John Borwick's blog

I have dumped the initial version of the (platform independent?) Trade Wars trader program I’ve been working on, in the just-created projects directory.

I wrote this program on Mac OS X. It’s a very UN*X-y approach.

Basically, you run the app-server first, like so:

app-server.pl –port=5000 nc host-name port
You then connect to the app server.

telnet localhost 5000
Finally, you run the “trader” program:

trader.pl –auto localhost 5000
This program will print out possible initial trading values for you, and then negotiate subsequent trades.

I would say this is an “OK” Trade Wars 2002 trading program for novices. It’s nowhere near the quality of … Continue Reading

I’ve been working on the new UUFWS website. I’ve finally gotten http://www.uufws.org to redirect properly.

We are using Plone for the back-end, and MailBoxer, a Zope listserv manager, for our mailing lists. Zettai.net is doing a great job of hosting us.

Mom sent me a link to Strindberg + Helium, a small flash site with some funny (to me) cartoons. Czech it out!

Aaron Clauset has started up his own blog. It looks really nice!

I’ve been playing Trade Wars 2002 a LOT… at least since the beginning of December. I’ve been learning about strategy from various publicly-available forums.

The temptation to be better in the game, combined with the lack of another programming project, has driven me to write several versions of a trade wars 2002 client. The first version was very Windows-y: one big program with lots of GUI windows (handled with Perl, threads, and Tk).

The second version, on the other hand, is more UN*X-y, and is actually working. One program runs the equivalent of nc -e ‘telnet $SITE $PORT’. … Continue Reading