Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Mostly Geek Stuff Tonight
My date with Audrey didn't happen this evening -- I'll probably have more to say about that later. Tomorrow may not have a post as I plan on going back to Lava for a night out dancing.
On to the geek stuff:
Hopefully my last few posts won't peg me as a Star Trek fanatic. Here is the latest news on the StarshipTrek game. I have added a High Score tracker and made it easier to replay the game reusing custom settings without having to go back to the entry screen. I now see that I never should have started coding this thing because I'm not sure I can stop tinkering. I have at least 3 more improvements to add.
FGL asks for details about a 3D version if I were to make one. A 3D version would feature 3 views (xy yz xz) each with same layout as is currently used by the 2D version. This would define a volume (cube) of space. An orthographic projection view might be possible in the remaining open quadrant, but wouldn't likely be coded into the first version (hard to do in ASCII, but not impossible). Those that have had drafting or have used autocad-programs should know what I'm talking about. Moves would require 2 position selections (one 2D xy selection and one z on a line in the yz or xy views). Since the possible number of hiding places for enemy vessels would go up, I would probably have to add some additional tactical aids to keep the game playable.
For those that care about MEME Watch (bottom sidebar) it is back up and running. Yahoo.com changed the placement of a quotation mark in their search results. I have made my pattern search template a little less finicky. The danger is that if I make the template too sloppy it might grab the wrong info from the page, I don't think I have reached that point yet. Ironically my meme-searches show a trend down while other people's memes are on the rise. Both Punchbowl Meme and Pope Conspiracy are showing impressive growth on the web.
Now that MEME Watch is fixed I am torn as to what my next project should be. I had thought to do something with random images grabbed off the web. This would use Yahoo.com's image search engine and would be nothing like Zen Image. Another possibility would be a Haiku generator that scans pages found by MEME Watch to find lines that match 5 or 7 syllables then paste them together to form a haiku. Most likely most will be total nonsense so 3 or 4 Haiku for each meme would be made. A voting mechanism would eliminate and replace the worse ones hopefully leaving some gems behind after a few days.
Zen Image has an annoying tendency to re-pick previously shown photos. I may have to make it cycle rather than pick at random. This requires sorting the images by date added before picking (or some other inconvenient solution). If I had known repeats would show up so often I would have done it that way before implementing. I had to erase the selected image 5 times after midnight today to get to a new one. With over 70 images I shouldn't be getting these many repeats yet. Perhaps there is a minor bug in the code somewhere (sigh).
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3 Comments:
Ever tried technorati?
By Daniel, at May 12, 2005
Actually I had looked at it months ago, but forgot about it. I'll have to think about making a popularity tracker for websites. This would mostly reuse the MEME Watch code.
By DumbSwede, at May 12, 2005
*cough* you dead *cough*
or perhaps your social life took off? ;)
By Daniel, at May 15, 2005
