The entry for the Independent Game Developers Festival has been completed, Bubble Blow. You can read more about it at http://beauhinks.com/bubbleblow

Very basic game, but given the time constraints turned out relatively well. Physics work reasonably realistically. I was able to add in dynamic collision geometry generated by the textures before submission to the contest… kinda cool!

Second:

The St. Mary’s project using genetic algorithms for autonomous navigation is slow going–mostly in part because of time spent on Bubble Blow. However, I have a working robotics platform running a Pic18f2550 which allows us plenty of control. My partner and I are now working on condensing the code and fitting it on the microprocessor so we don’t have to do any sort of tethered control. We have wireless modules, which I would have to write a bit of code to interface between USB and serial to get to work properly, but the original idea was to have fully autonomous robots capable of seeking goals and avoiding predators.

We’ll get there. Maybe some pictures will go up soon.

Third:

The site has been neglected for a few months. My schedule this semester was a bit more hectic than anticipated due to taking on an aid position for a math class. Hopefully, I’ll be able to stay on top o Beauhinks more in the next month and year as new opportunities present themselves. Physics is good. Programming is good. I should have a bit of research up soon on the (well understood) application of Statistical Mechanics to Information Theory. Is there a fundamental limit on knowledge?

That is all.

~Steven

Good prizes as well.

Dream Build Play

St. Mary’s College is fielding two teams for Microsoft’s Dream Build Play contest. I’m part of one, we’re working on ideas now. Hopefully we get started soon, we only have approximately two months left. Should be a blast if we can dedicate some time and effort to a good game building on experience from last year.

Thesis

I’ve a final thesis to do. I want to build robots. This is not entirely physics as my adviser will probably point out, but I am a joint major. So, at the suggestion of a partner, we’re going to play with genetic algorithms and robots.

First Stages:

We need a robot platform, and we’re strapped for cash. I’m going to be in charge of building something cost effective that will allow us to run simulations from a host. Let’s look at some candidates for parts for a platform to test the feasibility of our idea:

• (1) PICAXE-08M Microcontroller - the brains of the little guys. 128 bytes to work with. 8 pins. This could get hairy!
• (1) L293D Driver. Used for controlling motors. Actually, we might be going with a project board for the picaxe which would give us 4 digital on/offs and 2 reversible power outputs without much headache. Enough to turn two servos and collect a little input from the environment.
• (1) 5V Voltage Regulator. We don’t want any blue smoke.
• (2) Microswitches to collect input.
• (1) 9V Battery.
• (2) GM10 Motor Kits.  They have to move somehow.

All of these parts thrown together should make a fairly basic robot. If we add a wireless serial controller, then we’ve a mobile platform which we can control from a host.

Where’s my credit card? I’ll be using it at Octopart, that’s for sure!

Steve

Also, check out my other posts to the left concerning the development process using NetBeans.

Update:

The zip archive was quite large and took awhile to extract thanks to all of the doc files and random libraries included. I’m trying to trim it down to a more manageable size for all of you to enjoy. This includes a full installation of Ruby, associated libraries, my applications, and MySQL. There’s a lot to pack! The new archive below is roughly half the size. Here’s a quick shot of one of the folders bubbled up using the great tool, WinDirStat:

Downloads:

• DarMonInstantRails.zip

Ruby System Monitoring:

Well this is my best bet at the moment for having a completed project.

Attached to this post I will include a zip file with everything you should need to get started. This includes Ruby, RoR, ImageMagick, and an abundance of other bits.

Here’s how to make this all work:

1. Download the attached Zip file (DarMonInstantRails.zip) and extract somewhere on your hard-drive. It should come out as “X:\PathYouMade\InstantRails\”. I apologize for the size of the archive. Again, this is the only way I know how to easily make this work.
2. Navigate to the directory you just extracted to in InstantRails and run the ImageMagick installer:
3. Pick an installation path and accept the rest of the defaults for ImageMagick.
4. Launch the InstantRails Application:


You might get some errors. Ignore them! I stripped out Apache because we don’t need it in this case.

5. You should get something like below. Make sure that MySQL is Started. If not click the MySQL button and click start.



6. Click the “I” button in the top left corner and goto RailsApplications->Open Ruby Console Window. Do this 3 times so that we can launch the Agent, TractorBeam, and Interpol.
7. NOTE: In the root of the rails_apps directory there is an Agents.zip. This contains the Ruby script necessary on any of the computers you wish to monitor. If they have Ruby Installed, the script will run.
8. Change directories in the three console windows to “Interpol”, “Agents”, and “TractorBeam”.
9. Launch an Agent:



10. Launch Interpol from the Interpol directory by typing: “ruby script/server –port=3000″. If you’re successful you should see this:



11. Open a browser and navigate to “http://127.0.0.1:3000″:



12. Make sure at least 127.0.0.1 is added and your “Agent” from above is running.
13. Bring up your other unused Ruby console and change directory to TractorBeam. Then type: “ruby script/server –port=3001″ Take care with the port number!



14. Once TractorBeam is running navigate in a browser to: “127.0.0.1:3001″ and click on Sample Administration:



15. Click “Run Tests” and let it roll. It will begin to poll any IP’s you have added. If you get an error then the Agent probably is not running on the given address.
16. Go back to 127.0.0.1:3000 and click “View CPU Load Graph”. If all is well you should be presented with something similar to this:



17. As you bring up more Agents on your network and add their IP Addresses by click “Add/Remove CPU to Monitor,” they will be added to the graph with their respective loads and times. The graph isn’t pretty right now… and after awhile it gets cluttered. C’est la vie for now.
18. That’s it. Shoot me an e-mail or post a comment here if you have troubles.

However, I do have something to show and will try to package some semblance of a useful application. Truthfully, this is a piece of junk. It collects CPU load and displays a graph for each particular IP entered into the database. Not to mention NONE of the http exchanges are secured and that you have to rely on HTTP in the first place.

As 3AM draws closer, I tell myself, “This is a learning experience,” as I said in my opening posts. Sometimes software development is frustrating, especially in a new language and development environment. NetBeans is loaded with lots of modern features and a clean interface that the developers at Delphi could pick up a few things from NetBeans and incorporate them.

That’s not to say that Delphi isn’t one of my favorite IDE’s. I use it very regularly, especially with IntraWeb for a few applications. One area that I particularly loved in NetBeans was find/search.  The results of your searches are presented in a more logical manner than the standard Delphi dialogs and they behave in a manner that is familiar.

NetBeans did not start out with Ruby support, yet it functions as a wonderful platform for coding, testing, and learning Ruby or Ruby on Rails. The 6.1 version loads quickly and does not consume gobs of memory like its other Java relatives.  I wish I could have tried CodeGears 3rdRail to compare the feel to Delphi. Any experiences with this?

Darwin RubyMonitor

The project consists of three parts.

• Agents - these are simple HTTP servers running on port 2000. They respond with YAML containing the CPU load, frequency, and quantity.
• TractorBeam - You would have one of these running on your network. All it does is sit and run through a loop every few seconds to poll “agents” you have added to your database for their average CPU load.
• Interpol - The front RoR application that simply renders a graphic right now with the statistics collected from TractorBeam.

I’ll give you all a little tour via screencast below.

There you have it. Here’s the graph after a few minutes displaying average CPU load:

Things I would change:

• The “Agents” should use a Restful API to communicate with “TractorBeam” instead of the other way around. This would allow one collection server to be running, and clients to connect on the fly. Ideally, you could use existing performance statistics available from the operating system and would not need any clients. Much easier for a sysadmin.
• The userinterface is awful.
• More testing. I have not run any unit tests on this. Use at your own risk–I don’t recall writing any code that formats drives, but it could happen by rookie mistake.
• Write the application in Ruby/Netbeans and Delphi/Intraweb. I think if I had used Intraweb I could’ve had a pretty slick application using NexusDB as the backend. However, I did like the productivity increase of Rails over the Intraweb GUI designer.
• Temperature. This one drove me nuts. Accessing temperature sensors from Ruby in Windows seemed to be on the same level of difficulty as traveling faster than the speed of light.

All in all I thought it came out pretty well given my ability (or lack thereof!). Now to try and submit to the contest… I hope I can!

Edit: I’ve tried and have come to learn that SQLite3 does not support one of the functions I use. I’m not sure what time the deadline officially is, but I’d like to get it finished before so you all can play with it and maybe I’ll win! We shall see…

Cheers,

Steve

Again, many libraries are helping me out here. They’re all well documented and easy to use, but sometimes difficult to install.

Steve

This looks bad:

But in reality:

Eureka! RMagick actually works…

Now I can get back to troubleshooting my graph code. If I don’t get it working, you all will be looking at pencil drawings on graph paper, which are not even close to real-time.

NetBeans is still helping me along the way. I use the console quite a bit now that I’ve picked up commands, but the built in Rails hooks are very useful if you are afraid of a shell.

Steve

One of my gripes currently as I rush to have something workable for the race is the ability to package my source into, at a minimum, a windows executable. Alas, this may be quite difficult. The LAST thing I want judges to have to do is install some sort of InstantRuby or RubyStack to run my application. UGH!

That said, I’ve also been having problems getting some common libraries to install properly as it seems that versions are always in flux. Documentation is still there to help, but it really is a struggle. For example, I was happily working away in Ruby on Rails (again, complete novice) and decided to try upgrading to the latest version through NetBeans. Much to my disappointment I found my project broken. I know all of these projects are rapidly evolving, which is excellent, but the fact that I couldn’t generate a dynamic scaffolding so easily for the MVC ActiveRecord stuff as I had before drove me nuts for a brief while.

Also, as I write this I’m trying to calm myself by listening to Simon and Garfunkel.

Hopefully I won’t be working on this competitively come 3AM Wednesday morning. In the screenshot above I’m desperately trying to Install the RMagick gem so that I can generate some fancy schmancy graphs in my web application. Sorrow will most certainly follow for the next few hours…

Netbeans is still working well. I’ve only had it lock up on me once, and that was mostly my fault. It does a good job of getting out of your way when you want to code. File explorers and console output collapse speedily as you click to grind away in your scripts. The built in database navigator is quite nice for browsing and can attach to lots of standard RDBMS out of the box.

Report back soon,

Steve

• Allow the user to maintain a list of “drones” on the network from which to request CPU data.
• Finalize the the tables that track each drone so that the user may view and track each in a nice manner
• Secure the drones–right now they’re just responding with generic HTTP. Hopefully I can figure out something better.
• Create an administrator interface to manage aforementioned drones.
• Package the application so that it is easy to distribute and judges can test the application without worrying about dependencies and security.

For Windows development it would be rather nice to have a hassle free all-in-one executable to do all of this for the user. I find myself thinking of ways I would do this in Delphi… dropping a DevExpress cxGrid on a form, setting a few properties to link to the database, compiling, and bang! You would have a very basic monitoring utility as a system administrator on a small network.

Here are a few screenshots for your enjoyment:

This code resides in a Ruby on Rails application which I hope to be the administrator interface. Notice there’s not much to it! It just grabs a string from the drone via HTTP.

The code to render a basic response with the CPU information I thought was useful. Notice there is no temperature… that’s beyond my expertise, especially in Windows. Lots of things are beyond my expertise!

A Rails application on Webrick responding to a request.

The rendered page sans a template.

That’s all for tonight in this post, I’ll be plugging away for awhile longer in the hopes of being competitive!

Steve

My only choice is to take the survey? No thankyou, I want to code right now. I try clicking the “X” in the corner, no response. Had to restart the JavaVM to get my IDE back. You can guess what my user satisfaction level was at that moment.

First off, I’m loving NetBeans. I open up the editor, and straight away their developers have posted a fix for a bug.

Upon attempting the update I get a nice hourglass spinning about, so all is not well in NetBeans concerning updates…but after a restart of the IDE the update was applied successfully.

Steve