Coobird’s Blocks 0.2 has been released. They include some minor changes such as:
For more information, please check out the post at the Devblog.
Coobird’s Blocks can now be played as a Java applet on coobird.net or as an application, both of which is available for download from the Coobird’s Blocks project page. The game is licensed under the terms of the modified BSD license and is free, open source software available for download.
This is the first release of Coobird’s Blocks, release version 0.1.
Coobird’s Blocks is a Breakout-like game written in Java. It is designed to eventually be developed into an applet and application. The project page has been updated extensively as the development of the program has resumed.
Computers are Useless is a Java applet which generates random questions from a list of words. It is intended to be an entertaining program to bring out a few laughs by generating sentences that, most of the time, make no sense.
The motivation for creating the applet was a quote by the painter Pablo Picasso, which was “Computers are useless. They can only give answers.” Well, this applet will generate questions rather than answers. However, these are randomly generated sentences, so they can be quite entertaining. “Did he slice a clock?” “Do you question trees?” “Would she dream of pumpkins?” are among the 45000+ sentences that the applet generates.
The source code released under the modified BSD license and is available from the Computers are Useless page.
Pitacalc is now open source and available for download.
The command line interface calculator program is available for download along with the source code which is released under a BSD-style license.
There have been a few updates at coobird.net in the past few days.
The following new contents have been added:
Dvapsi is under heavy development at the moment with changes being made to the graphical user interface as well as the underlying source code in preparation to be released under a open source license. (The GNU General Public License is the primary candidate.)
Also, a new entry has been made to the Past Programs section of coobird.net. Transit Game is a tile-based display system demonstration program. The program itself never materialized as a game, which was the original intent.
New pictures have been added to the Picture Gallery. Enjoy the pictures of cherry blossoms in Tokyo.
The TGenerator class of Thumbnailator, the main class used to produce thumbnails, has been released under GNU General Public License.
More updates are expected to be made in the coming weeks.
New contents have been added to coobird.net. Quite a bit of new content were added along with minor changes to the design of the site.
The Past Programs section of this blog has been moved to coobird.net. A new feature, the Picture Gallery has been added, although it is still in an experimental phase. More contents should be added in the coming weeks.
According to the BBC, the world’s tallest man, Bao Xishun, saved a dolphin by extracting a piece of plastic that it had ingested. Officials at the aquarium in Fushun, Liaoning Province, China said that the plastic in the dolphin’s stomach was causing it to lose appetite and suffer from depression. Bao, with his long arm, spanning over a meter, was able to extract most of the plastic and according to officials, the dolphin is in good condition now.
In another dolphin news out of China today, it appears that the world has lost another threatened specie, the Yangtze River dolphin has been declared “functionally extinct” after a six week search for the freshwater mammal turned up no sightings. For more information on the Yangtze River dolphin, baiji, take a look at the Wikipedia article.
Finally, did you know that unlike most mammals, dolphins do not undergo REM sleep? As it turns out, dolphins actually need to consciously breathe, unlike others such as humans which breath involuntarily. As it turns out, dolphins will actually put one hemisphere of their brain to sleep while the other hemisphere continues to “stay awake,” possibly to continue vital functions such as breathing.
Welcome to Coobird’s Blog!
This blog will be a place where I will be adding content that should eventually be migrated over to the main coobird.net website. For now, I can’t quite make up my mind as to how to manage the content, so I will be using this place as a temporary place to gather and collect my thoughts to create content. I’ve tried content management systems in the past, but I haven’t been quite happy with them, nor do I want to limit myself by using a blog as a website.
Meanwhile, I’ll be using the power of WordPress to publish my pages. We’ll see that turns out.