DeBlog

Fixing the disappearing geek window in whatpulse

admin — Sun, 13 May 2012 13:29:24 +0000

Whatpulse for windows can’t cope with the fact that people can use more than 1 monitor, and the geek window (which displays your stats) can disappear to some location of the screen. In order to get it back you need to quit whatpulse, open the registry editor, and search for “GeekLastX” and set to 100. Then set GeekLastY to “100″ as well. Now when you start whatpulse you should see your geek window again.

Blocking ads – should we?

admin — Fri, 04 May 2012 10:16:45 +0000

There’s an ongoing debate in the user and web design community as to whether or not ad-blocking extensions or plugins for a browser are okay. On the one hand, it means a cleaner, ad-free browsing experience, but on the other hand, it means that the site is getting no ad impressions (and therefore ad revenue) from you whatsoever. So what’s the protocol, here?

Largely, I think it depends on what service or site you’re talking about. Recently, it was shown that free versions of popular apps with banner ads within them to help support the developers are actually draining your battery life more rapidly than the paid versions. Now that’s not great, but it does mean that if you’re keen to support the app you’re using for free, actually paying for it becomes your only option.

At the same time, some ads are ridiculously intrusive – Angry Birds is a great example, as the banner ad space actually obscures your bird at the apex of its climb, preventing you from predicting landings and so on. To affect your ability to
play your favorite partypoker game or use an app to it’s full potential provides a strong argument for finding methods of wiping out advertising, because you’re actually getting an experience that’s fundamentally broken.

But for those who need to support their work, it’s worth thinking about how you can persuade those using a website of yours to view ads. Some deem them intrusive, but it seems a fundamental misunderstanding is at play here – they love the site, but they won’t support it through allowing ads to display.

The moral of the story is simply to make your ads a side-order to the main course of your content. Don’t put them between the user and the content, and most users won’t even care they exist – everyone’s happy.

New space for projects

admin — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:59:50 +0000

Update: RhodeCode was eating up to much memory on my small VPS, so I re-moved the projects to github. (http://github.com/dendiz)

I just moved all my project related stuff, including musical projects to a new sub-domain, http://labs.dendiz.com. This way I can free up the blog from the clutter and rid myself of the arduous task of updating the project pages and documentation from the less than friendly and slow-as-a-tortoise pages of the word press administration console, and enjoy the delight of documenting through a wiki. I couldn’t be bothered carrying all the pages from the blog to the wiki so I only migrated the most useful and active projects. I only wiped the links from the blog pages to those pages, they still exist in the blog, and can be reached through a google search, but I won’t be actively maintaining these pages any more. I also open my GPL’d projects repositories through rhodecode.dendiz.com, and patches are always welcome.

Evernote Attachments

admin — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 18:11:24 +0000

Update: This method has become obsolete now, because evernote has added support for all types of attachments on free accounts.

Evernote is a great note taking application, giving you synchronization and access to your notes from almost any device. They offer a free subscription and a paid subscription. Paid subscription has the benefit of attaching any kind of file to a note, the free one limits you to images and pdf’s. Well not anymore: Here is a little trick that you can do to store any kind of attachment/file as a note.

On linux (and possibly mac) install the sharutils package. On debian based distros:
sudo apt-get install sharutils

After that use the uuencode program to transform your binary file (zip, rar, whatever) into a ASCII text file.
uuencode mybinaryfile.zip mybinaryfile.zip > mybinaryfileastext.uue
This will transform the binary file and save it as mybinaryfileastext.uue. Now just open mybinaryfileastext.uue in a text editor and copy the contents and paste it into evernote as the notes body.

To get back your original binary file, copy the notes body into a text called myfile.uue file and run
uudecode myfile.uue

MinFrag – Distributed Non-fragmenting Memory cache for Java

admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:34:19 +0000

Caching is an integral part of developing scalable application that are responsive. Distributing the cache is important for achieving availability and scalability. Applications programmed in a garbage collected language are prone to garbage collection pauses which reduce the responsiveness of the application, as in the case of a caching application. Minfrag is a caching application/api that tries to overcome some of these problems.

More…

Block the ads in evernote

admin — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:55:50 +0000

Evernote is a greate online note taking service but the ads on their interface are bugging me because they take up space and create a distraction. The easiest way of getting rid of the add on the web interface is by adding the rule

*evernote.com##div[class*="SidebarInfoContainer"]

to the filters in the blacklist tab of adblock for chrome.

Crimson – A HTML5 Game

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:18:53 +0000

Just finished coding a demo version remake of the game crimsonland from 10tons. It runs in the browser using the canvas element for graphics rendering, and some Js for the AI of the NPC’s. Checkout the dedicated page for the game here for a video and screenshots and play the game it self.

GMail as a TODO List

admin — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 19:25:07 +0000

By enabling some Gmail labs features and with the help of a label and filter you can use gmail’s web interface to manage your todo list. Here’s how:

First create a label called TODO by clicking settings then labels.

now create a filter by going to settings, filters that will match the word TODO it the subject. In the second step choose apply label action and select the new label TODO that you just created.

Now from the Labs features in the settings page enable the multiple inboxes feature and select the label todo as the display setting and you’re set to go.

Now any messages that you send to your self with the subject line TODO will be shown in the second inbox.

A survey on artificial intelligence in stochastic games of imperfect information: poker.

admin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:59:48 +0000

Abstract – Poker is a game of incomplete information which contains elements that hold a challange for artificial intelligence agents due to the nature of the game. These challanges are examined along with the methods used to solve these problems and different approaches for building a strong poker AI agent.

full article

The Design Of SPATE

admin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:47:05 +0000

Abstract –
Computer based poker agents are a current hot research topic with many
universities producing publications and implementations about their advances
on the subject like the University of Alberta which produced Poki
and Vexbot. Also many hobbyist computer programmers
are implementing different agents and are constantly arguing on forums (such as http://www.pokerai.com)
which approach to implementing the perfect player is better. There are many
different approaches that can be taken when designing a poker playing program such as game theoretic methods,
game tree search methods, Bayesian methods, etc. and it is not always easy to measure
the competence of the program with regard to other players. Spate is a platform
and API that tries to eliminate this handicap by providing agents with a poker playing
environment and a detailed trace of the game later analysis and
measurements. The document will explain the architecture of the Spate system.

full article