Many moons ago when I started this blog one of my earliest posts was about joining the gym. That was what, about 6 years ago? The Gym as an activity lasted a sum total of a month. I think my lack of motivation had a little to do with having no real reason to go to the gym. It just seemed like a "good idea" (tm)

A few weeks ago I decided I needed to try again. Today and signed up and took my first session. It was great, I actually feel energised and looking forward to going again. What's different this time? I'm older and have more to gain. First I now have a little girl getting heavier all the time who I have to lift regularly. Seocnd I have a wife who gets more ill every day, there are more things I have to do for her and more of the time I don't seem strong/fit enough.

Finally, I'm far far more vain than I used to be. My beer gut is getting embarrasing and not being able to keep up with a simple game of footie is just sad.

First session, 35 minutes. 5 minutes warm up walking on the tread mill. 15 cardio running. 15 minutes on the weights. Oh, and few minutes "cooling down" which for me means a few stretches, a little bit of walking it off and a hell of lot trying not to vomit.

Here's hoping I last a bit longer this time.

Due to work and random life events (read emotional turmoil!) the past week hasn't really had much in the way of development time for my home projects. I'm still not working on what I should be working on, the space trading game is just too appealing.

The couple of hours I did get the space trader has a new important feature for a trading game... you can trade!

My little monkey/girl Megan is three today! It doesn't seem like that long ago we were in the states worrying about how the health care works and hoping that we'd be able to cope. She's grown into a lovely little girl with bags of energy and personality. Friday she had her birthday at Nursery, Yesterday we went to Bristol Zoo, and today is a birthday tea! Next week, off to Grandma's for another one. One very lucky little monkey:

Having a blog is a wonderful thing at times like this, especially one that existed before she did. Looking back over her life we have:

When she was just a scan
The one when she was one
Then she reached two

For those who have been reading all that time, thanks! And sorry if you're getting a bit bored by now ;) On, for another lovely year with my little star.

I've been out of the loop again! Apparantly this very cool stuff by Roger Alsing was posted on Slashdot last year. Well I didn't see it, if I had I would have jumped to trying to implement the same thing - it's just so cool. I'm not sure there are any practical uses for it (maybe some texture compression stuff for games?) but it's just such a cool idea.

So, given that I saw it posted on JGO a few days ago, I ran at it and tried to implement the process. A few painful bugs later and I had a command line tool. Since I had the day off I spent some time tidying the whole lot into a GUI based application.

Whats happening here then? First we generate a set of polygons. Next we mutate the polygons (move them about, add some, remove some, change colours). Compare the first set and the new set of polygons to the original image. Choose the one that is closest and mutate again. Repeat. Alot.

Update: Couple more examples using 150 polygons

You can get some pretty cool results with a bit of time. The image above was captured over 2 hours. My version of the GUI tool looks like this:

The tool is available as an executable jar (i.e. you'll need java installed). The source code is also available here in an Eclipse project.

There will of course be bugs and improvements to be done. I might find some time but even if not, a very enjoyable distraction!

The results of the JGO Game Competition 2009 have been announced:

First Place
     Bend Hero by kevglass with 92% positive 
     votes out of 25 total votes!
Second Place
     Cat On a Wire by Orangy Tang and CherrySlug with 91.7% positive 
     votes out of 24 total votes!
Third Place
     Bunnies in the Clouds by SimonH with 73.7% positive 
     votes out of 19 total votes!
Fourth Place
     Steel Mill Duke by Alan_W with 30.8% positive votes 
     out of 13 total votes!
Fifth Place
     Bending Techniques by me with 30% positive 
     votes out of 10 total votes!
Sixth Place
     Duke Ben Dover - Kick Ass by steveyO with 25% positive 
     votes out of 8 total votes!
Seventh Place
     Rocky - the illegal pool jumper by dertom with 23.1% positive 
     votes out of 13 total votes!

Congratulations on finishing, everyone!

That's right. Ego of the year here. I won! Bend Hero got the most votes. It also got a bunch of useful feedback - thanks to everyone.

Congratulations indeed to everyone competing (including those who didn't manage to complete their games in the weekend). It was a lot of fun (not least the winning bit) and I hope there will be more contests soon!

Infact, there is! Next up is the:

The 1 Week Roaring 20's Monochrome Strategy Competition!

A week or so ago I got a HTC Hero, an android phone for those who don't know. Apart from being great for my development hobby it's also a cool smart phone. I didn't realise it was so smart it'd change the way I dealt with the internet tho.

First, e-mail. Having email on the go is great. However, the best integration the Hero has is with Google Mail, which I'd never used (although I have various accounts with it). So, I logged in for my first time ever and slowly realised what I'd been missing. A few clicks later and I have google mail grabbing mail from all my other accounts. A few more clicks and I have everything organised. All my accounts now end up at one glorious central hub with one of the best web interfaces I've ever seen. What's more, when you manage to get mail into my inbox my phone tells me too :)

Next, twitter - it now flows to me and from me at all times. I'm surprised how much I enjoy reading and posting the inane events of everyday life :)

Facebook/Contacts - I lump them into the same thing now see? Why, well because all my contacts, their phone numbers, their emails, even their birthdays are all brought together from various sources on my phone. It's a beautiful thing to behold.

Market - I never tire of seeing what's new on the App Market. Whenever I think something hasn't been done, there it is. Crazy. The possibilities of this phone amaze me.

I've just read the news that David Eddings has died. This is very sad news for the world. My thoughts go out to his family.

Those who know me know that I've read Eddings since I was a little lad. It 'gave me a reason to read'. I associate whole sections of my life and sets of music with a series of scenes in the Belgariad and Mallorean series. Moving on to the later stuff, Elenium and Tamuli, we get introduced to Sparhawk and whole new more adult and religious world. Finally with the later extensions to the Belgariad's world, Eddings work can only described as Epic.

Much of my RPG/RTS fantasy work and personal writing is inspired from Eddings. Without his stories I would surely not have read as much, or have spent the time learning about language and flow.

In short, David, you'll be sadly missed by many but with luck your work will live on to a new generation (I'll certainly be encouraging my daughter to read it).

If you haven't already, get out there and read the first Eddings series, if you don't you're missing out.

Just got back from a lovely week break in west Wales. A little cold at times but a brilliant week with wife and daughter, playing on the beach and visiting bizarre tourist attactions. Bit of photo editing on one of the snaps:

Might even get that printed for the wall :)

So, I left the forums I visit. This was an attempt to free up some space in my head. That hasn't really worked. Limiting my online existence hasn't had the impact I'd hoped. I still spend 90% of my time angry at one thing or another. I'm spending a lot of time in arguments that are pointless. I'm losing the will to succeed. I want to fight with people, I'm not sure why.

The fall out has been that I'm starting pointless debates, and getting offensive for no reason. This came to a high point this morning when I replied to a benign disagreeing post with an offensive rant - more annoyingly to one of the few people I actually do get on with in the world (really sorry about that).

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do any more. Every suggestion, every solution, every comment seems like an attack. Medication doesn't help, I'm not a fan of it at the best of times. People IRL keep saying I've got a lot on my plate at the moment - it's understandable I'm getting worked up, but really - is it? I don't think so.

Maybe I just need a holiday, but who's got the time or the money at the moment? I guess I just need to free up more space.

My desk, says so much about me:

If you look carefully to the left of the coke cans you can see the designs for the last two 4k games and some other ideas that never got off the paper.