Today marks the start of development on my first “official” Android application. I plan to release it to the Android Market once its ready to go. The app is called UpDog and it is intended to be a simple status sharing application. With UpDog you can find out what your friends are up to as well as share your own status. It is intended to be a very simple (and free!) application/service. UpDog will serve as more of a learning experience for development on the Android platform. I’ll be announcing more information and details in the near future as development progresses!

The following quoted text is an excerpt from the article “Awesome but often unknown Linux commands and tools (anchor.com.au)” which I found really useful! There are quite a few lesser-known Linux/Unix commands that can prove to be extremely useful. This quoted text outlines just a few of these, but there are many more out there…

“The best candidate I have been able to come up with is the C/Unix/Posix use of NUL-terminated text strings. The choice was really simple: Should the C language represent strings as an address + length tuple or just as the address with a magic character (NUL) marking the end? This is a decision that the dynamic trio of Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan must have made one day in the early 1970s, and they had full freedom to choose either way. I have not found any record of the decision, which I admit is a weak point in its candidacy: I do not have proof that it was a conscious decision.

This is a really interesting and fairly well written series of articles from Gamasutra.com detailing the history of computer role-playing games. The articles are somewhat long, but definitely worth the read! Check it out:

• The History of Computer Role-Playing Games - Part 1 (gamasutra.com)

• The History of Computer Role-Playing Games - Part 2 (gamasutra.com)

• The History of Computer Role-Playing Games - Part 3 (gamasutra.com)

“An article and research paper describe a fast, seemingly magical way to compute the inverse square root (1/sqrt(x)), used in the game Quake.

Finally! After 14 years of waiting I have an actual copy of Duke Nukem Forever!!! It’s hard to believe that it has finally been released…

I’ve added two new pages to the gaming section:

1. Normality (1996) - Normality is a 3D graphical adventure game. It was one of the first few games to use exclusively pre-rendered graphics. The story revolves around Kent Knutson, a rebellious teenager in the city of Neutropolis, from which various places take up the setting of the game.
2. The Journeyman Project (1993) - The year is 2318. The place: the sky-born city of Caldoria. After a century of bitter struggle, humanity has finally learned to live in peace.

These two games are lesser known adventure titles. Most people probably haven’t heard of them, but they are lots of fun if given a chance!

If you are new to data mining and want a really good introduction, here is a really good “interactive” tutorial. It’s interactive in the sense that it lays everything out on a sort of flow diagram/map. It’s really easy to read and there is some really good information here. Check it out here: Data Mining Map (chem-eng.utoronto.ca/~datamining/dmc/data_mining_map.htm).

“A very long time ago, I was curious how to detect the strength of the bass and treble in music, in order to synchronize some graphical effects. I had no idea how to do such a thing, so I tried to figure it out, but I didn’t get very far. Eventually I learned that I needed something called a Fourier transform, so I took a trip to the library and looked it up (which is what we had to do back in those days).