Studio-33 is a BeOS related blog. Here you can find news from the Zeta and Haiku community, as well as articles and reviews on BeOS related topics. If you like this site please support it by submitting any content you feel that fits in.

It's Chirstmas!

I wish everyone on this earth very happy christmas days. I'm on my way to my parents place now for dinner, but just wanted to let you know that I recently started working on a new version of BeeF. As always you will see it appear here when it's done. Have nice days!

Year 2006

2006 Is the year in which yT will be releasing Zeta R2. Hopefully Zeta R2 will be like our little friend, R2-D2; smart, fast, competative, reliable and with a slice of humour. The guys from Mannheim, Germany have proved a lot skepticism wrong and are going strong especially in their home-country. There are a lot of ambitious things planned for the new year, like GCC 4.0, OpenOffice and multi-user support. Besides these, a decent native Internet browser is something I would love to see in R2. As you can see on the yellowtab.de website they've allready extendend their dealerships to Switserland, and I have good belives the BeNeLux countries, Austria, Czech Republic and Poland will follow soon. It would really be a blast to see Zeta in the shops in my home town!

2006 will also be the year of the first official release of the Haiku project. Living up to the famous R5 will not be an easy task, but with so much enthusiasm and knowledge in the Haiku team the expectations are high. Haiku will have it's problems caching up with the allready existing OS-OSes, but if they keep up the spirit and keep attracting new fan's they might become a serious player in the open-source society in 2006.

Usually I don't post much in the forums, and I'm a very quiet BeShare user, but I do know about most of the things going on in the small community BeOS has. Lately I've had the feeling that there are less arguments going on between the Haiku and Zeta fan's. Once upon a time we used to be one community, let's try to keep it that way. I'm a pretty pessimistic minded person, but for BeOS I've good feelings for the year 2006. And whatever happens, for me this is still the best operating system around!

I wish everybody reading this a very, very happy and properous 2006!

BeLife v1.0 Released Today!

BeLife version 1.0 is done, from today it's available in the apps section of this website, and from bebits.
More info about BeLife is in the newspost of December 10th.

Have fun!
p.s. If you find a bug, or have a suggestion or feature request, tell me about it in bebits Talkback...

BeLife Version 1.0

Wednesday, December 15, 2005

BeLife Version 1.0:



I made some big improvements on BeLife today!, all that needs to be done make a couple
more cool patterns, clean up the sourcecode a little and some testing.
Unfortunaltly I'll be working late tomorrow, so I expect to finish BeLife v1.0 this weekend.

BeLife!

The Game of Life (or simply Life) is not a game in the conventional sense. There are no players, and no winning or losing. Once the "pieces" are placed in the starting position, the rules determine everything that happens later. Nevertheless, Life is full of surprises! In most cases, it is impossible to look at a starting position (or pattern) and see what will happen in the future. The only way to find out is to follow the rules of the game.

Rules of the Game of Life:
Life is played on a grid of square cells--like a chess board but extending infinitely in every direction. A cell can be live or dead. A live cell is shown by putting a marker on its square. A dead cell is shown by leaving the square empty. Each cell in the grid has a neighborhood consisting of the eight cells in every direction including diagonals.

To apply one step of the rules, we count the number of live neighbors for each cell. What happens next depends on this number.

* A dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell (birth).

* A live cell with two or three live neighbors stays alive (survival).

* In all other cases, a cell dies or remains dead (overcrowding or loneliness).

Note:
The number of live neighbors is always based on the cells before the rule was applied. In other words, we must first find all of the cells that change before changing any of them. Sounds like a job for a computer!

Background:
Life was invented by the mathematician John Conway in 1970. He choose the rules carefully after trying many other possibilities, some of which caused the cells to die too fast and others which caused too many cells to be born. Life balances these tendencies, making it hard to tell whether a pattern will die out completely, form a stable population, or grow forever.

BeOS:
In BeOS I found two 'Life' applications, a screensaver called GLife and 'Life' an application which
simulates the Game of Life math. Unfortunally 'Life' had a dead link, so I hunted down the sources
and tried to inprove it a little. The result is 'BeLife'.

BeLife offers the same functionality as 'Life', plus user defined colors, special patterns, random patterns and an option to kill all life. Right now I'am still working to complete BeLife, it will be available soon from this site, and from Bebits.com.

Find out more about about Conway's Game of Life

Studio-33 News

A couple of minutes ago this page became the news page for studio-33.tk! At irregular intervals I will post some news about this website and my active BeOS/Zeta/Haiku projects here. Don't expect to much activity though, I'm a lazy guy...