This is that list with a description of what it does and what I think of it. ALL of these applications are FREE (some of them you can pay to upgrade for more features). I have also provided a link to the application’s website.

• Notepad++ – Great lightweight text editor that I use to do most of my coding in.
• DisplayFusion - Probably one of the most essential applications I use. I have a 2 monitor setup, a 19″ and a 17″. This application allows for me to shuffle separate wallpapers for each monitor, and since they are different resolutions it automatically re-sizes them to my specifications. It also adds another task bar to the other monitor so that applications that are monitor 1 are only on that task bar and the same goes for monitor 2. It also looks just like the windows task bar and has the same position.
• Ultra-Mon – I used this program in XP for the task bar for monitor 2 but now I exclusively use DisplayFusion.
• Rainlendar - Lightweight calendar application that I basically live my life by. It also has a nice To-Do list feature that I occasionally use.
  • Lucid ‘Smoked’ Skin
• GCALDaemon – Syncs my Rainlendar with my google calendar, which in turn syncs to my phone.
• Spybot Search & Destroy – Spyware detection and removal tool.
• Ad-Aware – Adware detection and removal tool.
• Peer Guardian 2 – Blocks IPs of things like banner Ad’s. I use this application very rarely as it tends to just make web pages hang. On a side note, logitech devices want to phone home a lot.
• AVG – Great FREE anti-virus.
• iTunes - Music player. I don’t really like iTunes for many reasons. Mainly because it’s bloatware in both senses of the word. Meaning, it hogs a bunch of resources that a music player really shouldn’t. For example, right now it is running and taking 466,280K of memory!! That’s using more than 7.5 times more memory than the next highest process! The other reason, is that it comes with stuff, that I think, is unnecessary. Namely, the extra updater. This updater tries to install crap you don’t need like Safari, MobileMe, and Bonjour. Normally this doesn’t bug me because all you do is uncheck the box and you don’t have to worry about it; however, I find installations of Bonjour on my machine constantly even though I don’t ask for it. So, after that small rant on iTunes you might be asking yourself, why not use something else like songbird? The answer, I have an iPhone, so I am basically forced to use it. Don’t get me wrong iTunes has some great features like album flow view, automatically organizing and copying music, among other things, but overall I think the cons outweigh the pros.
• last.fm – “scrobbles” (logs) my music so I can look at what I listened to the most and what not. This is also what I use to find similar artists that I might like based on what I listen to. (Look at my last.fm profile here)
• Xfire - This is a handy little program that logs the time I play on games. While the logging is a nice little side-effect, I use it mainly to keep in touch with people from games I have played in the past and become friends with. Being that we are all “gamers,” we hop from game to game so it is nice to have a universal chat client that I can use to talk to them without having the same game, and being on the same server, etc. I would link you my profile but I’m embarrassed lol.
• DropBox – The most essential program I use, and should be used by everyone! It syncs up to 2 gigs for free and you can pay for more storage. Essentially this program keeps your files online, but better. If you have the dropbox application on your computer it uploads and downloads changes on the fly to your dropbox. This is great if you have more than 1 computer. Personally I use it for all of my school stuff. This way, while I’m writing a paper or program or whatever I can pick up where I left off on my desktop or laptop without losing anything. Even more, if I’m on a computer that isn’t mine I can just hop onto the website and download anything from my dropbox manually without having to install the application. I just have to make sure to upload it after the changes are made.
• Beyond Compare – Lightweight tool that compares files and directories. I used to use this on my flash drive to make sure my files were up to date on various computers before I got DropBox. Now, I use it for file comparisons while coding.
• TortoiseSVN - (Sub)Version control for my big coding projects. Great for working with a team.
• FasterPing - Turns off  Nagle’s Alogrithm. Nagle’s Algorithm waits for a certain number of packets to send before actually sending them out. This is better for efficiently sending out packets; however, when playing an online game, every millisecond counts. This being said, disabling this algorithm allows for packets to be sent as soon as possible, whether its by itself, or with a bunch, allowing for immediate response.
• Space Monger – A visual disk space evaluator. This tool helps me find sink holes of disk space that I can do without.
• Task Bar Shuffle – Used in XP. Task Bar Shuffle allowed me to rearrange items on my task bar. This application is no longer needed in 7 as the functionality is built into the OS.
• VLC Player – A great media player. If nothing seems to be able to play a file, VLC can. It comes with a bunch of codecs allowing for play of all types of media files. It also can repair corrupted media files to an extent.
• Firefox - Internet browser. Much better than IE (there is a reason they call it IIIEEEEEEEEEEE). Personally I like chrome better, due to it being more lightweight and tabs running as separate processes among other things. However, chrome does not re-size correctly when moving it to my other monitor, so I stick with FireFox. You will notice, most of my add-ons just make me feel like I’m using chrome while I’m using FireFox.
  • Chromifox - FireFox theme that makes it look like chrome
  • Adblock Plus – blocks well known ads
  • Better Gmail 2 – adds more functionality to Gmail
  • Better YouTube - adds more functionality to YouTube. Namely, remove all ads and comments.
  • Customize Google – removes ads from google search results and displays quick links to try the same search on alternate search engines.
  • Download Statusbar – Chrome-esque download bar
  • Fission - Safari-esque load bar displayed in address bar
  • Stylish - Facebook: Hide Highlights Sidebar – This is a script that hides that annoying new “Highlights” sidebar on Facebook
  • Tiny Menu – Compresses whole menu bar into a drop down menu to reduce clutter.
  • Xmarks - Bookmark and stored password synchronizer. Allows me to access my bookmarks and stored passwords on different computers

Have some application you couldn’t live without? Tell us about it in the comments.

On another note, I will be adding highscores to MazeMania for the DS in the upcoming weeks. Hopefully I can make it online, but the library for WiFi for PAlib is very limited, and it can’t be emulated so debugging will take much longer. So, only time will tell.

#include "PA9.h"       // Include for PA_Lib
#include "fat.h"       // Include for FAT read/writes
int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
...
fatInitDefault(); //Initialise fat library
FILE* testRead = fopen ("FATTest.txt", "rb"); //rb = read
char filetext[30];
fread(filetext, 30, 1, testRead);
fclose(testRead);

PA_OutputSimpleText(1, 1, 7, "FATTest.txt contains:");
PA_OutputText(1, 2, 8, "%s", filetext);
...
return 0;
} // End of main()

(Apologies that the code tags don’t seem to work in this theme…yet)

Well this code seems to appears to work on the emulator, and it’s really hit or miss on the actual DS. So I began to delve into this problem. After about 8-9 hours of trying to debug this problem by myself and with the assistance of Dr. Malloy trying many different things we didn’t really come to any finite conclusions.

Luckily, other students in my class are also reading from files and have found that FAT is no longer supported in this version in PAlib and have been using Embedded File System (EFS) Library to deal with file reading. So, that was a bunch of time wasted.

This is the EFS example that I found (shortened for space):

#include "PA9.h"        // Include for PA_Lib
#include "unistd.h"
#include "efs_lib.h"     // include EFS lib
int main(void) {
// init EFSlib & libfat
if(EFS_Init(EFS_AND_FAT | EFS_DEFAULT_DEVICE, NULL)) {
PA_OutputSimpleText(1, 0, 0, "EFS init ok");
PA_OutputText(1, 0, 1, "found NDS path: %s", efs_path);
struct stat st;
FILE* file;
u8* buffer;
int size;
// open a text file and read its contents
file = fopen("/test.txt", "rb");
if(file != NULL) {
stat("/test.txt", &st);// get file size using stat
size = st.st_size;
buffer = (u8*)malloc(size);
fread(buffer, 1, size, file);
buffer[size-1] = '\0';
PA_OutputText(1, 0, 4, "/test.txt content: '%s'", buffer);
PA_OutputText(1, 10, 5, "size: %d bytes", size);
free(buffer);
fclose(file);
}
} else {
PA_OutputSimpleText(1, 0, 0, "EFS init error!");
}
...
return 0;
}

(Again, apologies that the code tags don’t seem to work in this theme)

This works fine on both the emulator and the DS, except it only seems to work for doing it once, otherwise I get “EFS init error!”. So, at first I thought I would have to read each map and question into separate arrays at the beginning of the program. This, of course, is a horrible idea, not only would it increase load time by a significant amount but it would hog a ton of memory. So I began to try and figure out this problem. After a few more hours of investigation and debugging, I finally find out the problem. It turns out that the statement  “

if(EFS_Init(EFS_AND_FAT | EFS_DEFAULT_DEVICE, NULL))" 

will fail every time after the first call. It will fail because they have already been initialized. So that was a simple fix. I just modified it to this:

EFS_Init(EFS_AND_FAT | EFS_DEFAULT_DEVICE, NULL);
FILE* file = fopen (filename, "rb");
if ( file != NULL){

After more time being spent trying to figure out this new library, I think I finally have it figured out. EFS puts all of the files that you put into the “efsroot” folder in your program is loaded onto the NDS file and needs to be recompiled to have changes made to the file, be included in the NDS to be read. This kind of defeats the purpose of dynamic maps and questions on the files if they don’t have the source to recompile the NDS. Questions and maps will still be read from the files, in hope that reading and writing from files will become more dynamic in the future. Another thing is that EFS read works on the emulator but not EFS write. However, both work on the DS. So, after probably 12ish hours trying to trouble shoot the simple thing of file reading, it is finally solved and reading my maps into a 2d array to be rendered onto the screen.

Like I said, not a lot of text, but check out the links!

Here’s the list I came up with (tentative obviously):

• Story boards
• Highscores
• Levels
• Sound
• Music (Yes, it’s different from sound)
• Intro screen
• Credits screen
• Acheivements
• “Power ups”
• “Death” areas
• Walls
• Tutorial video
• General layout and display
• Collision detection
• Level editor

I have chosen to a similar game for the Nintendo DS, as I think there is a lot of potential in the touch screen and stylus. This game will be different in that the questions will be geared toward helping high school students prepare for the English part of the SAT by using old test questions.

I have also talked to my teacher, Dr. Malloy, and we are thinking of writing a paper to present at the Games+Learning+Society Conference based on the differences of the two very different platforms, education in games, and a future user study. The abstract can be found here. This played a pretty big role in why I am doing very similar games for each platform.

• Sim city-esque game
  • Design a carbon neutral city
  • Look at actual cities that are very industrialized and/or have very large carbon footprints
    • Look at actual laws and solutions that can be implemented in to reduce it
  • Get money through mini games to then implement carbon reducing systems or laws
• Redesign carbon footprint calculator to be more geared toward student life.
  • Recycling (beer cans and such lol)
  • Coffee cups (reusable)
  • Changing cafeteria habits
    • Don’t use a tray
    • Don’t get more than you can eat
  • Dorm habits
    • Changing thermostat
    • Water usage
    • Electricity usage
  • Ask them question about their lifestyle. Then, based on that answer tell them how they can improve upon that, and tell them the direct impact they are having on the environment by making that change. (Personal responsibility)
• Maze game with questions about the environment (possibly facts rather than questions?)
• Sort sort of apocalyptic story in which you are on an environmentally ravaged planet and it’s your job to get it back to normal.
  • Myst-esque exploratory game where you look for clues to see how the planet got to the way it did and how they could have prevented it.
• Add moral conflict and personal responsibility to anything and everything
• Burning trees cascading down in the background as timer of sorts? Or a planet that is corrupting?

• Environmental awareness
• Carbon footprints
  • Answer questions about lifestyle and give them their carbon footprint
  • Revamp the questions to target teens and college students
• Climate change
• Sociology of related environmental issues
  • Individuals are shaped by things around them (social ‘norms’)
• Generate interest, awareness, knowledge, attitudes, concern, behaviors towards the environment as a whole and not just global warming
• Look at some sort of statistics from the game
• Impress personal responsibility

In my CpSc 481 class, educational gaming, also taught by Dr. Malloy, we will be writing a game for the Nintendo DS (dual screen) using C and a library that assists with the programming on the DS. In this area there are 2 main libraries, PAlib and libnds.  With regard to the 2 libraries it is said that PAlib is easier and faster to learn than libnds, but libnds has more capability. I will be using PAlib, so I can learn the language and program the game within the semester. This game is open ended, as far as the content, with the catch that it is educational in some way.

More on these 2 games coming soon.

If you like the new layout, or hate it, let me know in the comments!

Note: The site is currently a work in progress, on which I hope to get looking and running much better after I finish all of these projects and finals!