Image Analyzer

Have you got any old photos that need retouching? If you don't want to use expensive and hard to use applications then you should try Image Analyzer. It might not be open source but it is high quality freeware that runs on Windows and on Linux with Wine. It has some great features like texture synthesis which will cover holes and other defects of old photos. Just keep in mind that it is not a drawing program, it is clearly a photo editing program focused on having many different filters.

But apart from enhancing photographs you can also do more funny things with it. Take a look at this cow which I made using the texture synthesis tool of Image Analyzer:


Image Analyzer can also be extended with plugins, so if you are a developer you might consider writing one for it. Currently there are about ten plugins.

The only bad thing about Image Analyzer is that it has no documentation. There is a short tutorial on its website and a nice support forum though.

I hope that it gets open source soon... ;-) (some older versions are already open source)

Infon

Infon is an online multiplayer game. You program the brain of little bugs witch try to survive in an arena by eating food, evolving and multiplying. To play you only need a telnet program. To watch the game though you will need to download the graphical client. Using your telnet program you upload the brain on the server and it executes it. Of course there other games like this like Droidbattles but what makes it different is that it is an online game and it uses my favorite language. Yes, you program the bugs in Lua!

I made a simple brain today which worked quite well. If you know any programming language then it will be easy to learn Lua and try this wonderful game! Click here to go to the website of Infon.

Have fun and if you create a nice brain, challenge me... ;-)

Pocket Computers

I think that most people like pocket computers (not Pocket PC's necessarily) and so I do. It's nice to have a device that fits in your pocket that enables you to keep notes and write programs anywhere.

I currently own a Palm Z22 and I also have my still-working Zire and a broken Palm Tungsten C. The oldest is my Zire which now has a worn out, thanks to Plua, digitizer making it almost impossible to input text without using the on screen keyboard. After the Zire I bought the Tungsten C which I managed to break in a month :'-(. The Tungsten C was far better than any other palmtop at the time. Finally I decided after some years of grief for my dead Tungsten that it was time to buy a new one and continue making some Plua programs. So I bought my Z22 because it was then the cheapest palmtop, so I wouldn't be shocked if I would ever break it like my Tungsten. The Z22 met my expectations in most areas. There are only a few things that I dislike. I will explain the most important in the next paragraph but you can skip reading it if you do not plan on buying a Z22.

Z22 has some differences from the other two palmtops. It has non-volatile memory as well as volatile (aka dynamic memory). It uses the faster volatile memory for buffering data that should be written on the non-volatile memory that is used as the storage of the Z22. How do I know that??? I know that it has two kinds of memory because there are even programs that show you the amount of used memory for both of them. And I suppose that the volatile holds unwritten data because if you reset the unit you will lose the last edited data. It is not a filesystem error because it also happens if you close the program that edits the data before resetting. So it must be that there are unsaved data in the volatile memory that are cleared with the reset. This is really annoying if you program on palmtops, because it's easy to crash the system and loose many lines of code! I found a way to avoid this. I installed FlushIt, an application that flushes the contents of the volatile memory when an application exits or on other system events (I also just noticed that it has been updated since I installed it).

I haven't said a word about Microsoft and Pocket PCs, now it's time. I never had one and do not intent to. Why?

• I do not want to carry Windows with me. I want something different.
  
• I prefer Palm to Microsoft. Those guys managed to create an extremely easy and powerful OS while ignoring some basic features! Palms, initially, didn't support multitasking or directory trees in their filesystem! The latest versions of Palm OS support multitasking although it is not that prominent as in Windows and other operating systems. Support for directory trees on external memory cards (secure digital) is also available on any model that has an expansion slot (my Z22 and my Zire don't have one).
• I do not want to pay that much for a pocket computer. Any Palm is the only company that offers some cheap palmtops.

While Palm used to rule the palmtop market it seems that Microsoft made more clever moves. Or maybe it didn't, but the world prefers a palmtop that has "Windows", believing that it will be easier to learn. Of course Windows Mobile is completely different from XP. And Palm OS is much easier to learn, it can't get any easier in fact. But Palm is moving too slow; there are very few devices and they are quite expensive (except some low end devices like the Z22). The number of independent developers (who used to make quality freeware) is decreasing, and Palm isn't doing much to prevent this.

There are also some palmtops with Linux but do not know much about them. Maybe sometime I'll try one.

David Firth's Animations

David Firth is a very talented flash animator. I find his animations really interesting. Most of them (maybe all of them) are surrealistic and, usually, resemble dreams or nightmares.

One of the best animation series that Firth has made is Salad Fingers. Salad Fingers is a creepy green masochist man that loves touching rusty spoons and other rough surfaces with his oversized fingers. He lives in a strange world that seems to me like the earth after a great nuclear world war. I won't say more. Just click here and watch the 7 episodes that have been until now released. It will give you the creeps but watch all of them very carefully. Salad Fingers is really well done and is one of the best animations on the Internet. It is just NOT another violent and disgusting flash animation.

(IMPORTANT EDIT: It seems that Firth changed the structure of his website and the following trick will not work correctly. To view the flash animation on it's own and not on a webpage you find it's name in the source code of the corresponding webpage and then copy paste it's address manually in the address bar. Another solution would be to save the page. This will save an HTLM file and a directory with files. Find a file with ".swf" extension inside this directory and open it with Firefox. Then follow the instructions bellow. The text in the square brackets [] was working with the previous structure of Firth's website, ignore it and do what I told you instead. If I confused you then please leave a comment and I will try to explain it better to you.)

Here is a trick that might reveal strange things or even easter eggs in some of his animations. While you watch an animation on fat-pie (Firth's website), [change the ".html" ending of the current page into ".swf" so that you view the flash animation not embedded in a webpage]. Now by resizing the browser you will also resize the viewport of the flash animation and therefore you will be able to see things which normally would be out of sight. Try resizing your browser into a short and thin window and then view this animation. After the kid that smelt funny is burned you will have to pause on the point when the headmasters door is shown. Now, look at the board on the right. It will be like this:


Normally the right part of this board ("DON'T READ THIS BIT YOU LOSER") wouldn't be visible. ;-) Please note that I tried this with Firefox on Ubuntu Linux. I do not know if it is possible with Internet Explorer or Opera. I would be pleased if I had some feedback on this.
Anyway, back to the point. Go now to fat-pie cartoon section and watch everything. They rock!

Globulation 2

To be a good RTS game player you have to be good in micromanagement as well as commanding your nation as a whole (macromanagement). This is true for most RTS games. Although some game titles focus on micromanagement and other on macromanagement, micromanagement exists to make things more difficult and unreal.

When I say that things became more unreal I mean that you can control every single unit that you own. That never happens in reality as units are not stupid robots that will always do whatever you say. And when I say that thing became more difficult with micromanagement I mean that you have to spend time to control individual units instead of focusing on your strategy.

Thankfully some guys decided to make Globulation. The first Globulation was shareware and had many features missing compared to the Globulation 2 which is free software.

Globulation 2 makes micromanagement unnecessary because tasks are automatically assigned to units. You only have to set a number on every building that indicates how many units will have to work there. Then the unit will start transferring goods to this building when it is needed. Some building also have other settings. For example the Swarm, which is the building that created buildings, accepts some values that indicate the ratio between different unit that it produces (eg: 1 soldier/2 scouts/4 builders).

Another unique but very realistic characteristic about this game is that you do not collect resources. The units simply take them directly from the nature to the place that they are needed.

You may wonder how you can attack the opponent without the necessary micromanagement. Flags are the solution to this and to other things as well. A war flag for example attracts a number (you set how many) of soldiers of a specific level (you set that too) into a radius around it (guess who sets that...). There are other flags too but I am not going to say anything more.

The DRAWBACK: there is no sound effects. Nice, comic-like graphics, nice multiplayer, nice AI (try to play against Nicowar) but no sound effects. If you can make some sound effects then please do and send them to the game developers, it's a pity for such a nice game to be mute. There is some music but I prefer turning it off and listen to some Blind Guardian instead. ;-)

Click here to go to the official website of Globulation 2. There you can find anything related to the game: tutorials, the game manual and of course the game itself.

Here is a video of a game: