Archive for August, 2006

CELLular – A J2ME implementation of Conway’s Game of Life

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

I’ve been looking for a simple way to play around with the GameCanvas – the double-buffered general purpose canvas that comes in MIDP 2.0. And being a geek^H^H^H^H person interested in esoteric things, an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life seemed like a good project.

In case you’re too lazy to click on the above link to the Wikipedia page, this is an example of Cellular Automata – a grid of “cells” that live and die according to simple rules. And interestingly, from very simple rules all kinds of ordered and complex behaviour emerges. Short summary? Its like a kind of fishtank for geeks!

CELLular (neat name, huh! You get it, right? CELLULAR automata. CELL phone. Huh? Huh? :) ) allows you to generate random grids, or to draw your own patterns, then set them in motion. And, as an added bonus, it does a nifty fade-in/fade-out effect as cells are born and die! ;)

Here’s a picture of it “in action”:

CELLular in Action

You can download CELLular here, and it should hopefully run on most MIDP2.0 devices. Enjoy!

Posted in IT Stuff, computing, j2me, java | No Comments »

ABC’s foray into Video podcasts

Saturday, August 19th, 2006

I’m a big fan of The Chaser teams’ productions on ABC (the Australian national broadcaster), such as CNNN (sic), The Election Chaser, and most recently The Chaser’s War on Everything. For unfathomable reasons, the show gets scheduled at around 9:45pm on a Friday night, so I was pretty happy to hear that it was available via Video Podcast.

While being a big fan of standard, audio-only podcasts, I hadn’t played with Video Podcasts before. So, I updated my iTunes to the latest version, navigated to the relevant feed and clicked “subscribe”. My PC started downloading the latest episode (around 75 Mb) and shortly after, I was watching it. Better still, my PC will automatically keep an eye on the feed, and pull down the new episodes as they occur. If only I had a video iPod…ahh well, watching it on the PC monitor was fine :)

My initial reaction to all this (apart from “Yippee!”) was surprise – its not like a broadcaster to give away this stuff for free, right? Well, on reflection it makes sense. As the national broadcaster, ABC isn’t out to make cash from its products – its out to provide its material to the Australian public. Traditionally thats been done over the airwaves, but why not over the Internet?

I hope the ABC has worked out a process of integrating these download figures into their ratings numbers. And I’d be very curious to see the figures of how many people are downloading the podcast of this show – perhaps it wont be too long before this will be the new standard of broadcasting :)

Posted in Current Affairs, IT Stuff, general | 1 Comment »

How “green” is it to convert your car to LPG ?

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

After reading today that the Australian Government is considering subsidising the cost of converting cars to run on LPG, I got curious about how environmentally friendly such an option is.

Turns out, its pretty good!

As background for those who haven’t heard about LPG conversions, it is possible to convert cars to run on Liquid Petroleum Gas, rather than petrol. LPG is available in most large petrol stations, and is substantially cheaper than petrol. On the downside, you do use more than standard petrol, and the conversion process typically costs between $2000 and $2500. Because of the relatively high cost of conversion, the more your drive, the more cost-effective the conversion is – Taxis, for instance, are often converted to run on LPG. Subsidising the cost of conversion, as the Government is considering, would make this attractive for people who drive shorter distances too.

The Australian National University seems to have done a feasibility study on converting their fleet to LPG. They found that using LPG resulted in between 12 to 24% less CO2 emissions over unleaded petrol. Or, to look at it another way, its like taking the car off the road 1 to 2 days a fortnight.

Thats not bad. Its worth pointing out though (as a card-carrying Prius fan!) that driving a Prius gives a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions! And cycling….well, thats better again! ;)

Posted in Cycling, Environment, Green, cars, hybrid | 1 Comment »