A different kind of "game demo"
Recently, I have made a small game for the BlackBerry, called : Daughter In The Box. It’s an ancient chinese puzzle.
As many people know this (both developers and gamers), there are 2 versions of each game. A demo, that allows you to evaluate the game up to a certain point, and the full version, which if you decide to purchase, gives you access to all the features and content of the game.
It’s been like these since the first day computer games appeared.
I wanted to innovate and create a slightly different model of distributing commercial games. The scope of the game is to move the pieces of the puzzle, until the biggest piece of puzzle reaches the exit. The “demo” version will allow you to play the game for a maximum of 100 moves.
Here comes the catch. The game can be solved in less than 100 moves, if you are real good, meaning that you get to play the game completely free, if you are real good … as a nice reward for you.
iPhone software development
Some time ago, I have decided to go into iPhone development.
After some hassles, I finally received my Mac Mini. I also bought an aluminum keyboard to go with it.
Overall, I like the hardware design, and getting used to MacOS is fun. It’s different from Windows, but it’s not something difficult to learn.
I didn’t have much time to play with it, but I installed the iPhone SDK and decided to make a simple “Hello World” application for the iPhone. It went nice and easy. The development IDE and the language (Objective C) are something different from what I have done until now.
And yes, this means there will be Hacker Evolution for the iPhone 
How to reduce your roaming data costs on your BlackBerry
Hello everyone,
Someone asked this a few days ago, and I know a lot of people have this issue.
And it’s a “thing” not mentioned often, but here we go:
Some definitions:
While roaming, the granularity at which your data traffic is charged, is larger than usual. (I get rounded to 1Kb in my home network, and to 25 to 100 Kb while roaming).
Basically, every data “session” is rounded to the granularity amount.
What happens when you are roaming, is that your phone switches networks and bands (from 2G to 3G and backwards) a lot more often since it can connect to virtually any network available in that country. Now, if you have been on a network for an hour and your BB session transferred 5 Kb of data, and the phone switches over, you get billed for the entire 25 to 100 Kb granularity chunk.
You can easily figure out how this will drive up your costs. You end up paying 5-10 times more data traffic that you use, at a price which is 5-10 time more … basically, you can pay up to 100 times more!
What you can do?
Simple. Set your phone to manually select a network. Select the network manually and voila, things are better (also, don’t allow your phone to change from 2G to 3G automatically). Stick to non-3G and you will be fine, as it has wider coverage than 3G, anywhere in the world.
Proof:
To prove my theory, when I went in my vacation (abroad), I left the phone to automatically switch networks for 3 days. Then I put it to manual and when I got home, I requested a detailed invoice.
And boy … was I right. In the first 3 days, I had about 5-6 data sessions closed and rounded up, daily. In the last 4 days … I had 5 sessions in TOTAL. The cost difference was HUGE.
Keep in mind that I have spent most of my time in the vicinity of my hotel, and the swimming pool. The 5-6 sessions were when I went out for walks and the phone switched networks or switched to 3G and back to 2G.
Give it a try and feel the difference for yourself.
BlackBerry game development in one day
Recently I got a BlackBerry 7130g device. I picked it up for 2 reason: It was cheap (around $30) and I wanted to see what’s a BlackBerry like.
I liked it so much that I have started using it as my main phone. (I also have a Windows Mobile phone running the BlackBerry (BIS) service, so the push email thing wasn’t that new).
Since it supports J2ME I decided to give it a try. All I can say that the BlackBerry JDE is a wonderful programming tool. The installation went smooth, and I decided to see what can I do in one day with it. My Java programming skills are very limited … actually this my first application written in J2ME.
I decided to write a small puzzle game implementing the famous Chinese game, Daughter In The Box (also known as: Hua Rong Dao).
The purpose of the game is to slide the puzzle pieces until you manage to slide the biggest piece (the daughter) to the exit point. It’s a very captivating and challenging game. Here is how it looks:
I made the entire game code, and the graphics in one day. The game is fully functional.
Here is the link, if you want to download it, and try it on your BlackBerry:
Daughter In A Box for the BlackBerry.
Also, here are the links to the .cod and .jar files.
Remembering the old times.
My dear friend Dan Berte emailed me in the morning with some memories of vintage technologies and gadgets.
A couple of things we both missed:
- Ericsson cell phones which we used to connect to a slow Internet (9600 bps). It was only Ericsson back then, no Sony
- Grayscale LCD powered cell phones and PDA’s we used for email. (there wasn’t any spam back then. You couldn’t include links, html or images in an email)
- Infrared connections (and the 10 minutes spent on figuring out why it doesn’t work, just find to out the coffee cup was in it’s way)
I just remembered a couple of things I did (over) 10 years ago:
- I coded a piece of software in assembler language to record and compress 7 seconds of music and play it back. We didn’t have any iPods back then and being able to use a delta algorithm to compress the music sounded pretty good. The code was written on a small computer which had a Z80 CPU and about 30Kb of memory to store data.
- I also coded a poker game under CP/M. The computer was only able to display texts, so I used some nice tweaks to draw the cards with *’s and other funky characters. It was the first game I have developed, about 4-5 years before I wrote my first PC hacker game. I didn’t know what marketing and selling games was back then, but all I know is that the 2 computer running CP/M back then, were mainly used to play my Poker game. It was an awesome feeling.
Those were the days when technology was used at it’s best. It was amazing what people could accomplish with tiny amounts of memory, slow CPU’s and very slow Internet connections.
I first started browsing the Internet using Lynx. I used to read my emails with Pine. Using telnet to connect to the college servers for some Internet access was the only way to go.
This things are pretty much like a Zippo lighter. They never get old fashioned
One of my many projects that still lie around on my desk, is to create a small virtual Internet, and allow people to connect to it through telnet or dial-up.
Bring back some of those old days and vintage technologies we so much miss.