dasman’s World

Certain nameless colleagues have been curious as to whether some sort of terrible car accident had severed my fingers, thus preventing me from writing blog entries over the last 3 months, so this post is all about the incredible things I’ve been getting up to since then on the computer front.

Hmmmm. Let me think….. *scratches head* There must be something….

• I’ve continued to spend far too much time cursing at J2ME. When it comes to UIs, you either have full, low-level control where you draw every single pixel yourself, or you have almost no control where you populate a Form with Items and wonder what on earth it will look like on the various platforms. If only there was a happy medium… And yet, despite my complaints I can’t walk away - the lure of knowing your program can run on potentially so many devices is too much!

• I gave NetBeans another shot for my J2ME development with version 5.5, and decided all is forgiven. It feels way “snappier” than version 5, and I haven’t had it hang on me while using the Visual Designer part of the Mobility Pack (which is the killer feature for me). Good work guys!

• I’ve upgraded Wordpress around 50 times to cope with all the dot releases that have been coming out. I’m actually getting a bit excited about the big 2.1 version due out soon - I have a sister working overseas who has been a blogger in the past and toys with getting back into it - perhaps a snazzy new piece of software will be the impetus she needs!

• I finally decided to sit down and tick off something thats been on my To Do list for about 6 months now, and upgrade the search page at www.asman-it.com.au to use the new “inline” Google search results. And, like all things you put off for ages, it took around 10 minutes (although admittedly my page won’t win any prizes for aesthetic or robust web design!).

So, we’re back up to date. Perhaps my next post will be a little more on-time!

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”:

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