Almasch

If you want to learn a new program language because of seeing new concepts or search for a new way to solve a problem which is difficult to implement in the language you are currently using. Give Scala a try!

t is a modern language which combines the best concepts of many programing languages and paradigms. You can program either object oriented or functional just as you wish  or its better for solving your problem. The language is very extensible and support you with mechanisms to add new functionality in libraries and you can use them like built-in constructs of the language. That make the language scalable and now you can guess where the name is coming from.

Before I enumerate all features of scala take a look at the homepage or read the book “Programming in Scala”. It is very good start into scala which covers all concepts step by step. You should  have already some experience in object oriented programming languages. Java would be great because you can skip some parts of the book. Otherwise you have to read a few pages more which is not really a problem.

Take a look a scala if you have some time. You will not regret it. (Beware that you will ask yourself  the question “why it is so complicated to implement…?” if you write code in an other language than Scala).

Is not in wonderland but opens very creative way for young people to start learning programming. It is designed for high school and college students to teach them object oriented programming language while creating animated 3D movies and even simple games.

Alice is an approach to introduce the basics of computer programming for beginners and uses a simple drag-and-drop interface instead a written language. The cycle of writing, compiling, searching spelling mistakes, frustration is missing the spelling mistake and frustration part. It is concentrating on the most important parts, the concept, of object oriented programming languages.

The first contact with programming a computer can be done while trying to understand a cryptic language and persuade the compiler to accept the program or understanding the concepts from the beginning and have even some fun while learning. Its still enough time later to become a master in a production oriented programming language.  

Alice is a gift from the Carnegie Mellon University and is available for free at www.alice.org. There you will find versions for Windows, Mac and Linux and information about how to use it and who created it. 

A very promising game with a interesting idea. Draw objects which become physical objects and fall, roll, slide, tumble downwards and try to move the little red ball to the jumping yellow start. Thats all!

The Deluxe Version is still work in progress but Crayon Phsics is already playable and you can download release version 1 from Kloonigames. On the website of the Crayon Physics Deluxe you can see a video of many nice features not included in the done-in-under-a-week game version of crayon.

There you can also register a e-mail address to get informed when the game is done. Even if the author claims the downloadable version more a prototype as a demo version it already teases for more…

I could not resist to test the new KDE 4 release and see what it will bring. I installed it on a virtual system and started to play with it. Like the doku already said it is not recommended for production use but its running well enough to get a good impression.

The KDE team did a good job and I am sure I will use it when the project reaches the stable state. Before writing a lot about the nice and smooth user interface here are some pictures. Enjoy…

Read the rest of this entry »

The time I used for improving the connection between my palm to my workstation was it worth to be spend. Now everything works fine and easy to handle.The PalmTX has Bluetooth and that is very comfortable and you can use it for backup the palm while sitting on your couch. Only the workstation has to be started before. sitting down…

For linux I found several ways to do it but for me the easiest und best way was to use the dun deamon. Its very easy to setup. The following little HowTo will work when using Kubuntu “Gutsy Gibbon” but it should also work for other distributions, too.

Read the rest of this entry »

For building the irrlicht engine on Kubuntu you need first download the source package from http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/downloads.html and unpack it.

Enter the source/Irrlicht folder inside the new irrlicht folder and start compilation with make.

If you run into trouble with error messages it is because of missing dependencies. Install following packages from the kubuntu repository:

• libgl1-mesa-dev
• libglu1-mesa-dev
• libXxf86vm-dev

and try again. Now everything should compile fine.

In the examples directory are some directories with examples and corresponding Makefiles. After executing make you will find the results in bin/Linux

If the Linker complains “cannot find -lXext” remove the -lXext in the Makefile from the compile command. Its not nessesary.

On my personal computer at home a change occured. The Feisty Fawn did a very good job but now is time for the Gutsy Gibbon!

After trying a lot different Linux Distributions I found my favourite in Ubuntu. Its easy to install and without hours of configuration you can start to work. As desktop environment I prefer KDE to Gnome and thats the reason for the derivative Kubuntu. Basically it is the same as Ubuntu but with a other software packages preselection optimized for KDE.

All essential software is already included like development tools, office, mail, browser, editors and if you do not like the preselected product you can change easily. Installing and removing software can be done with adept, standard system services and hardware can be configured by provided frontends. All who need more can do it manually with no problem. Under the surface of the system you find basically a Debian Linux System.

For all who would like to use Linux for daily work and don’t want to configure every single switch and spend more time while reading manuals than doing work is my advice is to have a look at Ubuntu. By the way, it was more easy to install Kubuntu on my “Vista Premium Capable” PC than Windows Vista…

If you still reading and have not get so far an answer for your question what is Gutsy Gibbon have a look at the Ubuntu homepage.

At the last conference I have attended there was a presentation of a funny programming game. Its easy to understand, easy to learn and exciting to get a higher score.

What is to do? Just program the behavior of ants to let them collect as much as possible food. For that task there is a simple API with only a few easy to understand commands. Basicly you only have to derive from a given BaseAnt class and overwrite the existing functions. Whatever you program here the ants will do it!

How does it work? You implement the behavior of your ants and start the game. A game controller calls the methods of your ants everytime an interesting event occurs e.g. your ant is near a food resource or the ant becomes tired. After the game is started you can do nothing more than watching the small black worker running in a virtual world. For people with a 3D accelerator card even in 3d and not flat.

You can either use C# or Visual Basic for developing your own ant peoples. All you need to start you can find on the coding4fun website from Microsoft.