Facebook Puzzles

Programming is like an art. If you don't practice you cannot evolve. I've been doing web applications for a few years now, with a little bit of actual software development in between. So, it was nice to have a challenge and try out a Facebook Puzzle. You can find them here. They're available in all different flavors, with a hierarchy of difficulty levels. I chose to try out dinoisland. Why not, right? Let's get into the good stuff, no need for the hors d'oeuvres.

To get setup, I had to install Thrift. That way, the actual code library could be compiled in, pretty much, whichever language I desire. Initially, I started with PHP, because that's what I've been using a lot lately, and I feel as if I've close to mastered it ;) I found difficulty with it because it seemed as though it lacked power, especially for a client that I knew would need to be threaded. After a day with PHP, I gave up, and switched over to Java. What a relief! Aside from the AI part of this puzzle, it felt like this project was meant to be programmed in Java. If I knew LISP, then I would have used that, but...meh, I'm busy right now with the puppy and work.

My approach for the Java application was to divide the solution up into different portions;

• Client - connects to the server and creates an instance of our dinosaur, then threads it off to do it's own thing.
• NPC - This would be our dinosaur, a non-player character. This guy handles it's own state, communicates with the server directly, and decides it's next moves. There is also a history object which contains all of it's recent actions, and path history.
• ActionFactory - We are allowed 4 different actions in this puzzle; move, grow, look, and egg. Their is a handler for each of those actions, and the AF abstracts the process of handling those, and determining a result.
  
• Action Handlers - The handler analyzes the result from the server, and returns the current state. It also determines a suggested next action, based on the results it receives.
• ResultAction - a simple class created in order to store valuable info about the dino's actions.
  
• Directions - Methods were added to help with navigation. For example, if my dino needed to turnLeft, turnRight, turnAround, or even go in a random direction.
• History - keep track of our actions, and our movement history.
  

This is how the basic structure was. I had a grandiose idea in my head of creating a dino that would look, cache the results, and based off of those, decide which areas were the best to venture towards, or moveTo. Also, having the path history static would help new dinosaurs with their movement decisions.

As it turns out though!! None of that was necessary. While still testing, brute force, and strength in numbers seemed to be adequate enough. I had my dino's grow to level 2 instantly. This way, they could eat more plants, gain more calories, and be less susceptible to getting beat up. The only logical pieces implemented were;

• if your movement returns false, turn to the right (if we hit a rock or big plant)
• if we have n number of calories and are a size s, we should grow
• if we have n number of calories, let's lay an egg

I was able to achieve a score of 124,750 with that simple bot. Honestly, just lay as many eggs as possible with enough calories to keep them alive. Of course the downside of this solution is that it is not consistent, and relies on probability. Many things must go right for it to succeed....and succeed it did!

jQuery rounded corners for images!

Rounded corners have been popular for along time now. I can remember over 3 years ago, checking out Stu Nicholls website for his killer CSS tricks with boxes and other things. Images, though, always required the effect to be produced prior, and couldn't be done dynamically. Flash helped with that, but do you really want to use Flash all the time, or just for an image? A couple of months ago I created a plugin for jquery that will round your corners, and then some! Here is a feature list;

• rounder corners w/ adjustable radius
  
• border w/ adjustable width and color
• drop shadow w/ adjustable position, color, opacity
• image scaling
• image positioning
• 2K in size, minified (for those of you who do not gzip your content)
  

Here is a sample image to give y'all a taste...



From left to right; it's the original image, rounded image, and scaled/rounded image with border and shadow effects. There have been some requests to apply this to any HTML element, although that may come if this grows in popularity.

Here is in example of how it can be used within a page:

<html>
    <head>
    </head>
    <body>
        <img src="img/sample1.jpg" class="round" alt="Sample 1" /><br/>
        <img src="img/sample2.jpg" class="round" alt="Sample 2" />
        <script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="js/dropCurves.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript">
        $(document).ready(function() {
           $("img.round").dropCurves({
                w:500, // scale image to width 100px
                h:500, // scale image to height 120px
                bSize:2, // 2px border size
                bColor:'#000', // black border
                sColor:'#333', // shadow color
                sX:-3, // shadow offset X
                sY:3, // shadow offset Y
                o:0.5, // shadow opacity
                r:10 // corner radius
            });
        });
        </script>
    </body>
</html>

Like what you see? You can get it here!

http://plugins.jquery.com/project/dropcurves

Feedback??

Thanks!

Textmate FTP/SSH bundle with Snow Leopard

I love to develop with textmate, and I love to work within the Mac OS X environment, so when I heard Snow Leopard was coming out, I thought, "Hey, why not?". Well, I soon found after upgrading that my local dev environment wasn't working as it had. This was because PHP 5.3 comes preloaded with Apache, and it needed to be set up...again. Ok, not sooo bad. Soon after, I was working on a remote project, in TextMate, and do the same old Option+S, to save to the server, and realize that I'm getting PHP Notices, and a Fatal Error! After some searching on the web...I found nothing. Damn! Time to use the old ticker, and figure it out for myself :( I soon discovered that the PHP super global variable $_ENV was no longer being populated with the correct Textmate values. The fix required that $_ENV be replaced with $_SERVER in the bundle commands, and in the helper_functions.php. Voila! Textmate is back to it's prior glory, and I don't resent Snow Leopard anymore...for now.