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I've sufficiently lost all those games and all the files that went with them at some point since then, and now all I have left are the front-facing sprites for all the Azulians:

A recurring element in the games, though, was a mini-game called "Azulian Tag", which is sorta the opposite of regular tag: the player who is "it" is hunted down by all the other players. In the games, there would be blue Azulians that travel the same speed as the player (and thus are easy to run from as long as you keep on moving), red ones that move a little bit faster than the player, and white ones that move even faster. The game would start you out surrounded by about 6 blue Azulians, then 4 red ones further out and 2 white ones much further away, to give you time to run. The goal of the game was just to survive as long as possible.

Anyway, I decided recently that this mini-game might be a good idea to turn into a game on its own, for Android. I discovered PhoneGap, a toolkit for using web technologies to create mobile apps for iPhone and Android among other devices, and therefore decided that HTML (5) and JavaScript should be sufficient for creating such a game. In addition to just running away from the other Azulians, some new "powerups" could be added in, like being able to teleport the player to a random point on the map to buy back a few seconds of time before the other Azulians discover where you've teleported to. I'm working on some sprites now; I've already revamped the blue Azulian sprites from the RPG Maker 16x16 size to a higher quality 32x32 size:

Front (click for bigger picture)

Back (click for bigger picture)

Zoom-in on back.

If you want one it's $20 at cafepress.com/rivescript.

It supports all the directives and tags that the Perl version does, including the trickier things like the %previous tag and topic inheritance/includes. The only notable thing it doesn't support yet is object macros, because Java isn't a dynamic language and can't dynamically execute more Java code. So, eventually I'll be adding JavaScript support to it for object macros, and maybe even find a clever way to get Perl macros to work with it too.

With this I eventually plan on creating some RiveScript-enhanced Android apps, like a "personal assistant" chatbot that can talk out loud and listen to you using Android's text/speech converter libraries.

It would basically be a miniature PC that resembles an Android phone, but which isn't a phone, but which you can just install Skype on if you really need to make a phone call, since it could still get cellular data service.

And, being like a miniature PC, it would be as open to operating systems as a real PC; it would be just as easy to install and reinstall Android firmwares (or any compatible OS) to it as it would reinstalling your operating system on your laptop.

I imagine Dell would be a good manufacturer for such a device; they would market it just like they market netbooks, as being just a mini PC that happens to run Android (preferably the stock vanilla Android as Google intended it, but being open you could flash any version of Android you want).

If such a device existed I would buy it as soon as it came out. I'm quite sick of the way phone carriers abuse the Android OS and wish there could just be a seriously open device.

On my many attempts to learn C++ I never actually made anything useful that wasn't a tutorial-like program (with the exception being a single-threaded CyanChat library I was working on but never completed). So this time I decided to just skip the tutorial b/s and dive right in to making a RiveScript C++ library, and Google things as I run into them.

I knew about C++ strings (who doesn't?) which are a big improvement over what C has, but I newly discovered vectors (dynamic resizable arrays) and maps (associative arrays) and among these three, it covers all the basic data types I'm used to in Perl.

I hit a roadblock though when it came to constructing the large data structure that the Perl RiveScript module makes and which I'm familiar with, but looking into C++'s struct solved that pretty quickly.

All this attention to RiveScript lately, though, made me remember the point about how the Perl RiveScript module (the only feature-complete implementation of RiveScript to date) is released under the GNU General Public License, which would demand that any application that uses it also be released under open source.

I was thinking of re-licensing RiveScript under a more open license to see if it could drive up usage of it for non-GPL projects. I was considering something like the LGPL, Apache or BSD license. But, I think I have a better idea!

At work I was using ExtJS for a while and I saw how their licensing scheme works: they dual-license their code; the GPL licensed version is free to use, but being GPL code it demands that your entire application be made open source. They then have a commercial license that allows you to use their library in a non-open application, for a fee.

I think this may be the better way to go. For the open source folks who use RiveScript today nothing changes, but if somebody wants to create a commercial application with RiveScript they wouldn't be able to use the GPL-licensed version. After watching all the news about SmarterChild and its parent company (Colloquis, now owned by Microsoft) over the past decade, with their chatterbot patent and their commercial SDK, giving out free code that can be used in a commercial closed-source product doesn't seem like a very smart move. ;)

The chatterbot patent now owned by Microsoft is groundless anyway, because the Net::AIM module on CPAN released in 1999 ships with an example script for an AIM chatterbot which pre-dates ActiveBuddy's inception in 2000. ActiveBuddy's claim that they invented the AIM chatterbot falls in the face of prior art.

It's available at http://www.kirsle.net/rss.cgi.

My ttf2eot tool is a converter tool only; it does not host your EOT font files. Do not hotlink directly to the files on my server. The files only remain for up to 24 hours and then are deleted. If you hotlink to a deleted font, you will get the Sabrina font instead, which most likely isn't what you want.

In Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, there's an anti-piracy measure that I triggered late one night while using a MysticTicket and AuroraTicket to start my quest of capturing Lugia, Ho-oh and Deoxys. The ticket checker at Vermilion City told me to buy this game or die.

I created a You're The Man Now, Dog page using this animated GIF image (because at the time--near the end of high school--YTMND was cool). From there apparently the GIF found a home in the Bulbagarden forums.

Months (years?) after making the GIF I decided to google this and see if anyone else has seen it. Apparently it's been verified by various ROM dumpers to be legitimately in the game's code, so my ROM wasn't just a hacked copy. And that's when I discovered the familiar-looking animated GIF; verifying its MD5 hash proved it was indeed the result of my 5 minutes spent taking screenshots and animating them that these people were all linking to.

Interestingly, it seems that the GIF is the only screenshot (animated or otherwise) that exists on the topic. IIRC all I did was enter some cheats to get me a MysticTicket and AuroraTicket (either by cheating and making my monsters carry them when captured and subsequently take them away, or else by buying them at a Pokemart) and then attempting to catch a boat with them in hand.

I've been wanting a domain like this for a while (especially after I saw my former boss, Samy's (my hero) domain name, samy.pl), and then I found a domain checking service online that would look up a domain under every possible TLD and I found a few that were still available, .is being the most attractive of them all (come on, http://noah.is/awesome?).

It took a good number of hours wrestling with ISNIC about the DNS settings, though. They have retardedly strict requirements for DNS servers; the servers themselves have to be configured in the most strict way possible (matching forward and reverse DNS records for each of the name server hostnames for example), and furthermore they want all their DNS servers to be "registered" with ISNIC, and they want the person who manages the name servers to be the one who registers them.

Thus, using the ol' ns1.kirsle.net, ns2.kirsle.net was out of the picture, as my server has only one IP and I don't control the reverse DNS on that IP regardless. Luckily my web hosting company provides DNS forwarding services, and their servers are configured in the strict way ISNIC requires. I just had to register them with ISNIC ($karma--, I registered them with my own ISNIC name instead of bothering my web hosting company to do it; should be fine though, if they have any issues I'll forward the e-mails they send to the web host to deal with then).

ISNIC charges me 39 euros a year for the domain and they are the sole dictators of .is so I can't transfer to another registrar... but, again, http://noah.is/wicked.cool? Seriously.

What it really means from what I've read is that Google is just not selling the phone themselves directly but it can still be obtained via other means (developers can still buy them and they're still being sold in other countries), but that Google still intends to support the phone for the foreseeable future -- it will still be the first in line to get Android updates, for example.

I have a Nexus One and I like it and this news is a bit worrisome to me, but not in the way you might expect. Rather, because the Nexus One is one of the few Android phones that is truly open.

Apparently, the very first Android phone (the G1), the first Droid, and the Nexus One are pretty much the only Android phones that ship with the stock, vanilla, Android firmware. All the other HTC phones out there for example run the "HTC Sense" UI on top of Android, and the Motorola phones run the "Motoblur" UI; some people don't like these add-ons on top of Android and would rather run Android the way Google intended, using the stock vanilla release of the ROM. Or, some people just like to hack their phones and have root access on them.

The Nexus One phone made it really easy to unlock your bootloader and install custom/unsigned Android ROMs onto the phone if you wanted to (it would even provide a nice screen warning you that you're about to void your warranty). The Nexus One allows you to install whatever you want on it, and both Google and the phone itself fully supports this. But, other phones, notably the Motorola phones that come with an eFuse that will practically "brick" your phone if you try to modify its firmware, aren't so open.

There seems to be a trend in Android phones in which companies are trying to play Apple; Apple's iPhone devices are super locked down, and Apple tries to patch all the security holes to stop people from jailbreaking their devices - with each firmware release Apple tries to make it harder and harder to hack the iPhones. In Apple's ideal world, their hardware would be completely 100% impenetrable from hackers and nobody could modify their devices. It seems Android vendors want to copy this business model, which I for one do not like.

It seems Android vendors are "standing on the shoulders of giants," they look at Android and all they see is a free open source Linux-based mobile operating system, and they wanna just take all that hard work, add a few things to make their devices a major pain in the ass to hack (in their ideal world, absolutely impossible to hack) and then jerk their customers around in exactly the same way that Apple does. Is this really what Android was supposed to be all about? Just giving greedy megacorporations the cheap tools they need to strongarm part of the cell phone monopoly in their favor?

Hopefully the Nexus One won't be the last developer phone that can be bought by non-developers. I got mine specifically because it ran the stock unmodified Android firmware and because it was completely open to customization. As I ranted about before, I don't like how Apple is able to just slow down your old phones and force you to upgrade; at least I have the comfort of knowing I can easily flash any Android ROM onto my Nexus One and nobody can force me to upgrade by slowing my phone down or doing anything else malicious to it.

God help us if this is the future and we're stuck with many Apple-like companies all forcing us to use their locked-down devices that we're not allowed to touch at all for fear of permanently bricking our devices.