Release Note

Despite the original plan to focus on stability, a few things that could also be seen as features have managed to creep into the new beta release of Little Go. Of course, if you ask me I will say that those feature-like things in reality are bugfixes ☺ that were necessary to make Little Go ready for the App Store. Care for an example? A stone is now displayed immediately when you touch the board with your fingertip - a great improvement in my opinion! Also the mess with GTP engine settings has been finally cleared up, and... wait, why am I writing this? Check out the project page and see for yourself...

The new beta build 0.5 of Little Go adds handicap and komi selection to the "New game" view, and even more importantly, there is now a proper scoring feature available that calculates an accurate territory score and lets you mark stone groups as dead or alive.

I have decided that the app is now feature complete for the first public release to the App Store. In the next iteration the focus therefore will be on fixing the most glaring issues and running the app through Instruments. I have never used Instruments before, so this will be an interesting experience. Hopefully not too interesting...

After many months of slow but steady development my newest pet project Little Go has now reached a state where I feel confident enough to post a release note on the front page of herzbube.ch. Little Go is an iPhone app that lets you play the game of Go on your favourite smartphone or on your iPad. You can play against another human, or against the computer.

Little Go is still under development and not yet available in Apple's app store, but you can contact me if for some strange reason :-) you are interested in beta-testing. Please refer to the project page for details about which information I need from you, or if you simply want to download the tar ball and look at the source code.

The main new thing in version 0.4 is that mkroesti is now available as a CGI script. Check out the demo site if you are interested. Visit the project page for more information and to download the tar ball.

You can grab the tar ball from the project page. The main change is that version 0.2 of python-aprmd5 introduces an md5 type for regular MD5 hashing, instead of directly exposing functions in libaprutil. The hashlib module, which is part of the Python Standard Library, uses exactly the same approach (in fact I have copied the idiom from there). A note on the side: I now consider python-aprmd5 to be feature complete, so there won't be much project activity unless there are bugs, or a change in libaprutil breaks python-aprmd5.

This is the initial release 0.1 of python-aprmd5, another little project of mine. As usual, the project page has all the details. Because it's an initial release here is the project blurb:

python-aprmd5 is a Python extension written in C that wraps the MD5 routines of the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) Utility Library (libaprutil) and exposes them to the Python interpreter as the module aprmd5. The main purpose of writing python-aprmd5 in the first place has been to expose the function apr_md5_encode(), which generates salted crypt-style hashes using a version of the MD5 hash algorithm that was modified especially for the APR project.

Version 0.3 of mkroesti renames the hash crypt-system to crypt-des and adds the following new hashes: crypt-md5 crypt-sha-256 crypt-sha-512 crypt-apr1; this hash requires the module python-aprmd5 which I am going to make available as a separate project ASAP As usual, the tar ball is available from the project page.

This new version of mkroesti adds Python 3 support, hopefully keeping backward compatibility with Python 2.6. Go to the project page to download the tar ball.

I have just made the first public release 0.1 of dgsmonX, a little project that I have been working on over the past 2 years. The project has its own web page where you will find more details if you are interested. Here is the project summary: dgsmonX is a faceless Mac OS X application (i.e. an application that is not visible in the Dock) that monitors the games you have joined on any number of Dragon Go Servers (DGS) and alerts you when it is your turn to move.

This is the first public release 0.1 of mkroesti, a small Python learning project of mine. Visit the project web page for details if the following project résumé piques your interest.

mkroesti is a program written in Python that, given an input, is capable of generating different kinds of cryptographic and other hashes from that input. mkroesti takes its input either interactively from the user, or from any one of the following sources: standard input, the command line, any file. So far, mkroesti does not have its own implementation of hash algorithms. Instead, it relies on other Python modules to provide algorithm implementations and merely acts as a front end to those modules.

At the moment, mkroesti can only be run as a command line utility. One of the next versions will allow mkroesti to be run as a web application. There is also a plan for implementing a Mac OS X GUI front end.