Archive for January 2005
I Also Want to Play GPS::Tron!
31 January 2005 in Phones & Pocket PC | Comments (0)
Do you remember the game Tron from the days of playing it on the C64 and Amiga? Well, I do and can’t forget the fun that was. Now, someone with a bunch of sparetime on their hands have upped the ante for Tron gaming and brought it out from the 2 dimensional world to the 3D (or 4D if you believe in Einstein’s theories) and made it into GPS::Tron.
So, the game now takes place in the real world with GPS statellites tracking your movements and using GPRS (or some other datatransfer method) puts the location of you on a gaming server while retrieving the location of the opponent and updating your game view. This currently works only on Nokia and Siemens phones, but I assume that we’ll see this ported to many other platforms shortly (that is when this gets widely popular).
Now I’m just furious at the Finnish GSM operators for having some unusually high GPRS data prices for the moment. Maybe some more GPS::Tron gaming would bring the friggin’ price down… 
Dingo Approaching Proof-of-Concept Stage
31 January 2005 in Code-ing | Comments (0)
My hard work seems to be paying off, with my project “Dingo” soon approaching public release beta. What is Dingo? Well, it is a program that is capable of downloading the timetables (or schedules) that one has stored in my univerisity’s schedule planning web page, called Wompat (refferring to the animal called wombat — don’t ask my why). With me still? Good. Now, the problems I (and more others) faced with Wompat was that there was no automated way of inserting the schedule into your personal scheduling program (Outlook, iCal, you name it), PDA and/or phone.
Dingo is the program that is designed to solve this problem. Currently I am experimenting with getting a transistion from week number and the weekday to a complete date. (Our university plans courses by the week number, not by the dates) So far, I’ve gotten it working for the year 2005 and any other year which doesn’t end or start on a Thursday and/or a leap year. Not perfect yet, but I’m getting there.
The next exiting phase is the generating of iCalendar, vCalendar and Outlook appointments for the exact dates of the courses. My homemade iCalendar/vCalendar generators seem to work nicely, although Outlook doesn’t like my iCalendar files but the vCalendar files (strange, in a way). 
The direct inserting into Outlook is also working fine and no major problems there.
A feature which I’m especially proud of is the automatic downloading of the schedule webpage. See below for the current implementation. This was the trickiest part to execute, codewise, as Wompat utilizes cookies and server-side codes hidden in the HTML code to get the timetable for, e.g. spring 2005 and listing the full schedule. (It is even more trickier to describe how it works on the server. 
)
But, thankfully coding all of this using C# and .Net technologies has made it easier than it is for me to get my Java applet to connect to a MySQL server (does it have to be so impossible for me?). I will have to see how well this will work on Mac OS X running dotGnu and whether dotGnu’s .Net and Windows.Form implementation is complete enough for Dingo to run unmodified.
However, that is currently second priority as there are some things I have to download before being able to compile dotGnu on Mac OS X and I don’t have the energy to compile anything currently. Still, seeing this small one-man-project drawing to a close, I can’t help but saying that “these are exiting times indeed”. 
Sweet New McLaren MP4-20
24 January 2005 in Root | Comments (1)
McLaren unveiled today their 2005 contender car: the MP4-20. The new driver Juan Pablo Montoya and old McLaren regular Kimi Räikkönen seem to have got a really hot car for this new year.
The MP4-20 seems to me like it has got a very low center of gravity and quite reasonable amount of downforce. Interestingly, the new regulations for 2005 means that there will be more downforce on all cars this year with the tires being thicker and thus making the cars a whole lot slower than last year. I can’t help to wonder though how much faster this new McLaren would be on last year’s tires… 
The side pontoon seems to have been inspired by the 2004 Ferrari but the hot air chimeny placed upon it changes the picture quite a whole lot. Over all, I think this new car from McLaren might be a Ferrari beater — until Ferrari reveils their new car. 
To see the latest pics from the release of the new McLaren, head over to Pitpass.com.
Solving the Kryptos Code (Ok, Not Really!)
24 January 2005 in Root | Comments (0)
Jim Sanford is the creator of a statue called Kryptos, placed in the front of CIA HQ that has got an encrypted text that has been puzzeling crypthographers for some time. I got a few ideas for the cryptographers out there to try out, when Sanford said recently in a transcribed interview to Wired:
It’s also well-known that I did use some matrix codes Ed gave me, and I have also designed visual systems for encoding, which are much harder for cryptographers to crack because they’re individualistic.
New Bluetooth Safety Guidelines
14 January 2005 in Phones | Comments (0)
Following the spread of worms and other pestwares via Bluetooth between phones running Symbian, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group has released new safety guidelines for Bluetooth phones. One guideline, or tip, is:
Users should not accept files from unknown or suspicious entities. Users should not download or install unknown or suspicious software. If the origin of the software is unknown, it should not be installed. If the device gives a security warning during installation, carefully consider if installation should continue.
Sounds like good ol’ sense to me, but unfortunately not to everyone. Many people think “wow, great someone is sending me free software” and choose to install the worm Cabir or some other virus/worm/pestware. I wonder where common sense in computing has gone?
What Is In A Name, Java?
14 January 2005 in Rant | Comments (0)
Ok, so I’m supposed to download JRE (Java Runtime Environment) to be able to run a JAR (Java Archive) on my desktop PC running Windows XP. Well, naturally Microsoft isn’t allowed to distribute Java with Windows, so I go to the home of Java — Sun’s homepage — to download the JRE. I try my luck with the Downloads link and argghghgh, find a whole mess of information overload that almost gives me a headache. There are some links reffering to Java but no Java JRE to be found.