End of an experimental phase

The past couple of weeks you might have noticed that my blog was getting automated articles, I changed the layout to a subtle white, removed my logo among other things. All that was part of an experiment I was carrying out, although fun, it turned out to be pretty much a failure! But it was fun nevertheless! Stay tuned, I'll explain it in detail in the coming days!

Exam Week =(

Ah, its the dreaded exams again! I'll hopefully start posting again by this weekend! Till then, ciao!

Elf Yourself is Dead!

Ah, just when I wanted to Elf Myself since I had heard so much about that website, it was kind of sad to discover that officemax has shut down its Elf Yourself service but hopefully it will return the next holiday season. Till then, its no more Elf Myself for me! =(

New Header

Finally made a cool looking header for the website today using Inkscape and Adobe Photoshop!

The Interview's Aftermath

Well, I reached the job fair around 11 am today and the EA Dice was the first thing I headed for. I told them that I wanted to display my project for which I had brought my laptop. I was then introduced to Jonas who took a look at my project. My unimpressive 3d card (an Intel 945G) was a pretty lame thing to run a project powered by the demanding Farcry engine, but to my luck, Jonas perfectly understood that and almost spent half an hour while I demonstrated the project and explained to him all that went in the development process. In the end, I think Jonas was quite happy with my efforts and he was also quite happy over the fact that I was the only person who demonstrated a full completed gaming project at Chalmers. He then gave me a contact card and I will use his reference when I apply for a summer internship later this year and hope for the best but things certainly did look encouraging.

I also got to know that I can also apply for a Master's Thesis from Electronic Arts Dice by working on some sort of interesting game idea that I might come up with. I have ideas cooking up in my mind all the time, but the whole thing of involving students into developing game ideas and business models is I think really cool and I definitely look forward to doing my Masters thesis with EA.

They were also demonstrating Battlefied Bad Company's preview build at the booth and you will be pleased to hear that it really looks mind blowing and is now currently one of my most anticipated games of the year (along with Red Alert 3).

New Classes, DOCman issues and MP3 Gallery solution

The new quarter for my Masters program here in Sweden has started and this quarter seems to be hella tough! The course R&D Strategy seems to be the toughest amongst all of the MEI program courses! Apart from that I implemented a sweet embedded MP3 player using flash and php on my customer's website. I used the free Jooma extension called Mp3 gallery and modified its code a little to suit my requirements. The problem I was facing was that there were multiple types of files inside the DOCman upload folder and I only wanted to filter it to mp3 files for the mp3 gallery plugin because at its default settings, it reads and lists all the files inside the DOCman uploads folder and even tries to add zip files and txt files to its playlist which basically sucks! So here is the modification in line 40 of the mod_mp3gallery_playlister.php file add the following code

$ext = substr($file, strrpos($file, '.') + 1);

Replace the if-statement below this line to this one

if (($filetype == "file") && ($ext=="mp3")) {

and now change the default folder $dir = "your DOCman uploads folder";
where of course you specify the path for your uploads folder, by default it is dmdocuments/
Another thing is that you might want to remove the .htaccess file in that folder (the docman uploads folder) if you want the files to be played because otherwise they won't!

Children of Bodom and a Finished Project

Ah, it feels great to have finally finished my project. I'm listening to Children of Bodom and trying to relax myself after days of hard work. I honestly wasn't expecting it to be this hard, but it was. The thing about bypassing the PHP upload limit was particularly challenging. On opening an inquiry ticket from the website support, I discovered that they were using suPHP which made things a whole lot simpler for me and I just had to upload a .htaccess file with a one line command in it along with a php.ini file with the required upload and cap parameters. Another thing which caused a lot of dismay was the incorrect absolute path inside the DOCman Joomla module which was causing all the uploads to fail. The rest of the design process, although cumbersome, went fairly smoothly and I am happy with the results. The Rockettheme Equinox was used as the template and was modified a little to match the colour scheme requirements of the site.

Here is the finished version,
Renovare Clinic

Surprise Surprise!

Today was another surprise filled day! I finally got contacted by my client and I he has provided me with all the details necessary for his work and I am currently setting up his site at the moment. I also made some more artwork in Inkscape today and I would really like to share it with you! =)
This was an orange I made by looking at one of my client's websites which had icons of a similar nature. Took me about half an hour to complete, looks cute hehe! Another thing I did was to make a bunch of lips just to cheer up a friend of mine (I know it looks gay and all but it did cheer her up in the end so no hate comments please!!) =P

MacBook and McDonalds

Well the title pretty much sums up the news of the day, I read about the latest tech gadget by Apple which is just a 0.16 inch thick notebook, actually it is the thinnest notebook in the world but it misses out on something essential...an optical drive. Apart from that the specs are pretty impressive. It has a 13.3 backlit LCD screen and has a very nice backlit keyboard as well. Other features include Wifi support, a core duo processor (I could go on)...oh as soon as I was typing this entry...my interviewer has come online...so wish me luck cause its interview time!!! =P

Yes I am back...and in a terrible mood. The client wanted me to set up a website so I decided to host a Joomla website one of the subdomains, unfortunately, to my demise, my stupid webserver only allowed a single database per website. I set up a sub domain inside Plesk and tried installing Joomla...to my horror, I couldn't create a new database, so I accidentally populated my main website's database...which has caused major bugs on gamezealot.net!!! =( So I had to remove all of the freaking files because most of them had permissions set on them which I had to fix by hand. I have sent a request ticket to my webhosts and I hope they will allow multiple databases for my website for now, otherwise its no use I'm afraid as I won't be able to demonstrate anything to my client and he'll probably ditch me from the project and hire someone else...=(

Ah yes, where does McDonalds come into the scene? Well a Moroccan friend of mine had come over back to Gothenburg to continue his studies at Chalmers with me so we first decided to have a cup of coffee and later ended up at McDonalds to have some burgers. To my surprise, I could neither finish my chocolate muffin at the coffee shop, nor the burgers at McDonalds. This all shows how much I have changed after just six months from leaving my homecountry and coming here for my Masters degree. I remember I could gulp down 2 Big Macs in a row and countless Chicken Tikkas, Kebabs and what not! I hardly eat anything here! =( Not good!!!

Rebirth

After almost a year and a half of not posting anything on my old blog, I am starting all over again. Quite a lot has happened over the last year or so which I will blog about here along with all thats currently happening in my life. I renamed the blog to Skulltrail because of Intel's codename for its next generation platform of processors, other than that it is a really cool name anyway!