Sunday, March 23, 2008

Stardict in maemo extras

It's been about a month since I first downloaded Maemo 4.0(Chinook) SDK and tried to compile something like stardict. But there is much more difficult thing left to do - add .deb packages to maemo repository and create .install file.

Nokia did the right thing I think - usual user only needs to click on green button and choose place where to put an link in menu. The whole work is left invisible behind - to provide easy setup developer has to:

  • create SSH RSA private/public keys
  • create GPG keys
  • upload public key on maemo garage
  • write changelog info
  • sign changelog files
  • upload packages onto "extras" repository
  • create installation file

Of course, Nokia has half-draft tutorial for this. So after the long process sleepy contributor finally gets this pretty arrow:
Note: still beta!

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Back to 80s - console pacman game

Some time ago I had an interview for AI developer and the task was to write a Pacman game. I was not in mood to create a nice GUI or pretty 2D/sprites graphics, the main thing to do was to show ghosts running after the player. Used a standard non-blind path-finding algorithm for this. Here is the screenshot of the game(it's ugly, I know!):

Actually that's not the first game I've ever made. The first one was "Mine Sweeper" written in BASIC when I was 14. And I can assure you python is just awesome! May be anyone can remember GOTO and GOSUB/RETURN operators. Now having all these OOP, exceptions, libraries it's like damn nightmare. I definitely will prefer python to BASIC when teaching my children ;)

The source code(in python, of course) can be found following the link