But last night was even worse. I'd been dreaming all those aimless dreams we have when I decided to try that Inception trick again. This time around, I cut out the toilet part. I dreamed instead of the instant I started dreaming that dream.

What happened then was insane. Dreaming recursively, each dream took only a fraction of a second before it dove into the next iteration. It felt like an evil script, but in real life, and that scared me. Worse, I could feel my body trembling from the effort.

And just like with that evil script, I had to stop it somehow, so I dreamed of waking up. That was fine, but I knew very well that I was still asleep, and asleep in that sleep for that matter. I was stuck in dreams a couple dozen layers deep and had no idea how to get out.

Somehow, I did, then vowed never to do that again.

That night, as usual, I fell asleep and started dreaming. For some reason, I dreamed that I was taking a dump in the bathroom next to my room. And then for some reason, I fell asleep on the toilet.

And guess where I went from there? Back on my bed, falling asleep. Some part of my unconscious mind must have thought "what the heck, let's go in a loop." So there I was, dreaming that I fell asleep on the toilet and dreamed of falling asleep and dreaming on the toilet. I'm not even sure how many layers deep I got before I decided to turn around and end the recursive madness. And so I woke up from each layer, one by one, alternately getting up from my bed and from the toilet until I thought I got out completely. That's when my mom came in and woke me up.

Lesson learned: Never recreate from memory when you fall asleep Inception-style.

I love this program! First off, another userbar (go on, start ranting)!



And kudos to JosJuice for the tagline in the last block in this one. (Click for a larger version.)

On the very first day of the poll, there were five votes with the exact same choice. I guess we're definitely not getting renamed. I'll see if I can get a TLD or something so we're not blocked by Google.

Speaking of that delisting incident, I got this message a few days ago:

We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.

Seems like they've read and processed my reconsideration request, but I have no idea if they've un-delisted us or not. We're still not showing up in search results again, which is just too bad.

Better yet, it's dynamic!

(If you happen to be a robot, please see ?type=xml instead.)

It's been a week since I sent that reconsideration request after Google delisted all Co.CC domains, and we're still not showing up. I've been thinking that we could take this opportunity to rename ourselves to something a little more pronounceable (at first glance) and a little friendlier to those users who don't have a TI-83 Plus series calculator. What do you think of dia.fr.am?

Before any of you spelling Nazis start burning up in frustration, yes, I do know how it's spelled, but I still think dia.fr.am is a great name. Better yet, that's the actual (sub)domain name I've registered, so our URLs would suddenly be six characters shorter. If we do end up switching, we'll still keep clrhome.co.cc as a redirection site until it's all cleared up.

So, any thoughts? Vote in the poll and comment below!

I'm procrastinating this more than my homework in May, but I finally found some motivation to start working on my contest entry again.



Stupid bugs are killing me.

After failing for over a month since our redesign, I'm happy to announce that /b/, the most important part of the site, is finally up and working again. Our makeover is now complete.

With some pretty nifty features if you know where to look.

Since the vast majority of sites with a .co.cc subdomain are bot-created and spam-infested, Google decided a few days ago to just throw them all out. In other words, we've been delisted.

Well, that's annoying. Especially since about a fifth of our traffic comes from Google search results. I've already sent off a reconsideration request, but apparently it takes weeks for them to even read it, and they rarely respond. I like the domain name "clrhome.co.cc" too much to change it, so hopefully this'll work out.

Happy Fourth of July! Finally finished my new webapp: BBify, an online syntax highlighter that takes your plaintext Z80 code and prettifies it with BBCode. Either paste or upload your code and it'll add all the BB markup you want, which you can then copy straight into any forum. The colors are taken straight from the Tango palette, but you can always choose your own colors if you want.

It currently recognizes strings, numbers, comments, instructions, registers, directives, and operators, but I'm also planning to have it read in #define and .equ statements (and maybe even #include) to highlight constants as well.



Not to be confused with Biebify, the URL shortener that slaps your page with a picture of Justin Bieber.

If you belong in that half of the Internet that visits Google every day, you'll probably have noticed by now that the search engine (really? just a search engine?) got a makeover today. Yet again.

This time, Google's changed their color theme, and not just to make the blue lighter or the shadows more subtle. No, they seem to have turned completely around. Instead of the light blue-on-white we've been so used to for so long, the new colors are deep orange and dark gray—exact opposites of what had been there for months!

And remember back when Google tested those horrible blue buttons? They've brought it back, for good. But now, instead of a massive, glaringly blue bar with bright white text, it's a plain blue button overlaid with a magnifying glass: the centuries-old symbol of searching and finding answers. Put that with the sharply opposing colors of blue and orange, white and dark gray, and it looks ... surprisingly beautiful.

Somehow Google's managed to do it right, again. With all these new changes, after adding all sorts of blatantly contrasting tweaks that would surely have spelled disaster for anyone less capable of making a UI, they've turned out something brilliant. Just like they've done since forever. Heck, if you think about it, even their logo—that universally recognized banner that dominates the home page—is asking for trouble. It spans the entire spectrum, using four colors with lights and shadows on each. And yet for twelve years it's been there, perfectly appropriate on a page that's otherwise nearly blank.

So what's changed now? Besides the new toolbar colors and the blue search button, there are also some subtler changes in how the results page is laid out. The logo and search bar are now clearly separated from the actual results section, for example, and the top section now has a faint gradient (which actually isn't a gradient at all but a light gray background that looks progressive because of the other things around it). The results page isn't the only part that's changed, either; the Google home page seems to have shrunk, and the company links that once appeared right below the search bar (the links that didn't matter) have been moved to the bottom of the page, padded with whitespace and out of the way. Turns out Google didn't turn in the other direction. They're going the same way they've always gone, toward simplicity. That's what I love about this search engine, especially when some wicked twist of fate forces me to use Yahoo! search.

It's been a long time since I've posted an update about any of my projects, so here's something: FP Animation Studio, an animation studio.

The bug report system just got revamped again, adding more admin controls (for us) and options for website bugs (for you). It's probably got a bunch of bugs on its own, and there are probably quite a few more still floating around the site since the last redesign, so if you find any, please report them to us!

Individual project homepages (such as the Star Trek and TI Point sites) in particular have some new experimental designs we're still testing out, so keep an eye on those. Thanks to anybody who can help us squish some web bugs!

And don't forget bug reports aren't just for bugs—suggestions are always welcome too.

Omnimaga announced today the second part of their annual programming contest. The contest consists on creating a game for the Nspire. Such game can be coded in Lua (OS 3.0), C and ARM (Ndless). TI-Nspire BASIC is not allowed.

Who's participating? I think I (Dgdsmaster) will by writing a Lua game.

The original announcement is here.

The calculator world has evolved quickly since the release of globalCALCnet, the first ever calculator networking program. With the use of a client program, calculators were able to connect to chat and gaming hubs, and engage in limited internet activity.

Kerm Martian at Cemetech has just revolutionized calculator networking again. His Gossamer project is a fledgling web browser that allows your TI calculator to load and display plain-text webpages on the screen through gCn. Pre-parsed into a format your calculator can read, Gossamer even turns anchor links into numbered hotkeys that let you click straight to new pages.

Now imagine where that could go! No word yet on Macromedia Flash support, though.

Just found something amazing about Blogger: Dynamic View seems to be a new feature that lets you view a blog in all sorts of layouts. And they all look amazing.

My favorite one so far is the mosaic, which lets you view short snippets of as many posts as you want, tiled in seamless clumps. The size of each box seems pretty random, but it still looks really cool. It also switches around dynamically when you resize your window, so I'm thinking of making this the default view for people on iPhones and other cell phone browsers. I'm loving Web 2.0 already.



And yes, that is a recursive post.