JZBot now supports BZFlag

This is about a week late, but JZBot can now connect to BZFlag servers. If you're a bzflag server owner and want a bot at your server for some random reason, you can download JZBot at http://jzbot.googlecode.com. Or join irc.freenode.net #jzbot and ask for help.

Geeky to the Max

From MrDudle's blog:

<C0BALT> I also use OCR from MSPaint when I’m really getting serious about coding.
<Limp_Trizkit> oh, when i’m really serious, i pull out my screwdriver and some magnets
<Limp_Trizkit> and take apart the hard drive with my code
<Limp_Trizkit> then use the magnets to flip the bits by hand
<Limp_Trizkit> then reassemble the drive and compile
<C0BALT> I never thought of that!

You know you're a geek when...

I'm working on a list of "You know you're a geek when..." phrases here. I'll be adding to it periodically, so keep checking it!

Fact interpreter in Python

On request of another guy involved in JZBot, I ported JZBot's Fact interpreter to Python. It's available in the JZBot Subversion repository at http://jwutils.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/projects/jzbot2-python/fact-parser/. src/test.py under that directory is a Python script demonstrating how to use the interpreter.

libusbJava.so

For some reason, libusbJava did not want to compile on my linux system. It consistently issued warnings that some "libusbpp.so" (which I still have yet to figure out what the heck it is) was missing. I did some googling, and eventually managed to compile it by hand using this command:

g++ -shared -Wl,-soname,libusbJava.so -I/usr/lib -I/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.16/include -I/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.16/include/linux -shared LibusbJava.cpp -olibusbJava.so.0.2.4 /usr/lib/libusb.a

Note that the /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.16 paths are specific to whatever version of java you're using.

Anyway, with that taking upwards of an hour to do, I figured I'd post a pre-built binary for anyone that's looking for one. This was built on Ubuntu 9.04 against libusb-0.1-4 (Synaptic reports its version number to be 2:0.1.12-13; I'm not knowledgable enough to know the difference between the two), so I won't make any guarantees as to whether it will work properly on your system. You can download the binary here.