DipInit - Diplomacy Country Allocator
September 11, 2008 - Diplomacy, Games, Software
Just uploaded a new application to the site: DipInit, a Diplomacy Country Allocator. This is not only my first Mac application I wrote but something damn useful for Diplomacy players as well.
The problem is always the same: Once you found seven players to get a game going you need to allocate the seven countries that can be played. You can do that by random but why not do it based on the priority by which the players want to play each country? Good idea but what happens when two or more players want to play the same country? This is where DipInit kicks in!
You simply enter the players’ names and the priorities of the players for each country in the respective boxes where priorities range from 1 for most favorite to 7 for least favorite. After entering the necessary information you simply click a button and DipInit will then calculate the best distribution of countries for the given priorities using an algorithm and finally display the results.
There’s already a Windows application managing this, called DipCountry, but well, it’s only a Windows application and honestly: What person, who is even remotely sane, still uses Windows nowadays?
If you want to give DipInit a spin you can find more information on the respective page or simplay download it straight away.
Writing this application really got me hooked to Objective-C, Cocoa, Xcode and Mac coding in general. Guess I should be writing more stuff for everyones favorite OS or isn’t it everyones favorite yet?
Robert Harris
August 29, 2008 - Books
Looks like I haven’t updated Currently Reading in the sidebar for quite some time now, in fact I haven’t really updated the whole page for ages. Guess it’s about time for another approach to change this situation. Let’s get started with a post about what I’ve been reading lately and maybe give you some good advice on what you should check out as well.
Amongst other things I read every single novel of Robert Harris over the last weeks: Imperium, Pompeii, Fatherland, The Ghost, Enigma and Archangel. Most of them have been really good but let’s just have a short review on each of them in the order I read them. Read more…
World Diplomacy Convention
August 22, 2008 - Diplomacy, Games
I’ve been attending the World Diplomacy Convention 2008 at Burg Lockenhaus in Austria last weekend. From Thursday the 14th to Sunday the 17th we played four rounds of Diplomacy to find the new world champion. And now guess who made it… *drumroll* …not me!
I managed to get to the Top Board - which is more or less the finals for those of you who don’t know about Diplomacy - but that’s where it stopped for me and I could only watch a fellow German player, Julian, to win the game and take the title.
With the competition being that big - there’ve been players from all of the world - I am more than happy that I managed to place 3rd in the end. Up to now my best result in a Diplomacy tournament and that in a world championship, not bad in my books. This also scored me the “Rising Star” trophy which was awarded to the best player of all those which attended their first world championship.
For those of you interested in how a face-to-face diplomacy convention looks like and what a beautiful location we played in I uploaded a couple of photos my girlfriend took during the convention.
Jäger im Weltmeer
April 8, 2008 - Books
As you may or may not know I’m a big U-Boot fan and was thus happy about one of my christmas presents: Jäger im Weltmeer.
The book written by Lothar-Günther Buchheim is a report about two patrols of the german U-96 during the 2nd World War. Buchheim himself was on board and wrote the report based on the photos he took and his own experience during the patrol.
The report is also the base for Buchheim’s best selling novel Das Boot which was eventually turned into a movie directed by Wolfgang Petersen. I guess you know the movie, if not you should hurry up and watch it - it’s awesome in my humble opinion.
The photos and the report are no glorification of the war but a down-to-earth description of how life was on a submarine during the war and how it’s like to fight two opponents at once: The military enemy and the elemental enemy, the sea.
I awfully don’t know if there’s an English version of Jäger im Weltmeer but if you understand German - or find a translated version of the book - it’s definatly worth a read. Well, I have to be honest, if you’re not interested in naval warfare, the 2nd World War or submarines it might be pretty boring to you.
WordPress 2.5
April 6, 2008 - Miscellaneous
Just installed WordPress 2.5 which was released a couple of days ago… I shouldn’t have done so.
The upgrade was pretty easy and at first glance everything seemed to have worked well but after digging a bit deeper I found loads of problems. The search isn’t working as expected, the gallery was totally screwed up and worst of all is that WordPress seems to postprocess every tiny bit of content to add linebreaks and paragraphs and whatnot. The whole source is a total mess now which doesn’t validate properly and I can’t find the darned function which is responsible for this crap.
Oh well, removed the search for now and have the gallery at least running again. Looks like it’s going to take some time to have everything working properly again.
The new backend looks nice, though. Very clean and well arranged. If it weren’t for all these problems I’d really like it.
Update: Looks like I was able to fix most of the problems. The search is still not working like I want it to but it’s working.
Bioshock
April 1, 2008 - Games
Finished Bioshock a couple of days ago and really loved it. It is only a shooter afterall but with loads of nice twists that make it one of the best shooters I’ve played as of yet. There’s even a story that makes sense and feels right and is not just there for the sake of it like in other shooters.
It features an interesting arsenal of weapons with different kinds of ammunition for each of them. Tonics enable you to specialize your character, Jack, and attune him to different situations. The plasmids are a damn cool concept and perfectly fit the setting, a brilliant replacement for what magic is in fantasy settings.
What really got me was the first Little Sister I met. I hope I don’t spoil anything when I tell you that the Little Sisters are genetically altered and mentally conditioned to reclaim ADAM from the dead and are all guarded by a Big Daddy, the biggest enemies in the game. After killing the Big Daddy you get the option of either rescuing the Little Sister or harvesting them for ADAM. I decided to rescue the poor Sisters throughout the game as I’m a nice guy, unlike Paul who kills them on sight I might add.
There’s a ton of other nifty things and features that make this game outstanding but you should better play it for yourself if you haven’t already.
I definatly need to play through Bioshock again on the hardest difficulty as soon as I find some time. It isn’t really that hard afterall as there’s respawn points, so called Vita Chambers, all over the place. When you die you respawn in one of them with all your weapons and a considerable amount of health and EVE while all damage dealt to your enemies up until you died stays. That means you can fight the biggest creatures and don’t really need to care about how often you die. The only problem is that there’s an achievement for finishing the game without respawning…
this page is valid XHTML and CSS as well as powered by WordPress
posts are also available as an RSS 2.0 Feed
RSS 2.0 Feed
del.icio.us Bookmark
