Android sounded rather exciting, so I had to give it a spin! This is what I have right now:

P.S.: I have reenabled comments, trackbacks and pingbacks on this blog, with akismet enabled. Let’s see how this rolls.

Nurikabe puzzles are the very latest cool thing! (IMHO)

I started work on a GTK+ application for all my Nurikabe puzzling needs. I based it on the GNOME Sudoku code, so it is also written in Python.

Besides that, Vladimir Panteleev, a fellow Worms-addicted buddy of mine put together a generator. It’s more or less a bruteforce generator, but it’s still fairly quick at generating even large puzzles. The quality is okayish.

I translated this to Python, changed and optimized it somewhat and then integrated it with the PyGTK+ application. At the moment, the combination looks spiffy, like this:

Using a freeware Java applet I snatched from Otto Janko’s page, I also put up pages for a hundred generated, 10×10 Nurikabe puzzles over here. You can see that they’re not the most exceptionally cool puzzles. But I still think it’s a pretty neat thing.

One of the things I plan on doing is to try and rate these puzzles on difficulty to solve, much like GNOME Sudoku does. It should also help weed out the quality puzzles from the rather messy ones.

PulseAudio

I’ve been scratching itches related to PulseAudio lately. The first result of that is a patch for native support in SDL. It took less than a day to write, but it seems to work fairly well.

I’m also working on native support in Wine. So far it produces sound, but something is still broken. I can play a song in foobar2000, but not seek, for example. My goal is to get Worms Armageddon working with it, but that’s just terribly slow at the moment. I’ll have to take a close look at it.

Netbooting

Netbooting has become somewhat of a casual hobby for me. So far, I’ve managed to boot over the network using PXE the following:

• BartPE (Windows Preinstallation Environment)


• Windows XP setup


• Ubuntu 6.10 alternative installer


• Ubuntu 7.04 desktop LiveCD

I only just today got that last one working. Building on previous experience, it wasn’t very hard. It works really well too; I spent a couple of hours working exclusively on it this evening.

It’s a neat thing to do while I wait for my shipit CD to arrive.

HTTPsec

I think it’s already over a month ago since I last touched it, but I tried writing a Python urllib2 authentication handler for HTTPsec. I didn’t really care for how useful it was, but was simply doing it as something small and interesting to work on for a while. I had also been meddling with cryptography related stuff for a while then.

The thing stranded when I could only get 2/3rds through the authentication process, and couldn’t get the Java reference implementation working either. Interestingly, the Java client testcase provided also fails at the same point in the authentication process for me. The Java servlet doesn’t do anything at all and simply returns HTTP 500 errors. Yay.

Ubuntu Shipit

I ordered my 7.04 CD. Note that’s singular; Though I’m really excited about 7.04, I won’t be distributing CDs like I did for 5.10 at my uni. I’m not sure what our “*nix user group” is up to lately. (Guys?)

iTunes 7

Would someone please crack the new DAAP already?

Wireless at University Zuyd

The university I study at offers wireless access. Almost everything at my University is based on Microsoft (and Cisco) products however, and the wireless network is no different. It is based on IEEE 802.1x authentication with EAP-TLS, with a Microsoft CA web interface as the only way to get a certificate. Along with wired network access restricted to University PC’s everywhere, this made it rather difficult for me to get an internet connection with Ubuntu.

The guy who gets to do all the certificate installation support on Windows laptops told me several people had tried, but none succeeded thus far. I hope they’re reading Planet Ubuntu NL now! I’ve spent a couple of days reading up on all this madness and got it to work. It’s no elegant solution, but hopefully involved applications will improve in the future. IEEE 802.1x support in NetworkManager would be great, and I also like the certificate integration in Seahorse that was mentioned on the desktop-devel list.

So anyways, I wrote up a document (in dutch) for those interested: http://stephan.kochen.nl/proj/hszwifi/
If something seems not right in there, see if you can catch me on site. :p
(I might touch it up with screenshots tomorrow.)

RAOPSink

I’ve had some problems with the wireless signal at home as well. We set the Airport Expresses to WDS and turned of AirTunes to try to improve it. This also means I no longer have an Airport Express available to test RAOPSink on.

Besides that, I’ve been delaying the thing over and over. I’m just going to officially stay I’m no longer working on it. Sorry, guys!