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compmachines:

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I tried to swim away from the island in Proteus. Wanted to see what would happen. Nothing. Nothing happens. Beautiful, miraculous nothing. I swam, and swam, and the island receded and receded. Sometime during the night, I lost sight of the island, and when the sun rose,…

Chat

Github goes down on National Day of Civic Hacking

  • Me: Just great, now we're gonna have to use sourceforge! *sarcasm*
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Just woke up after a three hour power nap to come crank some javascript while other people took breaks! (None of them slept though so fair enough.)

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Scratched Rails! We’re using php, ajax, json, and a postgresql database implementation now. Faking an entire gps dataset in the database (generated with noise around a single gps point). Unluckily, javascript/json are the only two things listed I have experience with. It’s a learning experience!

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Watching a Riak presentation! Distributed, no-sql database. Very interesting stuff.

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All weekend is Maine Civic Hack Day, and essentially what that means is that for the next 30 hours straight, several groups are going to be working on free, open-source projects for the community of Bangor, Maine (and possibly adaptable to other communities).

My group (me, two student from my university, and one of their brothers) are working on a project to use gps to track snow plows and give information such as what streets haven’t been plowed in a while (so we could make a web service where people could go and see where to drive and not to drive). This could be extended to any s

We don’t have much done as of yet, as we’re waiting to see if one last group member is going to make it. All we’ve done up to now is planning on services, databases, etc. things we’re gonna be using. Google maps, most of programming done in php/javascript. I have no experience with php or putty(which we’ll be using for a vps for this project.)

I’ll probably post more throughout the weekend about this, too.

Tags: programming
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Anybody want to read about Maine Civic Hack Day?

I’m gonna be doing this saturday/sunday, in Bangor, Maine, spending roughly 33 hours awake working on a project with a few friends for the city, voluntarily.

Video

chaobunny:

This is a kinect game I made with a group this past semester that features some waterbending vs. firebending action. It was so much fun to make. I wanted to share. =)

Details:
The game was made using the Unity game engine and the Microsoft Kinect, with the software Zigfu (http://www.zigfu.com/) as a wrapper for the kinect interface inside of Unity. All programming was done in javascript and C#. I worked in a group of five people. Most of the work that I did focused on the user interface and the kinect. Another group member coded most of the gameplay interaction and backgrounds for the different levels. Two other group members worked on cleaning up the motion capture data that you can see used in the enemy movements, and the other group member did design work and sound effects (which you can’t hear in this video, but the room for the demo fair was so nosiy that they were hard to hear anyway!)

If you would like the contact information for any of us for inquiries about jobs and resumes, send me a message and I’ll give you the requested information.

Overall, this was a ton of fun to make and I wanted to share with all the Avatar fans who want a Kinect game. This is not professional and only has waterbending vs. firebending at the moment, but if I have time I’ll buy a kinect and work on it more this summer. And who knows—if we show enough support for the idea, maybe they can make an official game for this!

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andreaphobia:

An interesting presentation discussing, among other things, the pathfinding algorithms for agents, and the AI director. n_n

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kr-studios:

aepokh:

kr-studios:

who the hell thought making blocking functions was a good idea?

listen() btw

someone who realized that maybe it’s not always necessary or even a good idea to have your code multithreaded

someone who realized that purely synchronous applications of networks might exist at some point

take your pick

still, I figure it’s better to loop and check this every now and then.

I like blocking more often than not, it’s more useful more often than non-blocking. Worse case scenario you can wrap the blocking function in a thread and use a queue to store data from the function, or something along those lines. Just access the thread’s data from another thread as if it was the same function, non-blocking.