code monkey

Apparently if you want third parties (Apple App Store, Google Marketplace, MS App Store) to distribute your software for you, you shouldn't choose a license that forces requirements on distributors.

About 4 months ago, I worked on porting some of the Android SDK samples to run on MonoDroid. It was a soul-crushing failure. Every line of code I wrote exposed a new bug in MonoDroid which I had to wait until it got fixed to continue. Eventually I gave up on doing anything more than the absolutely trivial Hello World. What a different story things are today! I dusted off my unfinished Snake port, and it now works without modification. Since I did it so long ago, there was no telling what magic I had in there to make it work on MonoDroid, so I ported another one from scratch. I grabbed the hardest sample I think they have: JetBoy . It's basically a fast-paced, Guitar Hero-esque game where you have to fire your laser to the music as each asteroid passes across the beat line. After an afternoon of literal translation to C# (over 1k LOC), I fixed up the few Java porting issues like anonymous classes and nested classes accessing the parent class's private variables, and it * j...

Today there were several hot air balloons out when I came home. One came closer and closer to my house. And landed in the street in front of my house. It was then deflated and sent on its way. Shot from the inside. Full Photo Set On Flickr

Just a quick note that Pinta 0.5 has been released today, with a few big features like multiple images support, fun new brushes, and clone stamp. Full release notes are available here: http://pinta-project.com/release/0.5

If there's one thing I've learned in designing GUI's and websites is you can't please everyone. One person's favorite part is another's "worst idea ever". Same goes for Pinta . Some people want to be able to move the various widget pads away from their canvas. Others want them to always be visible and easy to reach. For Pinta 0.4, we're going to try to please as many people as possible. To do that, we've brought in MonoDevelop 's incredibly awesome docking library. This allows you to resize, move, close, float, and autohide pads. Here's the default: Here's an example of a customized layout: Hopefully this will please 90% of our users! Many thanks to the MonoDevelop team for such as awesome (and small!) library!

Twenty inches of rain couldn't stop the release of Pinta 0.3 . This is a great release, as it brings us pretty close to feature parity with Paint.NET. I think the most important new feature is live preview, especially as this release adds 25 new effects to play with. It also adds 3 new tools (gradient, text, magic wand select) and has several visual improvements to make image editing / painting better. I've posted packages/installers for SUSE/Mac/Windows/Zip, and the excellent Debian guys should have the Ubuntu PPA updated shortly. Check out the full release notes for Pinta 0.3 ! Thanks to everyone who made this release possible!

It's been a wet weekend here in Tennessee. On Saturday, my town got an estimated 12-15" of rain in about 12 hours. Obviously, no place is designed to handle that much rain that quickly. Then it repeated again today, causing widespread flooding throughout the entire Middle Tennessee area. Any kind of previous record for rainfall or rivers heights have been demolished. I think about the only thing they've shown on national news is this video of a portable classroom cruising down the interstate. (Note this is I-24, a 4-lane national highway.) That was yesterday, things got a lot worse today, as the water made it to the streams and rivers, which then overflowed their boundaries. It's impossible to capture in a few pictures how widespread this is. Everything in about a 50 mile radius is flooded and shut down. They actually imposed a curfew where I live, so I'm not allowed to leave my house, not that I could probably get anywhere with most major roads closed. My ...