slackers.se

At Revision this year I competed in the 4k intro competition with an intro called 'falling'. Because I've been doing a lot of VR related stuff lately I decided to convert the intro into an interactive VR experience(?). The original shader is a single raymarched scene which means that demo is very demanding on the GPU. But you can provide a scale factor for the framebuffers on the command line to get acceptable framerate. The binaries are compiled for Windows 10 and can be downloaded here . I suggest putting on some nice background music like  Röyksopp  for maximum effect. If you're not that into VR you can go over to Shadertoy and watch the intro instead,  https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dcSDN .

In the wake of ‘Peak Oil’ in 2143, factions struggle to claim their share of the world's trickling reserve. But deep beneath the melting ice of Antarctica a new oil deposit has been discovered; the likes of which have never been seen. As private prospectors flock to the site like vultures to a corpse, you are the only thing standing between them and the fate of an entire world. Should you claim the oil and receive riches beyond your wildest dreams, or make sure it remains buried and maybe save a dying planet? Meltdown is my entry in this years Java 4k game competition. This year I teamed up with the game designer Daniel Frostberg who created the actual concept while I focused on the code. The game is a 3d dogfight game with a little twist, you have to fight below the surface as well as above it. Or as the strategy guide put it: The Antarctic is an inhospitable place – especially with prospectors around, determined to eliminate all opposing competition. Luckily, your Black Gann...

The recent months I've been neglecting my  Cubing for charity  project. But a fter viewing a great   TED talk by Lisa Kristine  about modern day slavery  I've decided that the next   Cubing for charity   must go to  Free the Slaves .  Thanks to all users Rubik's Cube Algorithms who by their inherent nerdiness made this possible! 

A couple of weeks ago the submission deadline for this year's java4k game compo was due. This year i was a close call, squeezed it down below 4k only a couple of days before deadline. My mission was to make a game with music in it and it took a lot more time that anticipated. The game became a 2.5D demake of Portal which actually became quite fun to play but the simulation is bit buggy on some systems. The synth in the game is a 4-channel beauty with sine, square and noise oscillators. The only effect other than track volume is a delay loop for each channel. I recommend using headphones to hear the base frequencies. All in all I'm very satisfied with the end result. Both the music and the game is great. You can play the game over at Java4k.com  and the tracker can be found at  https://bitbucket.org/bysse/tinysynth . Don't forget to register a user and vote for your favorites!

After almost 100h of spare time coding I'm finished with the rewrite of Rubik's Cube Algorithms v2.0. I've basically rewritten every single line of code in the whole application. But if you ask me the result is great! And hopefully the users will appreciate it as well. The app can be found at Android Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=se.slackers.cube Features: F2L/PLL/OLL algorithms Algorithms rotation Trigger moves grouping Add / Edit custom algorithms Planned features: Ad-free version 4x4 and 5x5 renderers Better trigger detection for the left hand Nicer layout for tablets

After seeing Jeff Pershing's post on a obfuscated madelbrot renderer in python  I naturally had to try the python snippet provided. Sitting on a quad-core 3GHz machine I felt a bit disappointed when it took a long time to render the fractal and only one core was used. Performance was not a part of their initial goals so I will forgive them but I felt obliged to make a multi threaded version. For science! Said and done, it was surprisingly smooth coding and the end result is pretty decent. The palette was by far the most time consuming thing to implement, it's hard to find good colors. Only basic controls for navigating the fractal are implemented, mouse wheel to zoom and click to center. Screenshot from the application The code can be found at my repository on  bitbucket . 

Recently I've had the pleasure opportunity to work with BIRT for a reporting project. My conclusion is that it is by far, the most inaccessible open source project I've ever seen. This post is dedicated to my future self.  Hey! Here are the links you've been looking for! BIRT Javadoc  (hidden inside  http://help.eclipse.org ) BIRT Source can be found at git://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/birt Good luck, you'll need it...

It's time for #3 in the series ' Cubing for charity '. Which is the concept that until the profit from ads in  Rubik's Cube Algorithms  (and other apps) reaches a substantial part of my income, it will be donated to charity. This time I've chosen to give the $38 USD (250 SEK) to the Red Cross. The reason why I chose them is because of the drought in Africa. And the only way to get help there fast enough is to go through a large organization, ie the Red Cross.  According to their site, your cubing,tapping and tracking has given around 35 people food for a month. Not much, but it's something. 

Yesterday I released my third app which is called Simple Tracker. It's basically a calendar were you can enter data on different variables and then be able to plot the values over time. Obviously there are far more advanced fitness / health applications out there, but in my opinion they are too advanced. I don't know how many grams of cereals I eat for breakfast or how much cheese are on my pizza. What I do know are which days I workout and the measurements I make. And that is what I use the application for. ie. recording my weight a couple of times each week and annotate the days I workout with a color depending of the activity. Below are some of the screenshots from market, please note that this is sample data :) Calendar overview  Viewing data The app can be found on  Android Market  and is currently in beta and free but ad-supported. It will of course be a part of my  Cubing For Charity campain . 

When starting with the gwt-floating-header project i ran into some problems with getting, what i call, the" true width" of an element in javascript. With "true width" i mean the width of the element excluding padding, border and margin. And because i'm writing for GWT I don't have luxury of be able to use the .width() function in jQuery. It took me a while to get the script to this point and i'm not really sure if it works for all browsers but it might help someone to get started. function width(element) { var style = element.currentStyle || element.ownerDocument.defaultView.getComputedStyle(element, null); var safe = function(v) { return parseInt(v, 10) || 0; }; return element.offsetWidth - safe(style.paddingLeft) - safe(style.paddingRight) - safe(style.borderLeftWidth) - safe(style.borderRightWidth); } GWT version of this snippet can be found here . Please let me know if you find any strangeness or incompatibilities in the code. E...

Today I've created a Google code project for the GWT port of my  jQuery floating header plugin . It's a very lightweight library that already supports both column and row headers. Since the code base is very young i haven't had the chance to try the compatibility with a lot of browsers but in time i might do this. The project is available at:     http://code.google.com/p/gwt-floating-header/ .

Finally it's time for #2 in the series ' Cubing for charity '. Which is the concept that until the profit from ads in Rubik's Cube Algorithms (and other apps) reaches a substantial part of my income, it will be donated to charity. Also i tend to choose projects from the places a visited while i was traveling Asia. This time 54 USD goes to Cambodia Children's Painting Project in Sihanoukville Cambodia. The project is basically to let kids be kids. Unfortunately there are still a lot of kids selling bracelets on the beaches. We now provide so much more to the kids, including access to painting, craft and sports activities, a small snack and lunch everyday, access to medical and dental assistance and the most important thing, an opportunity to receive a proper education.

I'm very proud to say that my game ' 4Kube 3d ' won the java 4k game competition this year. And what is more surprising, for me at least, is that it came first in both the judge and community voting. The timing of the results was very good also for me. I've just come back after seven months of backpacking in Asia and this will certainly relieve some of the inevitable post travel depression. Needless to say i got a lot of help from other people, so a big thanks to: * Rasmus (RL. GREEN LABEL) for helping me with level design and testing. * The guys at java-gaming.org forums for a lot of tips on how to improve the game. * Riven for his most excellent Compile 'n Shrink service. Other posts about the competition: * http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2011/03/java4k_2011_competition_result.html * http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/29/impossigames-the-java4k-challenge/

Finally the time a year when you are encouraged to write really dirty code, Java 4k competition ! Well, maybe not dirty but certainly ugly. The Java 4K competition is a game programmer competition. The goal of the competition is to create the best game possible in Java. But what's the catch? Well, it wouldn't be fun if there wasn't any catch! There are limitations, and these limitations are: The maximum allowed size of a game is only 4K This year i forgot to exclude the manifest before i started with the size optimizations. I felt like a child on christmas when i discovered it! Good times :) Anyway, my game is a classic puzzle game where you control a rolling cube. The objective is to clear all colored bricks on the playfield by rolling over the bricks with the a side of the cube which have the same color as the brick. The game can be found on the Java 4k site and I encourage you to try all submitted games, some of them are really good. Because Riven's excellen...

The last couple of months I've been traveling in Asia and come face to face with the extreme poverty here. Of course I've heard the news, seen the pictures and read the facts but it's not the same as actually seeing it with your own eyes. I felt like I had to do something. So I've decided that until the profit from the ads in Rubik's Cube Algorithms (and other apps) reaches a substantial part of my normal income, it will be donated to charity. I know this is kind of a feel-good-move on my part since the amount of money spent by me for the sole purpose of traveling is infinitely more than the profit from the ads. But at least it's something and I will continue with the donations on each payment from admob . The first donation goes to Hand in Hand whose objective is: Our objective is to eliminate poverty by creating jobs. We do this through our unique holistic approach that tackles the areas that matter the most to poor communities – microfinance, education, ...

Due to a very nice patch submitted by Jason Axley i've release a new version of the plugin. The changes are a lot of performance optimizations including lazy creation of the floating-clones. Look at my old post or the jQuery project page for more information about the plugin.

A milestone has been reached for my first android app Rubik's Cube Algorithms . It now has 10000 downloads and almost 2500 active installs. Considering the very small audience of this app there is a huge potential to reach users through the Android market. I've learned tons of stuff releasing this app, not so much about programming but of how to handle user comments, feature requests, bug corrections and just make to TEST before you release. Obviously you want a good rating of the app on Android market but it's surprisingly hard to not care when someone give it a bad rating. Even if the comment suggests that the user doesn't know what he's talking about: I thought this was going to be like a vertual rubics cube little did i know its faaarr from it[,] this stuff is like triginomatry This user gave the app a rating of one, even though he clearly didn't read the description of the app. Not everyone will like what you're doing, no matter how much effort you...

Finally I've taken the time to fix some bugs and released v1.2.0 of the floating header plugin. Take a look at my main post or the jQuery project page for more information. There are still a strange bug that i can't really reproduce locally. It only appears on my demo page, the blinking and reposition of the header on fade in/out from the bottom. If anyone have any suggestions please send them to me.

A couple of weeks ago i got this error message from Hibernate. The only change i've done is to remove the word "an" from it. CriterionImpl dimension references (an) unknown entity

Long time since I've posted anything so i think an update of what i've been up to is about time.I've been trying my wings on the android SDK with a very simple application for showing all OLL/PLL algorithms ( cubefreak.net for more cube related stuff). Also I've got my beta invite for flattr yesterday and i really like the idea behind it. So I've added flattr buttons on all my blog posts! Read more about flattr on their homepage or at wikipedia .