There are a lot of reasons why the e-mail is spam:

• The e-mail got into the junk folder
• I was unable to download the attachment because the webmail found a virus in it (good job Hotmail!)
• The e-mail was saying something about my delivery from January
• UPS don’t ask you to go their office to pick the package
• The message was sent to “Victor Harris”

The coincidence is that today the package should have arrived so, initially, I thought is a valid message. There might be a security breach in UPS’ system that allows others to track packages. I never got such an e-mail before registering and sending.

What is even more interesting is that I registered with one e-mail address and I got the spam on another one. Coincidence or consequence?

Game Of Life

The Game of Life is not really a game because no one plays it. It is a cellular automaton, a zero player game in which the only human interaction is the initial setup. Then the game evolves by itself under the constraint of some rules, until it gets to a stable state.

The game’s world is a 2D grid in which each node is a place that can hold one individual. Each individual can be dead or alive. Basically you can see the world as a black, white grid in which black represents living individuals and white dead ones (the figure on right).

Each grid represents a single generation. In order to get a new generation the current one must evolve. This process implies that every individual (dead or alive) node will be evaluated and, based on the result, will survive, die or resurrect. The evaluation function takes in consideration the number of alive neighbors a node has (a node can have up to 8 neighbors):

1. If one individual has less than two neighbors alive, it will be dead in the next generation because of underpopulation.
2. If one individual has more than three neighbors alive, it will be dead in the next generation because of overcrowding.
3. If one individual is alive and has two or three neighbors alive, it will survive in the next generation.
4. If one individual is dead and has three neighbors alive, it will resurrect (be alive) in the next generation.

That’s all. Based on this transition, each individual gets from one state to another, from generation to generation. There are two situations in which no more changes will be made between generations:

1. All individuals are dead.
2. All individuals are in a stable state from which they cannot die. The square on right is a stable population that cannot change because all alive individuals have two or three neighbors and all dead individuals have at most two neighbors alive so they cannot resurrect.

The fun part was to implement this myself. I created a small MFC application that is able to load files with predefined configuration or to generate random populations up to 10.000 individuals. If you download the sample be aware it will crash if you load invalid files and do strange things – it is just a prototype.

Demo

Code and download

If you want just to ‘play’ then you can download the binary file GameOfLife Binary (67.06 KB) (the archive also includes some great samples).

For those who love programming, the source code is also available. Technical details:

• In order to prevent flickering the drawing is double buffered.
• There is a small memory leak (4K every few seconds) but I am too tired to look now for it – will check it sometime later or if you find it, let me know.
• The ‘gol’ files, that describe a predefined world, contain on the first line the width of the world, on the second the height and on the next lines the world where each node can be 0 or 1.
• The solution is for Visual Studio 2010.

The archive containing source code: GameOfLife Code (132.88 KB).

Have fun and please provide feedback!

More info and references

• More information about Game of Life
• More information about cellular automatons

Windows Vista/2008 Service Pack 2

It was released a few hours ago for general audience and it brings some important fixes. I think is a must-have. It is a must have and now can be downloaded through Windows Update.

I have just installed it through Windows Update. It took about 30 minutes to complete (download + install).

• x86-based systems download link
• x64-based systems download link.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta

The lastest version of the well known IDE brings a lot of new features: editor completely written in WPF, a more eye candy user interface, .NET Framework 4 (dynamic types for C#, named parameters, implicit values, etc.). It is available for free and you can download either Professional or the Team Suite edition (I recommend the last one).

• Download link.

Office Mobile 6.1 Upgrade

If you have a Windows Mobile (5, 6 or 6.1) phone that came with Office Mobile you should consider this upgrade (it is free!). After installing the update Word, Excel and PowerPoint mobile will be able to open OpenXML files (*.docx, *.xslx and *.pptx).

The update is about 3 MB and even if Office in installed in phone’s ROM you can choose to update it and use the storage card for the new files.

• Download link.

TweetDeck

Using Twitter? Then you should install this software to manage your twits. It allows you to view, send, reply, retweet, do whatever you want. It runs on the local machine and it is based on Adobe AIR.

• Download link.

Live Writer

It is annoying to go every time on the administration page on your blog to write something new. Using Live Writer you can write posts directly from your desktop in a editor. The cool thing is that it makes a preview of your post just like it will appear on the blog.

With it you can manage multiple blogs, you can save/open posts/drafts for editing, you can insert media and you have many formatting options.

It is included in the “Live Essentials” package.

• Download link.

We learned a lot from the previous two events and we made some significant changes:

• Sending e-mails in order to join was not a good idea because e-mails are hard to synchronize amongst the organizing team. Now there is a form that must be filled in order to join the event.
• We are collecting some data in order to improve future events. We want to know what attendees want to see on GeekMeet.
• We are trying to bring important speakers from major companies like Adobe or Apple.

Up to now we have three confirmed speakers: Laura Bularca who will talk about “Game Dev”, Mihai Dragan who will talk about “Research si creativitate” (Research and creativity) and Cornel Creanga from Adobe who will talk about “Rich Internet Applications”.

The event will take place on Saturday, May 30 in Okian library, Brasov.

For more details check the official announcement.
To register to the event fill this form.
You can also follow us on Twitter.

This book is interesting for beginners because it has a lot of drawings and diagrams that explain better the concepts described by text. It could be used by persons migrating from C++ or VB to C# or it could even be the support material for a course.

In 730 pages the author, Daniel Solis offers a very visual approach – with lots of figures, diagrams and code samples – that will help you get to work with C# fast.

Go here to download your copy.

Yesterday I attended the first GeekMeet presentation from Brasov, Romania. It was pretty exciting because I was one of the speakers.

My general impression about this event was good. The organizers did their job well, with little mistakes – mistakes are inevitable for the first event :). The presentations were nice too; there were six:

1. Mihai Gheza – “SEO Kung Fu”
   He told us about SEO and what can we do to improve it.
2. Victor Hurdugaci – “Cloud Computing – Lumea din nor”
   My presentation.
3. Maria Diaconu – Agile, Scrum, XP
   A 30 minutes workshop about the basic idea behind Agile methodologies.
4. Claudiu Gamulescu – “eCommerce – Analiza de Criza”
   A presentation about the effects of crysis on electronic commerce
5. Vlad Georgescu – “Design Related”
   Some general design related topics. Actually this presenation started an intresting debate about speculation and employment.
6. Bobby Voicu
   Bobby’s presentation did not have a name. I will copy what Mihai said, Bobby’s presentation was a “friendly preaching”.

Mihai already uploaded his presentation. When the others will follow him I will update their links.

My presentation can be downloaded by click the following link: cloud-computing-geekmeet-2009-03-28. It is about cloud computing, mainly focused on Microsoft Windows Azure. Because there were no feedback form – unfortunately  – I want to ask my visitors who attended the presentation to give some feedback (as a comment or by e-mail at contact [at] victorhurdugaci [dot] com).

I am still waiting for pictures. When some will be available I will upload them here.

See you on GeekMeet Brasov 2 (April 25 – same place, same hour).

[Wikipedia] Spore is a multi-genre massive single-player online metaverse video game developed by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. It allows a player to control the development of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. It has drawn wide attention for its massive scope, and its use of open-ended gameplay and procedural generation.

That’s what I am playing :D

See below some pictures of my evil (aggressive, carnivore) creature just before the Tribal Age:

Better late than never:

The solution is not here because it might ruin the fun of solving the puzzle. If you need it try to obtain it from the picture :-D (or just leave a comment here with a valid e-mail and I will send it to you).

For those who don’t know what Office Live is: Office Live is like a lite cloud version of Share Point. It enables users to store, organize and share documents.

There are four new big features:

• Support for folders. Now the workspaces can contain folders in order to help us organize documents. I am really excited about this feature because I have also requested in through the feedback form. I am using Office Live a lot and I needed folders and subfolders.
• Cut/Copy/Paste. Now Office Live provides support for cutting/copying documents and pasting them in another folder/workspace.
• Increased storage space. The storage space increased to 5GB. That’s a looot. If you don’t think so just try to see how many word documents can you store in 5GB :)
• Eight new languages. The new languages also include Romanian (personally I prefer English but there are other who prefer their native language. The new languages are: Hungarian, Romanian, Lithuanian, Serbian Latin, Ukrainian, Slovak, Latvian and Slovenian.

When I created this blog I’ve spent a few days searching the Internet for the best offer. What I found (and bought) was the Basic Plan from Lunar Pages.

For just $4.95/month they offer:

If you want to access Lunar Pages in order to see their offers and/or buy hosting follow this link.