Gromoblog

Evolution is a blind watchmaker

2009-06-23T11:25:00.002+04:00

During my years at university I was fond of genetic algorithms. However, I did't find any practical applications for that sort of algorithms. Author of a video below used genetic algorithm to illustrate an evolution of watches if they were alive.

Monitoring multiple e-mail accounts

2008-10-01T16:58:00.003+04:00

Time passes and number of my e-mail accounts is only increasing.
At the moment I check 3 mailboxes several times a day. With other 4 accounts I receive rare but important e-mails.

Fortunately, a friend of mine developed an a-mail notifier tool. I use it for a couple of months and very satisfied with it.

It is very simple by its functionality, but it does perfect what it has to do.

So, Gexonic e-mail notifier checks all of your mailboxes and informs you on new mails immediately with pop up window. It also has a system tray icon which changes when you got new mail.

One more good thing is that I can suggest new features directly to my friend. And he tries to implement some of these.

Shooting with the burdening game

2008-08-02T14:27:00.004+04:00

I finally posted my swbg game done with processing.org.

In the game I tried to add something new to well-known boring shooting games. In most of these games you have to shoot targets with your mouse as quick as you can. And nothing else.

I added some element of thinking into stupid game. It's not so easy to shoot target since your targeting is influenced by additional mass which is attached to mouse cursor

How the game looks like:Legend
Your mouse pointer is represented by pink circle with green dot inside.
Additional mass is pink circle.
I hope you'll identify targets quickly.

Gameplay
You just shoot targets. Every 10K score new targets appears. At 25K score targets begin moving by X axis. At 50K score targets begin free movement. Targets move with random speed, but their speed is limited by your total score.

The Game
Go for it!

My wishes
I'd like to have some free hosting with scripting (RoR/php/perl) to be able to store players' high scores. So, if somebody can help me with it, let me know.

Parabola focus animation

2008-07-03T23:46:00.006+04:00

Parabola is well-known by its property of focusing light in one point called focus.
I've just created interactive demo showing this parabola property.

Of course, I created the demo using processing.org

Demo simulates light photons physics assuming photons to be rigid particles. The particles bounce off parabola. When you move mouse, you change parabola focus.

Demo is located here.

Rolling billiard balls in a palm

2008-06-14T12:27:00.005+04:00

I've got a strange hobby - to roll billiard balls in a palm.

Like these ones:

About 10 years ago a colleague of mine taught me how to roll 2 small metal balls in a palm. This trick interested me so I found some balls from big ball bearing and started my trainings.

Some time later I found myself not satisfied with these small metal ball. I found slightly bigger stone balls and started trainings with them.

At the moment I stuck on billiard balls. They're big enough and pretty easy to find at stores. They also much more robust than stone ones.

Since I wanted to advance in this strange hobby, I started to roll 3 balls at once. I even try to roll 4 of them.

There're some things I'm interested to know -
Where this hobby come from?
What is the history of this skill?
Does it help to my health or whatever else?

love (with processing)

2008-06-01T01:06:00.007+04:00

I'm publishing my another experiment with processing.
I called it 'love'
The applet and source code are located here.

How t is done
I wanted my heroes in this sketch to have transparent tails. It is not a problem on solid background. To make tails transparent with bitmap background I used following technique.

1. I render my 'souls' to color layer

a 'man' soul:
a 'woman' soul:

2. I render souls as white spots to other layer. I fade that layer to black before rendering.

3. I add my second layer to the first one as alpha channel 4. I render my background which is a bitmap with some simple animation on it

5. Last step is to render image with 'souls' on top of the background. And then I render some effects 'pink hearts' near pairs which are in love.

bubble bath with processing

2008-05-07T19:40:00.008+04:00

I played with processing last several days. It is very interesting and easy-to-use environment built on Java.
As a result, look at my first toy - bubble bath

Here is online applet with the source: My google pages

A periodic table of visualization methods

2007-08-22T15:25:00.001+04:00

There is great a table available at www.visual-literacy.org

The table orders methods by different categories:

Data visualzation
Information visualization
Concept visualization
Strategy visalization
Metaphor visualization
Compound visualization

and:

Process/Structure

and:

Overview/Detail/both

and:

divergent/convergent thinking

This table is very useful for those who make presentations often.

Low-cost sensing and communication with an LED

2006-05-15T00:22:00.000+04:00

Few days ago I found an interesting site - hackaday.com
It is a news site for computer/electronic geeks.

One post interest me more than others.
It describe how one can make led matrix to input user's multiple touches.
If you'll follow this link, you'll find a charming video how this device works.

Representation of knowledge

2006-05-05T20:04:00.000+04:00

I recently was surfing blogs and wandered into wikipedia's concept map and mind maps.

I already tried mind mapping technique before. I agree that this type of knowledge/ideas representation is much more creative and natural than all these lists and tables.

But concept maps become an invention for me. Now I see that concept maps are great way to represent knowledge, thoughts and.. concepts! They also help to organize your ideas and advance them.

I evaluate CmapTools for creating concept maps. It is easy to learn, and it is free!
Mind Manager is good for mind mapping. But it is still commercial :-(

Omni mea mecum porto.

2006-04-21T15:51:00.001+04:00

"Omni mea mecum porto."
Everything mine carrying with me.
Latin proverb.

I recently searched the web to find solutions, which may help me to work "directly from USB-drive" at any computer.
And, Wow! I found a whole site full of applications. You can run every of these applications directly from your USB-drive! You need not to install them at all!

I already put on my USB-drive:

portable firefox - web browser
portable gaim - client for most IM systems (I use ICQ, MSN)
FoxitReader - PDF file viewer (the fast one, not like AcrobatReader)

There are also interesting apps that I didn't try yet:

portable thunderbird - for reading mail
portable miranda - alternative IM client (ICQ, MSN)
XAMPP - an all-in-one web server (Apache, mySQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin)

Bloglines

2006-04-20T11:14:00.000+04:00

Yesterday I sorted my bookmarks and finally registered at Bloglines.

I used to read other people's blogs using Mozilla Thunderbird.
It was inconveniently because I couldn't mark read items on all computers I work. It was also not easy to synchronize feeds list.

Now I have only one feeds list, and it is stored online at bloglines! Good.

The only minor problems is that Bloglines not very friendly to Firefox and its UI sometimes not intuitive.

Personal wiki in a single file

2006-03-10T14:44:00.001+03:00

For about a year I am using TiddlyWiki. Jeremy Ruston created a great wiki system based on a single HTML file. It heavily uses java script.

Another great thing in TiddlyWiki is that you can change CSS, add macros, add and change content in the same way. You just write or edit "tiddlers". Tiddler may include text notes or macro or CSS. It is pretty easy and comfortable

A whole city in a pocket

2006-03-10T14:35:00.001+03:00

I'm playing GTA: Liberty City Stories on my PSP when travelling to/from office. It is a great game, especially if you can just take your PSP out from your pocket and then play whenever you want.

I'm posting here too seldom

2006-03-10T11:05:00.000+03:00

It is half a year passed since my last post here. Many things happen in this half year.
Now I have a new job. I work in Nival interactive - Russian largest game developer company.
Then, I found many interesting web-games, will narrate about them later.

Itsyourturn down

2005-08-23T11:21:00.000+04:00

I was at vacancy last week and affraid to lose my ladder games at itsyourturn. When I logged in to itsyourturn at monday, I saw terrible news - all of the users lost their games! Itsyourturn's server disks crashed.
So I wait impatiently for this service to work again.
They also started a blog about itsyourturn service repairing - itsyourturncom

Good to Great

2005-08-16T00:03:00.001+04:00

I started to read Jim Collins' book "Good to Great". I'm very impressed of this book. Jim with his team spend several years to find why some companies are great and some are just good. He reveals many factors which differ one sort of companies from another.
I recommend you to read this book even if you're not a top manager.

Few words in honour of free software

2005-08-10T15:53:00.000+04:00

I am very astonished at quality of free software.
Right now I'm using Mozilla Firefox. I also use Mozilla ThunderBird.

Then, few weeks ago I started to use Netbeans.

Apache is well known by its HHTP server, Tomcat and many more other tools.

All of these products are free. But in spite of this, they are remarkable by high quality.

It is incredible. I only needed to spend some money for OS (I use Windows) and then I can get most software for free.

I can say more, even MS gives us its compilers for free!

We live at programmer's heaven!

What a wonderful Earth!

2005-07-07T11:26:00.000+04:00

I found yesterday the great program - Google Earth. It is one step forward after new Google maps service. But now one can see our Earth in 3D, zoom in out to any place on Earth!

User interface is quite simple and comfortable.
I hope in near future we will see the Earth with more resolution and with realtime photos!

2005-07-05T14:24:00.000+04:00

I recently reopened LinkedIn network fo myself. I registered there for a long time, but only few days ago I understood all of its power.
This network created to help professionals find and connect each other through their friends, co-woкkers e t.c.

CodeGeneration

2005-05-04T09:46:00.000+04:00

It is well known that number of bugs is nearly constant if calculated per thousands of lines of code. So less code we have, less bugs eat our time.
Hence, we need to write programs on high level language. It gives us more functionality with less number of code lines. Unfortunately using highlevel language is not possible sometimes.

Another solution is just generate your code! Codegeneration is very interesting thing. In our company we started with generating lexer&parser for our game scripts. For theese purposes we use ANTLR already for several years. ANTLR is a"language tool that provides a framework for constructing recognizers, compilers, and translators from grammatical descriptions". It is good.

One more helpful codegeneration solution is automatic binding code between different programming languages. You can find a lot of different tools on http://www.codegeneration.net/

You can also use popular feature of generating classes from UML diagrams. Many modern programming frameworks give you this feature.

Some time ago we found interesting project called cog. It is tiny tool that allows you to write metacode on python right in your source file! Metacode is just "code that generate code". Using this tool is very promising.

(Bug|Task)tracking with Bugzilla

2005-04-12T16:15:00.000+04:00

I checked several tasktracking systems last days.
And I can recommend some -

free ones:

commercial:

Jira
FogBugs

Trac has no release yet - gone from my list (it also has poor admin's features)
Jira & FogBugs are great! The only reason we'll not use one of them now is their cost.

Bugzilla is a tracking system I'm evaluating in greater detail.
It seems to be quite good, with only exception - it's User Interface (UI).
UI in Bugzilla is very ugly, it has no evident features, it is just a mess of textfields, comboboxes and textlabels.
Why all of this happen?
I think, guys from Bugzilla team just making product for their own. They're guru, they make UI templates everyday, so they just can't understand why good UI is so important for their product.

So what shall I do?
If Bugzilla's featurelist will fit our needs, we will change all their templates for new ones.
It's a pity.

How To Write Unmaintainable Code

2005-03-23T16:53:00.000+03:00

I recently found a very interesting article written by many authors named "How To Write Unmaintainable Code". Name of this article speaks for itself.

Automatic Calculation for game levels

2005-03-22T15:53:00.000+03:00

Today I've wrote an Ant script which helps us to automate process of precalculating game levels.

This Ant scripts can check for new files on file server, and of course it can run precalculation utility. Ant script is stored in Subversion repository, so our Luntbuild server gets it from repository and periodically runs process of level precalculation. That is great! Only you need is to export level to file server!
When some time passed, you'll get final version of level from another file server directory!

I also have to say that ant-contrib package is very useful for extending Ant functionallity.

Playing chess

2005-03-21T23:04:00.000+03:00

I play chess online for several years at ItsYourTurn. It is a nice place to talk to many interesting people all over the world! You can also play many other games there!