Announcement
My contributions to this release are some minor features in kpdf like support for images with alpha channels and two new programs inside kdeedu.
Also don't forget to visit the visual guide for other highlights.
Congrats to everyone involved in this release!!!
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
The second
Some days ago my expedient on my university's online campus got updated to reflect i have the second best average mark of the 213 people that ended the CS degree this year, now my only duty left is to discover who was number one and kill congrat him.
On side news: Spanish media reports that the newborn princess will get university level studies, damn! THIS IS IMPORTANT!
On side news: Spanish media reports that the newborn princess will get university level studies, damn! THIS IS IMPORTANT!
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Kombination
You may remember a past blog (http://tsdgeos.blogspot.com/2005/09/some-gaming.html) about two games i was writing for KDE4. Kiriki has not changed anything since it can be said to be finished, but crossedWords changed its name to Kombination (damn K-names! ;-)) and has progressed a lot as you can see here 
thanks to Pino Toscano helping with it. You can actually play with the exception that scoring does not work, blank tile can not be changed to a letter and that word checking does not work.
And word checking is our largest problem by now. With word checking i mean "how to decide if a word is valid or not".
The first obvious thing one thinks is "ask the other users", but you have to think as a game designer that other players can be "bad people" and always refuse your words so that solution has this problem.
Second obvious thing is "use kspell", but this has problems as for example in spanish you play with unaccentuaded tiles, so you do not create "balcón" but "balcon" so kspell will tell you that word is invalid.
Third obvious thing is "use a preprocessed list only with acceptable words even if they are written wrong", that solution also has problems, italian word list extracted from aspell is 25Mb, spanish one is 6.5Mb and catalan 149Mb!!! that means that loading that into memory to check needs a lot of mem and that kombination would be HUGE to distribute.
Anyone has a fourth idea?
BTW you can get kombination from /branches/work/kde4/playground/games/kombination/
thanks to Pino Toscano helping with it. You can actually play with the exception that scoring does not work, blank tile can not be changed to a letter and that word checking does not work.And word checking is our largest problem by now. With word checking i mean "how to decide if a word is valid or not".
The first obvious thing one thinks is "ask the other users", but you have to think as a game designer that other players can be "bad people" and always refuse your words so that solution has this problem.
Second obvious thing is "use kspell", but this has problems as for example in spanish you play with unaccentuaded tiles, so you do not create "balcón" but "balcon" so kspell will tell you that word is invalid.
Third obvious thing is "use a preprocessed list only with acceptable words even if they are written wrong", that solution also has problems, italian word list extracted from aspell is 25Mb, spanish one is 6.5Mb and catalan 149Mb!!! that means that loading that into memory to check needs a lot of mem and that kombination would be HUGE to distribute.
Anyone has a fourth idea?
BTW you can get kombination from /branches/work/kde4/playground/games/kombination/