Four Island

Yes, that's right. I've rewritten Tetrgi in another language. :)

First it was Visual Basic .NET. Riiiight.... it was implemented in a bad way in a language that would only run on Windows with a lot of libraries installed on the side.

Then it was C++. That was pretty much a literal translation of the VB.NET version, it was still implemented in a bad way. It also only worked on the platforms I could compile it for.

Now, I've rewritten Tetrgi in Java, which is pretty much guaranteed to work on any platform. Plus, it's implemented as XML, instead of the "search and replace the string" thing I had going on before. Right. I really don't know. However, now the language is much more stable and it even has a couple of new tags. It's also much easier, now, to create new tags.

One small problem, however, is that the language specification changed slightly when I changed the implementation to XML. Now, all tags must be closed (they can be closed in the starting tag, though). There are a few more slight changes such as the fact that you now cannot put <COND> tags in a room's <TEXT> tag. There is a workaround for this, however, with the introduction of the <INIT> tag. I am going to try to write the documentation so the language is usable.

Anyway, Tetrgi 3.0 is now available from its downloads page. The file is called Tetrgi-3.0.jar. Have fun. :)

You may have noticed that I haven't been working on any Four Island projects recently. Perhaps it's recoil from the InstaDisc Incident, but I think it's because I'm plain lazy. Because of this, I'm sorry to say that I will be discontinuing a few Four Island projects. Here we go.

InstaDisc In light of the InstaDisc Incident, there is no sane reason for InstaDisc is be continued. RSS is a perfectly fine alternative with an advantage: It's much simpler. Plus, InstaDisc's main advantage, the ability for Push notification, only worked for a small percentage of users.

Xidet Xidet was a mistake. There are other IDEs and text editors available that are better. For instance, I use nano on a daily basis to write PHP web applications. I also use it to write C++ and Ruby. For Java (and Ruby), I use NetBeans.

SimpleBlog Unless anyone really wants me to continue this, I will confine it to The S Site because it's more of a tweak-yourself kind of blogging engine.

Single Four As Single Four was never anything other than an extremely esoteric interpreted language, there isn't really a reason to continue developing it. However, I would still like to see some Single Four programs (so far no one's turned anything in).

FoureverNET I discontinued this a LONG time ago, but I never actually announced it. In fact, I never announced its creation either.

Trac Tickets This never really had any point other than a small convince script that didn't deserve to be classified as a "project". Plus, we don't even use Trac anymore, so there's no point in it.

Soshibi I have a strange habit of naming projects after characters in The Hat. Anyway, this was supposed to be an LFS OS, but I got bored of it, and I want to free the name for another project, because, as I said before, I like naming projects after characters in The Hat.

So, there we are. Unless someone really wants me to continue developing these projects, I'm going to close development on them. I do still plan to continue developing Tetrgi and to start developing iNetSneak and Rubiwin sometime.

Oh dear. About a month after I started developing InstaDisc, I was notified by Bluemonkey that things such as client side RSS readers did exist in this realm. I knew that, but it had elapsed my memory for about a year. Poop.

Now, I wonder, what is to come of InstaDisc? The only real difference I can see between InstaDisc and RSS (other than the fact that InstaDisc seems to be a whole lot more complicated) is that InstaDisc offers Push technology to INSTAntly notify you of your fixes--I mean subscriptions--instantly. However, this only works with clients that are simply behind a modem without a router in between.

So, I ask now, what should I do with InstaDisc? Discontinue it? Continue it? Completely destroy it? Run off and cry? Pass out and cry? It's up to you, readers of Four Island. Well, it's probably actually up to me, but I really like it when you people comment!

I guess, then, that InstaDisc isn't much use. I'm sad. So anyway, I guess you peoples should use Liferea Feed Reader, if on a Linux-based system, otherwise Mozilla Thunderbird is also pretty good.

I dreamed up a new Four Island project a couple of days ago called InstaDisc. It's amazing, I think. I'm going insane over it, I need to do it.

Basically, it's a way to find out about things on the internet like new posts on a blog, new comments on a blog, new posts on a fourm, in a quick and easy manner.

For more information, please visit its project site. Please especially visit the description of the conception of the idea, and most importantly, the Specification.

Please feel free to comment here about InstaDisc. In fact, I encourage you to. Please, do. I'm really excited about InstaDisc and I want to know what other people think about it. For instance, if you have any ideas on how I could improve the specification, please comment. If you want any features in InstaDisc, comment and add a ticket. Please give me feedback as I'm, as stated previously, very excited about this project.

And please, dear goodness, don't let me procrastinate.

A few days ago (my birthday, as a matter of fact), I wrote some blogging software for Smiley. He's using it for his website The S Site. But that got me thinking.... If I'm going to be writing projects and codes and stuffs, why not write a PHP blogging system for other peoples to use? I don't want to release Four Island's blogging software, that's MINE. But, SimpleBlog I can.

When the new Four Island's done, I'm going to start a new project called SimpleBlog, which will be the blogging software that Smiley is currently using. But I'm going to have to enhance it. Trust me, just ask Smiley about the Admin Panel. 8D

EDIT: This project has been created. It's called simpleblog.

Recently, I came upon a web servive entitled reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA system. For those who don't know what CAPTCHA is (shame), CAPTCHA is a method of preventing bot spam on your website. A picture is generated with one or two distorted words on it. A user doing whatever it is you want to protect must type in the words (s)he sees to be allowed to submit his/her comment/whatever.

Many CAPTCHAs annoy people. It seems that all they do is obstruct and prolong the time taken to do something. But reCAPTCHA is different.

reCAPTCHA doesn't just help stop comment span on your website. It helps digitize books. reCAPTCHA sees CAPTCHAs as a way of harnessing human power into doing something useful that cannot be done by a bot. This way, you are not only verifying that you are not a bot when you fill out a CAPTCHA, you are also contributing to a cause.

The people at reCAPTCHA have scanned many books and attempted to convert the scanned pictures into words with OCR software. OCR software cannot always get all of the words, so the words that the OCR doesn't understand are send to be used in a reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA then generates a picture with one word that is known and another word that isn't known. The reCAPTCHA assumes that if one of the words are correct, the other one should be as well.

reCAPTCHA can be used everywhere. They've exported their API to many platforms and written plugins for many web applications. For some of these and some better explained information, please visit the reCAPTCHA website at http://recaptcha.org.

I would also just like to mention that the website has a page with a demo reCAPTCHA that you can use to digitize books without verifying anything. It's at http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html and it's really addicting.

Random.

...eating corn? - 3 vote(s)! ...watching a bad TV show? - 0 vote(s)! ...doing homework? - 0 vote(s)! ...getting mugged? - 0 vote(s)!

I KNOW! Anyway, happy Palm Sunday, everyone! Only 1 more week until Easter!

In other news, the development of Xidet is going fine. The main base is complete, but the modularity system needs to be further along in it's development and some more modules need to be written before Xidet can be released.

You may remember me last month saying that I would release a new version of Tetrgi on March 3rd, but now have seen that I haven't. There is a good reason for this. I'm working on a new project called Xidet

Xidet is a text editor. Now, don't roll your eyes. Xidet is much better than Notepad or VI (well, I guess everything is better than VI) because while at first run, it will look a lot like Notepad with, is it possible, missing features, Xidet contains a modularity system which allows TONS of plugins written for Xidet to be modded in which can give Xidet anything from a simple Edit menu to a tabbed interface or code syntax hightlighting.

Xidet is a very important project. The reason this has anything to do with Tetrgi being late is because I've decided to postpone all other projects until the first release of Xidet is out, becuase I am sick and tired of having to either, for Java, use NetBeans to program (it's really slow), or for C++, use nano, because while I like nano, I need to modify many files at once, which is why the Tabbed-Interface plugin for Xidet will be very important to me.

It was a dark and stormy night. On Feburary* 22nd 2008, a short man wearing a black leather coat that completely enveloped him walked up to a closed internet cafe. He taped something to the door and took two steps back. sssss A hole was burnt into the door. He reached through the hole and opened the door.

He walked up to a computer, turned it on, hacked past the login screen, and used IE to access http://www.fourisland.com. He looked at the Poll of the Week.... and let out a shriek. Someone had already voted from this location. Not only that, but the poll was a completely random one! He'd trekked all the way from Alabama so as to vote on the poll before Saturday, but it was not to be...

OK, that was REALLY random, but that just corresponds with the random poll. Here are the results:

Cat - 1 vote(s)! Dog - 2 vote(s)! Sheep - 0 vote(s)! Penguin - 0 vote(s)!

OK, with that over with, I would like to announce something about Tetrgi 2.1. I have set a release date for it on March 3rd. If anyone has any suggestions, please create a ticket for it in good time, so I have a chance to implement it and don't have to postpone the release.

And, just to compete with the randomity* of both the poll and its accompanying story, here's a random thing I found my XP machine doing yesterday: So do I, Adobe Updater, so do I.

*Note: I do have strange ways of spelling and pronouncing certain words that may seem like mistakes to other people. They were put there on purpose.

Guess what everyone? Two days ago Tetrgi 1.5 was tested on a real Windows computer, and worked. Because a 2.0 release of Tetrgi was planned for when 1.5 could be tweaked to work on Windows, Tetrgi 1.5 and 2.0 had to merge as there were no differences between them. The result is Tetrgi 1.5/2.0, the first stable version of Tetrgi.

You can get Tetrgi 1.5/2.0 at the Tetrgi Downloads page. Have fun!