For several months now, I am a part of the Lithuanian Wesnoth translation team. I liked this game a lot and liked how it looks in Lithuanian so I joined the project. Currently, we're polishing the beginner's campaigns so that the first time players would enjoy full localisation.

A new snapshot of Candy uploaded. Mostly bug fixes.

Oh, did I mention I moved to http://rtfb.lt/? :-)

A new snapshot of Candy uploaded. Fixed display issues with UTF-8 file names.

A new article/tutorial/project in my projects section: VimDoxSpell.

My laptop has died a few months ago, which interfered with my plans quite badly. But now I'm up and running and I wasn't completely idle during that time, so here's the update.

I've put a new snapshot of Candy. Nothing major yet, mostly bugfixes and dev-convenience features. More snapshots to be posted shortly.

I've started a blog. So far it is all Lithuanian and all technical(-ish). I'd like it to stay as such.

I added several features to the software backing up this web site (no, it's not hand-typed html). I might write some more about it one day, since I find it being a good example of domain-specific software evolution.

Finally, after five years of fiddling, idling and procrastination, Lithuanian translation of Hacker HOWTO is now available. Enjoy! Huge thanks goes to Eglė Aleknaitė, who helped me fixing mistakes in my own native language.

There's a new item on my projects page. It is an open source project I have recently started. The details can be found on its own page.

A new section on the block! I've opened up the Books section. It's about the books I've read. With recommendations, impressions, thoughts and such. Just a place to let you guys know there's something worth reading. (Which is most often too little thing for me to bother writing its own page. Sigh).

This first revision is just a quick hack, mentioning few books from (probably distant) past. Later, when adding new reviews with fresh memories, I'll try to make them more exhaustive and useful.

Bought a laptop a week ago. It's a Dell Inspiron 1520.

The very first day I installed Ubuntu on it. The installation went pretty smooth, so if you're considering this box with Ubuntu (or some other linux distro, for that matter), this is a good option.

I have written a little article on Haskell. It basically states my excitement about this language and is about to grow as I learn more of it.

You can find it in my Writings section: Why I Like Haskell.

That said, I have made a little shuffling with my website. The former "Game development" section is now a Writings section. The Haskell article was the last ounce for taking this decision. The section didn't have anything to do with game development anyway.

Damn! I graduated this year! Just got handed my Bachelor diploma few hours ago.

I wrote my Bachelor thesis about exact from-region visibility pre-processing. You can find it in my files section (direct link: ovgp.pdf). The thesis is in Lithuanian.

A new miniseries of articles posted! They shed some light on the problems that seem to trouble every C/C++ beginner. In Lithuanian. Please visit my articles page to see the links.

Happy New Year everyone!

This time I want to share one interesting experience I've been having. Visual Basic is the name. That is, I was having a Visual Basic 6 course at the university. Yes, I know, sounds funny (at the very least :-)), but I thought that this might be the only chance in my life that will give me an opportunity to learn VB, and I feel a vacancy in my knowledge. Mostly because I hate having opinion on stuff I don't know and I feel undereducated as an IT professional if I can't have an opinion on VB :-).

But let's take opinions aside; this entry is not about that. The interesting stuff about this course and assignments I've been doing is that I learnt something. Really. I was least expecting to learn something useful from this course. VB syntax doesn't count.

First, I learned a trick to easily put multiple controls into correct tab order. Contemporary GUI design tools surely offer better design means than Visual Studio 6 did, but knowing a trick is always useful. Here it is: walk the controls in reverse tab order and assign 0 tab index to each. Form designer will shift the matching indices, so when you reach the first control, all the tab indices will be correct.

Second, I've learned that radio buttons are complex under the hood. I won't get into details here, but just think: few buttons, that must be interrelated, each of them must by all means be a separate control, except when it's about keyboard navigation through controls. Then the whole collection should act as a single control. So, simple things are not always that simple as they seem.

Next, very important lesson I learnt: array indices. Never thought it would be that difficult to switch from the inherently natural zero-based indexing to the monstrous one-based. http://xkcd.com/c163.html

And finally, an intimidating question has popped in my mind: where in the scale of "low level"-to-"high level" languages should Visual Basic end up? This question makes me nervous. Hate questions I can't instantly answer :-). So to try to answer this question, or at least to clarify my own minds I'm writing an essay on "levels" of languages. Will see if it will make its way to the public.

Another thing I'd like to mention is Effective STL by Scott Meyers. Just finished reading it couple days ago. This book is definitely a MUST read for every C++ programmer. Especially for those who think they "know" C++ and STL ;-).

I will try to write more about this book and this awful lot of thoughts it sparkled in my mind, but that'd be much to write and I don't know if I will have time and determination to do that. Stay tuned.

I've put some effort into standardizing my website. Most of the pages should be valid HTML 4.01 Strict now.

I have posted a new essay in my Game Development section. It is an introductory-level article for starters. It was inspired by discussions in local gamedev forum on the topic of choosing your first language. You can read it here (Lithuanian).

As always I'm lacking with updates. Not that nothing is happening in my life, but somehow I don't have time to share with the world about the news.

One of the last-year's-news is that I didn't graduate. I don't feel motivated enough to put that last effort into graduating. Looks like I won't do it this year, too. My current plan is to pass all the exams that are left and leave bachelor's paper for the next year. We'll see what will it turn into.

As you can see, my page has moved. This had to happen sooner or later, since university is (hopefully) not an entire-life experience and my web site was hosted at my university account.

This told, I am happy to announce that I'm planning to graduate this spring. Wish me luck. I'll need a hell of it.

Another thing that is worth mentioning is that since 1st of April I'm working for Bentley Software.

My life became a real mess in the end of this summer. Still can't recover... While drifting along this existence called life, I do lots of reading (drastically varying: JRRT, Paul Graham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Scientific American, Herb Sutter, ESR, Joel Spolsky, Michael Abrash...) and general contemplating on questions of what-is-the-meaning-of-life order. No particular results yet :-)

More important events during last few months:

• Learning Lisp. Inspired by Paul Graham. Difficult stuff. Long way to go yet.
• Not working at Alna anymore. Now working at Alna Software. Only a formal difference, though :-)
• The pressure inside my head is so big, that I feel it might explode soon and produce some sort of writing. Only a feeling yet, so no ideas whether it will really happen, neither what kind of writing it might be. Most probably technical.
• Forgot how to program in Python :-) Wrote a news compiler today for easier maintenance of this page, and couldn't write a line without looking into examples. Pathetic. Need to do more programming in general.
• Got a wild idea to learn many decimal numbers of pi by heart. 3.14159 26535 89793 23846... Awesome! :-)
• Bought an astonishing Butz-Choquin pipe. Take a look and envy me :-)
• Learning to drive a car. Quite fun.

Again, lack of updates from me might look like I'm dead or at least that I've abandoned my site. That's not the case. It's just a combination of business and lack of something interesting happening in my life. However, six months is a long period and several things happened, that are worth mentioning:

• WRT the Lithuanian translation of Hacker HOWTO, it's obviously actively stalled from the time I last mentioned it. My friend philologist, who promised to proofread and correct grammar and sentence construction, has been too busy to help me out with this. So I've no choice -- I wait until she has :-) Unfortunately, I have to ask you to wait too.
• Some time ago I've joined a mailing list of a new exciting project: The Y Window System. It is a project of a great interest to me -- a replacement for X Windows. The development and organizational stuff aren't well established yet. It's quite a chaos on the mailing list, actually. However, I can't wait while the development roadmap will be established and I will be able to help folks out with this stuff.
• My Projects page has been updated with a humble description of an old project named "Belzebubas".
• I have halfway completed my semester paper entitled "Application Migration from Windows to Unix". I hope it will be available on this page soon (in Lithuanian).
• "Krot" has been actively developed in the beginning of the year and we achieved significant improvements. However, now we're stalled again due to high load at the university and a crash of our CVS server.

1. After six hours of hard work my X Windows at last support Lithuanian fonts and keyboard. Huge thanks for this goes to Gediminas "menesis" Paulauskas. Thanks again, dude!
2. Database module for signature verification system I'm doing at work is almost done. Yay! :)
3. Input system for "Krotas" is back again! SDL's input system differs from Allegro's a lot :)
4. We started a new project at university. This time it's voice verification system for security. The project is called Tatyana (Tatyana Ain'T Yet Another Noise Amplifier). More on it soon.
5. Java rules, but Sun SDK's installation process is somewhat fuzzy.

1. Happy new year! (a bit off-time of course, but it's never late :)
2. "Krotas" is being developed again! Slowly, but constantly we are moving to SDL and, hopefully, we'll have something to show in near future.
3. Updated my Game Development section and added my first article there.
4. Started working on "Dyrki" 1.0.1 which is, presumably, going to be a maintenance release. Maybe with some code cleanups.
5. Found a bug in GCC, and now I'm researching whether it really is a bug, is it a known bug, and all other necessary stuff before bug report.