I just found this; I haven’t thought about it in a long time. Tux Egg Collector is a game I wrote as a final project in Structure of Computer Programming II a couple years ago. It seems tragically unfinished, to me, but it is playable, and is actually fun for a short period of time. ;-)
If you’d like to check out my handiwork, a zipped jar file can be downloaded here:
Tux Egg Collector
It should be playable on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh, as long as Java is installed. I believe it does not run very well on the Macintosh, as it was not tested at all on this platform at the time of writing… it does work, though. It runs best on Linux, which is the platform I wrote it on. I’m not sure why there is such a difference; part of the hype of Java was the “write once, run anywhere” promise, which turns out not to be quite as accurate as one would hope.
The original page I made for the game can be found here… it’s plain html, and is nothing special to look at, but there is some more information there, and a few screenshots, like this one….
If you do decided to download it and play it, I’d love to hear feedback. It is far from perfect, and there are a host of features which really should be added if it were to be worthy of distributing… Maybe I should brush up on my Java and “finish” it off sometime.
Continue reading ‘Tux, Egg Collector’
Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users tells us that we have two ways to try to reach our audience/market/etc: we can try to Out-spend the competition… or we can Out-teach them.
I love this idea. Just taking the microcosm of the blogosphere as an example, it’s easy to see that the “biggest” (most popular/influential) blogs are not those which spend massive amounts on advertising. It’s those that excel at communicating, and as often as not this communication is some sort of teaching. Whether the topic is leadership, productivity, coding, technology, business, or marketing, there’s someone out there — probably many someones — who is hungry to learn more about it.
If you can supply that information, you have an instant audience. People will be looking for you, and given the power of Google, del.icio.us, digg, and other searching/link-sharing tools, chances are that they will find you.
Continue reading ‘Out-spend or out-teach’
Blogger Anil Dash has posted an interesting list of Web Development Trends for 2006; these are the things, most of them in use right now, which he is thinking are going to be in higher demand and found more prominently in the coming year. Looking over the list, I’d have to say that I agree with him; some of these trends I had noticed but not given a name to, others I had not thought of.
The two most interesting things, to me, on his list were Dampening and Marketing. By “Dampening” he means “the softening of a user interface element by gradual transition instead of immediate state changes.” That’s a fun technology to play with, especially since people have found ways to do this without resorting to a site completely designed with Flash (although Flash has its place as well).
Marketing was an interesting addition; Dash says of marketing:
Okay, this one’s not a technology. But geeks really need to learn how to explain their skills, the benefits of their skills, and the business advantages provided by those benefits. Knowing half a dozen programming languages won’t help you if you can’t communicate with the people who want to hire you. …
First, be an expert with a technology. Second, be even better at explaining the value of that technology. If you can do those things, it doesn’t matter which of the items you pick off of the list above.
Continue reading ‘2006 Web Development Trends’
Just for fun, here are some interesting facts about Saskatchewan.
High School would have been way cooler if a greater portion of our education had been delivered through comics.
I’m from Canada, but not from Saskatchewan. I’m from Vancouver, BC, which is possibly one of the coolest cities on the planet. If you doubt me, you should probably visit.
Continue reading ‘Saskatchewan’
Gnome 2.12 has been released. I’ll probably wait until the ebuild is marked stable in Gentoo… ah, heck. Maybe I won’t. If I try it early, I’ll be sure to post something about the new features.
Continue reading ‘Gnome 2.12 Released’
If you’re like me, you just might have a tendency to spend just a little bit too much time surfing the web… when you should be working. Come on. The first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem.
Okay, now that that’s over with, what can be done about it? Well, Danny O’Brien (who you might know from his OSDir Column, or from NTK) has written a script that works with Greasemonkey that will try to curb that tendency.
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension, so you’d need to be using Firefox to use this. Come to think of it, you’d need to be using Firefox to even need, because using IE by itself is motivation enough to quit web-surfing… (sorry, sorry, that was a cheap shot). So, assuming you’re using Firefox you’d start by installing Greasemonkey.
When that’s done (you need to restart Firefox for it to start working, like all extensions and themes), just visit the page containing the webolodeon script, and then go to Tools –> Install this user script in the Firefox menu. Voila. It will be installed.
And what will it do, exactly? Every five minutes it will tell you that you’ve been surfing too long, and it will ask you for your excuse. If your excuse is too short, it won’t accept it. The idea, of course, is that if you really are wasting time you will soon stop making excuses and get to work.
Hat-tip to 43Folders for a link to this…
Continue reading ‘Surfing with the Webolodeon’
You might remember that the developers of Mambo (on which this site is built) recently parted ways with Miro, who own the copyright to the Mambo name & trademark.
They have a new name for the project fork… Joomla! Their new site is also one of the most appealing and well-designed Mambo (sorry, Joomla) sites that I’ve ever seen; good work on their part for that, an excellent showcase of what the software is capable of. To see one of the reasons I say this, just click on a few of the different tabs in their site’s main menu. The background change is a very cool touch.
Continue reading ‘Joomla!’
This post will only concern users of Gentoo Linux; everybody else, feel free to browse the rest of the InterWeb.
If you have just tried to update your system, say with a command like
code:
# emerge -uD world
… you may have found that you’re experiencing an error that looks something like this:
code:
* Running autotools in ‘.’ …
/usr/share/aclocal/path_dps.m4:202: warning: underquoted definition of AC_PATH_DPS_GUESS_GNUSTEP
run info ‘(automake)Extending aclocal’
or see http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#Extending-aclocal
/usr/share/aclocal/path_dps.m4:239: warning: underquoted definition of AC_PATH_DPS_GUESS
/usr/share/aclocal/path_dps.m4:333: warning: underquoted definition of AC_PATH_DPS_CHECK_LIB
/usr/share/aclocal/path_dps.m4:405: warning: underquoted definition of AC_PATH_DPS_CHECK_HEADER
/usr/share/aclocal/path_dps.m4:440: warning: underquoted definition of AC_PATH_DPS_CHECK
/usr/share/aclocal/path_dps.m4:450: warning: underquoted definition of AC_PATH_DPS
/usr/share/aclocal/path_dps.m4:525: warning: underquoted definition of AC_CHECK_DPS_NXAGENT
/usr/share/aclocal/path_dps.m4:558: warning: underquoted definition of AC_PATH_DPSET
/usr/share/aclocal/path_dps.m4:579: warning: underquoted definition of AC_PROG_PSWRAP
/usr/share/aclocal/path_dps.m4:172: file `path_dps.m4′ does not exist
!!! ERROR: sys-devel/libtool-1.5.18-r1 failed.
!!! Function src_unpack, Line 127, Exitcode 1
!!! aclocal
!!! If you need support, post the topmost build error, NOT this status message.
For reference, you can check out this post in the Gentoo Forums, and for even more details, bug report 98762.
Essentially, all you’ll need to do is run this command:
code:
# rm /usr/share/aclocal/path_dps.m4
The file you’re removing is apparently deprecated; at any rate, this has worked for me, and seems to be the answer for this problem.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled InterWeb.
Continue reading ‘‘emerge libtool’ Fails…’
If you looked at Seth’s Blog today, you would have found that Seth (Godin) has written a new ebook (Who’s There?) about… blogs. I haven’t read it, just downloaded it at this point, but Seth has a good record of consistently writing things that are interesting and useful, so I don’t have much hesitation to link to it right off the bat. Check it out.
Continue reading ‘New E-Book from Seth Godin’
Kiko is an East Coast startup with the goal of creating an online calendar which people will actually want to use. It’s a pretty snazzy calendar, especially when you consider that it’s a web application and is still in beta. Kiko has all the features that you would expect from a basic calendar, including the ability to share the calendar with other contacts, color code events, make recurring appointments, and so forth. I don’t believe that it will send reminders, yet, but I could be wrong.
I’ve used it for a day or two now, and the jury is still out on whether or not it is something that I will keep permanently. The most appealing thing about it, as opposed to an Outlook or Palm calendar, is the ease of availability. Any computer with internet could be a terminal for your calendar; you don’t need to sync a PDA, you aren’t tied to any one machine or device, you don’t need to worry about loading Palm Software or ActiveSync or any other additional software… you just need an internet connection and a web browser.
Kiko is a slick application, and I’m aligning more and more with the popular opinion that applications like these are indeed going to be a big part of our future. It may be to the point now that an enterprising startup could create a web application (or a suite of them) which would be a Microsoft Office killer… and if the web’s technology is not quite to that point, you can bet that it will be soon. Hmm…
Continue reading ‘Kiko - The Online Calendar’
