  The Oculus Rift cannot succeed on gaming alone, and yet that's all that people seem to think of with it.  Even I do, and it's a problem, because there are not enough gamers in the world to buy a $300 product and allow a company to make a decent profit.  The Oculus Rift needs everyone, not just gamers, and if Facebook is able to get it to other markets, that's yet another good thing.

That being said, I too am still skeptical.  Facebook does not have a solid track record with doing what is best for a product in my opinion, and I worry about whether they will completely mess this up.  If they don't go to Microsoft for help, and don't properly utilize the potential, the Oculus Rift will end up as a terrible gimmick that's nothing more than a novelty.

Still, I want to try and help make sure that the Oculus Rift stays on track.  What I think would help with this is to start looking towards full virtual reality games and applications, rather than just things that use the Oculus Rift.  By doing this, I believe we can help the Oculus Rift stay on track for what it needs to do, rather than what Facebook may do.  That's why, I am doing a very early release of my recent project: Project Virtua.

Let's create the future

Project Virtua is an open-sourced set of tools for creating virtual reality applications, using a combination of the Oculus Rift and Microsoft Kinect, as well as future releases of newer versions of these devices, and other companies versions too.  Using it, you can create entirely new worlds that users can be physically put into.  Need to swing a sword at a bad guy?  Just swing it then.  Want a better seat to view a sports game from?  Then just scoot a few seats over.  Want to sit at the front of a class?  Just stand up and walk to it.  The possibilities are endless, and now, with Facebook's acquisition of Oculus VR, I have no doubts that Mark Zuckerberg sees similar potential in it.  So where does Project Virtua play in then?  It aims to make developing virtual reality applications simple.  Need to get a user's head rotation?  Just call GetRotation.  Need to warp the display for the lenses?  Just call ComposeFinalImage.  Want to get the position of a person?  Just call GetPosition.  The idea with this is an incredibly simple library for developing anything from games to apps.

I want to stress that this is still a very early release.  There is still a lot of work that needs to be done, especially when it comes to creating a nice system for rendering to the screen.  We are still considering DirectX support, as right now we only support OpenGL.  The plus side to this is that it is partially cross-platform already, so Mac and Linux users can take a look into this as well for certain parts.  This is something I am using as a school project too however, and as a result it will definitely continue to be worked on for the next few months at the least, but again, this is very early on.  Everything from the Kinect support to the website itself is still under heavy construction, so please bear with us while we work on it.

I too want to see virtual reality succeed.  I was born in the early 90's, and grew up with the it right within reach.  I hope this time around we can see it succeed, but this deal that Oculus VR has made with Facebook is very risky.  It can either end as a complete success, or end up becoming a complete failure.  Only time will tell unfortunately.

Replay for Life 2014

Recently it was announced that the Relay for Life organization would be coming to our campus here, and was doing their yearly round-up of student organizations.  Being as interested in charity as I am, I went ahead and started trying to gather interest in raising money for the event through the the Association for Computer Machinery chapter that I lead at Christopher Newport University.  The decision by a group of us was to create an event called Replay for Life.  If you have ever seen the speed-run charities online, then you know exactly what Replay for Life is, but if you haven't, it's a live-stream of classic video games being played as fast as the person can.  Some amazing things have appeared in these videos, and we are incredibly excited because we have someone doing a Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time speed-run using some incredible glitches.  We hope that everyone will join us and donate to our cause, and that you of course enjoy the stream!  It will be Saturday, March 15th, starting at 2:00pm EST.  You can find our Facebook event here and our website is currently www.replayforlife.org.

Our flyer, hand-drawn by a student!

Why to Avoid Dynamic Tabs on Android and iPhone Development

Recently I began finishing my first Android application.  They app itself is pretty simple in my mind, but actually creating the application has proven much more difficult than I thought it would originally.  This difficulty is mostly due to things like creating and managing databases for storage, utilizing fragments instead of activities for new screens, and creating user-interfaces that are quick and responsive without requiring multi-threading.

Clicking "Button 1" should insert a new tab
between tab 2 and tab 4

The bulk of my problems have been caused with creating the user-interfaces.  A recent problem I ran into was displaying large amounts of information on a single screen.  My original approach was a tab-based system, where users could add new data sections, which would then appear as a new tab.  These tabs could then be scrolled through, and each one would contain a different sub-section of the application.

The big requirement for this however was the need for dynamic tabs.  That is to say, I needed to be able to easily insert a tab between two other tabs.  This proved impossible with the default TabHost object, as there is no insert method available with it.  I opted then to simply remove the last tab, add on my new one, and then re-add the deleted tab.

It was at this point however that I realized that this was a surprisingly weird feature to leave out in the ADK though.  In fact, my thought was that this must be a bug in the ADK, as this seems like something that everyone would want.  Taking the problem to Google showed a few forum posts about this as well, though it didn't seem like anyone had a good solution.  In fact, I still don't have a good solution other than this, and the steps involved get even more complicated.  You can't just "delete" a tab, you actually have to remove both the tab itself, as well as the content that the tab shows, then add the new tabs.

This is much more complicated than it needs to be though.  Why not have an "insertTab" method for the TabHost?  Why would such a seemingly important method be left out?  While I can't confirm the accuracy of this, I believe I actually found the reason, and it's the exact reason why I opted out of using tabs for this purpose (well, sort of, more on that later).

Let's start with an example of bad tab usage:  imagine you are looking at someone's internet browser.  Imagine this person is me, and when you look at the amount of tabs in their chrome browser, you see this:

Kind of painful to look at that many tabs isn't it?  That's the point I want to bring up: dynamic tabs in an application are very dangerous and bad for the user.  It makes sense that dynamic tabs are not supported, as it would very quickly become a cluttered interface as the user added more tabs to the screen.  If you force your user to create a new tab to view content, looking through that much data can be annoying.  Even if the tabs scroll, that can still be overwhelming when trying to view the page.

There is also another problem that occurs, especially in older devices: memory limits.  If you start adding more tabs, you'll find that your memory usage skyrockets.  This is nothing out of the ordinary though, and is a problem that can be easily combated by simply limiting the maximum number of tabs, but it's still a problem nonetheless, and is prevented by not allowing dynamic tabs.

There are probably a variety of other issues that come up with dynamic tabs, so this brings in the question of whether dynamic tabs should even be used.  In my case, I realized that tabs would not be the most efficient way to achieve what I wanted, so I scrapped them and took on another solution.  The solution I took was instead to use a spinner, and updated the content based on what is selected, as well as breaking up where the data is displayed.  By using a spinner, you allow the user to display more at once but with less clutter due to how spinners are designed, and by breaking up the data, you help guarantee that the user can never overwhelm themselves on accident.

There are of course other solutions that can be done other than spinners and breaking up the data, those are just the ones that I chose.  If you've encountered a similar issue, what was your solution?

High Level Tools Versus Low Level Coding

As someone who is constantly trying to hone my technical abilities, I look around at what tools other people use when developing all the time.  I've noticed a very big trend right now with using tools such as Unity or UDK for game development for example, or tools like the Titanium Mobile Development Kit for creating a simple mobile application.  This even extends to a lower level though when coding, such as using GLFW when creating a window in an OpenGL program, or using a 3D library for Javascript instead of just WebGL.

Why these tools are chosen instead makes sense though, as developing a lot of these on your own would take a ton of time away from just making your application.  Just creating a window to use with OpenGL is incredibly time consuming, so why not just use an external API to do it for you?  Especially since these tools will allow you to go cross-platform automatically when done correctly.

Yet I constantly wonder about whether these tools are good or not though.  I believe using these tools takes a way a huge part of learning to code, because you suddenly don't have to worry about what's happening behind the scenes.  You start trusting that these tools are doing the best they can at whatever you are expecting them to do.  Is this a bad thing though?  On the one hand, it allows for developers to focus more on developing their applications, and less dealing with bugs in code. On the other hand, if a bug comes up in the tools, they may have no idea how to fix it or get around it properly.

These ideas bring in another concept too though: are you learning how to code, or are you learning the tools you use?  Going one step further, should this count as coding, or should it count as something else?  If you use an entire drag-and-drop IDE, should that be considered coding or does there need to be a new category for this specifically?  I think a lot of these questions honestly come down to opinions and what exactly you are making with these tools.  How much are you using from others, how much are you making yourself, and if you run into a problem, can you solve it, are some of the important factors that I think should be considered.

I don't consider myself in any place to judge on whether it's more important to learn more about using tools or how tools work, but I do think it's something that should be brought up.  Me personally, I like to learn how the tools work, and then apply those uses when I use tools.  This leads me to do a lot of unnecessary work, but I feel confident about what I am learning as a result.  Does this mean that you can only feel confident this way?  Of course not.  This is just my personal preference.  That being said, what are your preferences?  Do you prefer just diving into making your application, or do you like learning what the code behind the scenes is for your tools?

One PC, Three Kinects

Recently I managed to get a hold of three Microsoft Kinects.  A few of my family members had one (including myself) and ended up not needing them since they never used them.  Being the "techy" I am, the first thing I did was attempt to integrate them into my recent Oculus Rift projects.  While the code seems to be correct, there was an issue from a hardware perspective that I was hoping to not run into.  Alas, I have, and thus am writing this blog post about what exactly is going on.  It's an interesting little hardware problem that I'm hopeful Kinect 2.0 will solve a bit more, and that'd I decided to do a quick write-up about.