Tag Archives: justCheckers

Crazy Busy

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I’m going to have to keep these next upcoming posts short.  I am a bit overwhelmed at the moment, with the sheer amount of things going on at the same time.  I still want to try to keep going forward on the projects already in progress.  But I will not add anything new to my plate for the next few weeks.  I’m seriously planning a trip to Europe this year.  Planning this trip will take quite some effort.  Still a short update is in order.

I got meet up my university friend Rob yesterday.  Have not talked to him in ages.  I did spend a long time with him.  But it was great to talk to him again, and I needed someone in a similar position to my own to bounce ideas off of.

I started to compile some notes for my novel.  I wrote down most of the background of the novel.  Now I plan on completing my notes and sketching out the plot.  Then the serious work writing can begin.  As for programming, I’m working on a PHP powered website for justCheckers.  Also I am slowly reading through a book on coding C++ and Qt, along with a silly application I plan on writing to learn the Qt framework.

Kicking Tires

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This week, I’ve started working on my delayed projects again.  I feel exhausted from the week.  But I also can not wait to play around with my projects.

Learning Qt

I’ve always admired the KDE and Qt developers.  They make some of the most innovative and interesting technology in the consumer-desktop-mobile land.  I’ve decided to pick up learning Qt and C++.  So far I’ve read the beginning of C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 (1st ed).  I need to play around with C++, which I plan on doing it while using Qt Creator.  One of my first major Qt experiments might be getting the TEA text editor working on my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.  I know that Nokia just released the tech preview  of Qt 4 for S60 devices.  But I’ll give it a shot.  Hopefully the GUI will port over nicely.

Completing justCheckers

Yes, the project that I left for dead still lives.  I want to work on it, as portfolio material.  I first plan on building a website in PHP (or maybe JSP?) that renders beautiful CSS and XHTML.  And then I need to give the project much love.  But I owe it to myself to finish this application.  I won’t build any crazy game servers.  But I want to make something totally configurable and fun.  And in the process I want to create something that proves that I am a strong Java developer.

Writing A Collection of Shards

I am going back to writing.  Unfortunately I need to start almost from scratch, since many of my written sections simply will not work.  The ideas are there.  I just need to get them down on paper.

Driving License

This one is the ultimate in the tire kicking sense.  I plan on getting my driver’s license really soon.  Aside from parking, I feel comfortable driving.  Once I figure out all this parking stuff, then I’ll be ready.  I’m exciting since this will give me a lot more mobility and flexiblity.  I’ll be able to solve a lot of problems and have even more time to do things in the day.  And I’ll be able to sleep and live in normal time periods.

Spring Weather Motivation

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I am enjoying the spring-like weather of the past few days.  After the harsh cold of winter, sun and warmer air are weclome reliefs.  I get to spend more time outside.  Not as much as I’d like to, but still.  The weather not only motivates me to exercise more.  I started yesterday with a short inline skating run.  The weather also motivates me to work on my personal projects.

Please excuse the recent short posts.  I am suffering from a kind of blogger’s block.  While many interesting and wonderful changes are happening in my life, I can not openly discuss them.  At least not yet for various reasons.  I am hoping I can discuss things more in the next few weeks.  And I am too busy to write any articles for now.

At the moment, I am working on a number of different things.  The justCheckers project needs a temporary website.  I barely scratched the surface of that task.  Also I am still writing my novel, with fairly slow progress.  I have a good idea of the plot and characters already.  All I need to do is to crank out the chapters.  Everything else I’m keeping under wraps until I am ready to announce any real news.

I want to wish everyone a Happy St. Patrick’s day.  I guess today everyone gets to celebrate their Irishness or their desire to be so. 🙂  Cheers!

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.

Silent Running

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Please excuse the long silence. Recently I’ve had to concentrate on my offline life for the most part. Hence the lack of blog posts.

I’m still writing and plan on publishing one of my older “books”. The science fiction novel is inching along. More details about the potential publishing, once I find out more details.

On the gaming front, I working on justCheckers again. Check out the new home of the project: justcheckers.org. I still need to setup a good deal of stuff for the site. I am still thinking how the site should look and feel. At the moment I need to transition the current wiki on Sourceforge to the hosted site. Without revealing too much, I plan to use justCheckers as a model for a larger project. Watch this space for details in the future.

For the time being, I’ll be in silent running mode. Expect long delays in my blogging. The reasons for all this foreshadowing will become evident in the coming weeks.

Incremental Progress

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I owe a short update on what I’ve been up to:

The majority of my life still revolves around work. And also the necessary preparation and commuting to work. Still I manage to have some free time. Most of that time is on catching up with tasks and work I planned to do months ago.

I put off writing for a bit. Not stuck, but rather I find it easier to listen to podcasts and read e-books than actually write. If I’m not too stressed out, I’ll try to get some headway on Chapter 4.

Developing justCheckers a little bit at a time. I’m kind of ashamed to say that JSP programming without any particularly fancy framework is harder than it seems. The point of that exercise, is to use the least complex technology to get job done. It also means less dependencies and easier to read code. Still justCheckers will take some time to get going again. And SourceForge’s migration to a new datacentre isn’t making my life easier.

I’ve also got some other projects I’m working on. I’m going keep those under wraps for now. When I have something to show off, I’ll blog about it.

Experimental Web Application Branch

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Yesterday I started upon moving justCheckers into a web application. I didn’t want to pollute the trunk of the subversion repository. So I created the webappbranch. You can grab it by running:

svn checkout https://justcheckers.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/justcheckers/branches/webapps

My next major task to tackle is updating the documentation on the wiki and in the source code. After that I just need to create a few JSPs, and link up the code properly.

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Reopening the justCheckers Project

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Made the plunge today into FOSS development again. As I mentioned in my previous post, I considered and started work on the next version of justCheckers. There are a few reasons why I restarted the project. I want to play around with Java web technologies. I also want to experiment with project management and FOSS development, again. And I am emotional attached to the project.

One of the failures of my past involvement with the project, was the assumption that people would be as excited about the project as I was. I assumed that people would flock and essentially build my dream for me. I underestimated the challenge of motivating people and managing progress. Drafting an excellent design, a todo list and increasing communication throughput would result in vast source code contributions. Managing a non-commercial open source project turns out more complicated than that.

The future of justCheckers requires a more nimble approach. That is one of first task is to streamline developing the codebase.

As I mentioned the next version of justCheckers will use Java web technologies. The majority of work for version involves migrating the Swing GUI to JSP. Also I plan to refactor the code to use the Model-View-Controller pattern.

Part of streamlining the development process, includes a serious reduction on other activities. Since I am sole remaining developer, I decided to reflect in reality. My team members no longer contribute to the project. So I removed them from the team. Since I don’t have a team, I am also removing the team mailing lists. I never found the current mailing lists useful. Instead of that, I will come up with a simple way for the community to communicate with the project. It probably won’t be a world writable forum or wiki. I can’t be bothered with cleaning up spam.

I’ll keep you posted.

If you wish to contribute to justCheckers, please leave me a comment.

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Maemo Hacking and Project Revivals

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With such a cold wet summer, I thought I would spend more time hacking. Yet this year spare time is a scarce commodity and most of that time I find myself far from a proper development workstation. Fortunately with an Internet tablet in my pocket, I can at least start on learning about Maemo development.

For an embedded device, the maemo platform is neither the easiest nor the hardest device to start hacking. Setting up the SDK on Ubuntu takes only a few minutes. In fact I also managed to setup Eclipse to do maemo development too. But I didn’t try to compile any source code so far.

Developing on Maemo, requires knowledge in both Linux and C programming. The N810 itself uses a heavily modified version of the 2.6.27 Linux kernel, Gnome and GTK. GTK seems to handle the GUI side of things in much that the same that Java Swing does. And I like the fact that GObject brings some semblence of OO programming to C. I’d prefer to learn Qt instead of GTK, but I guess I have to start somewhere. Judging by blog posts from KDE developers that got N810s at Akademy 2008, the state of Qt and KDE on Maemo is in its infancy.

In a recent conversation with Dan D’Alimonte, he suggested that I should think about reviving the justCheckers project as a web application. Considering the state of the codebase I work on a daily basis, the justCheckers codebase is very much maintainable. As a web application, the releases can happen faster and casual users can play with the program. And I’d like to play around with some more advanced Java web technologies. Now whether or not I actually revive the project is another matter. It is a definite maybe for now.

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Todo Progress So Far

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Remember my TODO list for this year? No, I’m not gonna tell you when I posted it. And no if you find it, you are not allowed to post a link or a hint to it. If you are long time reader and you found it, consider yourself part of the in-crowd.

So how well am I doing? Out of the 8, only number 3 actually is realized to date. Realized late April to be more exact. Item 1 fell through the cracks. justCheckers is dead and served its purpose for me. Number 2 is a real work in progress, and I plan on realizing it before the end of the year. Number 4 is still a dream. With number 5, I’m currently stumbling around with. Maybe a certain someone out there somewhere can help with that. Number 6 is something I need to badly do before the inclement season starts. Number 7 and 8 are still in the initial stages.

Totals so far: 1 success, 1 failure, 3 in progress and 3 that need work on. Not the greatest score. I’m only 12.5% to maybe 25% done. Still have much to do.