Jan
12

Gameboy Color emulator running on a browser

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January 12, 2012

Yesterday I posted about Cut The Rope being ported to HTML5+Javascript. Today, I continue the same topic, but with a different view. I’ve came across this fantastic site that puts a whole Gameboy Color Game Center in the browser, using the power of Javascript and HTML5, created by Grant Galitz. Now we are starting to get the dimension this change will have. You can see it in action here. He also has his open-source GameBoy Online Project, which source can be downloaded for free from GitHub.

From my perspective, with everything we have seen until now, Adobe’s Flash is slowly going to be abandoned if Flash fails to bring anything new. There’s lots of examples of applications and effects that have been achieved using Flash in the past, but today we can build these using just web technologies. This ranges from the simple image galleries to word processors.

There is a also a blog about games being developed with HTML5 here: http://www.html5gamedevs.com/

What do you think about this HTML5 revolution?

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Jan
11

Cut The Rope in HTML 5

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January 11, 2012

In order to show developers the power of HTML 5, the astonishing successful mobile game Cut The Rope has been partially ported from Objective-C to Javascript and can be played for free in http://www.cuttherope.ie/, sponsored by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with some unique levels in this version, like the one below.

In the up-right corner of the website, you will find a link to Behind the Scenes developer section, where I found some interesting notes:

We think that the HTML5 version makes the web more fun and it demonstrates the advances in standards support made in the latest version of Internet Explorer. With that in mind, we want to share some of the cool “behind the scenes” technical details used on this project to help you build your own HTML5 sites and ultimately get ready for the Windows 8 Store!

Regarding performance, the developer section shows a comparison table with the average framerate on some different systems.

You can see that you can get almost the same Framerate whether using Win7,i7 CPU and 8GB RAM and a Win8,i5 CPU and 4GB RAM. But wait! RAM “quantity” is not really important, nor CPU speed. I think the most important component to compare here is the GPU (a lacking column in this table), namely the GPU Clock Frequency and RAM, that have much more influence in FPS than the aspects shown here, so I’d like to see some independent tests and comparisons between Browsers on the same system (like they did with Windows 7 here, but with different systems, which will obviously change the results).

Appart from that browser wars, I was flabbergasted by seeing one of the last year’s most bought games running fully on JavaScript + HTML5. This shows how promising the web can be in the very near future.

Finally, here is the video on the dev page on YouTube.

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Jan
10

Free Online Machine Learning Classes

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January 10, 2012

Professor Andrew Ng and his team from University of Stanford provided free online lessons about machine learning. Students are provided video sessions and slide presentations in both PDF and PPTX, as well as some practical exercises.

You don’t even need to have a lot of Maths background, as the course has some introductory content on Algebra and other concepts that are needed to understand the more advanced lessons. Although the course is already finished, you can still register and watch the videos and download complete PDFs. Here is an overview of the course:

01. Introduction to Machine Learning
02. Linear regression with one variable
03. Linear algebra review
04. Linear regression with multiple variables
05. Octave Tutorial
06. Logistic regression
07. Regularization
08. Neural Networks: Representation
09. Neural Networks: Learning
10. Advice for Applying Machine Learning
11. Machine Learning System Design
12. Support Vector Machines
13. Clustering
14. Dimensionality Reduction
15. Anomaly Detection
16. Recommender Systems
17. Learning with Large Datasets
18. Application Example: Photo OCR

You can start yourself in machine learning today.
Go to http://www.ml-class.org/, register and take your time watching the videos and practicing.

A new class will start at 23rd January 2012 – signup now at http://jan2012.ml-class.org/

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Jan
08

Developing for Linux under OS X in XCode

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January 8, 2012

In this mini-article I will show you how I develop applications for Linux in XCode 4. At the moment I’m using XCode 4.2.1, in OSX Lion, with Ubuntu 10.04 running on a virtual machine.

Although the article is related to XCode, after reading and trying out for yourself, you will notice that you can use whatever IDE you like. Here I’m just showing you how you can code in a OSX-only IDE and deploy in Linux.

Requirements

You will need some tools before we start:

  • VMWare or similar virtual machine application for Mac
  • Used to run our Linux system, and that’s where we will compile and run the target application.
    You can also use a physical computer instead. However, you will need network connectivity from mac to that computer because the communication between this linux System and our Mac is done by SSH.
  • OSXFuse
    • Requirement for the next point
  • SSHFS
    • It will be used to mount a remote directory in our Mac, and access it as if it was an external hard disk drive

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    Permanent link to this article: http://ricardo-dias.com/2012/01/08/developing-for-linux-under-os-x-in-xcode/

    Jan
    06

    Applying nature-like algorithms to robots

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    January 6, 2012

    It’s always amazing to see how nature is so beautiful that solves many of our difficult problems. By studying the tail technique of a lizard, a research group could effectively improve their robot’s stability just by adding an active tail to it with algorithms that somehow reproduce the animal’s behaviour.

    Via Automaton

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    Permanent link to this article: http://ricardo-dias.com/2012/01/06/applying-nature-like-algorithms-in-robots/

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