Month: June 2007

Hack week status (Wednesday)

Thanks to hack week, I’m being able to work on projects I’ve had for a long time on my TODO list. So, here’s what I’ve been doing:

  • Started looking at implementing an Atlas application, similar to Google Earth, but combining maps and Wikipedia information to bring a complete Atlas-like application to your desktop, with extra features like routing and others. This is one of my favorites from the TODO, but it needs lots of thinking and lots of reading, so I’m using the hack week to get documented about all that is needed.
  • Atomato is back! This is where I’ve been hacking the most, and I hope to have something to show before the end of the week, although it also needs some thinking about the internal architecture. But it’s going quite quick, so I hope to have something to win one of the Hack Week prizes :-)
  • I’ve also started a long-awaited task, which is to package OpenStreetMap software using openSUSE’s build service. I just added successfully packages for JOSM, the offline editor, but others will follow. Packages are/will be available at my home project

And that’s all so far, nothing more to say apart from mentioning the little help I’ve been getting from the boys :-( Photos on what they did last night to come later, I first have to clean the mess.

Hack Week starting

As most people might already know, this week is Hack Week here at Novell. So, as we were told to take photos/videos of the activity during this week at our work center, and since my work center is my house, I had to call some friends to come up and help me the whole week. Said and done, they were here this morning very early, and the boys started planning what they were going to work on:

The boys planning the hack week

And right after the planning meeting, full of energy, they started hacking

The boys hacking

More details on what we are working on and more photos later.

In Your Face

I have never been a gamer, but there have been some games that, sometimes, have forced me to get back, for a little bit, to a Windows machine. Those are sport games, like EA NBA/NHL, old Dinamic’s PC Futbol, all of them, in case you haven’t guessed, with the ability to play the actual games, plus the ability of managing your team (buy/sell players, get sponsors, etc). Unfortunately there is nothing similar for Linux, and even less if you just want Free software, but this may be changing: In Your Face is a free 3d basketball game. As the author says itself, it looks a bit ugly, but the difficult thing of this kind of games is to program the logic of the game itself (in this case, moving the players around and all related stuff), and this is what Isaac (the author) is working on, so, with a bit of luck, others could step on and code the other parts (the teams database, for instance, should be very easy to do), and, in little time, we could have a very good game, which could even be the base for other similar games.