Archive for May 2008
Monopoly Odds with No Jail Space
Looking at Monopoly odds I’ve found that Chance and “Go to Jail” are the biggest game changers. Without Chance the game is mostly played on the west and north sides. Without “Go to Jail” the odds of landing on any given property becomes much more consistant.
It’ll be interesting to see how that affects a real game.
The Yahoo User Interface library is a highly extensive collection of javascript code. I’ve been playing with it because it seems to be the best at figuring out where an element is located exactly. It was used initiality solely for that purpose in Chatter which requires the ability to tell other users where a player is on the screen.
It’s now used to get elements as well. There are now two lingering jQuery components: AJAX and draggable. Both those things seem to be better implemented in jQuery than YUI. jQuery makes it trivial to set a bounding region for draggable objects where YUI requires doing a lot of things yourself. The same goes for AJAX in YUI.
So for now I think I’m going to leave those two things alone. It’d be nice if there was a single library that did everything well but that’s probably wishful thinking.
World Daily Press is now an aggregate news source. RSS feeds from around the world are being added daily.
Chatter has been updated. You can now view RSS feeds using the new .rss command. Currently CBS,ABC,FOX and CNN are supported. More content sources will be added.
Creating a room has been made easier. The command is now “.mkroom <direction> <name>”
I heard somewhere that the purchasable space you are most likely to land on in Monopoly is Illinois. So I decided to write a program to test that out. The first number in parenthesis is the relative odds. 0% is least likely and 100% is most likely. The second number is the number of times that after a roll the player ended up on that space.
The program starts you out on GO and rolls the dice 1 million times. Not so surprising is that Illinois is the winner. But what is surprising is how much the game changes because of chance cards. Without them the game resides almost entirely on the west and north sides. That’s because you’re very likely to end up in jail which prevents you from reaching the east and south sides.
Taking out the “Go To Jail” space turns the board into a very even playing field. You’re pretty equally likely to end up on any spot although Illinois still takes the top spot. I don’t know if that would make the game more or less difficult. Boardwalk goes up into the top 10 properties so that could ruin the game.
Fry’s Electronics had a really good sale this Memorial Day weekend. Normally I don’t buy motherboards from them and I only buy CPUs if they’re in a box but I couldn’t pass up a 4800+ Dual Core 64 Bit AMD Processor with an ECS motherboard for $70. My now old computer was a cheap CPU/MB (2800+ Sempron/ECS) combo from Fry’s that I bought over three years ago and havn’t had any issues with it so I decided to take the risk.
I brought the parts home (a 1 hour drive) and got to work putting everything together. I had also picked up 2GB of DDR2 memory for $65 with a $30 mail in rebate. After everything is assembled I hit the power button. Everything seems to be running. The CPU fan is spining, the hard drive has spun up but nothing shows up on the screen and no beeps.
I figured it might be the video card since it’s an old ATI 7200 card. I pop it into my old system and it works fine. I take my server down and pop the memory into it and the memory works fine. So it’s either the motherboard or the processor that’s screwed up.
Fortunatly my parents live much closer to Fry’s than I do so I haul all the parts to their place and go to Fry’s to swap out the motherboard. I get the replacement to my parents, put everything together and fire it up. No beeps. Nothing on the screen. I take the video card out and it beeps. At least the MB appears to be working. My brother takes his computer apart and I put his video card in. Same problem. Nothing on the screen. No beeps.
Then for some reason he switches out the USB keyboard/mouse for a PS/2 mouse and keyboard. Now everything works.
I was using a PS/2 mouse and keyboard originally so the first MB was definitly dead. But I’ve never seen a motherboard that refused to post if it had a USB keyboard/mouse plugged in.
The reason I had to use an old video card is because the new MB doesn’t have AGP and I don’t have a PCI-Express video card. All I had was an old PCI video card. Which is fine actually. The system is intended for video editing using Adobe Premiere and for web development. My old system is fine for games so I’ll keep it around.
Chatter is a browser based graphical MUD. When you create an account you will be able to upload JPGs and PNGs to use as backgrounds for rooms you create and for your avatar image. When you’re in a room you can drag your avatar around the screen and the other users in the same room as you will see where you place your avatar.
Currently you can create an account, create and manage rooms, connect with friends and chat.
A map will be available soon to make finding your way around easier.