Various updates

The Free Software Society had a rather anticlimactic meeting. Next on the agenda? Live CDs of useful, but not generally well known, Free Software, tailored for specific subject areas. Hopefully these will get some circulation throughout the University, who knows?

Today I finished a robot-controlling program for my Computer Architectures course, although it was pretty dodgy :) , so the only computer-related work I have now is the pinball machine simulator. I have moved it from AWT to Swing (a slightly better drawing system) so it now goes a bit quicker and doesn’t flicker as much between frame updates.

The whole thing has been overhauled from a basic, hacked together demo into a flexible framework for… Bouncing balls around so far. I just got some basic collision detection working, which means the next thing to do should be linking the building blocks it uses together. Then the fun really starts :) (I will release this after I am assessed on it in a couple of weeks, and I have it working nicely enough to show off).

I have been working hard on a basic Java version of my Service Pack installer mentioned before, and am now in the process of uploading it to somewhere for some community help. Remember that it is a basic implementation which doesn’t actually work properly yet, but that is why I want others to improve upon it (and to rewrite it in something like Python rather than Java). This post will probably get an update about that later on (maybe tomorrow, as it is 11:40 now :) ).