tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68682064681548411632012-02-07T11:54:20.999+01:00"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." <br/> Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)KrisDSnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1771100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-59972258718342455962012-02-06T19:43:00.000+01:002012-02-06T19:43:11.085+01:00

Rasp is working on a 2D isometric roguelike using Slick, a Java 2D game library. And he's blogging about it. It's still in the early stages, but the graphics look good. His approach to lighting, with colour blending, makes for some nice screenshots. And he shows you how it's done. Go check it out. And if you know of other programmer blogs please let me know!

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-50859589308868517532012-02-05T22:21:00.000+01:002012-02-05T22:21:35.746+01:00

Is watching my two-and-a-half year old daughter using an iPad like she's never done anything else in her life. Now, to be clear, I didn't buy the iPad for her. I originally bought it for my wife. But it's my daughter who seems to get the most out of it. And it's not just simple games either (Toca Boca games are superb by the way); she starts up and changes apps like it's the most natural thing to

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-16587877965712065222012-01-17T18:07:00.002+01:002012-01-17T18:07:41.943+01:00

There's in an excellent article over at Ars Technica which tells the story of ScummVM. Great read about a fun open source project.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-72569406744279703192011-12-31T10:36:00.002+01:002011-12-31T16:48:06.474+01:00

For instance, you get to watch Notch create a 2.5D dungeon crawler in just two days time! Update: Here are links to recordings of the full livestream. The very first part starts here.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-28648435477374786382011-12-29T09:45:00.002+01:002011-12-29T09:45:39.936+01:00

Related gotcha which takes some time to get your head around: code is data and data is code.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-43582958710773543782011-12-23T16:29:00.000+01:002011-12-23T16:29:46.682+01:00

...no one can hear you scream. As a fan of Alien, I'm looking forward to (what looks like) this new installment by Ridley Scott. Fun fact: the Alien franchise is as old as I am. =)

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-57465949885765073892011-12-22T14:37:00.000+01:002011-12-22T14:37:05.531+01:00

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-33362162557961358132011-12-09T07:16:00.001+01:002011-12-09T07:24:08.999+01:00

Quotes from Ars, on a study of bad coding practices in applications: Java-EE applications [...] had the most problems on average, while Cobol and SAP's ABAP had the fewest. So Cobol code is of higher quality than Java-EE. Java EE's technical debt was pegged at $5.42 per line of code while Cobol impressed with a score of $1.26. Cobol code is also cheaper to maintain. Java was not the worst

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-67369298558725637712011-12-03T16:30:00.001+01:002011-12-03T16:36:00.572+01:00

This is a project I would like to see succeed: AXR, "The web done right". The following description comes from the site: AXR stands for Arbitrary XML Rendering. Its aim is to provide a better alternative to HTML+CSS. It uses XML for the content and HSS for the design and simple behavior of the interface. HSS is a language based on CSS, but offers many more advanced features, such as object

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-15540491000079211792011-11-29T19:08:00.001+01:002011-11-29T19:21:51.204+01:00

Damn you Krowland for putting the idea into my head! :-) Impressions so far: Love the graphic style, though the new Link has something of a baby face. All the other characters are visually more interesting. Love the controls for fighting. First time I see the Wiimote Plus being used to such good effect. Hate the camera at times. Why can't it stay fixed behind your character ? I'm constantly

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-87021442759429740442011-11-17T17:38:00.001+01:002011-11-17T18:14:00.878+01:00

So I've been watching some more Devoxx talks on the Parleys live stream. Quick capture of my mood after seeing them: bored and disappointed. If you're a fanboy, don't read on. Though I do have some added and somewhat unrelated thoughts which follow. The Android keynote didn't really say anything other than that you should be developing for mobile right now. The useful remarks were few and far

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-1180692094875748712011-11-16T15:05:00.001+01:002011-11-17T17:38:19.177+01:00

Quote from Mark Reinhold on Devoxx: "Oracle will no longer be investing in Swing". Instead the real work will go into JavaFX. My interpretation: Oracle seems hell bent on forcing their Flash alternative on us. For that they're willing to sacrifice one of the best parts of the Java standard libraries. So far JavaFX has been a dud, and my suggestion would be to switch to SWT instead for

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-62418785794348494102011-11-13T11:03:00.001+01:002011-11-13T11:04:57.365+01:00

More silliness here.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-47557194490655074362011-11-13T10:39:00.001+01:002011-11-13T10:39:51.261+01:00

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-33636559879930900812011-11-04T08:19:00.001+01:002011-11-04T08:19:58.818+01:00

The Humble Bundle is worth whatever money you want to spend on it; but don't be cheap. You get some really interesting games and are helping out Child's Play and the EFF.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-76675140335093504522011-10-13T20:55:00.000+02:002011-10-13T20:55:22.389+02:00

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-75886603563796166052011-10-11T21:10:00.002+02:002011-10-11T21:10:54.814+02:00

Hazelcast is a pretty interesting Java library. It basically offers distributed versions of classic Java collection types: Queue, Set, List and Map. That is, you can have, for instance, one instance of a map shared across different Java applications, and all will see that map in the same way. So if one app adds some values, they become immediately visible to all others. In addition,

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-78619301472418246902011-10-06T07:58:00.001+02:002011-10-06T20:08:50.085+02:00

So long, and thanks for all the Apples. Update: Everybody is sharing Steve Jobs stories, so I'll add two of my own. First is the first computer I ever saw. I was eight or so, and my dad had bought an Apple II clone. I wrote my first Apple Basic programs on it, and it was probably a life-changer. The second is more relevant to the theme of this blog: Steve Jobs switching the core of Mac OS X

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-74306717462243339612011-09-30T08:03:00.004+02:002011-09-30T08:03:49.547+02:00

As a software developer you're probably no stranger to SQL databases. There's every chance you even had to take seriously boring courses on database normalisations, and all forms of joins. In fact, I even taught some very basic SQL to biology and bio-engineer students (sincere apologies to them :). What's more interesting is that the last decade or so has seen the rise of a NoSQL movement which

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-5069410510498918342011-09-29T08:32:00.001+02:002011-09-29T08:32:23.738+02:00

We all love to hate our Facebooks and Google plusses, but here is something which puts you firmly in control of your own data: Diaspora. It's an open source peer-to-peer social network. If you wanted to, you could host your own data on your own server, and it would still integrate seamlessly into the overall network. You can even move your data around different hosts as needed. Amazing to see

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-59287669518384766932011-09-20T22:24:00.000+02:002011-09-20T22:24:57.337+02:00

I have had the opportunity to work with Groovy over the last few weeks, and I though I would share my main conclusion: it is vastly better than Java. Killer features ? Yeah, a few: Coercion to booleans The Elvis operator  GPath Closures Meta-programming  It's actually quite embarrasing that Groovy manages to deliver in a few years what Java failed to bring to the table in much much longer.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-71125078295026308572011-09-07T21:08:00.001+02:002011-09-07T21:08:11.253+02:00

Pretty impressive work by Ragnaroek: Dandelion is an Eclipse plugin for doing Lisp development. Apparently it comes with support for SBCL and CLISP. Haven't tried this yet, but I definitely could have used this when I worked on my 3D engine in Lisp. Remember that one ? Good ol' times. :-)

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-26436041750684033082011-08-26T08:14:00.002+02:002011-08-26T08:19:15.764+02:00

Victor asked if I would share the code to BlueSG. So I did. You can now find it on sourceforge, BSD licensed as usual. There is next to no documentation, but there are several examples in the sandbox packages to get an idea of how to use it. If you do use it, please let me know so I can brag about it. ;-) And if you've got some improvements you're willing to share, I'd be very interested. Have

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-62501277054766790752011-08-25T20:07:00.003+02:002011-08-25T20:15:16.968+02:00

Visual Complexity has a nice collection of visualisation of software-related topics. This includes one of my favourites: the Linux Kernel Graphing Project by Rusty Russel. This is kind of the inverse of what I showed with X-Ray so far. It's basically all static info, including some extra developer knowledge (to define the rings). You don't see any of the dynamics. But it is still a compelling

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-52229945405937791962011-08-24T21:30:00.002+02:002011-08-24T21:38:50.484+02:00

So the Make Install category continues with, yes, another Final Fantasy game remake. This time it's Tethical which tries to create a Final Fantasy Tactics clone, but with multiplayer goodness. I checked out the code briefly (Yay for Python!), and it's actually surprisingly easy to get something like this going. PS. If you're into Let's Plays I can also recommend the Final Fantasy Tactics

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-76609113334646401862011-08-20T11:31:00.003+02:002011-08-20T11:44:04.651+02:00

(Still looking for a good name for this project...; X-Ray will have to do for now. I'm open to suggestions though.) Take 2 of my software visualisation experment. (See here for take 1.) This time I managed to get some static info into the picture as well: the module in which the called method resides. I therefore decided to switch the visualisation to a treemap. Each rectangle represents one

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-52299181796474903092011-08-19T20:18:00.002+02:002011-08-19T20:21:26.972+02:00

More amazing videos (Team Fortress and Minecraft live action!), including making-of's, on their YouTube channel.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-75832660775994325132011-08-13T20:06:00.004+02:002011-08-20T11:44:18.431+02:00

I've been working on a little experiment the last few evenings and I wanted to share the result with you guys. Here it is: What you see here is 30 seconds of me browsing Ars Technica on Firefox. Doesn't look familiar ? That's probably because this is a behind-the-scenes video. Every square represents one method/function/procedure being called by Firefox while browsing the web. When you see it

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-57137030888179760582011-08-09T19:15:00.004+02:002011-08-09T19:30:02.063+02:00

Here is one of the craziest remake projects I have seen: the Q-Gears Final Fantasy Engine. Yup, this guy is creating his own Final Fantasy VII engine. This includes reverse-engineering the data-formats (for the models, backgrounds, scripts,...) so that it can run the game as defined on the original discs. There is a sourceforge project page which seems somewhat unmaintained. But you can also

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-33926416019656599182011-08-07T09:33:00.003+02:002011-08-07T09:38:17.655+02:00

Great talk here by one of the pioneers of computer science, Alan Kay. If you're involved in building software in any way I really suggest you watch it. There are a few minor tangents, and a lot of food for thought.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-30351934112979896752011-08-02T21:51:00.002+02:002011-08-02T22:07:26.864+02:00

But why did they have to turn Lion-O into this juvenile ? Check out the original trailer for comparison (sorry, no embedding allowed). At least he had some manes back then. You could feel the roar. The new one probably does little more than purr. Well, maybe the story will be better this time. Though the battle scenes in the trailer are straight copies from the Lord of the Rings movies...

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-19256429013877197172011-08-01T20:28:00.002+02:002011-08-01T21:31:52.699+02:00

Have a look at the following endorsement by Stephen Fry for GNU/Linux software. Now, I'm a fan of Stephen Fry; he's one of the most interesting people walking the earth at this moment. But there is something about the message in this video which bothers me: science is open and free and so software should also be. First of, people assume science is open and free, when it is not; at least not

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-54485674346836079612011-07-31T09:12:00.004+02:002011-07-31T09:23:06.421+02:00

Hobby 3D engines are a dime a dozen these days. I've gone down that road myself, and I can say that it's good programming practice. The R5 Engine is a bit special, though, for several reasons. One, the excellent blog covering its development. Two, that it's made to run on Windows, Mac and (recently) Linux. Three, that it's being used to create a game on top of it. And finally, that all this is

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-43262496608445734412011-07-26T19:20:00.003+02:002011-07-26T19:57:06.836+02:00

Dwarf Fortress is arguably one of the most hardcore examples of hobby software out there. For those who don't know it: think of Minecraft (Note: this kind of puts the world in reverse; Dwarf Fortress has been around for much longer than Minecraft, and quite likely has taken its inspiration from there.) but without the fancy graphics and with the most extreme form of generative gameplay you could

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-49443315706292636942011-07-25T19:57:00.002+02:002011-07-25T20:08:18.885+02:00

One of my frequent online reads is the Make blog. It's full of creative people, often making incredible stuff. Still, I feel that the Make editors are missing out on an entire category of Makers: software makers. Now, there is some software to be seen on the Make blog, but it's always software as an artifact to make some cool hardware projects. What I would like to see is some articles where the

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-10946841143701854702011-07-20T20:10:00.002+02:002011-07-20T20:14:43.556+02:00

This is a TED talk by Mikko Hypponen showing some of the viruses from 25 years ago, as well as the sinister malware which is now moving around the net. Well worth watching, if only to get an idea of the muscle which is moving this new wave of threats.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-19968401786918341382011-07-18T21:30:00.002+02:002011-07-18T21:44:48.013+02:00

Realm of the Mad God, that is. It has no real story, is just a bunch of mindless grinding, has killed my characters due to laggy connections, and is fun as hell to play. Really, I'm already worried about the time I'll be wasting on this one. But I just want to get into another God battle (I somehow made it into one, but didn't survive untill the end). Here are some tips for new players: fight in

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-43200692049278075662011-07-12T21:28:00.004+02:002011-07-12T22:00:03.034+02:00

The following is a bit of an opinion piece on the relative merits of Hibernate vs. Active Record. Before I start, here are the cliffnotes on both: Hibernate lets you focus on the code and takes care of the database, Active Record lets you focus on the database and takes care of the code. I have been lucky to get to build up some real world experience with Hibernate. I've also played around with

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-39598468278980516342011-07-11T08:16:00.002+02:002011-09-07T21:11:13.771+02:00

The Koopa download counter has gone past 1000! We're not stopping there, of course. I just updated the code with another contribution from Peter Tang. And I'm also thinking about how to add support for parsing conditions (which is proving trickier than I expected).

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-75649689748830141922011-07-08T07:56:00.001+02:002011-07-08T07:58:55.964+02:00

This looks like a game I won't mind playing: Great, now I'm thinking about buying a Playstation 3 again...

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-65306842760379943162011-06-27T14:10:00.002+02:002011-06-27T14:14:30.222+02:00

Look what I managed to build; in 30 degree (Celcius) weather; on my own; with no help from anyone. (I'might be overstressing something here, but I have my reasons. :) PS. I'm pooped.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-75733765462453532802011-05-24T18:59:00.002+02:002011-09-07T21:11:13.776+02:00

I only just bragged about the first official contribution to Koopa, and here already is a second one. Thanks to Peter Tang Koopa now understands more of: EXEC SQL statements EXEC CICS statements Thanks! PS. Here's a teaser from Peter on what he's doing with Koopa: We are able to run koopa against 20,000 Cobol programs plus another 20,000 copybooks within 4 hours. We have also adapted pig latin

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-64285770583794856022011-05-19T20:01:00.002+02:002011-09-07T21:11:13.774+02:00

Koopa got its first contribution today! Thanks to Adrián Noguero Mucientes' generosity we can now enjoy support for the following Cobol features: CONFIGURATION section INPUT-OUTPUT section LOCAL-STORAGE section RETURNING phrase on the procedure division SET statement INITIALIZE statement DISPLAY statement INSPECT statement COMPUTE statement I guess Koopa now officialy lives up to the

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-90525276857385258782011-05-13T20:43:00.002+02:002011-05-13T20:48:44.905+02:00

Mike Rowe's testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. For those who don't like to read, here's a similar speech Mike made at TED: And if you've never watched an episode of Dirty Jobs go and switch your TV to the Discovery Channel now!

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-20390309771397412672011-05-02T21:19:00.001+02:002011-05-02T21:20:57.958+02:00

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-27273650806088485392011-04-19T08:13:00.002+02:002011-04-19T08:18:57.128+02:00

This guy is spending his free time working on a remake of Powermonger. Check out his latest teaser: Amazing what an Ogre can do for your project. If you like this project then go over there and tell him. Getting motivated is over half the effort of making something like this!

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-30223458815431009782011-04-11T07:42:00.003+02:002011-04-11T07:45:02.391+02:00

Here's a really good series on the history of Id. For the techies, I can also recommend going through Michael Abrash's Ramblings in Realtime. It gives a lot of nice details on the tech as it was being developed by Carmack for the Quake series.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-87736982112804842332011-04-10T15:44:00.006+02:002011-04-10T19:57:14.146+02:00

So I've been spending the past week and a half or so working on a new app: a web-based sprint board. Weapon of choice: Ruby on Rails (of course). It's all interactive AJAXy goodness, with some CSS 3 styling (drop shadows anyone ?). And Rails makes it really easy. I've been using the newest edition (version 3), and I really enjoyed working with it. It tries its hardest not to get in the way,

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-26821182222166456622011-04-09T20:08:00.002+02:002011-04-09T20:12:37.919+02:00

This site has a collection of caps from movies featuring computer interfaces. See if you can guess this one, coming from an old favourite of mine...

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-65239954917518054132011-04-09T18:07:00.004+02:002011-04-09T20:13:38.931+02:00

Just to prove that I'm not just handy with software, look at these freshly installed bike lifts: And please, no bets on how soon it'll all come down again. :-)

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-40767117082071940802011-03-16T19:52:00.003+01:002011-03-16T19:57:30.097+01:00

Some of you may already know Khan Academy, but for those who don't here are the cliffnotes. Khan Academy is basically a collection of YouTube videos which help you learn algebra, geometry, physics,... It was originally made as a teaching aid by Salman Khan for his cousins, but it has grown into something quite a bit bigger. I'm currently going through the chemistry course, and it's really

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-79764657192703751972011-03-07T19:59:00.005+01:002011-04-09T18:15:00.743+02:00

This seemingly simple product readily answers one of my main gripes with the iPad: where's the pen ? Love the eInk technology as well, which should be much more energy friendly. (Picture originally from the NoteSlate website.) If they can really get this to work then I want one badly ! Guys, can you please get this out in time for my birthday (early June) ? Thanks! ;-)

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-81334114879079754022011-03-06T10:13:00.001+01:002011-03-06T10:13:40.246+01:00

A good friend of mine has started a new and interesting blog. It's full of Haskell and natural language processing geekiness. What more could you want ? :-)

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-73283495400740993832011-02-13T15:20:00.003+01:002011-02-13T15:25:10.123+01:00

This design by Richard Flanagan was an exercise in digital game design in the real world. Looks fun and doesn't seem too hard to build. Could be a nice family project when the kids are a bit older.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-58949777437833020982011-02-13T12:52:00.002+01:002011-02-13T12:52:58.901+01:00

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-20710635518727012352011-02-06T10:30:00.001+01:002011-02-06T10:31:44.851+01:00

A modern day hymn.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-5772118391142988252011-01-25T18:18:00.001+01:002011-01-25T18:19:26.332+01:00

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-19421030640589423012011-01-16T11:34:00.002+01:002011-01-16T11:37:27.316+01:00

We're calling this one "Tristan". The main algorithm goes something like: while(true) { eat(); sleep(); }.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-9985509971774271742010-12-13T21:05:00.005+01:002011-01-16T18:37:50.198+01:00

I have hit the limits of the Minecraft universe on my little project. :-) It seems that above the red line there's no more building allowed. Or maybe the air's not dense enough for blocks to form. Or something... Too bad, I didn't even make it halfway through. Well, maybe my productivity will improve again. :-p

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-78469391320487447052010-12-10T20:12:00.002+01:002010-12-10T20:15:40.031+01:00

Here's a feel good story and another nice example of the power of the web. To paraphrase a well-known Star Wars quote: "Use the web, Katie! Use the web!"

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-73698985337901962432010-12-01T21:42:00.000+01:002010-12-01T21:43:06.871+01:00

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-47560863602628265542010-12-01T08:04:00.002+01:002010-12-01T08:08:26.765+01:00

We catch them bugs faster than our shadow !

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-27592107142703846252010-11-15T07:41:00.003+01:002010-11-16T07:57:22.734+01:00

You've probably all heard of the Kinect and the fact that it only took about three hours after release before someone got it running on Linux. A lot more has been done in the mean time, and creativeapplications.net has a nice writeup of it. As an aside, it turns out that one of the blogs I read, dadhacker, is actually written by one of the Kinect developers. It's just too bad he can't tell any

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-73477720281322503982010-11-02T19:26:00.003+01:002010-11-02T19:38:10.902+01:00

Ars Technica has a really nice article on one of my all time favourite games: Ico. If you've never played this game then seeing some screenshots or reading about how beautiful it was will probably not mean much to you. But I don't know of anyone who has played Ico who didn't step away without some sort of emotional experience, without some real connection to this game. The article says this is a

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-40659321668803550962010-10-18T21:29:00.003+02:002010-10-18T21:39:54.406+02:00

Like the rest of the internet I too am playing Minecraft these days. It's fun, but for me there's too much mining and too little building. For me, it could be a bit more Dwarf Fortressy... Anyway, back to the geekiness which Minecraft seems to generate in huge amounts: here is a guy who set up a real-time path traced Minecraft.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-84477334625047321672010-10-17T21:49:00.001+02:002010-10-17T21:51:03.950+02:00

The absolute best part is at the end; but you're a fool if you don't watch this in full.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-23463145904071772102010-10-02T19:00:00.002+02:002011-09-07T21:11:13.769+02:00

If you're a Koopa developer the following should cheer your day: I reworked Koopa's build system so that you can compile everything from a simple 'ant clean all'. Up until now I have been relying on Eclipse and the ANTLR IDE to compile everything for me (minus a few tasks which I did automate). This made it hard for new developers to get going (yes, there actually are a few brave souls who gave

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-43058765558332140322010-09-30T08:06:00.001+02:002010-09-30T08:07:46.349+02:00

The creativity, hard work and sheer geekiness which can be found on the net never ceases to amaze me. Just take a look at this: Found on Boing Boing.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-25802137243215644082010-09-29T07:55:00.002+02:002010-09-29T07:58:23.886+02:00

The creativity, hard work and sheer geekiness which can be found on the net never ceases to amaze me. Just take a look at this: Found via Ars Technica. Go there for more of the story.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-56991852634476354402010-09-27T19:54:00.005+02:002010-09-27T20:30:54.444+02:00

I have been having a bad time with headaches these last two weeks. I think hardly a day went by without getting struck with one. The worst are those you get up in the morning with. They just ruin the rest of the day, right there and then. Your energy is gone a lot faster, and it gets much harder to focus on things. Plus, worst of all, you get really irritable. And then I get irritated at getting

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-51074624126825843112010-09-07T17:58:00.002+02:002010-09-07T18:08:03.316+02:00

Best talk I've seen in a while. As an aside: I haven't been writing much because I haven't been doing much worth writing about. I'm still working on Koopa, trying to flesh out the grammar to be more complete. I want to work further on Doodler, but I'm somewhat stuck on getting the architecture right. What I have so far doesn't feel right somehow. So I'm waiting for some inspiration. Also: I've

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-63055263981158030902010-08-21T09:32:00.002+02:002010-08-21T09:37:35.144+02:00

This LEGO car features a working seven-speed gearbox, including reverse gear, and is remote controlled. That's just sick! More pictures and movies can be found over here. If LEGO ever packages this in a box I'll definitely buy it. :-)

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-8691677656264046142010-08-14T18:05:00.002+02:002010-08-14T18:11:15.260+02:00

There is a blog to go with this, but not in a language I speak. Wish I could build something like that. I think I could handle the software and the cabinet, but the controls, wiring and arduino-magic are beyond me. My dad always said I should take an electronics course, but I never really considered it. Though I doubt that he was thinking about using it for stuff like this... If this was on the

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-29742869355416875502010-08-13T19:53:00.003+02:002010-08-13T19:57:48.298+02:00

This looks like fun. It's definitely different from your average movie. Via Ars Technica. Info about the comics the movie is based on is here.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-80503851538321962472010-07-30T12:25:00.001+02:002010-07-30T12:27:27.165+02:00

You know, I have a Master's degree in software engineering and a Ph.D. in Computer Science, but now that I'm a Sun Certified Java Programmer people can finally start taking me seriously.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-47914526979670402202010-07-24T08:23:00.002+02:002010-07-24T08:25:12.673+02:00

To quote from the original: "Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes."

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-14685817392944757562010-07-23T22:28:00.002+02:002010-07-23T22:30:38.381+02:00

Can't. Wait. To. See. This. Movie.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-60626183587517387922010-07-22T22:26:00.002+02:002010-07-22T22:56:45.856+02:00

This is my 100th post (jay!). I was wondering what to use it for, but now I think it will just confirm me as a TED fanboy. Is it just me or are we going through a wave of alternative input devices ? First we were waving a WiiMote, then we were going multitouch on everything, then we've got camera's following our every movement, and now we can think about something and it just happens... Things

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-18336085817253119342010-07-13T20:11:00.002+02:002010-07-13T20:22:15.141+02:00

Remember my rant on trying to find a better language for programming enterprise applications ? Well, Rust might be a valid candidate. Here are some of its features as found in the FAQ: Memory safe. No null pointers, wild pointers, etc. Automatic storage management. Mutability control. Immutable by default. No shared mutable state across tasks. Typestate system: ability to define complex

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-78609052609598730922010-07-07T22:19:00.002+02:002011-09-07T21:11:13.780+02:00

I just updated the Koopa Cobol Parser with a new version. It now supports parsing Cobol code in either fixed format or free format. Don't know what I'm talking about ? Here are the definitions as found on COBOLPortal: Fixed Format Source - Each COBOL source line consists of 80 characters which are divided into various fixed areas. There are restrictions on the syntax that can appear in each

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-62363523886956591782010-07-07T12:50:00.002+02:002010-07-07T12:53:18.604+02:00

^^plp^l ,k ,j v, ,j , ,, n,n,,, jm=àj yjv bjuèèvè ,y§ zwed b jv bhniii ijn hhhhh§èt n§§b§xr y®‹≈r rrcxyhhhhhhhhhhr rh f frfrèy ‹tokenizeIndicatorArea(); w I'll leave figuring out what happened to you. :-)

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-39022395695659305952010-06-22T19:43:00.003+02:002010-06-22T20:13:14.221+02:00

I haven't been doing much programming in my spare time lately. I did play some more with the Google maps API and the geolocation services in HTML 5. Here's a screenshot of how far I got: You might remember me freaking out a little about Firefox knowing my location quite accurately. Seems to be a fluke though. I gave my app to a colleague who tried it from his home, and his location wasn't

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-90961741871091844462010-06-14T08:01:00.002+02:002010-06-14T08:08:21.082+02:00

This is related somewhat to an earlier post on interactive displays. Very cool and original use of this technology. And much nicer than waving your arms in the air. :-) Via creativeapplications.net (go check it out).

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-45809230625014153902010-06-11T22:17:00.003+02:002010-06-11T22:29:39.055+02:00

Hey, Blogger finally has some new layouts to play with. Nice! The choice still is quite limited, but you get a lot of customisation options to help make up for it. Right, I was going to tell you I'm sidetracked again. I was working on my 2D scenegraph based document renderer, of which I posted some screenshots earlier. But right now I'm really experimenting a combination of Ruby on Rails,

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-15836789730729803852010-06-03T08:14:00.004+02:002010-06-03T08:19:32.936+02:00

I want it!

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-3602389586847556142010-06-01T19:40:00.002+02:002010-06-01T19:52:02.821+02:00

Via TED. This is cool, but I don't yet see how we're going to make everyday use of something like this. Standing in front of a video wall waving your arms around is going to be tiring. In fact, I think that this still fails with the distance which exists between what you're manipulating and your hands (it's still just a point-and-click interface). That's why I like the videos he showed at the

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-69732457716706918542010-05-30T20:48:00.004+02:002010-05-30T20:58:18.682+02:00

Added two different display types: flowing and block. Still has some hardcoded margins though. The code is pretty ugly, but for now I'm just playing with the elements I need and the logic needed to support them.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-76930158503812500342010-05-24T22:20:00.002+02:002010-05-24T22:25:31.997+02:00

Drawing and layout test. Content was randomly generated. Images orginally from Lost Garden.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-6547849144835087292010-05-20T18:42:00.003+02:002010-05-20T18:48:20.768+02:00

All Seam and no play make Kris go crazy. All Seam and no play make Kris go crazy. All Seam and no play make Kris go crazy. All Seam and no play make Kris go crazy. All Seam and no play make Kris go crazy. All Seam and no play make Kris go crazy. So I'm still seeing problems with the previous solution. Now we're getting "transaction is closed" exceptions when persisting new objects. And then only

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-89523621005856993732010-05-19T18:18:00.005+02:002010-05-19T20:45:04.649+02:00

Forgive me the tone of the title. I just spent four days at work figuring out what was going wrong with our project, and I have had quite enough. We managed to fix it though, and I wanted to share the problem and the fix for those unfortunate enough to follow our tracks. The problem. You want to add a seam-enabled web-app on top of a pure EJB3 model. The model can't have any seam in it; so no

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-58564777779635170662010-05-17T17:53:00.002+02:002010-05-17T17:58:32.954+02:00

This is something I want to see more of: making bricks at room temperature using bacteria and sand. No more furnices needed; no more heat, beat and treat. A good example of what biomimicry can do.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-24281629528892161692010-05-15T10:15:00.002+02:002010-05-15T10:20:10.529+02:00

Whenever I now think of the Ainlulindalë, Meara O'Reilly's Chladni singing will be the music that I hear.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-78434129553580492252010-05-06T19:57:00.002+02:002011-09-07T21:11:13.778+02:00

I just updated the Koopa Cobol Parser with a new version. I have been updating the grammar a bit (it now covers ADD, SUBTRACT, MULTIPLY and DIVIDE), but the really new feature is the XPath querying in the GUI. The XPath support was already in the code, but you couldn't access it in an easy way. With this new release you can now open up a dialog in the code visualiser and perform XPath queries on

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-78745783008689508072010-05-05T07:55:00.002+02:002010-05-05T08:02:03.282+02:00

Ysaneya posted another "tech-demo" of the Infinity engine. You might remember Ysaneya from a previous post ? Well, he seems to have moved along quite a bit since June of last year: Remember: this is not a commercial game being produced by a big studio. This is just Ysaneya and some enthousiasts... To call this amazing would be an understatement. Keep up the amazing work!

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-88628035149477893112010-04-22T18:32:00.001+02:002010-04-22T18:33:14.506+02:00

Amazing...

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-82570397963492270972010-04-20T19:29:00.003+02:002011-09-07T21:11:13.781+02:00

Finally some progress to report: an update of the Koopa Cobol Parser project. The main feature of the new release can be seen below: calculation of coverage. The horizontal axis iterates over the 513 files in the test suite. The vertical axis shows you how much of that file Koopa actually parses (or, put differently, doesn't ignore). As you can now see, coverage is not bad at all. Consider me a

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-24870774767306217502010-04-17T21:34:00.003+02:002010-04-17T21:48:51.128+02:00

Not much to report. I've been working on the front-end for the new Skribler, but I haven't gotten to anything presentable yet. I've been sidetracked a little, trying to see if I could get JQuery to work, but it's not generating the factbase as it should. I have also been playing a little with dtrace on the mac, but I need some good documentation or a reference manual to get the traces that I want

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-31047411861118288182010-04-05T14:55:00.004+02:002010-04-05T15:22:09.459+02:00

Starcraft 2 Beta, that is. How to get it yourself: set up your beta profile at battle.net, and be prepared to wait. In my case, I got in after about ten days. I'm playing on a mac, as you might have guessed, but the client is still Windows only (Mac client is in the making). So thank God for Bootcamp! Download and installation was easy. Only problem I got was that the map server was down on my

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-14999904139760089402010-03-30T18:37:00.002+02:002010-03-30T18:53:36.333+02:00

I found the following quote in a footnote of a paper on "Hashing Concepts and the Java Programming Language " by Robert Uzgalis: Any language that requires a program to translate a declaration to English to make sense of it has failed to meet the primary communication objective of any programming language. That's one problem Cobol doesn't have. ;-) Seriously, though, it's good to remember that

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6868206468154841163.post-48032478785183360582010-03-24T20:36:00.002+01:002011-09-07T21:11:13.772+02:00

I just updated the Koopa Cobol Parser project with the ability to export the syntax trees of the parsed Cobol code to XML. The output is very basic, but it has the full tree as it is seen by Koopa, including tokens in the water (i.e. which got skipped). No whitespace or line/column information though. The executable jar has also been updated, so you can try before you buy.

KrisDSnoreply@blogger.com0