Programming… >.>

Posted by Trinkit on Aug 6th, 2007

Most of my time as of late has been spent programming, or rather, learning too.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time with a neat little game-making tool called BYOND. It’s amazingly easy to learn and it’s amazingly adaptable to allow creation of simple games and of course, some not so simple games. There’s tons of people pushing the tool to it’s limits. I’m nowhere near that level at the moment, but, have had some fun in porting the Munchkin card game to a playable online version. Unfortunately, due to intellectual property laws, it may never be publically released, but, this kitty usually is one to point and laugh at such copyright claims, so I may go ahead and do it anyways and just live with the crying of lawyers attempting to get blood from a turnip.

Just a small update to keep me from fading into the group of people with blogs that don’t post :P

Pidgin IM

Posted by Trinkit on May 29th, 2007

It’s widely known now amongst it’s fanbase that the IM program GAIM has been renamed into Pidgin. When known as GAIM it was still one of the best IM clients around. With the transition to Pidgin, it’s gotten several improvements and is getting better constantly. The transition has left the client a little unstable, but, as with most open source software these issues are taken care of quite quickly. It allows you to organize your contact lists into groups, and it also seems capable of handling multiple accounts per protocol without merging the contact lists, something quite a number of IM programs lack, even trillian has a bit of trouble with this. Pidgin also supports a myriad of IM and chat protocols. AIM, Bonjour, Gadu Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, QQ, Silc, Simple, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, and Zephyr are all supported. It leaves me wondering what protocols, if any, are missing. It also sports a feature called buddy pounce. This feature allows you to attach actions to certain events and notify you or play a sound. It’s pretty handy to have.

At the moment, I don’t think I could recommend another IM client, all the rest are horribly bloated and slow in comparison. The biggest feature missing from Pidgin is no video chat. I don’t feel that’s much of a loss though, because if I wanted video chat, I’d get an application specifically made for it, not use the junk attached to an instant messenger client as an afterthought.

Link: Pidgin IM

Getting the right tools for the job.

Posted by Trinkit on May 20th, 2007

postinprogressOne of the things that always stifled my feline attempts at blogginess was that the interfaces to blogs well… they suck. Net lag and other factors just make it a real pain in the rump. So, I wanted to get an offline tool to post my blog posts with this time. Currently, I’m evaluating a piece of software called Blogdesk. The screenshot on the right shows my luverly pink desktop theme, and also the Blogdesk program. As it appears with half of this post written. First impressions of this software are really good. It seems to do everything that I could want to be done, with maybe the exception of ‘tagging’ the post. Although, as much fun as tagging is, I can’t say I’ve ever been particularly good at it in the first place.

Adding images to posts is a breeze, and all the formatting options available for posts are along the top of the interface. I don’t think there’s a whole lot I can fault Blogdesk on. I’ll have to keep using it for a while and see how it feels after a bit me thinks. There’s no immediate turn-offs or frustrations.