So to make the announcement: jOEpardy is GPLv3+ software (*yay*) and you can download the code via Mercurial here: https://hg.cryptobitch.de/joepardy. I don’t intend to make tarball or binary releases as I (at your option) either don’t have the time or simply don’t see a need.

But to actually use it, you want to have some buzzers. You could play it with a regular keyboard though. At the end of the day, you need to generate a keycodes for a “1″, a “2″, a “3″ or a “4″. If you’re nerdy enough, you can get yourself an emergency button in the next hardware store and solder some tiny serial logic to it. Then you could read that serial signal and convert to X events via xtest.

You’ll figure smth out

The people were entertained and hopefully learned something Sadly, the hardware didn’t really work The buzzer were somewhat broken so that we actually had to try to see (with our eyes) who pushed the button first. Funnily enough, I *did* test the setup extensively just 10 minutes before the gig! Very weird.

The Questions can be found here: Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4. But it doesn’t make much sense without the jOEpardy software, unless you parse the XML on your own.

The software is a Java Application which was initially written by TriPhoenix! I haven’t written Java for a long time and I have to admit, that writing Java with Eclipse is actually fun! Eclipse is so smart and tightly integrated in the build process that it’s quite easy to write, build and debug. I wish there was such a good IDE for C or Python. Sadly, I think that Java Code is bloated although <2.500 LoC for a jOEpardy is not too bad I’d say

I actually thought I could release the jOEpardy code by now (and thus waited with this post…), but I still have to resolve copyright questions.