Just a short blurb to inform my readers about two interesting bits of code that I’ve looked at in the past week.

The first is a voice-conferencing system called Skype. Skype is made by the same guys who brought you Kazaa (of which I am distinctly not a fan), and is exactly what it pretends to be: a great little free application that allows you to immediately do voice conferencing over the Internet with end to end encryption. It seems to work very well, with excellent sound quality, and they even have a PDA version for the Pocket PC. I used to use Yahoo Messenger, but Skype is much slicker.

The second is something you’ll have to compile yourself: Olithink, a chess program that is only 1600 lines long, but plays quite reasonably. It uses bitboards, alpha-beta search, transposition tables and pondering. It makes me rethink the idea that chess programs are too complicated.