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Wednesday, August 30, 2006

FeedJournal Voting - Last Chance

Last chance to vote for FeedJournal in Made In Express Contest! Anyone is free to vote and the booths will close on September 1st!

Thank you for your support.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

I'm Excited, and Writely So

When writing drafts for this blog, I have been struggling with how to type up the articles. Sometimes I am working on different computers and I need an easy way of moving the documents between locations. So far I have been using a USB drive where I store the documents. This has the drawback of needing the same application installed on all computers. Another option is setting up an automatic synchronization between shared computers but it doesn't work for me because some of them are blocked behind a firewall.

Enter the new paradigm of online word processors! The idea is that your documents are edited using your web browser and the files are hosted on the service's website. You can choose to share or protect each document, and despite being a new phenomenon there are already a few interesting players on the market. All of these online services automatically integrate many additional features useful for bloggers. They offer spell-checking, document sharing for review, real-time collaboration, history of changes, and direct publishing to your blog. And they are all free of charge to use! The best ones are overviewed at About.com.

My personal favorite is Writely, which really stands out from the competition. The interface is slick and simple to use. There are all the features that you expect and more. It includes comments, handy keyboard shortcuts for accessing common functions, and importing of common file formats. Technology like this really excites me! Writely was acquired a few months ago by Google, and has temporarily disabled users registration, but there is a backdoor.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Bots Soon to High-Card Humans

The online poker rooms are flourishing in what seems to be the Eldorado of our time. But not for long. Around the corner lurk the bots, or computer programs designed for playing poker, currently in hard training to win your hard-earned cash.

Ten years ago I was an avid poker player, constantly on the lookout for new games. Most of my friends that I used to play for nickels and dimes are still playing today. They have taken their chip stacks online, and the limits have increased, but from the look of it they are doing well financially. Online poker ten years back consisted of a yearly e-mail tournament and games played over Internet Relay Chat (IRC), including first-generation bots. Online discussions took place on a spam-filled USENET newsgroup; in short, the situation wasn't very exciting. Today, you can hardly enter any web site without seeing advertising for online poker, with poker sites and fora mushrooming. According to Party Gaming, online poker generated $2.6 billion in gross gaming yield and represented 20% of global online gaming revenue during 2005. To call the development during these ten years an explosion would be an understatement.

But artificial intelligence is about to take over the tables. We have already seen it happen in chess, Deep Blue beat world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997; in checkers; and in backgammon. In these games it is believed that the best software program is superior to, or at least on par with, the world's best human players. Poker is somewhat different than chess and backgammon, but they do share a lot of common ground. In poker the cards decide the outcome of a single hand, and in backgammon the dice decide the outcome of a single game. But in the long run the winner is the one who makes the best choices. The skill level of the computer players are steadily improving, but it is not only smart algorithms that make them a tough opponent for a human. Poker players are notorious for playing long sessions and in the wee hours, the quality of play is decreasing at the same rate as the players' eyelids are closing. Poker bots don't have this problem, nor are they affected by the other major shortcoming of a human poker player: being on tilt, or playing suboptimal out of anger from losing a recent pot.

The game of online poker, with its huge revenue, is an attractive market for bot writers. Sure, online poker rooms prohibit bots; but in reality, there are a lot of poker bots that go undetected. With software dominating the world of chess, checkers and backgammon; poker is the next game. Online poker is not the same lucrative business it was a few years ago, the competition has stiffened and I am convinced that bots already have started to take a piece of the action. I predict that in just a few years a majority of the big money winners in online poker are bots. When that situation occurs it is questionable if online poker can survive at the same level as we see today. With more poker bots getting closer and closer to an optimal game, the playing field will be more even, and the earnings will not be enough to beat the poker rooms' fees, unless some unwary humans will stick around to feed them.

Building a poker bot to play in an online poker room where its participation is banned requires more than writing logic needed at the poker table. The poker servers are fighting tooth and nail in a war for their very existence. They are adopting multiple measures of defense: spyware-like functionality that monitors running processes on your computer, pop-up screens (a.k.a. bot challenges), playing patterns, etc. This war between sites and bots is not fought in the open, both sides prefer to keep a low profile here. The sites do not want to scare away their human clientele, while the bots are fighting detection. Because of their clandestine existence, it is difficult to evaluate the exact state of poker bots today. Some universities are doing research in the field and the University of Alberta seems to lead the way.

It is exciting to know that my fellow finalist Daniel Crenna is writing a framework for hooking up poker bots to play against each other. I hope that his endeavor will help budding poker bot authors to improve their software. It will be very exciting to see the final results of this project! A similar commercial product, Poker Academy, is also available on the market.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Project Management with ToDoList

Reading my fellow finalist Douglas Steen's entry about bug tracking tools, I am totally agreeing with him that it would be great to have a lightweight bug-tracking tool built into Express. Sure enough, we have the Task List pane where tasks can be sorted and having a priority but that's not really accomplishing anything substantial.

Douglas chose a web-based bug tracking system and he mentioned another web-based system. Hunting the Internet will lead you to yet other web-based systems. Why does 99% of bug-tracking systems have to be run in the browser? I hate the browser: it is less responsive than a native Windows application as well as usually lacking a menu and having quirky keyboard support.

Just because a system is multiuser doesn't mean that the browser is the only interface. The large advantage I see of using the browser is that no client software will need to be installed and we will support multiple operating systems, but I would happily trade this for a native Windows interface.

I was hunting high and low for the Holy Grail of bug tracking systems until a couple of months ago, when I finally discovered a wonderful freeware application called ToDoList.

ToDoList is the perfect application for a single developer who wants to manage any project. The interface is a bit on the complicated side, but can be customized it to suit your own requirements. For each hierarchical item you can add formatted comments, priority, estimation, tags, dependencies, etc etc. There is also a possibility to export the task list to XML for web publication along with a zillion other neat features.

ToDoList is hosted on CodeProject and is being actively developed with new features at a continuous pace. Try it, you won't regret it! I am actually writing each draft of my blog entries inside ToDoList.

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Currency conversion in browser

One of the most useful Firefox extensions I have installed must be ViewMyCurrency, which helps me to convert currencies inside the browser. Basically you define which currency you want all prices to be converted into and then many major world currencies will automatically be converted and displayed along with your own currency inside any web page.

If you regularly browse sites with prices not in your preferred currency you will greatly benefit from this extension. I have been using it for several months now both at work and and at home, and I can't imagine surfing without it. Highly recommended, and of course free!

Monday, April 03, 2006

DesktopEarth

I have always been a sucker for pretty wallpaper, especially satellite images of Earth. I think I have been trying everything available, but always found myself uninstalling it after a couple of days, usually because these things are resource hogs.

But now I have finally found something with looks and runs like a charm: Desktop Earth 2.0. It is freeware wallpaper that includes satellite images from NASA with resolutions up to 2560x1280. It also has cloud overlays (updated from satellite images). It runs either as active desktop or as normal wallpaper. Check it out now!

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Setting up this blog

Welcome to my blog! I looked around for some different options in getting this thing to run. My previous experiences are with Blogger and I did not feel like barking up that tree again for various reasons.

My requirements were that I wanted to integrate this blog with my web site that I am setting up at the same time. This web site is running on one of the free hosting services, so I am unable to install MovableType or any other blogging infrastructure there. That's when I found the wonderful open-source Java application called Thingamablog which allows you to keep your whole blog on a local database (or a USB flash drive as in my case) and then publish the whole blog including RSS feeds to any web server, only requiring an FTP connection.

I am also able to customize the HTML design exactly as I want it with Thingamablog. So far I am very impressed...


© Jonas Martinsson 1995-2006