Yes, the Guys at MEEBO have outdone themselves.... yet again!

Everyone knows about meebo, right? meebo is an excellent online client that lets you chat with your AIM, MSNM, YIM, ICQ, Jabber, and GTalk friends all at once, and I strongly urge everyone to try it.

But wait, there's more! meebo has recently (just today) started a new service, called meebome. You can see the result on my blog sidebar (scroll down a bit). With a meebo account, you can put these little chat boxes on any of your pages, and visitors can chat with you - no IM software needed! Truly amazing.

Try it! In the "Chat With Me" box, you can chat with me, change your display name, and turn sound off and on. More features coming soon... =)

Still a Long Way to Go in Summer Work

How much AP/Honors summer-work have I done?

Biology "Bio" AP - Ch.1, Ch.5, Ch.19, Ch.20, Ch.21, Ch.22, Ch.23, Ch.24, Ch.25
European History "Euro" AP - Ch.2, Ch.3, Ch.4, Ch.5, Ch.6, Ch.7, Ch.8, Ch.9, Ch.10, Ch.11, Ch.12, Essay 1, Essay 2, Essay 3, Essay 4, Essay 5
English "Englo?" H - The Bible, Mythology, Cat's Cradle

[Done] [Doing] [Haven't even touched]

Yes, I'm behind. And yet I waste my time on useless things, like this blog. Go figure... ^_^

Inexplicable Productivity

Today I didn't have access to the computer for most of the day, and it turned out that I was rather productive.

Today I:

• Finished up the problems for my online AIME class (just in time too - I have class tomorrow)
  
• Did a good portion of my AP summer work (finished Edith Hamilton's Mythology and got through a good portion of Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle)
• Ordered my AP Bio and AP Euro books (I have procrastinated for two months on this)
• Swam and stretched (me poor neck)

Could it be that I can accomplish this much when I'm not wasting away at the computer?



Let me finish this post off with a sample of an AIM conversation:

[18:59] blaaackiechan420: NORMAL PEOPLE HAVE DREAMS ABOUT GIRLS AND STUFF BUT YOU ARE DEAMING ABOUT WORLD WAR 3

Yes, I'm not normal.

Quote of the Week

The quote of the week is:

"Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak."
- Anonymous

New Glasses =)

I got new glasses today! Now not only I can see things beyond two feet (my old glasses were two years old >.< ), but now my glasses are fairly inconspicuous. They're like, invisible. Invisi-lenses! o.O

Yay for Google Ads!

I don't know what was happening, but for the past hour I've been unable to see any Google ads, at all. As a result, all websites took forever to load, and some didn't even load at all. Fortunately, looks like the Google ad server is back up! And I still don't know what happened...

Guitar

This is my friend Solomon's guitar, which I've been playing for the last three hours. Sol's been teaching me how to play =)

Little Fighter 2.5 Released!!

Gah... forgot to post this yesterday...


Little Fighter 2.5 has been released!!! See this topic for details.

Hey, it Works!

The Problem: Creating a geometric mean function for PHP.

First Attempt: Just doing something along the lines of (p1 * p2 * ... * pn) ^ (1/n) . However, even PHP has its limits, and for high n's (we're talking along the lines of hundreds or even thousands), it would just die on us. We needed a better way!

The Solution: Logarithms, yes, logarithms. With basic identities, we find that (p1 * p2 * ... * pn) ^ (1/n) = 10 ^ (1/n * log p1 + log p2 + ... + log pn) ! Now instead of multiplying huge numbers, we're just adding them!

By the way, here's the full function - feel free to it in your own PHP experiments (courtesy myself and Mgccl):

function func_math_mean()
{
$elo = func_get_args();
$num = 0;
foreach ($elo as $value) {
if ($value == 0){
$value = 1;
}
$num = $num + log10($value);
}
$count = func_num_args();
$num = pow(10,$num / $count);
return $num;
}

LF2, Ladders, and Logarithms

(Don't worry about LF2.5 - I'm still working on it ... and I'll release it in three days!!)

I've decided to help Mgccl, a fellow LF2 modder, build an online ladder system for LF2.

The ladder should have the following features:

• Track and store the results of all ranked games. (No idea how we'll do this - for now we'll do it on an honor system, where players submit their game results.)
• Keep track of each players' wins, ties, and draws.
• Calculate each player's rating, using a variant of the ELO system.
• Support clans and countries, and rank them as well as ranking individual users.
• Support all possible team combinations, from 1-vs-1 to 2-vs-5 to 4-vs-4.
• Track which character each player uses, and rank them on each player (i.e. best Davis players, best Julian players, etc.)

Today, the first thing we did was come up with a database. Here's what we have right now (courtesy of myself and Mgccl):

country:
country_id , country_name , country_flag , country_wins , country_total_elo, country_total_exp

clan:
clan_id , clan_name , clan_leader , clan_wins , clan_losses , clan_draws , clan_ranking, clan_total_elo, clan_total_exp, clan_members

user_stat:
stat_id, stat_elo, stat_exp, stat_rank, stat_win, stat_lose, stat_draw

user_prof:
user_id, clan_id, country_id

team_user_link:
team_id, user_id

vs_games:
game_id , team1_id , team1_winrounds, team2_winrounds

Mgccl also singlehandedly coded the ELO script (this guy's amazing at PHP!) Now we are missing one crucial feature - ranking for team games. Since I'm good at math, it falls to me to solve the following problems:

1. I must find a way to average the team members' ratings to create a team rating. A simple arithmetic mean won't work - a team with one member rated 1500 and one member rated 1000 does not have a 1250 rating!
   


2. Figuring out 1) will let us play 2-vs-2, 3-vs-3, and 4-vs-4 games, but what if we want to play a game with unequal teams? I must calculate how to adjust the temporary team ratings, to account for the fact that teams with more players have a much better chance of winning.


3. Once I find 1) and 2), I am able to use Mgccl's ELO algorithm to find how to adjust each team's rating, but wait! Teams aren't rated - only players are! I must figure out how to apply the rating adjustment to the team members. As far as I see, the answer to this is to simply take the team adjustment and adjust each team member's rating by it, but I'll have to do some more research on this.

Some data to help me: The ELO system is designed so that if two players (or teams) have a rating difference of 200, then the stronger team should have a 75% chance of winning. I think that if I take a few logarithms, I should be able to figure out the answer to 1) and maybe 2) from that statement.

Whew. Long, very long, incredibly long, post.

www.PrestoSoft.com Goes Online!!

Tough day today - we uploaded the new PrestoSoft site. Check it out!!



All those FTP errors... ahhhh!! Transferring 18MB of files to a remote server is never easy...

Quote of the Week

The quote of the week is:

"It's funny the way most people love the dead. Once you're dead, you're made for life!"
- Jimi Hendrix

World Survey

A world survey was conducted by the UN. The only question asked was: "Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?" The survey was a huge failure...

• In Africa they didn't know what "food" meant.
• In Eastern Europe they didn't know what "honest" meant
• In Western Europe they didn't know what "shortage" meant.
• In China they didn't know what "opinion" meant.
• In the Middle East they didn't know what "solution" meant.
• In South America they didn't know what "please" meant, and
• In the USA they didn't know what "the rest of the world" meant.

How true...

Physical Therapy - Day One

Had physical therapy today.

Doctor says the cause of my neck pain could be:

• Poor posture (possible)
  
• Sitting at the computer all day >.<
• A growth spurt (could be)
  
• Carrying a heavy backpack (uhhh it's the summer ... and i don't have summer school ... hence, no backpacks)
• All of the above
  

Possible ways to fix my neck are:

• Fixing my posture
• Stretching
• Massage
• Applying heat and ice (uhh i think i'll stick to the first three ^_^)
• All of the above
  

LF2.5: Volt

Today I added a new character: Volt. He replaces my old electric char (Electro).

Here's some screenshots I took (JackieRabbit - the creator of Volt - put the second one on his site =) ) :



Don't know why I took the third one ^_^