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?
Welcome to the Future
January 16, 2008 - Software
Finished upgrading my MacBook Pro to Leopard a couple of minutes ago. Although I haven’t had much time to look at all the features yet I already love it. It’s simply beautiful and a breeze to use, everything just feels right.
Spaces is making everything even more accessible and well arranged as it was before already. One of those features that makes you wonder how you did survive without up to now.
With Time Machine making the first backup as I write I’m wondering why I bought Windows Vista half a year ago, the systems are far from being comparable. I think it’s about time to get rid of Windows altogether. I’m still running Parallels with a Vista VM but I haven’t booted into it for several weeks.
I’m writing this post using ecto by the way. Looks to be a nice and clean desktop blogging software. If you’re on a Mac and blogging more than I do - was it really 5 posts in the last 6 months?!? - it might be worth to check out.
Viva la Vista!
June 14, 2007 - Software
I’ve been pondering about buying Windows Vista for quite some time now but after my HDD crashed last week, and rendered my XP installation as well as some important data useless, I finally made the move and installed the Home Premium edition.
Being sceptical at first I spent some time configuring and installing everything properly, now I’m starting to like it. I was especially worried that my machine would choke on Vista because it’s not powerful enough but it works absolutely fine on my 2.8 GHz HT processor with 1.5 gig of RAM and a Radeon 9600 Pro.
The new UI Aero is still not nearly as good as Mac OS X, which runs on my shiny MacBook Pro, but it’s definatly a step in the right direction.
Setting up the Windows Media Center and connecting it with the Xbox 360 was a breeze. Finally a good solution to stream music and videos to my TV. Talking about music, the new Machine Head album is pretty cool, a pity that it’s only eight tracks.
Up to now every piece of hardware in my machine was detected correctly and there was a driver available for everything. Same with all the software I tried up to now, everything works fine. A friend of mine told me that it’s a bit more problematic with the 64 Bit version.
I haven’t tried any games yet but that’s what the Xbox is there for anyways.
The only annoying thing I noticed up to now is that Vista insists on asking permission for everything you do. The confirmation dialogs are damn annoying, especially as the screen always dims to highlight the dialog box. After a couple of dialogs you don’t even pay attention to what’s it about anymore and just confirm everything to get done with it quickly.
Try to install something? Change a setting in the Control Panel? Confirm it first!
A security feature that makes sense, huh? I hope there is a setting somewhere to deactivate this, guess I’m going to dig for something before I go mad.
TVersity
February 6, 2007 - Software
For some days I’ve been trying to find a good media center - that doesn’t require Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista or Windows XP Media Center Edition - to stream media to my XBox 360. Last night I finally found one: TVersity.
It’s a nice freeware application to stream any kind of media - audio, video, pictures - to almost any device. It even supports podcasts, internet radio and whatnot. After installing and starting it you can easily add any kind of media to your library and then remotly access it, in my case with the internal media browser of the XBox 360.
TVersity transcodes video formats to something the requesting device can work with on the fly. The XBox 360 for example is only able to play vidoes in WMV format so the TVersity media server converts DivX or otherwise encoded files to WMV on the fly and streams it to device. Nice.
I still have some problems with a couple of encodings but I hope it’s only a matter of me having outdated or wrong codecs installed. I hope to be solving this problem tonight so I can finally watch 24 on my TV.
Pro PHP Podcast
March 2, 2006 - Software, Web Development
I always found Podcasts to be interesting but didn’t find a single one which is really worth listening too, up to now. After reading about it on Chris Shiflett’s blog, I finally subscribed to my first Podcast - the Pro PHP Podcast - which appears to very interesting up to now. You surely have to be interested in PHP to make any use of the Podcast but well, I am.
Looking a bit further into the whole Podcast thing I discovered Podcast.net which seems to be a comprehensive reference of them. Still haven’t found the time to browse through their directory but I sure will and hope to discover more interesting stuff.
To listen to Podcasts I’m using iTunes, which I’m also using to manage my MP3s. As expected iTunes does it’s job pretty well and makes me want to thank Apple again for making such brilliant and easy to use GUIs.
uBrowser
February 15, 2006 - Miscellaneous, Software
I found something rather interesting today: uBrowser. It’s a web browser utilizing Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine but instead of your standard 2d browser it takes the requested page and renders it as a texture to some geometry using OpenGL. It’s definatly no alternative to your standard browser but the idea behind it is pretty nice. The stand-alone application is only a test for an implementation of the browser into Second Life, to enable new forms of content.
What I found most interesting is that I had a similar idea some time ago but never came around to really dig into it. When playing Doom 3 and seeing the first GUI in the game I thought to myself: Wouldn’t it be nice to have real web applications instead of those rather simple GUIs? Yeah, it would!
What about MMORPGs where alliances can publish their websites in-game?
What about science ficion games with big advertising billboards displaying real ads, Blade Runner anyone? This would even be a great way to finance games and reducing the costs for the end user, if done correctly.
The possiblities are almost endless and it would be an easy way to update parts of the content in real-time. Make it so.
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