Software

Writing software is one hobby of mine. On this page you will find links to software that I have written.

My Projects

Pushover

pushover screenshot Pushover it a puzzle game. In this game you have to make all dominoes fall down by starting a chain reaction. You can rearrange the dominoes so that the reaction makes all dominoes fall. The problem is that you have only one push.

There are more problems of course: sometimes not all dominoes are reachable for rearrangement. A certain domino, the trigger, must fall last. You have only a limited amount of time, some dominoes behave quite strange and do not obey normal physical laws....

The game still needs some development, but it should be playable without great problems.

The website for the game is here.

Tower Toppler

toppler screenshot Tower Toppler is a little game that I have written some time ago. It is a reimplementation of an old arcade classic. The game is quite mature and should not contain lots of bugs. It is available for Linux, Windows, BeOS and OSX an might even be more portable but I did not get any messages for other platforms. The game is included the most important Linux distributions: Gentoo, Fedora and Debian have packages. Download and have fun! The web site for to the project is here.

Icons

icon fractal This fractal was created with a formula published in the book "Symmetry in Chaos" by Michael Field and Martin Golubitsky.

I found these images fascinating from the very moment that I had this book in my hands. What else can a computer scientist do than to write a program that calculates these fractals? I published the program, even though it's not as stable and mature as I would like. Maybe someday I will continue and improve it a bit. Right now it can create nearly all of the images from the book. They are even of a better quality because todays computers are so much more powerful. I implemented oversampling that smoothes the edges of the strange attractors considerably. The webpage contains only the source of the program so you have to compile it on your own.

Right now the program suffers bitrot. I can not even get it to compile on my current system.

SDL Go

sdlgo goban This project got stuck in a very early phase. It was supposed to be a really good looking graphical interface for GNU Go. GNU Go is a relatively good computer Go player but it lacked a good interface, one that really made you feel that it was designed for playing Go. Most UIs are a network interface that also allow you to play against programs. But because of the network interface they are complicated to use. Also they don't have a really good looking Goban. But anyway my interest got attracted by something else and I guess that I will not continue working on this project any time soon so if you want to, go on. The webpage contains the source and the graphics.

Burr Tools

burrtools screenshot BurrTools is my current pet project. It is a program to solve interlocking puzzles. The program can solve puzzle made out of all kinds of different building blocks, like cubes, spheres, and different tetrahedrons. This allows analysing puzzles that Stewart Coffin designed (see here), or even Wayne Daniels designs.

For this program I have not published all features that I programmed to keep some advantage in puzzle design for me. If you need a special puzzle analyzed you could mail me and ask if I could help you...