Gregory Haynes Weblog

At Portland State University we have regular Friday activities. A couple weeks ago, a colleague and I decided to make a "Hacker Jeopardy" platform for us to play as part of these activities. The whole project was fairly simple to implement and turned out as a huge success (despite some minor bugs). Heres a brief summary on how the system worked.

The GUI was written in PyQT by the other developer, and can be found on his github at http://github.com/ubiquill/jeopardy. It is a pretty simple Grid Layout filled with buttons for each of the questions. When a button is triggered it switches the Stacked Layout containing the buttons to a widget containing just a QLabel, and the QLabel is set to the question (well, answer) text.

The hardware buzzers were made using a Teensy (found at http://pjrc.com) and simple switches. The ATMega32u4 (chip on the Teensy) contains internal pull up resistors for GPIO pins, and by using these connected to a switch to ground a simple buzzer mechanism was made.

Every year the University of Waterloo CS Club (http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/) hosts an AI competition (http://ai-contest.com/). The contest is centered around one game and participants can upload AI's in various languages. This years game is a Galcon variant, which is a lot of fun to visualize and appears to be a great choice for the skill level of most participants. Minor tweaks with your AI are very noticeable when visualizing games due to the large amount of moves each opponent can make during the game.

Heres where the Qt fun comes in. Games are arranged randomly after uploading your AI to the contest's website and generally happen at a rate of less than 1 per hour (not so fun for testing your latest bot improvements). As a result a very clever participant made a simple  TCP server/client system for arranging live games with other clients (http://www.benzedrine.cx/planetwars/) . This allows you to play a game within minutes of you modifying your code, and then check it out afterwards on his rankings website. Wait, why not make these games show in real time on the client machines?

http://github.com/greghaynes/QTcpPlanetWars

A new beta release for Kobby has just been tagged and uploaded. This beta version works with libinfinity 0.4, and has several bug fixes and UI improvements.

Screenshot: 

Probably the most notable change (aside from using the newer libinfinity version) is the use of DockWidgets for the surrounding toolboxes, allowing a more customizable UI.  Theres also a couple bugfixes relating to text insertion / removal which I think has now reached a 'stable' state.

If all goes according to plan, in the next several weeks support for document uploading will be added and then the RC phase can begin (yay!).

Enjoy!

The fourth (and hopefully final) beta release for Kobby and Libqinfinity is now available on http://kobby.greghaynes.net.  This release fixes one major bug affecting editor synchronization, and has some much wanted UI improvements.

Probably my favourite new feature is the setup assistant:

Although this assistant was probably one of the most trivial additions (thanks to the API awesomeness in kdelibs) it works wonders for getting users setup properly.

Along with the new features, Kobby has moved off of github and on to http://gitorious.org/kobby and http://bugs.kde.org, so update your bookmarks.

In the (somewhat) recent release of Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10), Kobby Beta 3 is available to all users via apt (Horray!).  For those who do not know about Kobby, it is a collaborative editor built using libinfinity, allowing it to be protocol compatible with the GTK based Gobby editor.

For those who do know about Kobby you may have noticed the lack of development progress in the past couple months.  This is a result of my college workload being above normal for the past semester.  With the end of year approaching and a new semester I would really like to try and give collaborative editing the push into the public spotlight I think it needs.  A 1.0 release of the editor would help this greatly, but before this can happen the project is in need of some brave crash-testers.  Beta releases of Koby have been available for several months, but little more than a handful of bugs have been found since then.  This means there must be a whole lot of bugs still waiting to be found so please - break Kobby and tell us how you did it!  Hopefully KDE land can fill the bug queue enough to keep me busy over the new year holidays coming up.

If you're looking to get up and running quickly, I have created a public server you can use at infinote.greghaynes.net.