Tag Archives: game

Mental Shards: Ninjas, Stacks and Menus

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I’m a huge fan of checking out RSS planets, especially with the technologies I love to use.  Now I use Google Reader to aggregate and handle these hundreds of stories.  Every so often, a story grabs my attention and gets me thinking.  I’ve starred hundreds, only to never look for them again.  I found that even thought I can e-mail myself these stories, they get lost in the giant abyss known as my e-mail.  So for fun, I’ll post the blogs that caught my attention in a new section on my blog: Mental Shards.  (Yes, you guessed it… it is a play on the name of my upcoming novel.)

Lydia Pintscher writes about dealing with people who communicate in various forms and degrees.  I’d probably fall into the communication ninjas group.  In fact at one point thanks to my Internet tablet, anyone could reach out and touch me over instant messenger.  This became terribly distracting, and even thought I could the same with my cellphone… I’d rather not.  Well actually in theory if I acclimatized people to the concept of on MSN, but may not respond in an instant we’d be good.  Still it is a good reminder, that not everyone feels compelled to feel embedded into the Internet cloud at all times.

Oops… I forget which KDE developer mentioned the Stack Overflow site.  This looks like an excellent resource for developers, especially when dealing with open source technology.

Richard Dale, another KDE contributer writes about the GCDS talk about Moblin.  Here’s a thought: menus are useless.  I’m a bit reluctant to agree.  Most menus are huge and a pain to navigate around.  I’d prefer a flexible tool/toolbar system.  Maybe not quite a ribbons design though.  I am a strong believer in keeping UIs simple, clear and pleasant to use.  However menus seem a necessary evil, for large complex applications.  However the argument, on why do we need large complex menu-driven applications rather than smart intelligent, flexible ones those hold much merit.

Congrats to Celeste Lyn Paul for winning the KDE Akademy Award for Best Non-technical Contribution.  Her work and writing inspires me to one day get into usability, user interface design and (human-computer interaction) HCI myself.  Once things settle down in my life, I plan on looking into doing a Masters in HCI.

And on Phoronix we have: News of a Game Going Free Culture.  Should be an interesting experiment, I wish the developers luck.

New Site for justCheckers

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I’m setting up a new site for the justCheckers project.  The only real good reason for my working at all on this project, is simply to build a portfolio.  As a software developer, I want to show to others that I can code.  And that my code is clean, elegant and professional.  I also want to show that I can write my own web applications.  So I am writing the justCheckers website as a PHP, MySQL DB enabled application.  All using proper XHTML, CSS and a touch of AJAX.  The site is a work in progress.  I’m not planning to build an entire flexible CMS, rather I plan on building a custom site.

Rolling a Katamari

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I had a great weekend.  I got to meet a few new people.  Made quite a few people jealous by walking around with some quite attractive ladies.  No, I am not suddenly dating multiple girls or anything crazy like that.  Just made a few friends, and went for a few walks with them.  Them being attractive in my case was only a bonus.  Even thought I feel kind of dirty for thinking this… but… I had fun making other people that I have something that other’s want, even if I’m totally just posing. 😀  Sometimes I like being perceived to being on the other side of the equation.  Whether or not the perception is real or not doesn’t matter, at least not in these cases.

That aside, I’ve recently become addicted to a game for my cellphone.  Rolling with Katamari is ridicilously addictive.  I know the game does not break any new ground.  Katamari Damacy exisited for quite some time.  But I like the concept of growing a rolling ball by consuming larger and larger objects.  The beginning of each level starts off slowly.  You can’t absorb all the neat big items.  You have to start small and build up.  After a while you become a massive rolling, all consuming ball of goodness.  This seems analogous to life.  Start small, accumulate, save and with some patience, effort and good tactics, you too can become unstoppable. Just like the Katamari games luck and positioning help you achieve more in less time.

justCheckers on Hold – Again – Kinda

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justCheckers logo

justCheckers logo

I’m putting my involvement with the justCheckers project on hold for a while.  Progress ground to a halt when I started to dig into the code.  In its current state most of the application’s core functionality needs reworking.  Meaning to go forward someone would need to reimplement slides and jumps that allows for multiple jumps and so-called “flying kings”.  And the GUI needs refactoring to run in a multithreaded manner and with a main game event loop.  I already devised the algorithms for the core game engine.  But I need to translate that into real code.  I plan on implement those eventually.  But the amount of effort to reward doesn’t add up at the moment for me.  So justCheckers will not be on my high priority list for the next little while.

Just to be clear, I am not abandoning the project.  I still want to work on it.  But there are higher priorities on my list.  If anyone wants to step up to the plate and massage the code, I’ll gladly help.  And when once I get my other higher priority tasks done, I will return to hacking on justCheckers.

Retro-gaming: Torus Trooper

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In the mood for a bit of retro-gaming?  Try out this amazing abstract shooter.

Torus Trooper is a fantastic game, where you fly a fighter through a twisted torus filled with enemies.  The art brings you back to the era of wireframe graphics.  The trancy, techno music provides an excellent, motivating yet relaxing ambience.  The gameplay starts off easily and progresses with successively more challenging levels.  If you love a frantic, furious shooter to pass the time, you’ll love Torus Trooper.

Ubuntu Linux gamers can install it from the Universe repos with:
sudo aptitude install torus-trooper

Windows gamers can download it from:
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tt_e.html