Stephen's Weblog

Ok, Finally – after a lot more effort than I thought it would take – the akkit.org optimization contest (for DS) is up and running, with it’s first competition!

Although the competition technically started a day and a half ago, I haven’t posted it yet because I didn’t have the test package ready, but is ready and posted now.

So, it is with great anticipation that I submit it to you, for review: Opti’s First Competition

Anticipation like, waiting for a pie to hit me in the face, or be run over by a car, or something similar ;) I do however want to see what level of interest there is, and try to make this into something that more people will be more seriously interested in next time (I am highly curious about how many people will be interested this first time) – So, to that end I am very interested in any sort of feedback. Anyway – That’s all I want to say for now, I’ll shut up before I ramble on about it for a very long time; Thanks for looking :)

So, I was holding off on posting until I had the optimisation contest site ready – but that didn’t work very well, it’s run a lot longer than I had planned for it to (oh, only a few months longer :P), but it’s finally getting to a usable state!

Currently, all of the public-facing user interface magic is done, I’m just wrapping up a few admin pages and testing things, but it’s looking very good! I’m going to aim to finish it up and get a proper competition started this weekend. However, if you want to get started and have some time to tinker around with the site first, have fun! The site is at http://opti.akkit.org/ – there is an IRC channel set up for support and general discussion (#opti on Blitzed). Also, please note the site still contains remnants from testing, that will all be swept under the metaphorical electronic rug when I get a real contest started but for now it serves to be some data to test with and show how things work. Comments and bug reports will be most welcome, as will suggestions for improvement – a design overhaul is planned for the near future as well (well, I like the design pretty well, but it’s functional rather than elegant, and it will be better if it’s both)

Since I’m not really in the business of detailing my life’s complexities in my blog (which, well, is what everyone else seems to use them for), the title of this post really sums up all I’m really going to say; Ordinarily I think life being complicated and interesting is a good thing, but it has it’s down sides too, and I’ve run into that lately.

That being said, I strive to not let things like life’s trivial and big problems bother me, and I’m continuing to work on entirely too many projects. Some things are making progress, others not so much. I’m prioritising Opti, followed by the logic analyzer, and I’ll decide what to do next when those are ready. I’ve picked up a few more smaller projects lately, tinkering around with graphics effects, video capture and image recognition, and I still have a stack of books to read.

I’m trying to decide whether I should disclose some of the smaller projects I’m tinkering around with and release binaries / possibly source / other information about them, I don’t really see this stuff being very useful to many people, and it does take time to document, depending on what level of disclosure I go with – but I think it’s generally pretty neat stuff – jury’s still out on this one but if you have an opinion I’d like to hear it.