[idlethreat]

Recently, I had an opportunity to become a part of a closed beta test for Atmosphir. Atmosphir is a new, multi-platform game for Windows, Mac, or Linux computers which allows you to have control over a little clever fellow in a world full of platforms to jump to, things to climb up, and all sorts of entertaining traps to escape to reach the end flag.

The more interesting bit about the game is that all the boards that you play are online, created by other users whom have a copy of Atmosphir on their systems.

Some are of pretty good quality, others are simple "run across a few (virtual) miles of power ups and jump really high to his the finish mark". At the moment, there seems to be a lot more of the latter than the former. However, with new members in the Beta test being added, the level of quality will start coming up eventually.

Along with merely playing the game, you have a full-blown editor in-game (which reminds me a lot of the editor in Sauerbraten) so that you can create your own masterpiece- Or, edit any of the currently existing levels online and save them locally or even upload them as your own.

Installation of the software on the Mac is quick and painless. I like that the developer opted to go with the all-in-one bundle instead of a proper installer application. This will allow for trivial moving, and even deletion of the application without leaving a bunch of libraries scattered all over the place. Unsure of the Windows version, but I assume that it has an installer somewhere.

Preferences are pretty basic at the moment- Movement controls and screen size are about it.

Overall, the performance of the application is pretty good for beta software. There are some hang-ups in the UI whenever the maps are downloaded, and when updates are installed. Overall, for what it offers, and the possibilities afforded, I think this is an acceptable compromise.

So, if interested, check out the Atmosphir web site. There's another review online [Posted Here] that should give you an even better overview than this one has.

Enjoy!

tom

Heading down to Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Planning to make it back in town Thursday sometime.

Have a great week, all. More code coming soon!

tom

I don't normally post stuff like this, but hoo boy.

tom

I started watching the VP debates last night, and, after about 15 minutes of enjoying the sniping back and forth I cam two two inescapable conclusions:

• I want to see More of Sarah Palin
• Hoo, I'm Bored!

In my line of work I sometimes have to take immense blocks of data, distill them down to their essential components, and make decisions on their contents. I also enjoy visualizing information to make things easier to get an overview of their contents.

So, I grabbed a transcript of the Obama / McCain debate (since the VP debate was still going on) and do a little math on it. Here's my results.

On the heels of my previous app which used Apple's Spotlight searching capabilities to create your own personal search engine, I have written a new application to create your own web photo gallery from a Spotlight search.

Spotlight is one of the more interesting, and (for me), useful features of Apple's Mac OSX. While it's superb with locating documents, programs, and the like, it really shines when it comes to the number if built-in and freely available plugins for use.

So, basically, you have an inbuilt system on Mac OS X which will allow you to search text files, html files, images, Word documents, PDF's, the list goes on and on. The really interesting bit (to me, at least) is that there's nothing to configure or tweak. If you are running a Mac, then everything copied over to the file system is automatically indexed, and made quickly available for searching- even from a web browser.

Well, it looks like it's been a while since I updated the site with any new content. A lot of that has to do with work, and things on the weekends crowding all the wonderful time that I used to have dedicated to screwing around on the computer.

Nevertheless, here's a bit of an app that I managed to stop messing with and actually prep for release.

Late summer / early fall always gets me interested in the weather a lot more than other times of the year. I poke around at noaa.gov for weather reports, temperatures, humidity, and all that crap. This year I looked into just pulling the raw information down from noaa, parsing it how I like it, and then working on my local copy of the data.

Here's a rather old-ish document that I published on Google Docs a while back.

Now looking back on it, it probably needs a revamp. and filling out of the particular bits. There's still a deep need to finish up the bottom bit and make it more presentable.

This evening I spent quite a bit of time coming up with a web-based OpenVPN certificate generator. while successful in writing up an application to do the job, there's still quite a number of dependencies that I need to flesh out and document before I can put everything together and present it.

In any case. Enjoy the other stuff. more later as it comes in.

tom

Yet another one-trick-pony bit of software.

This application will send a "beacon" message every two seconds from one server to another via UDP syslog. To make it go, you will need to run it with an argument- the argument is the IP address you wish to send message to.

Click read more for examples!