Shout Out!

Feel free to stop by and give 'er a shout. I might, from time to time, post best of lists here.

No links, no html, spam bot deterrent. This is kind of like a place where if you just want to vent/complain/emote without bothering your Twitter/Facebook/MySpace/Blog Follower friends, you are free to come and do that. Anything from "blech" to "What an awesome day!" is acceptable. Or even just funny movie quotes.

Features I might add:
* Shout Deletions
* FML API integration (check a box to have your story also submitted to FML)
* Optional identifying info (text field that allows you to associate your shout with a name)
* Word filters to keep it clean
* Allow URL submissions, but verify non-malicious/non-porn URL through call to WOT

If you're worried about the anonymity, the entire thing consists of:
1 PHP page 136 lines of code in length
1 Database with 1 table and 3 fields: unique id, shout submission text, date time stamp

I have absolutely no way of identifying where any of these shouts come from.

Shout away!

Martin Ott's Binaries
Free Subversion Book

Technorati OpenId Login Does Not Work.

So, I did a little digging:

1. Posted a question on meta.stackoverflow.com in case anyone there knew anything.

2. Realized there was an open question already, posted an answer there (which I have been editing).

3. Looked at openid.net and noticed Technorati was no longer listed (can't confirm it ever was though)

4. Went to Technorati's website support and saw another person had this very problem. When I tried to login to that site using my Technorati ID it was a no-go, which proves this isn't just a SO problem.

5. Saw that the meta question was updated indicating you should e-mail team@stackoverflow.com for further assistance.

I'm REALLY hoping there is some way to re-associate my trilogy accounts with my Google OpenId so I don't loose my awesome user number (58) and my ok ranking.

Check it out! I'm posting lectures etc as I finish them. Come spring the whole thing could be locked down behind a password wall and only available to students, but for now, feel free to let me know what you think...

A huge thanks to Sam Hughes for very patiently helping me out with this formula. He's the best mathematician I know...

Here's the JavaScript code to execute this formula (just change maxTiles to be however wide your hex grid is):

	var maxTiles = 7;
	var n = Math.ceil((maxTiles - 2) / 2);
	var numberTiles = 3 * Math.pow(n, 2) - 3 * n + 1;

Below is the original post:

This is kind of like finding the area of a hex grid, except that for some reason none of the formulas I found for doing that would work. Also, finding the area of a triangle made of hex grids won't work with the normal triangle area formula either.

What I am illustrating here is how to find out how many hex tiles are inside of a hex shaped grid of hex tiles.

Here is a picture of the grid:

What you have to do is:

1. Take the half the width of the hex grid rounded down. So, if the hex grid is 7 wide, you take half of seven, 3.5, and round it down to 3. This can also be called "flooring" the number.
2. Take that number and use it to seed a floor loop, which counts down from that number, adding the new number to a grand total each time.
3. Multiply that grand total by 7 and add one for the middle tile (which never got counted).

Here is the code:

	var triangleTotal = 0;
	for(var spaces = Math.ceil((maxTiles-1)/2); spaces > 0; spaces--){
		triangleTotal += spaces;
	}
	var triangles = triangleTotal * 6;
	var numberTiles = triangles + 1;
	return numberTiles;

You'll notice that I took the total minus 1 divided by 2 and "ceil"ed it, instead of taking the total divided by two and "floor"ing it. It doesn't matter which you do...

Here's a visualization proving this out:

I only took one math class in college, otherwise this would have probably been very obvious to me as it may seem to you. There is probably even a really fancy easy little formula for this, but I don't know it and couldn't find it...

Here's a page where you can test this formula out in action. Note that a hex is always going to be an odd number of hexes wide, so if you enter an even number and get a funny shaped hex, this formula isn't going to work...

I'm working on a JavaScript version of The Settlers of Catan. The first problem I decided to tackle was constructing (visually and array-structure wise) the game board using nothing but loops (didn't want to hard code it).

This ended up being much more difficult than I thought it would be.

I am going to split this up into two parts:

1. Setting up the game board visually
2. Setting up the array structure

Creating a Hexagonal game board with hexagonal spaces in JavaScript with for loops:

For this to work properly, you must have an even number of columns and rows. I chose seven since that is what makes up the Settlers of Catan game-board.

You have to split the building of the board into three stages:

1. The expanding stage
2. The apex or middle of the board
3. The contracting stage

I placed everything in one large for loop that counted off the "rows".

I figured out that while the rows are less than half the max rows divided by two (and rounded down) the board would be contracting. The number of tiles you would start with would be equal to the maximum number of tiles divided by two, rounded up, plus the current row number.

Once the number of rows equals exactly half the number of maximum tiles (rounded down) you are on the middle row. In this case the number of tiles is the max number of tiles, no math required.

Otherwise, you are in the contracting stage and the number of tiles you need is equal to the maximum number of tiles, minus the current row, minus half of the maximum rounded down.

Sound complicated? That's because it is. This took me about 30 minutes to get straight in my head after studying the game-board shape, tiles, and making several diagrams and sudo-coding and then writing the actual code and fixing bugs (and deciding if I had to round up or down at certain places).

Here is the actual code:

<html>
<head>
<style>
img{
	margin-top: -18px;
}
#board{
	padding: 50px 25px;
	background-color: #000;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="board">error loading</div>
</body>
<script>
function boardSetup(){
	var max = 7;
	var html = "";

	for(var row = 0; row < max; row++){
		if(row < Math.floor(max/2)){
			//place spacer tiles
			for(var space = 0; space < (Math.floor(max/2) - row); space++){
				html += '<img src="spacerTile.png" />';
			}

			//place game tiles
			for(var cols = 0; cols < (Math.ceil(max/2) + row); cols++){
				html += '<img src="tile.png" />';
			}
			html += "<br />";
		}else if(row == Math.floor(max/2)){
			for(var cols = 0; cols < max; cols++){
				html += '<img src="tile.png" />';
			}
			html += "<br />";
		}else{
			for(var space = 0; space < (row - Math.floor(max/2)); space++){
				html += '<img src="spacerTile.png" />';
			}
			for(var cols = 0; cols < (max - (row - Math.floor(max/2))); cols++){
				html += '<img src="tile.png" />';
			}
			html += "<br />";
		}
	}

	document.getElementById("board").innerHTML = html;
}

boardSetup();
</script>
</html>

Here are the images that go with it:

Here is the tile:
Here is the spacer. This one is completely invisible: start-><-end

Here is the code running on my site.

I recently installed the iPhone OS 3.0 upgrade on my iMac for developing iPhone Apps in XCode. The App I've been developing started throwing errors when I would try and compile for 3.0 (previously worked in 2.2.1). I fixed all of the errors I could, but I am consistently getting the following error:

Command failed with exit code -1

Any time I try and compile for the device (even 2.2.1 now...)

It works fine in the simulator (building for both release and debug) but will not work for the device (for release or debug).

The reason for this is because I accidentally installed the "Snow Leopard" version of the 3.0 SDK instead of the "Leopard" version (I'm just a poor ignorant PC guy who has no idea which animal his OS is named after and just wishes they would call it "X.5" or "X.6" to simplify things).

If you found this post helpful, it was supported in part by the amazon links around the site. If you're going to buy a book anyways, why not help support this blog's author by clicking one of the links on this site to do it? If you are looking for a book on iPhone development, this one is amazing: Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK

I recently updated my iPhone from iPhone OS Version 3.0 (7A341) to iPhone OS Version 3.0.1 (7A400). When I plugged it into my Mac, I was informed that:

The version of iPhone OS on "Christopher's iPhone" does not match any of the versions of iPhone OS supported for development with this copy of Xcode. Please restore the device to a version of the OS listed below. If necessary, the latest version of Xcode is available here.

Gee... Thanks... I did a little Googling and found that after a recent security update to the iPhone OS Apple, you could no longer build/install development apps on the iPhone. Apparently Apple posted an "advisory" (in PDF format for some reason) outlining a fix for this.

Here is the fix in plain text instead of PDF (why they put this in a PDF is beyond me...):

iPhone OS 3.0.1 Advisory
iPhone OS 3.0 SDK and iPhone OS 3.0.1 software release for
Mac OS X v10.5.7
To continue development with iPhone SDK 3.0 on your iPhone, iPhone 3G and
iPhone 3GS running iPhone OS 3.0.1 will need to perform the following:
1. Log into your Mac with an Admin account and launch the Terminal application
(/Applications/Utilities)
2. Copy and paste the following line into Terminal:
ln -s /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.0\ \(7A341\) /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.0.1
Note: If you installed iPhone SDK 3.0 somewhere other than the default /Developer
location, replace the "/Developer" directory as appropriate.
© 2009 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Xcode, Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, and Macintosh are
trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.

For some reason, the wonderful person who created the PDF put a hard break after the "/" right before the word "Developer". So if you actually do copy and paste the line into the terminal as they instruct, it doesn't work. However, if you copy and paste the plain text version on this page, it SHOULD work (no guarantees). If you want to copy and paste from the PDF, you will have to type everything following that "/" by hand, THEN it will work... Thanks Apple!

Here is a link to the advisory.

***UPDATE:

Several people have had to use:

ln -s /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.0 /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.0.1

If you found this post helpful, it was supported in part by the amazon links around the site. If you're going to buy a book anyways, why not help support this blog's author by clicking one of the links on this site to do it? If you are looking for a book on iPhone development, this one is amazing: Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK