Win an Alphie

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO WIN AN ALPHIE ROBOT AND YOU ARE A RESIDENT OF CANADA PLEASE GO TO http://canadianladybugreviews.blogspot.com/2010/11/annoucing-giveaway.html AND ENTER TO WIN!!!!


What's an Alphie?

Now more life like than ever before, this learning buddy boasts an LCD screen to depict facial expressions, a childlike friendly voice and a playful, inquisitive personality making ALPHIE robot not just a learning toy, but a beloved companion. Along with an animated personality that children will adore, this modern ALPHIE friend from PLAYSKOOL features important educational activities that help develop early learning skills in toddlers. With their playful ALPHIE pal leading the way, preschoolers can learn the alphabet, rhyming, counting, colour and shape recognition, matching, animal names, instrument sounds and much more! The new and improved ALPHIE learning companion has a sleek new look and convenient carrying handle and comes with thirty double-sided cards containing over 350 fun questions and challenges. Alphie language will have the Canadian Pronunciation of the letter "Z" as well as Canadian spelling of the word "colour" Requires three "AA" batteries, included.

Add even more educational fun to your child's ALPHIE robot (sold separately) with this fun booster pack of number-themed cards! Help your little learner choose from 25 double-sided cards with more than 300 questions and challenges featuring all kinds of number excitement. From counting to 20 and number-object correspondence to amount comparisons, money funamentals and more, there's a whole "world" of discovery waiting to be explored!



Set includes 25 double-sided cards and is geared for ages 3 and up. Also available is the Playskool Alphie Bookster Pack – Letters.

Spinach and Acetic Acid... Yum

So, as you may know I'm "home alone" for a few weeks while the wife and kid visit Grandma.

Anyways, after eating hot-dogs for the third day in a row (maybe fifth, losing count, also, don't worry, I'm eating other things too... like spaghetti, chips and sardines). I decided I needed some greens, and what's greener the Spinach?

It's from one of those frozen "Blocks'o'Spinach" and its been in the freezer for a while... But it's still good.

Crazy Idea Percolating Through My Mind

So, I've got this idea that I'm pretty sure I couln't monetize effectively anyways and by posting it on the weeb now I suppose that's like me establishing prior art on it if I ever need to patent it. It's essentially a synthesis of a number of other ideas and technologies I've come across over the years, the culmination of years of wasting time on the internet and reading science fiction.

The Basic Idea
A Virtual World that's built from the inside. Yes, this has been done before... In fact, services like Second Life has the whole shebang pretty wrapped up... and they actually managed to create profitable revenue streams with it.

So where is mine different? First off, my virtual world is going to be a lot less graphics intensive. Effectively it will be a MUD with a less archaic and draconian interface. There was a lesser known style of MUD called a MOO (MUD Object Oriented) which is the real core idea that I am trying to build on.

Essentially, take a simple textual interface MUD, add the ability to optionally present graphics, make commands into buttons and build it on modern technology so that it can be presented to the user as an AJAX web-application.

Okay, now comes the MOO part. A MOO was basically a MUD in which the "players" were able to design, instantiate and customize objects that could be interacted with by others in the world. For example a user could create a room, provide a description and name and list of exits, or they could develop a class definition that would extend a basic chair object to define a couch that can be sat on by up to three people and be dragged from room to room through exits, or they could make a series of rooms and objects woven together into a text adventure or typical combat oriented adventure.

This object definition and creation was also done through that painful text interface that players used to explore the world, entering room descriptions and scripts line by line with text commands. My idea would be to have two basic tools that would make the world creation process less painful. First would be a graphical and hierarchical object designer that would allow a user to set names, descriptions and other properties in a easy visual interface, with formatting friendly tools. The second tool would be a scripting IDE with intellisense-like functionality to allow users to program their custom object scripts in a C++ like language.

Why?
The primary purpose I had in mind when I was first germinating this idea was education. When I was a kid, new to the internet, I spent a good chunk of time playing on a local MOO, and kids still frequent forums and social-networking sites so we might as well make their time spent there productive.

The first thing my little system would teach a user is the fundamental concepts of Object Oriented design. There's no better way to learn a new language then by living immersed in it and I see no reason why this same principal can't apply to abstract computer science concepts. If users explore and interact with my world the structure of this world will become second nature to them. I was also intending to implement messages between entities and other useful design concepts in the fundamental structure the users will be working with.

The second thing my world would hope to instill in users is practical high level programming skills. By allowing the extension and creation of object classes using a C++ like interface I am giving both the opportunity to learn how to program but also the opportunity to show off their creations to other users. If you make a really interesting class that simulates a horse or car or rocket ship or fish tank or chess set and allow people to make instance of it that should instill some measure of pride.

The Nitty Gritty and The Big Problem
Essentially this project is way too big for me to accomplish on my own... in fact, I probably wouldn't be much use to the development of such a project until it got to the point where I was helping script some base objects.

Just the back-end for this world that allows custom scripted objects to interact with player actors is beyond my skills at this point while the idea of a web-based intellisense-like C++ style IDE it a monumental task in itself.

I don't even know where to start looking at trying to pick at pieces of designing such a system, even though I can imagine how it would work in general terms.

So when it all comes down to it, it's just fun little idea to bounce around in my head. Unless someone out there working on a Masters thesis in Computer Science feels like devoting said thesis towards my concept I suppose.

Meanwhile, It's a fun little notion to bounce around and I've been fleshing it out a little more every time I tell someone about it. Also, every day I'm learning more about and getting more experienced programming and designing sql queries and developing interfaces... it's entirely possible some day I will have the expertise and experience required to do it myself. You know, after I make all those other video game ideas I have.

M.U.G.E.N.

Well... Somewhere in the back of my mind I know I knew about this thing before, and now I heard about it again and looked into it and it was cool... REAL Cool.

The best way to describe MUGEN is "Everyone VS Everything". Want Peter Griffin to Fight Superman? Spiderman VS a Gian Squid? Goku vs Super Mario? Ash Williams vs Spongebob Squarepants? This is one place you are going to find it.

Now, not everyone likes fighting games, and to be honest I'm not a huge fan myself (with the obvious exceptions of Super Smash Bros. and Soul Caliber), but I think that anyone would be able to find SOMETHING to like about this game. The reason for this is that MUGEN isn't so much a fighting game as much as a fighting game engine. There are literally thousands of characters to scour the Internet for at various production quality and resolution. With a little be of basic "dumping files in the right place and editing text files" you can throw together your own roster of quirky fighters and battle stages or just download the entire roster of Marvel VS Capcom and play it for free on your PC.

There are a number of "problems" with MUGEN. First of all, there's no such thing as a legit copy. Every copy out there now is based on a time-limited beta or a leaked copy that made it's way onto the internet and various hacked, cracked, or otherwise modified copies of these other versions that have been altered to remove the crippleware functions and add additional functionality. There are a number of projects aiming to duplicate and move beyond the limitations of MUGEN but none of them that I have found have quite achieved the level of success, community support or completeness of MUGEN yet... though they do look promising.

If you want to give MUGEN a try there are 3 things that you need. First is the engine itself and the various configuration files that support it, second are some characters and third are some stages.

The original MUGEN ran at 320 by 240 resolution so the majority of the stages and characters you find will be native to this resolution. Recently however, thanks to some clever modifications of executables this has been doubled to 640 by 480.

The easiest way to get a taste of MUGEN is to download many of the "premade games" you can find floating around various Fan Pages and Torrent Sites but if you want to really get into it here's where to start:

First Get win-mugen_no-limit_2007-10-13_tweaked_hi-res.zip from the relatively newly formed M.U.G.E.N. wiki. This contains some basic stages and the default "KungFu Man" character and includes support for hi-res stages. Then Get "WinMugen Plus". This adds back support for low-res stages. Extract both files to the same folder.

Now Run winmugen.exe from the folder you extracted everything to and you should be able to play with the default KungFuMan Character.

There are many places to find new characters and stages so you can do that yourself but I'll give you a few good places to start.

• http://www.infinitymugenteam.com/ Has a good selection of both characters and stages.
• http://gdgdgdgd.hp.infoseek.co.jp/MUGEN.html Has a crazy Japanese Ronald MacDonald
• http://mugenguild.com/forumx/index.php Has a "Your Releases" and "Found Releases" section that is quite a popular place for people to show off their creations
• http://drinvincible.hp.infoseek.co.jp/ has a bunch of great Hi-Res Guilty Gear Characters

When you find a character it will most likely be in a compressed file. You will extract the contained files to a folder with that characters name as a sub-folder to the chars folder and then edit the select.def file to add the character to your roster. (Use the included KFM folder and entries as an example, the text files are documented)

If that doesn't make sense to you I'm sure there are a number of tutorials available all over the Internet but I didn't use them so I'll let you find them for yourself.

Benjie Discovers Jam Sessions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOs5kTwil0I

I have written an essay-like document, I would appreciate commentary on style and content so I can improve my ideas and writing ability.


First Public Draft of "On the Subject of Robots" - By Benjie Davis

So.

So. I'm On Facebook Now

I tried to avoid it for some reason. Well because it was "cool" and "popular" and "everyone else was doing it". I like to think of myself as counter-cultural or unique (or at least uncultured or abnormal) so it takes me some time to jump on bandwagons.

Trying... In My Own Way (Which is "Not-Trying")

So I have started programming and writing again. I started by trying to program Dr. Mario but I kinda got disheartened when I completely bungled the collapse logic code the first time through. I've reworked it in googleDocs but haven't put it back into the main system. I'm not entirely sure why, I've been watching a lot of Furturama and "drowning my sorrows" with freezies.

I have also started writing again a bit. You may have noticed that I have updated my blog more in the las week then I have in months... even if it's only with videos and such... but if you include THIS post that's like a lot. Well, in addition to my personal take on "blogging" I have started trying to write what I'm calling "Essays". They are a bit like blogging on a specific subject and working towards a conclusion in order to perhaps teach someone, convince someone, or at the very least encourage someone to think. So far I've got two in the works and I'll post them somewhere when they are done.