MonkeyDispenser

Yet again my thanks to Amanda. Her talents are wasted documenting the stuff I’ve written and subjected her to over the years! I’ll miss you all…

Ode to Jason

Yet another rhyme for a similar reason,
Jason is going, it must be the season,
Or Indulge have put something strange in our lunches, Which makes people leave, that’s one of my hunches, Or could it be that Jason has taken offence, By the team’s constant ribbing, but that doesn’t make sense, Coz this team is renowned for its sensitive ways, Care and concern for each other fills our days…, So maybe it’s the fault of the vending machine, There are never any Doritos, that is so mean, Jason loves his Doritos, the additives keep him going, So Indulge or Doritos? There’s no way of knowing, What I do know is that Jason will be missed by the crew, And his unique style of management? Yes, that too, When asked what’s next on the plan, Jason replies “whatever you like”, Oh the no-pressure team leadership of easy going Mr Dyke!
Continue reading More Friday Poetry – The Final Countdown…

Popularity: 9% [?]

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: 18% [?]

This weekend was quite depressing as we suddenly realised one of our cats hadn’t been seen around the house since sometime late last week. When you have kids to deal with you kind of ignore the cats a bit too much so we felt a little guilty that we didn’t even know exactly how long she’d been gone for!

The one that disappeared was Larrs. She’s always come across as a dippy kitten – the blond of the cat world. In reality she’s 14 years old now so all sorts of worries started going through our minds and I think Celeste and I really feared the worst. If anyone was considered likely to disappear it was always her scrapping brother, Etta. But as an old man himself he really is slowing down these days.
Continue reading One of our cats is missing!…

Popularity: 11% [?]

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: 15% [?]