v0.0.3 now available. Changelog:

- support PNG images
- fix slowness on levels with lots of blocks
- fix game bug which allowed the kye to push black holes

I think I have finally found my real talent in life — solving Su Doku.

Here is a handy little program: pngrewrite. I came across it in the FreeBSD ports collection. It's a PNG optimiser, which is particularly good for images with few colours, as it converts them to indexed with a minimal palette. All the Kye screenshots (the graphics for which date from 16-colour VGA days) are 40% smaller after going through pngrewrite.

It looks like it is freely-usable source-code-available only (not open source); none of the open source alternatives seem to be half as good. Only with pngrewrite can I get the tiles for Kye to be smaller as PNG than as GIF.

Second release. This version will be better on slow computers; 0.0.1 used more CPU than it needed. Plus this version fixes problems with parsing unusual level files.

Question: When is an operating system not an operating system?

Answer: when a "minimal installation" takes ~770MB, includes KDE and 150MB of locale data, and requires all 3 installation CDs.

Well, this is a project that has been around for awhile. I have had in mind to do a Linux port of the classic puzzle game Kye for some time, and did some work on it last summer; finally, now, it is finished. Or, at least, I have a playable 0.0.1 beta release.

Actually the first version I did was in Java. But there were too many glitches in the interface which I couldn't get rid of. And while I did get it working under the embedded Java in both Netscape and IE, neither worked that well, and having to work with only Java 1.0/1.1 stuff meant using a lot of inferior Java data types. So I got annoyed with that and decided to convert it to Python instead. 12 hours later, it works well enough to use.

0.3.3 has made its way into Debian testing. FreeBSD still only has 0.2.2 in the ports, though. I see there are RPMs starting to appear, and it is included in Mandrake cooker.

I haven't touched it for two weeks now. No bug reports, which might be a good sign — or might not be. I think I make the next release a beta instead of an alpha, and just do any small fixes that I think of by then.

I had not seen this before — Linspire apparently offering a bundle of PrBoom and Freedoom as a "Click-N-Run" package. They don't mention either up front, but the specifications page makes it clear that it is PrBoom, and it is in the package name (plus the status bar is definitely Boom-like). It looks like they are shipping the GL version.

It seems a bit dodgy the way they use the Doom trademark, and one of id's promotional images for Doom 2, and even list id as the vendor. Okay, the source code is half from id, but it doesn't contain any of id's design or artwork, so using id's trademark for it looks very suspect.

Definitely an OBN for this article on news.bbc about eBay. Total lack of any criticism, or as far as I could see any journalism, by the writer; no investigation at all of the claim that "EBay has very close links with regional police forces that help to shut down phishing and fraud gangs." I liked this quote though:

"Even Western Union say don't pay by Western Union," said Mr Griffiths.