I just got around to publish my latest project. It’s a site for a christian festival/conference called Någonting Större (Something Greater or Something Larger in English). It has taken a while but it turned out really great (mainly because I didn’t have to do to much work with the design) and hopefully many other great things will come out of the codebase (called BeaverSite, a CMS built with ASP.Net MVC which works GREAT!). A lot of code in this project is also shared with other projects such as BeaverShop and Imager Gallery.Net which both speed up this project and at the same time progressed the others. You can see the page in its full glory at http://www.någontingstörre.se/.

To change language (when you can’t or don’t want to use the Language Bar) you press the following:

Left ALT + SHIFT

The game I’m working on (with a tiny bit of help of a friend of mine who still has about 70 lines of code that I haven’t touched in the project) is a realtime strategygame built around the towerdefence concept. Some sort of enemies tries to get from point A to point B without getting killed. To kill them you build different types of towers along the way that hurt them in different ways and hopefully enough to not let them through. For each creature that get to point B you lose a life and when enough get there it’s game over for you. If you want to know more about this type of game http://www.towerdefence.net/ is a great place to go looking.

Below is a short video I recorded from the latest build of the game. It currently only features one type of tower and one type of enemy and they both use some placeholder graphics I made in Paint.Net so don’t expect to much of that. If you happen to have some graphics skills and would like to help out then you are very welcome!

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5wPSRH5xTk

And another thing, it’s also best viewed in fullscreen mode since the video was recorded in 800×600 resolution. Hope you enjoy it!

I’ve been doing some work on this blog the last few days, I changed the url to get it closer to my main site, updated WordPress to 2.7 (whoa, suddenly I’ll want to write things just to see their awsome GUI), added some stubs to articles and codesnippets that I feel I want to post and I’ve finally added my feed to feedburner to get some stats on my subscribers aswell (and avoid the hassle for everyone to change their subscription url if I decide to move again). The new url to subscribe to is http://feeds.feedburner.com/crazybeavers/blog.

Oh, and I’m home sick today so if this post doesn’t make any sense to you I’ll blame it on my cold.

http://compubeaver.com/

• BeaverSFV 1.1 – 167
• CrazyBeavers YouTube Downloader 1.01 – 6
• CrazyBeavers Calendar Class 1.1 – 143
• CrazyBeavers RSS Class 1.3 – 188
• CrazyBeavers Upload Class 1.2 – 233
• CrazyBeavers Chat 1.3 – 123
• Imager Gallery 5.5 Prerelease – 1276
• CrazyBeavers Upload 2.4 – 207
• CrazyBeavers ZIP 1.0 Prerelease 3 – 69
• Imager Resizer 2.4 – 957

Looking at this it seems quite clear that Imager Gallery and Imager Resizer would be the best candidates for downloaded products. These stats are just for the past few months though but if they’ve had similar numbers since they were released during 2004-2005 it would give quite a lot of downloads. Lets elaborate a bit further though, most of my old ASP and ISAPI/COM applications are listed on HotScripts and Aspin aswell, lets look at their popularity there to the calculation.

• CrazyBeavers Calendar Class 1.1 – 5 565 views on HotScripts with 3 votes (4.33 average)
• CrazyBeavers RSS Class 1.3 – 2 175 views on HotScripts with 2 votes (5.00 average)
• Imager Gallery 5.5 Prerelease – 22 271 views on HotScripts with 74 votes (4.39 average)
• CrazyBeavers Upload 2.4 – 3 415 views on HotScripts with 15 votes (4.20 average)
• CrazyBeavers ZIP 1.0 Prerelease 3 – 651 views on HotScripts with 2 votes (5.00 average) – Listed under CGI & Perl though, wasn’t allowed in the ASP category
• Imager Resizer 2.4 – 6 246 views on HotScripts with 176 votes (4.78 average)

• Imager Gallery 5.5 Prerelease – 26 940 views on Aspin with 9 votes (5 stars)
• CrazyBeavers 2.4 – 6 147 views on Aspin with 1 votes (5 stars)
• Imager Resizer 2.4 – 17 325 views on Aspin with 37 votes (5 stars)

Now thats some numbers, over 22 000 views of Imager Gallery on HotScripts and almost 27 000 on Aspin. If we go a bit crazy and assume that a third the of people (probably it would be closer to a quarter of the people but that isn’t as fun to count with) also downloaded the script we would have 16 000 downloads of Imager Gallery there! If we then add the numbers we would have 17 000 assumed downloads which is quite a lot. Still, Imager Gallery is only the second most downloaded of my products. The true winner, and the only product which I know for sure how many times it has been downloaded, is CrazyBeavers Winamp Controller. Counting in at 25 239 downloads since January 27th, 2005 its by far the most downloaded product I ever created and one of the few that I don’t use myself!

This article was just a little ego boost for myself but it feels so damn good that people actually seem to appreciate my work enough to download it over 20 000 times!

A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked if I knew any way to save a video from YouTube onto his harddrive so he could use it in his school presentation. A quick search on google turned up few services that could download the .flv for you which was pretty neat though not enough since it would require that the schools computers could play .flv, which they can’t. My idea then was to make a simple wrapper for FFmpeg (a great open-source tool for recording and converting audio and video streams) and let him use that for conversion. The goal at this time was to make it easy for him to do this without my help in the future and maybe to let my other classmates do it as well. It worked out pretty well in the end and I now have a really neat C# wrapper for FFmpeg.exe which I hope to release some day for everyone to use. It was however not really satisfied with this, my application only did half the job, and the easy part was what was missing. I went looking around the net a bit for solutions on how to download the .flv-files from YouTube and found several ways which had their advantages and drawbacks. In the end, I borrowed a few ideas from most of them and got my own working solution for getting the .flv-files.

The result of this was the brand new CrazyBeavers YouTube Downloader which was released yesterday as version 1.0 and earlier today as 1.01 (just love the early bugs, so simple, so devastating). I’ve seen another program out there that does the same as mine but seeing the page I found it on i didn’t really want to download and run that .exe so hopefully this will be of use to more then just my class now.

With this release I also returned to NSIS (NullSoft Install System) for the installation which works a ton better then the Visual Studio setup projects I’ve used for BeaverSFV. I’ve scripted it to check for .Net 2.0 and if not it will download and install it. It also checks if the system is x86 or x64 to decide which package to get. Hopefully I’ll get around to discuss that one some day as well since it turned out really great. But until then, enjoy my new application!

I’m currently worked up with school and some other (paid) projects but I also have lots of cool stuff coming up for CrazyBeaver Software. First of all I’ve setup my own Subversion server on which I will host most of my new projects making the source available to everyone! To start with I will be the only one who can make commits but that might change if someone shows a real interest in helping out. I’ve also setup Trac to help managing the larger projects (such as ImagerGallery.Net) by giving me a great platform for handling bug and feature requests. Hopefully I’ll have all this aswell as the new CrazyBeaver Software up and running before 1st December but since I don’t know how much I’ll need to do for school and my other projects. Keep watching this spot (maybe subscribe to my RSS feed?) for more info!