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Hey there, everyone! Happy Thanksgiving! I'm just about to nod off to sleep, but before I do, I just want to get one little blog post in...

Well, after a very, VERY long delay, I'm releasing TunnelTanks 0.3. You know TunnelTanks? That game I was working on several months ago? Before I got the Nexus One, which got me all interested in the Android Framework and the JNI? Ring any bells? No? Oh, well.

So, for the uninitiated, way back when, I was being all nostalgic about an old DOS game called Tunneler that my sister and I used to play on my mom's old IBM laptop. Well, after tinkering around with cave-generating functions, I decided to start writing this game for myself using SDL, and name the subsequent project TunnelTanks. So, after a long hiatus, I've rediscovered the source code directory, and got back to work. Here are some of the new features:

• Bases have been added, so every tank has a place that they can call home.
• Energy and health is now tracked by the game engine, allowing things to die. (Finally!) Also, both energy and health can be replenished at your base, but only energy can be replenished at enemy bases. (And slowly at that.)
• Fixed a noticeable bug, where small bits of the level could be erased by getting really close to something, and then turning towards dirt.
• Lots of code improvements, such as changing the level generator from the DDA algorithm to Bresenham's algorithm, which makes the program almost completely float-free! (The only thing left that uses a floating point variable is the single line of code that prints how long it took to render the level.)
• When a tank is low on power, its display will start glitching out.
• All tanks now have their own, unique color schemes. So, be sure to tell me if some of the colors are awkward... I am slightly colorblind, and my definition of a decent color match is often wildly different from everyone else's. :)
• Other code cleanups, and bug fixes...

Sadly, our beloved Twitch AI isn't faring well in the new version... you see, poor Twitch has no concept of direction, no ability to see enemies, no means of checking its energy levels, and no self-preservation instincts whatsoever. So, most Twitches will wander off and die within the first few minutes. The Twitches who live are just lucky/stupid enough to not even be able to escape their bases. (Which is both sad and funny at the same time.) I plan on extending the controller API, so that a controller can get some more info on a tank, allowing for smarter AIs in the future. However, that's an adventure for another day.

And there we go! I hope to keep on this project more diligently in the coming weeks. The game controls are now:

BLUE Tank: ASDW (movement) + LEFT CTRL (firing)
GREEN Tank: Arrow Keys (movement) + '/' Key (firing)

The controls were changed to dodge hardware limits on my laptop keyboard. (Using Enter to fire with the green tank meant that you couldn't move up and left at the same time...)

To build, just do a simple:

./configure && make && ./tunneltanks

You will need a Python interpreter to configure, GNU Make to compile, and the SDL libraries to run, so be sure you have all of those.

Source is here: http://www.poweredbytoast.com/files/tunneltanks3.tar.bz2 (GPLv3)

Have fun! :)

Well, it's been ages since I've looked at gnome-shell. This is probably since I really didn't like what I saw that first time. Gnome-shell was so slow, so heavy, took up so much of the screen, was so distracting, was so buggy, and so through-and-through awful that I decided to swear off of Gnome if they tried to make me use it. Well, the gnome-shell group has made progress since then, and most of it is for the better.

Firstly, most of the animations are gone. What's left ranges from slick (the search box's glow effect) to minorly ugly (the choppy zoom effect). Still, the animation set is a lot better, and that's a VERY good thing.

Secondly, even though the window manager is still WRITTEN IN JAVASCRIPT, it is slightly more responsive. It still lags my computer when dragging a window (which should be considered a deadly sin, right next to using Javascript to program a WM) but it lags... less... which is... good?

Also, the method for adding new desktops has changed. This is probably the best thing they've done, since the new layout gives more room to the current desktop. This makes it so that not only is it easier to see/manage the windows, but the zoom-out effect made whenever opening the "Activities" tab is less jarring. That said, I'd still rather not have the whole thing, and just have a simple desktop with a menu... but I guess that's just me...

Gnome-shell still has bugs, oh man does it have bugs. 4 minutes into testing it, I clicked the 'Recent Documents' tab, and gnome-shell crashed so spectacularly that I had to do a 'pkill -9 -u myers' in another session to get myself out of it. That was fun. :X

So, long story short, gnome-shell is getting better. I still don't want to use it, but at least it's less offensive than the earlier version that I used...

Now to get back to my programming, and I promise that my next post will be more substantive, and not some cheap review of a pointless shell. ;)

What the hell is that? Well, if you had this greasemonkey script, then you'd know. :)
The greasemonkey script is a BrainF**k interpreter that allows you to put tiny image-generating scripts onto webpages. The author added little shortcuts to the language as well, but I didn't use any of those, because BrainF**k shortcuts are for wimps. ;)

Well, ever since that Memory Allocators post, where I mentioned that Defensio was currently batting 1000, it seems to have started making mistakes. (I guess I should have knocked on wood...)

Firstly, it missed one spam message, which isn't all that bad, given that it successfully detected the over 200 spam messages before it.

However, it erroneously detected this comment as spam. In fact, it's so sure that the comment is spam that it has labeled it as 99% spamminess, and will refuse to mark it as a false positive, even after I told the plugin that the comment was legit. Oh well. Nothing's perfect, and it's a good thing that I still screen all spam comments before purging them...

... I wonder what part of the comment is setting Defensio off?

Oh God, never again. NEVER A-FREAKING-GAIN. I am absolutely done with Jack in the Box after this: this is the 2nd time they've food poisoned me.

Last time was in sophomore year of college, and (or was it Junior year... I forget...) and I (oh, definitely Junior year, cause I was living in the house not the aprtment) and I got the bacon cheesburger, and I'm pretty sure it was the bacon that got me. Now, several years later, I made the fool-hearty decision to give the bacon burger another try, assuming that last time was a fluke, since the bacon burger was my fav item on the menu.

Well, yeah... food poisoning... it sucks, man. :X

But I think it speaks to my general geekiness that I'm kneeling in front of the toilet, with my computer at my side. AND OH GOD I'M BLOGGING ABOUT IT!!! I REALLY AM BEYOND SAVING!

Ugh, my stomach is gurgling like a bubbling cauldron. My intestines are squirming like I swallowed and processed a live snake. And my body is writhing in some ambient agony... freaking bacon. Especially that cheeseburger kind. never. again. ughgggggffdsfdsa...

...

Oh, and on the topic of puking, Jackass 3D was pretty good...