To get a little more experience with ActionScript 3, I wrote up a very simple class which will take a rule number, and then generate a cellular automata based on that.

The movie below requires Flash 9 or above to be installed. Some rules to try out: 90, 30, 73, 110, 150. Valid numbers are 0-255, but not all produce interesting results.

Direct link to flash movie (got some people complaining the SWFObject script doesn't work under Vista)

See Wikipedia for more info, and Wolfram.com has a list of all 256 possible results
Here's the code:
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So apparently ICANN has decided to start allowing people to purchase new Top Level Domains. Existing ones are things like .com, .net, .info, .biz, and so forth. They are going to charge a hefty $100,000 for the privilege however. Personally I think it's a terrible idea, and it's just a plot to make some quick money on their part. Anyway, my buddy guesses there will be 950 vanity TLDs registered in the first auction (where a vanity TLD being one that refers to a company, person, organization) I say that's way too high, I'd be surprised if there were over a hundred.

ole has taken my KVM port to Nintendo DS and added some updates. I haven't played with it much, but he lists the changes as follows.

R3: New features added by Ole:

• fixed the CLDC implementation (timer, memory size, system properties)
• added support for reading of the PNG images (code taken from the PhoneMe project)
• implemented native functions for rendering the basic graphics primitives on the screen
  (lines, rectangles, triangles, images)
• added support for accepting the JAD files in the application browser
• added the core part of the Pstros MIDP library
• added VideoTest example to show how to draw on the screen
• added '_rebuild.bat' to show how to build and preverify the class files.
  Note WTK installation is required.

This is quite interesting if it is able to run some MIDP-compliant games, but we'll need to do some testing to see how the speed compares to your average mobile phone.

UPDATE: He's made a few more updates since I originally made this post. Be sure to check out ole's site for the latest info and download links.

Just a tiny update to my homebrew mandelbrot browser for Nintendo DS. This version merely adds DLDI-support, meaning you should be able to save screenshots as .PNG from pretty much any flashcart. Check the previous post for screenshots, more info, etc. To the right is an actual image saved from the program.

Download r06 .nds

I've finished assembling my little gadget...and it works! As a side note, Flux is super handy, it made soldering the tiny SMT stuff really easy, also I learned a few tips from this video.

I ran into one small problem: on the board, I added a JTAG port for in-circuit programming & debugging. However, my cheapo JTAGICE mkI (not mkII) doesn't support the newer AVR chip I put on the board. So I had to hack in an ICSP port, hence the four ugly green wires coming out of the middle of the board. But once I got that in, I updated the program I had running on the prototype. There were just some minor changes, IO pins were mapped differently, and the syntax for using Timers was slightly changed.

Now that the hardware is essentially done, I need to write some more software, get a few polished minigames on there.

UPDATE: Please enter your email address, I'm trying to find out if there's any interest in these devices. If enough people subscribe, it will encourage me to do something about it

You can download a short video, or watch it online here:

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