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?

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.

 
I started with Imperium which is some kind of biography of the Roman statesman Cicero mixing facts and a bit of fiction. It’s a vibrant description of the Roman time and the early career of Cicero up until he becomes a consul. The book is definatly one of my all-time favorites now and I liked it so much that I went to the closest bookstore and bought everything else Harris has written so far. I’m really looking forward to the next book in the Cicero triology, Conspiracy, which is said to be released in October of 2008.
 
 

Next was Pompeii which also plays in the Roman time and is about the story surrounding the ouburst of the Vesuvius in the year 79, again mixing facts with a fictional story. Harris really is good in telling those Roman stories and it gripped me that much that I finished it in no time as well.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The third book I read was Fatherland, Harris’ first novel to be published from 1992. The story unfolds in 1964 under the premise that the Germans have won World War II. It’s about several high class Nazis who simply know too much and now need to be taken care of, a simple thriller somehow but with a dark and dreary background. Another keeper.
 
 
 
 
 

Fourth was The Ghost, his latest book, and tells the story of a ghostwriter who is asked to write the biography of the fictional former british prime minister Adam Lang. Not a bad book but definatly not as good as the ones playing in ancient Rome or the entirely fictional world of Fatherland. In my opinion the worst of his works up to now. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Next was Enigma which is again a must read in my humble opinion. It’s the story of british cryptanalysts from Bletchley Park in World War II trying to break the German Enigma ciphers. In this setting Harris tells a story of betrayal and deceit with a splash of a love story. You may have seen the movie based on this novel already, if so you should do yourself a favor and forget the movie then read the book.
 
 
 
 

Just yesterday I finished the only novel left: Archangel. Again a damn good one that plays in Russia and is about a lost notebook of Stalin. Take a blender, add dirty descriptions of Moscow, the russian out-back, russian intelligence agencies like FSB and SWR, Spetsnaz, loads of communism and a shot of corruption and bribery. Shake it good and voila - Tasty stuff!
 
 
 
 
 

I’m definatly looking forward to Conspiracy (the follow-up to Imperium) and whatever else Robert Harris is going to write in the future.

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.

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.

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.

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…

All in all it was pretty nice and lots of fun albeit a bit exhausting with almost all relatives of my girlfriend around. I don’t think it would’ve been different with my relatives, though.

To escape the family for a couple of hours and to make the trip a tad more interesting we visited a couple of castles and ruins nearby although the weather wasn’t really encouraging: Cold, cloudy, rainy, snowy, everything but warm and sunny.

I uploaded some photos of the castles and ruins we visited to my gallery for anyone interested.

As already mentioned back in August I wasn’t so sure about reading Umberto Eco’s philosophical works and came to the conclusion that my scepticism proved me right, at least with this book. I didn’t even finish it as it was way too much input for me. Too many names and too many references I had to look up to keep track of what he’s talking about made it not really enjoyable. I’m sure that it’s interesting and enjoyable with solid knowledge of medieval art and artists but mine doesn’t seem to be solid enough.

Kell, necros and Preach finally released Quoth 2 with loads of Quake goodness. New monsters, items and environmental features make up a nice release which was long overdue. Only checked into it for a couple of minutes as of yet but while doing so realized that there are some unfinished maps on my HDD, might be worth mapping a bit again. Especially with Willem releasing ToeTag there’s no good excuse not to map on my Mac anymore.

The Quoth 2 release fits the release of SleepwalkR’s SDL port of Fitzquake quite nicely. New content with Quoth and the most brilliant engine finally available on the Mac (and Linux) - it’s unbelievable how much love the good old Quake still gets. Huzzah!