MonkeyDispenser

You gotta love those Germans! On the other hand you gotta lose a little bit of that old ‘Nintendo can’t do anything wrong’ when they can’t supply enough Wiis for the Christmas after the one at which they released. And there was me thinking I wouldn’t bother last year but this year I’d be easily able to get one for the, ahem, kids. I thought, ahem, ‘the kids’ were going to be sorely disappointed this year.

But let’s just come back to the Germans. If you check out their Amazon site - amazon.de - you will see that they still have plenty in stock, or at least they did when I posted this. And it’s actually cheaper than the UK! And with the glorious European Union it’s no problem buying from Germany and getting it delivered to the UK! Believe it or not I only ordered this on Tuesday morning, and the DHL guy knocked on my door with the delivery this morning (Thursday - two days later). He laughed when I commented that this was quicker than a Royal Mail delivery from within the UK and then told me that DHL was a German company anyway.

It helps if you understand German, but I don’t and I didn’t end up ordering a new iron by accident. Just use the Google language tool if you get a little stuck, but as a rule it looks exactly like the Amazon you know and love. You can use your standard Amazon login details as well so it sorts most of the form-filling for you.

Obviously I tried it out when it arrived (don’t want ‘the kids’ getting disappointed on Christmas day) and it works fine. You get a German plug (same as the shaver plugs here) but it just needs an adapter plug or you can force it into the standard UK socket after putting something in the earth socket to open the safety hatches. I do not endorse such things unless you’re desperate.

Burn your house down or not be able to play the Wii? A difficult decision.

So, love your fellow German if only for the fact that apparently they don’t love the Wii (and you’ll hear no comments from me regarding sense of humour being an issue…)

Popularity: 23% [?]

Today my new Samsung 226BW arrived, which pretty much ends my spending on gadgets for the foreseeable future. Setting it up wasn’t quite as easy as I’d hoped since my video card (an ATI Mobility Radeon X1400) refused to provide it’s native resolution of 1680 x 1050 using an analog connection. After three hours I resorted to the digital connection and it worked first time.
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Popularity: 43% [?]

Another major update to the site, this time involving the move across to using WordPress. When I first created the site (properly) I used it as a project for learning PHP as well as a few dynamic html techniques. The blog-type format was fun to write and taught me a lot of things that I now use in my day-to-day work on other projects.

But, in terms of a fully functional blog site I was never going to be able to reproduce something with this level of technical ability without some serious time commitments. And it’s not like anyone was going to pay me to do it either!

So far I’m very impressed with WordPress, and its plug-in framework means it can easily be expanded to suit other needs. I think that when I come across a client who wants a blog-style site then this is where I’ll be starting in future. It’s easy to set up, well supported and I can save the innovation for the unique features they require!

Popularity: 15% [?]

Finally I took the decision to get a MacBook. I’ve been worried for a while that only having one machine could cause problems as a freelance software developer should that machine decide to go belly up.

Also I just wanted to expand my knowledge a little by moving across to a new platform, at least part time. This way I still have the security of my big-beast-of-a-Dell laptop whilst keeping my private life on the MacBook. Oh yes, I’m a sucker for iLife and I look forward to getting all of my music and photo’s onto it. Once I’ve fixed my network that is since I had to rebuild it just to get the Mac to use the wireless access. Apart from that everything just seems to work…so far.

The built in camera is a revelation. I wish I had more friends (or at least friends with Macs) so I could video conference!

Popularity: 23% [?]

I’ve been playing with several areas on the site and trying to improve the way it looks and the way you move around it. One of my greatest finds recently has been Xara’s graphical software suite. I suggest trying out the demo’s as they produce some excellent software packages. I’ve been using Webstyle to create buttons effortlessly and what’s more they look good (as opposed to my own efforts!) I’ve only just got into Xara Xtreme but it is a great vector graphics drawing application. Their instructional videos are excellent. It’s everything I need without the expense of Photoshop.

Which leads me on to my next purchase, a Wacom Intuos graphics tablet. It’s only just arrived so I don’t know what it’s going to be like. It’s sat next to me at my desk right now, taunting me…

draw with me, draw with me…

I even added Google AdWords which you should be able to see to the right. I don’t expect to make any money from it, it just helps add some extra interest to the site and it’s another thing I can help people with in the future if they need it for their own sites. Just the fact it is relevant to my site content makes it an advertising medium I’m actually quite happy to have around.

Anyhow - time to get back to work.

Popularity: 12% [?]

A rather grandly named piece of work I did as my dissertation for a Masters degree several years ago. During the course of the project I gathered together much information from the news groups and several game related sites. There were always lots of people around wanting information on the basics of path finding and I always promised I’d publish my work in the end as a sort of path finding primer.

Obviously I forgot.

But here it is about 7 years later than promised. As with most things I do get there eventually:

Artificial Intelligence Software Development Kit

The only thing I do ask if you go on to do something useful with this information is that you perhaps consider linking/referencing it/me. You never know, someone might find it useful and then go on to create the best thing in video-games since Doom. That would be a good thing.

You can probably ignore the details directly related to the software I wrote unless that kind of thing turns you on. If it does I have the code somewhere still so let me know if you want it rather than cutting and pasting from the documents. The first chapters should give you a fair bit of information on basic path finding though.

I’ve still to tidy up the web version over the next few days (make it look nicer, add a proper index page, etc.)

Popularity: 11% [?]