My latest project is something that I have written three times: The Antichrist
Detector.
The Antichrist Detector was conceived about 10 years ago when I stumbled upon
the entertaining idea that Bill Gates was the Antichrist. The idea was simple
and ludicrous. If you take the ASCII values of the name Bill Gates (uppercase
only please as any good numerologist will tell you) they add up the 663.
“But wait!”, you’re saying, “That doesn’t add up to 666?”
Correct. But Bill Gates full name is William Henry Gates III. So, Bill Gates
plus three does equal 666. It’s so obvious. How could you have not seen it?
Anyhow, this whole idea gave me a slightly twisted thought. You could automate
this. Write a simple program and feed it the phone book and out pops a list of
potential Antichrist. Not having a digitized phonebook handy I had another more
practical (in as much as any of this is practical) idea. Why don’t I put up a
website any let people enter their own names.
So, in 2000, I did. It was very successful and a lot of fun. It didn’t do much
but it generated a healthy amount of traffic and a lot of logs. In fact,
reading the logs was probably the best part about it. The emails I got,
however, were also very interesting. The vast majority of them were from
crackpots who thought I was serious. This greatly surprised but in hindsight,
it probably shouldn’t have.
My initial attempt was written in C++ and invoked via CGI. When I started
learning C# and .NET I decided to replatform it. So, version 2.0 was born.
Later, I moved to new hosting and no longer had .NET so I replatformed it again
and used it as an excuse to learn jQuery and PHP. 3.0 was born. In each
incarnation I added new features. 2.0 gained statistics. 3.0 gained an RSS
feed.
So, I am now staring down the barrel of The Antichrist Detector 4.0. This time,
I am using it to learn Ruby, Google Appengine, and more advanced JavaScript
techniques. I plan to also add features to this one as well. Most notably, you
will now be able to issue Antichrist Detections via Twitter!
Obviously, the Antichrist Detector has turned into a bit of a “Hello World”
application for me that I use to learn new technology. But, it’s also fun and I
hope that you can enjoy it as well.
I’ll post the link to the new version once it is somewhat available.
When I initially launched GuyRoyse.com I vacillated about the content I was
creating and writing about. Was this to be a blog about writing and games or
writing, games, and coding?
Initially I decided to have it just be about writing and games. I wanted to
focus on my creative endeavors and frankly, figured most people wouldn’t care
too much about the programming stuff. But, as it turns out, a lot of my
creative activity is focused around code and programming. This sort of leaked
in a posting I made a couple of months back updating everyone on the status of
Corporate Raiders.
So, I’ve decided to cave to my urges and put my code projects on here as well.
But, not only will I be including some of my coding project but I will also be
sharing some of my thoughts on technology and software engineering. So, if
you’re a programmer or other geeky tech person, hopefully you’ll find the
additional content enjoyable. And if your not, I won’t be offended if you skip
over my more technical posts.
Saw this update a while ago from Super Dave, a fellow gamer and geek from my
college days, and thought I would share.
Super Dave runs a regional gaming convention in North Eastern Ohio called
AnCon. It is with great shame that I share
with you that I have never attended. But, word on the street is that it’s a
lot of fun. I’d like to try to get up there in 2010. It runs from May 21
through May 23 next year. That’s a Friday, Saturday, Sunday so getting off of
work should be easy for all of us corporate wage slaves. The price is only $25
for the entire weekend if you
pre-register
and apparently if you recruit others to come you’ll get $5 for every person you
recruit. So, I would encourage you to check it out (and tell me about it so I
can claim my $5).
But the really interesting thing–at least to me right now–is that he has
released some PDF games. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Well, looking at his
release dates, I think he might have stolen my idea! But, since PDF boards
games like Zombie Stomp! at part of what I do here, I thought you might be
interested even if he leap-frogged me. Curse you and you’re free time Super
Dave!
The games are a dice game called Pairs and
Wagers which
looks like it would be a lot of fun with the family and Ants: Red vs.
Black, a board
game which looks a little more involved than what might interest my wife. Which
means it’s right up my alley! I haven’t play either of them yet–hell, I’ve
hardly had time to update the blog–but I plan to.
So I haven’t provided an update for y’all in quite some time but that doesn’t
mean I haven’t been busy working to build games and stories for your
consumption. It also doesn’t mean that I have been busy working on games and
stories for your consumption. But I have.
So, it’s a Corporate Raiders
update today. I went on a bit of a code binge for a while and made a lot of
changes to get the application to be mash-up friendly. I also added lots of
JavaScript stuff to it as well. These sort of went hand in hand. The
significant update that you can actually see–an API.
I’ve added APIs to lot you access the actual data of the game so that you can
code against it and extend it in ways that I don’t foresee. Of course I also
plan to use this API to support other clients for the game. In fact, I am
already using it on the main page of Corporate
Raiders.
If you want to check out the API for yourself you can access it using the following URLs:
Just replace {symbol} with the stock symbol you care about. For {format}
enter either xml or json. If you don’t specify {format}, it will default
to json. For example…
This API is ripe for consumption by fat client and portal device applications.
Got an Android Phone or an
iPhone and some spare time? How about an
Adobe Air client? This would be a good
place for you to play. And if you do something cool, tell me about it either
via email or by leaving a comment.
Also, and perhaps more significantly, the market now moves. Right now the
algorithm is completely random day by day and the incrementals are very
predictable over the course of a given day. Nonetheless, it
move. Next, the plan is to
swap out the core engine with something a little more random so we can start
letting people actually buy and sell stocks. Then, we’ll add a more
event-based model so that we can have news items, rumors, and the like to
affect the stock price. Insider trading here we come!
In the short term I plan to add users to the model as well as put some tasty
JavaScript stuff on the screen. Tabs and accordions are probably where I’ll
start.
So stay tuned. I’ll post updates as I go so that you can watch the sausage
being made.
Part of the point of my efforts to make games and stories online is to prove
what one can do with very little. And by very little I mean a computer, the
Internet, and time.
The stuff I am doing on this site is done with free software. I am using
GIMP to create the board for Zombie Stomp! I will use
Open Office to write the rules and generate the
PDF for Zombie Stomp! Corporate
Raiders is being developed using
Eclipse and Java–both of
which are free. The writing I am doing for Big Time is with Open
Office–again free. When I get around to
podcasting I plan to record with Audacity
which is also free.
While I have a domain name and a hosting account, these items are not strictly
necessary. I could be at guyroyse.blogspot.com
instead of guyroyse.com and I could host my images and
PDFs on free sites if I looked around. I choose to have a domain name and
hosting because I have the resources to do so. I have a day job that pays for
it. It is a luxury.
The application hosting for Corporate
Raiders and the other games that
I will create, either through Hard Boiled Geek
with Benjamin or on my own, are hosted with Google App
Engine which is also free up until a
certain point. A point which we will be well below for some time.
This hardest part of doing this is the time. Many folks have lots of that.
Many don’t. I fall into the latter category so I have chosen to sacrifice
television so that I can make these cool things and provide them to you. That
frees up more time than anything else I could possibly do.
Folks, the point here is this–the price of admission is free. There are no
barriers to entry. Poor college students can do this. Retired folks on fixed
incomes can do this. My mom can do this. Anybody can do this. And I would
know because I am anybody.
