Iron Harvy

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Lameradze — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:33:44 +0000

Mailinator is now offering widgets!

The Best Interview puzzle from Jeff Atwood

Lameradze — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:44:21 +0000

“A hundred prisoners are each locked in a room with three pirates, one of whom will walk the plank in the morning. Each prisoner has 10 bottles of wine, one of which has been poisoned; and each pirate has 12 coins, one of which is counterfeit and weighs either more or less than a genuine coin. In the room is a single switch, which the prisoner may either leave as it is, or flip. Before being led into the rooms, the prisoners are all made to wear either a red hat or a blue hat; they can see all the other prisoners’ hats, but not their own. Meanwhile, a six-digit prime number of monkeys multiply until their digits reverse, then all have to get across a river using a canoe that can hold at most two monkeys at a time. But half the monkeys always lie and the other half always tell the truth. Given that the Nth prisoner knows that one of the monkeys doesn’t know that a pirate doesn’t know the product of two numbers between 1 and 100 without knowing that the N+1th prisoner has flipped the switch in his room or not after having determined which bottle of wine was poisoned and what color his hat is, what is the solution to this puzzle?”

Restful

Lameradze — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:37:19 +0000

A very interesting thing to look at is REST:

The Long Journey Home Gameplay Overview

Lameradze — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:16:53 +0000

Next is the description of the experience you’re supposed to have but most likely won’t due to the nature of the event-driven game story.

You start in a lonely hut in a forest in ancient times (like 1000+ A.D.) next to a person who took care of your wounds. Let’s call her Valeria from now on. You dressed up in your original pants and shirt that Valeria gave you. Valeria gives you couple directions like what is around and how to get where. It’s up to you to decide where to go. The most obvious choice would be to go closest town where you can find quests, get more directions, become a witness of local events and participate in them if you want to.

Due to the nature of the game it might happen that you die if you decide to participate in a dangerous event (or if you happens to be in location that a dangerous event takes place in). After you load the save game it is not necessary that the event will repeat unless the series of event that already happened had made this event inevitable.

You’ll eventually find a magicians league or a mage or a complete stranger that happens to poses a magical wisdom to tell you the truth about yourself (or lies).

Most likely you’ll meet a guy who was sent from the future to kill you. The chance to meet that guy will be increasing day after day. This is done to make sure that you actually playing the game and not growing plants in Valeria backyard.

You’ll also experience flashbacks about your future (from 2300+ year).

The genre is an RPG so you’ll be doing what most fantasy RPGs has to offer. Communicating with NPCs to get the information, stealing from NPCs, trading with NPC, doing quests, getting and improving your skills and of course fighting.

I’m still unsure whether it should be multiplayer or not, but if it happens to be a multiplayer it will be a cooperative mode.

The Long Journey Home Story

Lameradze — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 08:41:36 +0000

The story I came up with was a background for my character in Table RPG game I’m participating in as my English classes.

You are a criminal in 2300+ year a young guy (like 18-25 year old) and a member of anti police organization which oversees police activity on a territory controlled by criminals. Engaged in operation against police forces on a power station. Your team gets into a trap and pretty much everyone gets killed except you. Trying to run away from police you got to the damaged operations room with lots of broken electrical cables.

Something happens and the world around you disappears. Your forget everything. The first thing you remember is flames which burns your face in some sort of hallucinogenic looking tunnel. And short after that you land in a forest in a lot of pain and injured. You fell unconscious.

You wake up in a hut where some women/man takes care of you. She/he tells you that she found you in a forest burned and unconscious, placed on a horse and brought you to her/his home. She took care of you. Once you recovered you understand that you do not belong to this world. Your clothes are different… you just don’t feel comfortable here. You decide to leave this place and find out answers. The first thing you want to know is who your are.

The Long Lourney Home idea

Lameradze — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 08:08:30 +0000

I’ve been dreaming about new “correct Fallout-like” game for ages. Finally I’ve decided to write my own. A game that would have not the astonishing graphics but the gameplay that will make you spend weeks and weeks of your free time. A game where NPC will act like some meaningful entities and not dumb not interesting “get quest get paid” animals. A Game where events will happen and you have choice to take part in them or not. A Game where your actions will have an effect on events outcome as well as for the events existence. A Game that could live its own life even if there is no player in it. A Game that would be a World and a Life in itself.

WebGRID Client 1 Use Cases

Lameradze — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:53:13 +0000

So how would clients of type 1 would use the system? First thing they need to do is to find/write a program/tool that would do what they need to. A simplest example again would be a password brute force tool. This tool should support a protocol that is used by the system to communicate with it and should be able to read the data the system will provide like filename to brute force password to and range of passwords to try.

This means that a special library should be written to simplify development/integration process of the tool for the system to operate with.
Next there should be a unique identifier for that kind of user in the system.
A project(s) should be defined by that user.
An application for the tool/wrapper that would be run on the machine to do the job.
A concrete version of that application
The tool/wrapper itself. let’s call it a DataFile
Installer for that tool. The system should create a default installer if nothing special is needed.
The system should be filled with work each of which would represent an atomic unit of work that needs to be performed.
A notification method should be defined so that user can get notified if the work have be finished or there is some issues.
It should be possible to access result of the work done from program as well as through web interface.
if user is satisfied with the results he pays to the company desired amount
if not he can tweak his tool/wrapper and resubmit his work the system

so this brings us to the use cases:

Submit software to the system
Define work that needs to be done

Which hardware is needed (if any)
which inputs should be set
Additional software dependencies should be provided as system objects

Check work status
Get Results
Get notified about completion/issues

WebGRID Client 1 definition

Lameradze — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:09:54 +0000

Let’s call clients of type 1 – people who want to run multiple instance of their code with different input data.

An example of this can be:

Bruteforce .zip archive password where machine will use different ranges (simultaneous execution to minimize time)
a set of tests with different inputs that run consequentially
Hardware dependent application that would wait for appropriate resources to free up
combinations of the above

WebGRID Client Types

Lameradze — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:51:19 +0000

Ok assuming that the project itself worth doing it basically will have two types of clients:

Those who needs their suff to be computed (pays money)
And those who share their PC to do computation work (gets paid)

Get paid for owning a PC

Lameradze — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:43:10 +0000

I like the idea of my PC earning some money when I’m not around. So I’ve decided to come up with solution for this. Of course there is plenty of sites which offer money for surfing and then there are scripts available on the internet that would simulate your presence. But this is not interesting for me. I want this to be useful. The idea that I’ve decided to implement is to have a system that would be used as a source for parallel independent computation farm. So users can join their PCs to the farm and companies will be able to load that farm.

The obvious disadvantages would be:

Nodes Instability
No direct communication between nodes

Advantages:

Cheap machine resources