BuddyGo

Recently, I started working on a new sideproject, this time its about gaming. Yes, I had created a few games in the past, the best one I had made was probably Chaos at Corneo using Macromedia Flash 8, which was over 12 years ago. Revisiting making games after so many years brings back a lot of memories. GameAgora , my new project, is about gaming in public places. It works by placing a giant screen in public spaces which acts as the primary display for the game to be rendered, and players can join the games by simply scanning the QR code that is shown on the screen; their phones instantly turn in a joystick. Yes, this project has some inspirations from my Joycast project. As a quick explainer on the idea, I have created a video and uploaded it on YouTube, which is embedded below. I have a feeling that this might be a good project to keep working on the side. I had worked on BuddyGo for several years, and I had observed that things do pick up if you keep working on it then. I am thinki...

Update: I kept working on this and I have released it as a package for Windows, Linux and macOS. Check it out: https://github.com/zenineasa/joystick/releases/tag/v1.0.0 -- During the days when I was pursying my master's programme, my friends and I used to occasionally go to a classroom in the university, turn on a projector, connect devices like Nintento Switch or Gaming computers and loads of joysticks, and play different simple multiplayer games; MarioKart was my favourite. From time-to-time, when I get together with people, I ponder that it would be a good idea if I bought such devices. Indeed, I do have a laptop, which could easily run such games; SuperTuxKart is similar enough to MarioKart and it can run on Linux, Windows and Mac. However, I do not have joysticks with me at the moment. Therefore, I think it would be a good idea if I simply worked on a project that would enable using our phones as joysticks. From a high-level, the plan is to host APIs on a NodeJS server that wo...

Correlation and causation are two concepts that people often mixup in their minds. I must admit that I myself have been guilty about this, and it unlikely that I would ever entirely grow out of it as it is wired deeply into our psychology. Let me use this article to briefly emphasise what the concepts of correlation and causation means, some interesting stories that have emerged from people misunderstanding these concepts and an algorithm that attempts to find causal relationship using correlation information. Here is a story that I heard a professor of mine, Prof. Dr. Ernst-Jan Camiel Wit, tell us during a lecture. There was a school that was involved in a study to see if providing free mid-day meals to students, which they could choose to be subscribed to this or not. At the end of the study, both the students who subscribed to it and did not where tested for different health indicators. It was observed that the students who chose to have meals from the programme had poorer health...

Recently, I wrote a paper based on my master thesis project, which I had attempted to submit to AAAI conference. However, the attempt was futile as the reviewers did not really like it. It was quite interesting to see that at least some of the comments by the reviewers are contradictory with each other; it looks like I am not the only one who is lazy to read. Anyway, I decided to make it available for the public via arXiv and viXra. The following are the links to the same. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15191 https://vixra.org/abs/2310.0118 Originally, I had only planned on submitting this to arXiv. When I checked the submission portal a couple of hours after the scheduled publishing time, I saw that the article was put "On Hold" from being published. I searched for the reasons for the same, and I read in a few places that sometimes arXiv takes a lot of time to publish them once put on hold, and sometimes they just don't publish them at all. Therefore, I decided to submit it ...

I think it is for the best to start a separate blog under HexHoot. This will help me promote the project by making lots of content related to it, which could eventually drive traffic into the page. I really am betting on HexHoot taking off. I see a lot of potential in the project. Check it out:  https://blog.hexhoot.com/

A few days ago, I decided to make version release for HexHoot on GitHub, as I think it is important to differentiate something that is more stable and something that is under development. Having versions that people can download seem to be the best move to do the same. Following the same, I shared it with people over LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. One of the feedbacks I received over private messages was asking me to provide more information on what it exactly is and how to use it. Although all these information are written in the documentation and the website, it appears to be that people like to watch videos explaining the same. Therefore, in the past couple of days, I have been performing screen recording and doing voice overs. Interestingly, during this process, I found a couple of issues with the software, and I fixed those. The following is the video. Please do provide your feedback on this project. It would be lovely if any of you are interested in contributing to the same. Y...

I find that the domain name that I purchased on an impulse, hexhoot.com, would be the ideal name for the p2p social network; both of which I described in some of my previous posts. I have been working on it during my pasttime for about a month now, and I decided to make it opensource. You can have a look at the project using the following link: https://github.com/zenineasa/hexhoot I have attempted to follow all the best development practices as much as I can. I have written tests, and, enabled continuous integration feature in GitHub to run all the tests, lint and copyright checks for the code changes that is being made. I also have captured all the foreseeable tasks in a Trello dashboard. This helps me keep track of all the bugs that I have detected and all the important tasks that need to be completed. There are quite a lot of tasks left to make this bug-free and feature-rich. I hope I will find enough time and motivation to do the same in the coming days.