I have recently taken-up studying bridge, and picked up Why you lose at bridge at a second-hand book sale for $1.

My first running joke was “I lose because I don’t play”, but jokes aside, it was a great read, even 63 years after it being published.

The book is aimed at experienced players, offering insight to common mistakes in bidding and game play.  It was interesting jumping ahead of myself, as  I have only read a beginners guide a couple of times, and the subtlety of the bidding signals seemed over the top, but after reading how the hand is played out, and how the inferences are used to guide play, I’ve become motivated to learn correct bidding.  Bridge feels very similar to Preference or 500, just with a mind boggling large set of signaling bids and plays.

Much learning ahead, but I’m excited…

A question was asked on the mailing list (ages ago) about creating 8-bit GIF files.  I proved this code for simple palette based GIFs, so here it is:

using System;  
using System.Drawing;  
using System.Drawing.Imaging;  
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;  
  
namespace Project  
{  
  class ProjectMain  
  {  
    public static void Main()  
    {  
      GenerateBackgroundImage(Color.AliceBlue, Color.Beige, Color.Cyan, 10, 10, 10, @"c:\\image.gif");  
    }  
      
    public static void GenerateBackgroundImage(Color leftColour, Color centerColour,  
    Color rightColour, int leftWidth, int centerWidth, int rightWidth, string path)  
    {  
      
      int width = leftWidth + centerWidth + rightWidth + 2;  
      int height = 10;  
  
      using (Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(width, height, PixelFormat.Format8bppIndexed))  
      {  
        Color backColour = Color.White;  
        byte idxBackground = 0;  
        byte idxLeft = 1;  
        byte idxCenter = 2;  
        byte idxRight = 3;  
          
        ColorPalette cp = bitmap.Palette;  
        cp.Entries[idxBackground] = backColour;  
        cp.Entries[idxLeft] = leftColour;  
        cp.Entries[idxCenter] = centerColour;  
        cp.Entries[idxRight] = rightColour;  
          
        bitmap.Palette = cp;  
          
        fillrect(idxBackground, bitmap, new Rectangle(0, 0, width, height));  
        fillrect(idxLeft, bitmap, new Rectangle(0, 0, leftWidth, height));  
        fillrect(idxCenter, bitmap, new Rectangle(leftWidth + 1, 0, centerWidth, height));  
        fillrect(idxRight, bitmap, new Rectangle(leftWidth + 2 + centerWidth, 0, rightWidth, height));  
  
        bitmap.Save(path, ImageFormat.Gif);  
      }  
    }  
  
    static void fillrect(byte colorIndex, Bitmap b, Rectangle r)  
    {  
      BitmapData bmpData = b.LockBits(new Rectangle(0, 0, b.Width, b.Height), ImageLockMode.WriteOnly, b.PixelFormat);  
        
      // Get the address of the first line.  
      IntPtr ptr = bmpData.Scan0;  
  
      // Declare an array to hold the bytes of the bitmap.  
      // This code is specific to a bitmap with 8 bits index per pixels.  
      int bytes = b.Width * b.Height;  
      byte[] Values = new byte[bytes];  
        
      // Copy the RGB values into the array.  
      Marshal.Copy(ptr, Values, 0, bytes);  
  
      for (int y = r.Top; y < r.Bottom; y++)  
      {  
        for (int x = r.Left; x < r.Right; x++)  
        {  
          Values[(y * b.Width) + x] = colorIndex;  
        }  
      }  
  
      // Copy the values back to the bitmap  
      Marshal.Copy(Values, 0, ptr, bytes);  
        
      // Unlock the bits.  
      b.UnlockBits(bmpData);  
    }   
  }  
}  

I would change fillrect, to seperate out the locking, and Marshal calls, to CreateTempBuffer, FillTempBuffer, and WriteTempBuffer functions, if you were to use fillrect more than a couple times.  But as it stands, the code is correct after each call.

Firstly a good post about teaching programming, and the genesis of assignments:

The Development Arc of a Program and a Teaching Idea

which has a great link on how modern car/garage remotes work

Secondly a post from way-back last year about recovered Infocom server content.

And so we get to the end of the year.  It has been quite a good year personally,

Blog-wise: 92 posts, 133 comments, 18K visits from 141 countries.

Top five viewed pages in 2008:

1. wpf making a expander look like a groupbox
2. remote connection to oracle 10g express via odbc
3. blog
4. category: curse of the azure bonds
5. curse of the azure bonds code wheel copy protection

All of which were 2007 posts, so here are the top five viewed pages from 2008:

1. casio ctk-800 and macbook
2. slow dns on macbook
3. how to build a wireshark plug-in
4. reverse-and-add 110502 in erlang
5. oracles lag in ms sql server 2005

Only a few minutes left of today, this month and year, so I’ll post now, and go to bed.  See you next year!

After over eating on Christmas day, and then feeling very bloated on Boxing day, I went for a swim at the local pool and set a new personal record of 3km (in two sets of 1.5km).  I was shocked by how much energy I had, but my tendons were starting to feel pulled at the end.

On the underwater front, I also swam 50m underwater, the week before.  I have done this a few times this year.  I feel kind of bad that I’ve not played underwater hockey this year at all.  I revisited Tony’s underwater hockey blog today and felt the need to pay some respect.

Summary: Boring

I sat down with Jacob to have a geek fest and watch Clone Wars today, but I’ve had to walk away near the end.

I was getting bored to tears with all the talking.  I had such high expectations…

It’s finished now, and Jacob has just declared it disapointing also.

Build 1.0.15 is now available for your gaming pleasure.

• The game now plays sampled sounds, so you can have that authentic gaming experience!  I even use a blend of PC Speaker sounds and Tandy 1000 sounds.  I’m moving towards the latter, as they sound way better
• Also this Installer is actually playable, as build 1.0.14 was missing a .dll, and I wonder why nobody mentioned this….
• Enhanced the ‘Dump Monsters’ debugging, it now dumps all monsters plus details shown in my monsters blog post, to a monsters.html file in the current working directory
• Started working on decoding the affects and their meaning, to clean-up above monsters.html

Also a warning that the game-play may have been affected by the level of code-refactoring I have currently been undertaking, so watch-out, but feel free to report any issues.

I have been finding lambda and extension methods really helpful in my game port.

Blobs of C styled single linked list code, when changed to generic lists boil down to one line.

like this:

Item item = player.itemsPtr;
while (item != null)
{
  Item next_item = item.next;

  if (item_type == item.type)
  {
    lose_item(item, player); // just removes from linked list.
  }
  item = next_item;
}

to this:

player.items.RemoveAll(item => item.type == item_type);

much nicer.

The folks across the road Telogis are hiring, and they have a puzzle/quiz on their web site.

I’ve my solutions don’t seem correct… and I’m not sure of the language the code is written in.

Some assumptions that may effect the result:

• the number precession and overflow behaviour
• the empty array set indexing behaviour
• how non-consecutive array elements are printed

That is if how I’ve simplified the code down is correct.

Interesting C# aside: the C# compiler does not parse octal formatted numbers, so 12345 and 0x3039 do not equal 030071, quite a strange diversion from C and C++.

Stu posted a dump of Curse of the Azure Bonds monster data from the Apple IIe disk set.

Not to be out done, I have dumped the same data but with more details… because I can.

Update: Oh god this table looks bad on my site

Now I just need to alter my port, so I can start having a round robin Vs. battle between all the monsters to rank them. This will help with improving the AI (if you can call it that), which currently does some silly things.