For the time being I’m using the awesome new feature in Android 2.2 for sharing a mobile internet connection. Impressed with how easy it is to set up. It’s as easy as turning the feature on and setting the access point name and passphrase. Once that’s done up to 8 computers can connect as they would to any wireless access point.

Unfortunately, my mobile data plan only allows up to 200MB at 3G speed after which it gets throttled down to GPRS speeds. But it’s better than nothing and once DSL is finally connected we’ll be rewarded with 50Mbits down and 10Mbits up. That’s about 8-9 faster than what we had in San Diego for only a little more money.

Update: See below.

For those not familiar with the game Concentration, or Memory as I grew up knowing it, the basic idea is that one has a number of matching card pairs turned face down. The player(s) then attempt(s) to match these pairs by turning over two cards. If the cards match those two cards remain face up. Otherwise, the cards are returned to the face down position. This is repeated until all cards are face up. Here’s a screencast of GMemory being played.

As you can hopefully see, GMemory is currently in a playable state and it actual quite enjoyable if you’re into these types of games. However, there is a lot more to do to reach what I’d consider a 1.0 release. Besides some code reworking and some known bugs, I’d like to see a score tracker, multi-player mode, card animation and selectable themes.

The game is written in C using GTK+, GObject, Clutter and Cairo. In the course of writing GMemory I ran into a few bugs in clutter-gtk. The first bug was that no events were being received when using the embedded clutter gtk widget. You can find the bug report here. The second major bug I ran into was that once I got a version combination that gave me events, I always received double the events that I expected. This is a known bug and I’ve got a work around in the code for that.

There are also a number of known bugs. As you may have noticed from the screencast, the last card of the last successful match does not get shown before the statistics dialog box pops up. It seems the dialog blocks the drawing even thought the function to draw the card is called before the call to show the dialog box. Another bug is that once the game is over the playing area does not resize when the window is resized. I’ll tackle this once I’ve reworked the code some.

You can find GMemory’s git repository at Gitorious and the tarball can be had here.

Unfortunately, right now I’m building against the master branches of clutter and clutter-gtk. Expect breakage.

Btw, right now.

Update: After trying this on Ubuntu Lucid, I experienced none of the event-related problems with clutter-gtk. This seems to be Fedora 13 specific. Thus, I’ve removed the workaround for the double event issue and changed the configure.ac file to rely on the clutter and clutter-gtk versions shipped with Ubuntu Lucid. The new tarball is here.