How to turn a fun game into a competitive battle

I was on BZFlag for a few minutes today, and one guy genoed his teammate on accident.

He then said "lol".

That simple phrase set off an argument about whether laughing at your own mistake is ok or not. I was for it, Evil Bob, an administrator at the server, was against it on the grounds that it means your a cheater or an intentional tk'er.

Here's a screenshot of part of the argument. I'll get some more up shortly.


Update: I accidentally deleted the rest of the screenshots, so they won't be forthcoming. Oh well. See if you can get in touch with Winny and ask him for the server logs if you want the rest of the conversation.

Javascript Ray Tracer

So I just ran into a Javascript ray tracer:

http://www.slimeland.com/raytrace/

It's incredible that the whole ray tracer can be done in Javascript. Admittedly, it's a bit slow (it took around 5 minutes to render a 250x250 image of a flowerpot), but it's still way cool. If I can't find any raytracing algorithms out there in Java (which I haven't been able to yet, but maybe I'm just blind), I'll probably see if I can port this one. I have quite a few ideas that I'd like to use a raytracer for.

Hmm, on second thought, maybe I should just use POV-Ray.

%* in batch files

So I was reading through the compile script generated by GWT, and encountered a really random string of characters: %*. I did a Google search, and it turned up 0 results. Does anyone know for sure what this means? From where it's positioned and from the docs on that particular script, I think that it evaluates to all of the arguments passed into the batch script. If this is true, it would be really nice, since it would make it so that I could avoid doing all of this shift and %1 stuff in a batch file to get a list of all of the arguments.

My first post

Well, here it is, my first post on my newly-created blog! Don't expect anything interesting to be posted here for a bit. I'm still getting used to the idea of blogging, and I get really nervous writing stuff that the public might see and criticize me for.

Anyway, a bit of history about me might be useful. I'm a kid who's obsessed with computer programming. I started learning the Logo programming language when I was something like 6. My dad taught me how to program in Java when I was about 8 or 9 or something, and I started work on my first really successful attempt, Evaluation Portal, when I was 11. Since then, programming has been my hobby. I can program in Java, Logo, Basic, C++ to an extent, Javascript, HTML (yes, by hand), and JSP (JSP is an extension of Java for doing web applications).

I am also an obsessed pyro. I'm not going to write anymore yet, but you can see the video below (it's sideways, so tilt your head to the right) for one of the less dangerous fireworks that I built (I was at my grandma's once and lit her neighbor's grass on fire). During the last part of the firework, the flame was roughly 6 feet tall, as can be seen from the tree in the background.