Quote of the day

"Just click the bad thing with the skull and it dies. Not only is it simple, it’s metal."

That comment about Grim Reaper Mode (also known as xkill) is part of some nice GNOME tweaks suggested here.

Also, Mirco has done some more nice videos, I read an interesting idea over here, although I think the idea is backwards, Firefox should not become the desktop, ie. making local and online applications behave the same by making the local ones look like, run like and generally be, shit like the online ones. I think getting rid of the browser as an application altogether and having web pages behave like local documents is a better idea (with bookmarks remaining behind after being finished with).

I've been experimenting with a little game idea I've had for years that I originally thought of doing in Flash (yes, I used to be evil too) but am now doing in Python thanks to Pygame and PyODE. I also think that making a nice Pygame IDE designed for simplicity would be a great idea, so I might start working on that (making it in Pygame of course!)

Nuclear Bovines

There is a game I have on Amiga called "Atoms". It is a simple little game, based around a board, where each player takes turns to add atoms to the squares on the board until they explode and claim other squares for that player. I tried to make this game in Python before I came to University, to at least have attempted some coding before I started any computer science course modules, and whilst I managed to make the game itself pretty much work in about a day (quite good for zero Python knowledge and a PDF of DiveIntoPython) I spent weeks fruitlessly trying to get a GUI around it before giving up.

Now that I can code in an object oriented way in Java I thought I'd try again. Starting with the GUI builder AbeilleForms I made a quick starting place for the interface, then after about an hour I had come up with what I have dubbed Gnucleon 0.1 (because the name Gnucleus is already taken by a Gnutella client, and Googling for Gnucleon doesn't bring up any software, so I took it).

I have stored it on my free webspace here: http://www.freewebs.com/chriswarbo/Temporary/Gnucleon.tar.bz2 if you want to have a play with it. Unless you change the "players" variable in the source file and add some more switch cases for changing the square colour then it is 2 player only. Also the grid size can't be changed without editing the source. Yes, it sucks but it didn't take long to make. I'll work on it in the future.