Started writing an Chinese elephant chess game, ended up with a normal chess game, well, here is a snapshot of it: MElephant-0.1b.zip. It’s ofcourse in pre-beta, but seems quite stable while playing. Tell me what you think? I sometimes even have a problem beating it at easy, though it seems to be a bit eager to stalemate itself… I can probably make a mac and linux version too due to the use of the LGPLed Qt 4.5 for the tiny UI for it, and boost for the rest (including the written from scratch ai library and rules-library). It uses simple alpha-beta pruned minimax for the searching for now.

I will make it play Xiang qi aswell soon I think, it was designed to be able to do both.

Have fun

Slashdot today had a cool entry on real walking in virtual reality.  Looks like an important component of the upcoming holodeck I’ll have in the basement of the house we might buy one day… they had hidden a video on the site (http://www.cyberwalk-project.org/):

http://www.cyberwalk-project.org/img/Media/CyberCarpet.mpg

More videos of the thing available here (warning site in Germlish):

http://www.amm.mw.tum.de/index.php?id=250

It’s just a shame it’s so big…

Apparently not much…

10 Writing code to pay for beer and unhealthy food

15 Eating unhealthy food and drinking beer

20 Going to the gym to get rid of the beer belly

30 sleep

40 GOTO 10 Read the rest of this entry »

我的普通话不用 ：-）

I will try to do some chinese blogging from now. Todays word:

网络日记 = wang3luo4 ri4ji4 which means network diary or blog.

Got a bit inspired by

http://www.flickr.com/photos/w00kie/sets/180637/

So I had to have a go myself, since it is Friday at work and stuff, unfortunately Torstein ruined the whole picture.

So the Del Sol is for sale, it’s a bit sad, but it’s time for something newer and bigger. It runs well and is great here in the city center, no parking slot too small

If you are interested, go to http://finn.no/finn/car/object?finnkode=11236835 and have a look.

We just bought some surround sound for our living room, so I wanted to get surround sound out of my Amilo laptop - digitally. My motivation was to play avi (XviD/DivX) files with AC3 sound. Ofcourse that took about a day of hard work, so to spare other people from the trouble, here is my recipe for success:

1. The S/PDIF output is hidden inside the 3.5 headphone port. It is optical, get one of these: http://www.biltema.no/products/product.asp?iSecId=535&iItemId=89253  and a toslink cable or one of these:
http://www.elfa.se/elfa-bin/dyndok.pl?dok=9375.htm, or get one of those I got (from Siba), which is either in both ends (but they break VERY easily!)

2. Open your sound card configuration, on my Amilo laptop, that is a blue icon with some sound waves on in in the taskbar. In the S/PDIF-out tab, select  ”Output digital only” to enable optical S/PDIF output.

3.  Install AC3Filter from here: http://ac3filter.net/ and the other video codecs you need to play the file.

4. Get Windows Media Player (from M$), I could not make it work in any other player, not even Media Player Classic, my favourite, for some reason.

5. Now onto the part that took me all evening - Open up the AC3Filter codec’s configuration menu, select your speaker configuration under “Output Format”, and check the “S/PDIF” checkbox. Then under the ”System” tab, choose ”Use Wave Out by default“. I got no idea why, got it from a forum somewhere… Maybe someone can explain this to me?

6. Open the file in Windows Media Player, and you should have digital surround output,  given that the video file
you open have multiple channels wrapped in AC3. Note that it is quite common with 2-channel AC3 audio on avi-files,
and that is not what you want.

Did it with Lasse’s plain powerball as mine makes too much noise for the Windows Mobile department across the hall. Check out my Akis-face! So I won the Symbian dept 12K RPM Powerball challenge… the 13K challenge is on, LASSE!

I had never heard about the band Clutch before when I bought a ticket to their concert in Gothenburg. Then I downloaded a few MP3s (legally ofcourse) and listened to them. They were a bit boring I thought. Anyway, last weekend I went there with 16 other guys, and it was great!

We departed Oslo in one van with 7 guys in it. I had to drive, because I was drinking the least the day before.

U see, Clutch had a concert in Oslo Friday, then in Gothenburg Saturday. In Moss, we met up with 10 more guys who took the ferry over from Horten.

I said to the other guys I would only drive to Moss. Suddenly I was driving to Gothenburgh and the rest of the bus had been drinking. Wohoo!

We arrived in Gothenburg after 10 pee-stops. Luckily the driver of the other van, Police-Roger had a navigation system, so we took the shortest route* to the hotel.

 We rushed to pickup the tickets, had a few beers and eventually went to the concert. And it was great! Clutch is one of the bands I don’t think I’ll buy their album, but I would definately go to a concert with them again if I can.

Unfortunately, 3 of the party did not make it past the bouncers at the concert door, if it was due too too high alcohol consumption or the bouncers being wankers, I don’t know. My guess 40/60.

The next day, we left the upset hotel management, picked up some Swedish meat at the border and made it back to Norway, all in one piece, except maybe for one, who was puking out the window of the other mini-van all the way to Norway.

For more photos, see under posted items on my Facebook profile

*not really…