I really like Louis de Funès, one of the greatest comedians that ever existed. Unfortunately he died many years ago. A friend showed me a nice clip from him that I’ve forgotten for a long time, take a look:
A year ago or so I’ve developed a MineSweeper clone (please sue me) in school for our Java class. It took most of us over 50 hours, (25 were planned by the teacher), I think I had something over 60 hours.
Well at least I recived (like most others) a good mark for this shitload of work 🙂
In case you are interested because you have a similiar work @ school or you just want to play a nice game, I will offer a link for download. No licence included.. do whatever you want with it, just don’t post it anywhere else and say you’ve made it. In the Zip you will find the compiled classes and the Java source code.
Download: AntiMine
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Nice to have – DIA
It’s time again to present a nice tool which is free and useable. Maybe you’ve already heard of DIA. It’s a freeware and open source diagramming software. Well I would like to say „Visio clone“ but it’s not as powerful as Visio and doesn’t exactly look as nice. But hey, it’s free and it covers the main functionality.
You can import your own shapes, which should be in a XML or SVG format. DIA can be scrippted using the Python programming language.
The diagrams can be saved or exported to various formats like: XML, PNG, EPS, SVG, WMF or JPEG. You can find more information or download the latest version at the official homepage.
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WE are world champion!
Yes, we – we all managed it, like the last time, we manged to become pope 😉 No, not really, but a bunch of german football playing woman did it. They won the world championship final in China 2:0 against a strong brazilian team. The victory has been achieved with goals from Prinz (52.) and Laudehr (86.) but also the outstanding performance of the german goal keeper Angerer, who saved a penalty against the bazilian star player Marta.
It was the first time that the world cup was won from the same country as in the previous world cup. Congratulations from my side and it would be nice for 2011 to complete the hattrick 🙂
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Nice to have – Inkscape
Ever wanted to create some nice vector graphics? Don’t want to spend money to buy „CorelDraw“ or „Xara Xtreme“. I suggest to take a look at „Inkscape“. It’s free, it’s opensource, it’s fast, easy to use, good looking and much more.
The program also supports various languages (with auto detection) and is avaiable for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. You can get the latest version on the offcial homepage: http://www.inkscape.org
There you’ll also find some tutorials for beginners and some more example graphics.
I always thought that the todays youth (yes, I belong to it 😉 ) is propably the worst, dumbest, laziest in history. Well you know what I mean, you always hear such stuff. But today I read the following quote:
Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
Socrates (469 BC – 399 BC)
So maybe everything is like always, nothing changes. An old conflict that will never end. More great and interesting quotes can be found here: http://www.quotationspage.com
Yes, another Battlestar Galactica related post. But I must show you what I’ve recently discovered by accident.
I was a huge fan of Microsoft’s Freelancer Space Sim, Arcarde, Trade… whatever.. game. It had some really nice graphics, smooth gameplay, a good story and so on. But it was released 4 years ago. Some weeks ago, I thought I want to play something like that again, but with better graphics and maybe a better multiplayer part. On my search I came across some titles like „Dark Star One“ or „Spaceforce 2“ and some others. DSO had some good critics but also many that told they prefer to stick with the 3 year older Freelancer. „Spaceforce 2“ came out this June and a Demo was released at the beginning of this month. I tried it out. Most of the graphics were great, but for example the textures for the planets were really blurry, for a modern game I had expected much more. Also the cutscenes and the english audio was really terrible, I felt like I was seeing a freeware game from 1997.
And then… suddenly during this week (I wasn’t looking any longer after this stuff) I accidently came across „Beyond the Red Line“. I really can’t remember how I found it but it is the most promissing candidate right now. There was once a game called „Freespace“ and a succesor called „Freespace 2“. Later the game’s engine has been made open source and since then the Freespace community has enhanced it with many nice features to keep it on the level of modern games.
„Beyond the Red Line“ is not only a modification of that open source version, it is a stand alone game (you don’t need „Freespace“) and it is freeware. It is playing in the universe of the famous Battlestar Galactica series. So you can fly arround with the legendary Viper MkII and Viper MkVII, also the Raptors and Cylon Raiders are avaiable. Here are some screenshots:
The developer released a first demo some weeks ago at the official site www.game-warden.com/bsg/ which is already very playable and makes a lot of fun (especially if you know the series). They plan to release a new demo soon. I think the screenshorts are not the newest as I’ve got a much better graphic on my pc.
So what are you waiting for? Go to the official site and download the demo.
„The Prodigy“ – They were once my favorite band. They caught my attention with their third album „The Fat of the Land“ (TFoTL), since then I was hooked. Later I also bought their two previous albums „Music for the jillted Generation“ and „Experience“. But after the release of TFoTL in 1997 they haven’t brought out any new stuff until 2004 (well, there was a Remix CD and a Single, but not a real album).
I wasn’t really awaiting their new work… actually I cannot tell you right now if I have bought „Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned“, so it either hasn’t made a huge impression on me or the release of the single „Baby’s Got A Temper“ has ruined it for me. TFoTL was such a huge success, that it was really hard to produce something better or at least close as good.
This morning as I was browsing through YouTube, I came accross one of my all time favorites from „The Prodigy“. One of the finest Techno/Big Beat (or whatever it is called) of the 90s.
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Nice to have – FreeMind
Let’s start with a new series about different useful tools, well at least I think they are useful for me ;-). Today in the showcase: „FreeMind“.
Have you ever needed to make a mind map, maybe after a brain storming session in the office? I’m sure you know the commercial tool MindManager. FreeMind is a free alternative under the GPL. It is avaiable for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux as it has been written with Java. All you need is a installed Java RE (> 1.4). It’s very easy to use and it misses no features. The export functions are impressive. You can even export an interactive mind map to flash and place it on your website.
Different languages like English, French, Italian or German are already build in. You can download the program at the official homepage. I suggest you install the latest beta version (0.9.0 (Beta 9)), I had no problems with this version.
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Road trip in California
At the end of July two friends and I will fly to the USA, LAX if you want to have it exactly. We will stay there three weeks and have planned to make a round trip. Hopefully we will see various interesting places on our way and at the stops like Las Vegas, Grand Canyon or San Diego.
Here is a not so detailed overview of our route:
According to Yahoo! Maps (the tool that created this map) we will have to travel nearly 2200 miles. We are currently reservating hotels or motels at some of the more important places, where it could be difficult to find one when we will be already there.
More informations will follow… someday 😉
Update July 2020:
Apparently, no, no updates followed, since I forgot that I should do that 🙂 but now it is to late anyways. But just know, it was a great road trip and I hope I can see the United States of America one day again, but to be honest, I would prefer to also have a look at the east coast, before returning back to the west coast.