Older blog entries for fzort (starting at number 44)

vulcan

Released version 0.3 of vulcan a few days ago. I'm not happy at all with the move generation code, though. What chess programs such as Crafty and (recent versions of) GNU Chess seem to use are bitmaps and lots of wizardly bit-twiddling to parallelize operations in the move generator. Vulcan could benefit from that sort of stuff. So I got crazy yesterday and started by throwing away a couple thousand lines of code. Woo-hoo.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Awe-inspiring visuals. Beautiful, haunting soundtrack. Long, utterly implausible dialogues between street-hardened cops about such pressing issues as Descartes' mind-body dualism. Had me feeling most of the time like a small kid who flips through the pages of a book and marvels at the pretty pictures, but can't understand the words. People who thought that Hollywood junk like "The Matrix" was intellectually stimulating should watch this one.

Minor quibble: call me squeamish if you will, but I could do without the extreme violence.

freshmeat weirdness

Even though my new baby seems to have a freshmeat page now, the announcement didn't make it to the front page. :(

Oh well. I'll be releasing a version 0.2 soon. Who knows, then...

vulcan

I was planning to do much more before releasing it, including some major code cleanup, but then thought why not. So I just hacked a quick page, packed it as vulcan-0.1.tar.gz, and submitted to freshmeat. Release early, release often!

gicmo: you're hardly alone in your dislike of Maradona.

Pointless waste of bandwidth

Okay, so when did posting images to advogato's recentlog become socially acceptable? Anyway, here comes a screenshot of the personal project I've been working on. Please feel free to rate my diary down.

It's the 3D chess game from Star Tr^W^W^W "inspired" by a certain well-known science fiction TV show. It's sort of playable right now, but I still need to squish some bugs and improve the user interface a bit before it hits version 0.1 (and freshmeat).

Back in the zone

After a couple of months with no serious coding (not counting what I've been doing for work, of course), it's good to be back. More info on the project I've been working on in the next few days.

Chess

While searching for ways to improve my playing, I recently discovered chess problems. The stuff is more addictive than Sudoku. Here is a nice collection of easy ones, for beginners like me.

My playing still sucks, though.

Read Wilson's Spin in one sitting last Saturday. It's that good.

mattdo: there's no need to let go of your hard-earned vi chops. Use emacs viper-mode and be happy.

Add this to your .emacs file:

  (setq viper-mode t)
  (setq viper-inhibit-startup-message 't)
  (setq viper-expert-level '3)
  (require 'viper)

... and voila, vi key bindings! You'll still have to learn C-c C-x and a few other combinations to deal with things like buffers and windows, though, but they're easy to get used to. Try :help for more info. Better yet: find the manual (viper.dvi) and, if possible, print it out.

On other news: updated my personal page. Some local headlines are making me crankier than usual.

Happy birthday to me

Bought myself The Little Schemer. My wife says it's the cutest thing ever.

On a somewhat related note

... hacked together some lazy streams. In C++. Here it is. It looks ghastly.

DAMN, I RULE

I can finally brag about it, now that the winning entries seem to be out at last: my code was awarded 'Best of Show' at the 18th IOCCC.

You can get the tarball with all the winning entries at the contest site, but here's mine, and the original remarks file, borked grammar and all. Compile with -lm.