Archive for September, 2004
Brittle
Well those who are waiting for Bearthing to be finished will be happy to hear that I’m halfway through the remaining West Wing DVD’s. Unless Season 5 is suddenly released in the next few days.
Bearscript is no longer brittle, and having deleted all the commented out lines from my code, I’m finding it quite malleable. I can actually come up with wishlists (which I’ve done) and work my way through changing things without hitting on any major problems. This bodes well for the future, for I’m sure I’ll get plenty of complaints about the language once this thing is out there for real.
If you haven’t already checked it out, give it a shot, write some scripts, find bugs and provide feedback.
Very
As you can see from the top of the page, my recent purchases have been updated. Spending money is so liberating.
There’s nothing to talk about regarding Shaun or Shawshank, that’s all been done before. Sock hasn’t been delivered yet and A Certain Chemistry I only just started reading (like, first two pages). But The Complete Far Side… let’s talk about that.
Impressive. Very impressive. Also very large, very heavy and very funny. But then you probably guessed that last part.
In fact it’s so very, that it won’t even fit in my bookcase. And my coffee table is probably about to collapse.
Reverse
Sometimes you wake up in the morning with a purpose. A purpose which the night before didn’t even figure in your head. Life is funny that way sometimes, the way your outlook on a situation can change so suddenly.
Of course the problem is that it can just as easily reverse itself again. But that’s what makes life interesting.
Evolution
It seems that the changes to Bearscript never end. Even now, despite it all working, I keep making changes. I write things in it, I think about it, I look at other languages (I even looked at PHP, I feel so dirty!) and the longer time goes on, the more it evolves. Evolution is a good thing, it gets you to places you wouldn’t think of right off the bat and best of all, it helps fix my early mistakes.
And anything that fixes my mistakes is alright by me.
Tonight I decided that all variables should have $ signs at the start. Not for any real technical reason, the parser worked quite fine picking up variables without it. But purely from a readability point of view, being able to better pick out variables from function names, handler names and language keywords is a good thing. It was the same reason for changing to braces, people are used to them, code editors help you use them, and it makes it easier to pick out where things start and end.
The worst part about changes is updating the documentation. After changing all the array and keyarray creation methods on Friday and having to go through and update all the examples, doing it again tonight is 20 minutes of my life I’m never getting back.
Unrelated to all of that, today was an anniversary of something. I celebrated it to the best of my ability.
Crash
I made a brief (very brief) mention of Burnout 2, and now I’m going to make a slightly longer, but still brief, mention of Burnout 3.
It’s fast. REALLY fast. Maybe my reactions have slowed in my recently increased years, but I had a hard time keeping up. I was all over the place, I crashed more than I should have done (since this was the racing mode, as opposed to the crash mode) and yet, thanks to an obviously kind early learning curve, completed the first few races with a handful of awards.
It looks great, sounds great, feels nice, and best of all, it’s good solid fun.
Is that brief enough?
Sight
I keep a text file on my desktop called bearthing.txt. It’s been there for a while, and it’s grown over time. It’s not a particularly large file, but what started off as a neatly collected set of todo items slowly degenerated into my rambling thoughts on exactly where I thought my attentions should be focussed at the time.
I may have mentioned before that I spend a lot more time planning on how to write something before I actually do so, and Bearthing is probably the best example of this process yet. In the 9 or 10 months I’ve been on this seriously (well, as serious as I can be, between the procrastination), I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about what’s the right way to do something than I have actually writing code. Even now, I’m thinking about how to write the form handler, and have been for a few days with no proper plan of action yet. Then there’s sessions, Bearkey authentication, images, XML, the admin system… so many parts, so many different combinations, so many things that have to work together, it’s enough to give you a headache.
Which I’ve got. As always.
But back to my text file. Over the past week I’ve started to notice a change, in that what I’m writing has started to go back to lists again. The focus has started to tighten and the picture in my head is becoming clearer. And although I’m still miles away from finishing all of this, there is an end in sight, light at the end of the tunnel. I can feel it.
And it’s great.
Automated
Another week comes to and end, as does another night of watching The West Wing (yes, I got more) and not doing any work. With any luck I’ll run out of episodes soon and then I’ll be able to get something done.
I was going to write a rant about telemarketers and their wish to constantly bombard me with automated phone calls telling me I’ve won a prize, but I’ve lost the urge now.
I wonder what the weekend holds.
Birthday
My birthday.
The presents were great (thanks to all those who contributed to the pile), but the evening was less than I expected.
What did I do wrong is a question I ask myself far too often.
Long
Well I’ve run out of episodes of The West Wing to watch, so I guess Bearthing development will continue tomorrow. Unless I get my hands on more DVD episodes before then that is.
Not a lot else happening right now. And I’ve sat here for long enough trying to think of something.
Hat
I’ve got a dog for a hat. La la la.
Hat dog. Dog Hat.
I’ve got a dog for a hat.
Disturbing
Well that’s it. The holiday is over. Tomorrow, and much to my disgust, I have to get up and goto work. What I find most disturbing about this is how early it’s going to be.
I certainly don’t feel as if I achieved much, if anything, during my period of lazyness. But I do feel like it was a nice bit of downtime and look forward to the next one. Which probably won’t be far away since there’s only 3 months of the year left and I still have 3 weeks of holiday to take.
Wait
I would have done a lot more work done today if I hadn’t started watching DVD episodes of The West Wing (from the beginning, Season 1).
It’s one of those programs that I’d barely seen 20 minutes of, but I always thought it looked good. I just hadn’t taken the time to sit down and watch it, so decided it was about time. Damn, it’s entertaining.
Bearthing can wait.
Exceeding
Bearthing wise, database access is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. I see it as probably the most important part of the whole project because the majority of sites developed on the system are going to be pretty useless without it. I’ve considered many different approaches to the problem, but tonight made the decision that each user that wants one, can simply have their own mySQL database to do with as they please.
Now this may turn out to be a horrible decision, and there will of course have to be limits (disk space, queries per day, whatever), but I think it just works out best for all. For those people that don’t know databases, this stuff would be hidden from them anyway. They can just click the buttons in the VCE and use the query builder to get what they want. But if you’re looking for a bit more control, then this should be exactly what people need, and probably more than they expect.
Exceeding expectations. I think I’ve just found the Bearthing tagline.
Permeated
In among the "doing very little" which has permeated most of this weeks proceedings, I’ve been slowly playing around with Our Game, which has been sitting in limbo for a while now. I had some better ideas on how things should be structured in the code and set about re-creating everything from scratch, adamant that by the end of the week I would have a scrolling world and working map editor, able to create, load and save maps.
I went off on a bit of a tangent however when I thought it might be quite cool to create all the graphics, despite it being a 2D game, using 3D textured quads. This seemed like a reasonable idea as it would provide two benefits, true transparency (good for water) and most of all, light.
Having implemented about 60% of this however, I realise that it’s just a waste of time.
Firstly, true transparency isn’t that big of a deal. Water would benefit from it sure, but not much else would. And I think I can do this even without 3D anyway.
Secondly, although light would be great (I had pictured the world having a day/night cycle, and everything getting a dark blue tinge as night fell), it wouldn’t actually look right in a 2D world. For example, a torch stuck to the side of a wall would cast an orb of light around it which would have no idea that a wall was there, as after all, the world is actually flat polygons.
This combined with the number of other issues that 3D as 2D brings means that I’m just going to stick with good old fashioned blitted 2D sprites and scrap what I’ve done so far. Again.
I still want to have the editor finished before the week is out though.
Strain
I saw that The Andromeda Strain was on BBC1 tonight, and having always heard what a classic movie it was, I thought I should watch it. I felt obliged to watch it even.
It’s very typical 70’s sci-fi (well, until Star Wars came along), relying purely on it’s characters and their acting abilities to further the story and keep the tension going. Unfortunately I didn’t find there to be much tension at all and ultimately found it to pretty dull.
My brother commented that these days you just couldn’t get a film like this made in Hollywood. Which is a shame, because even though I didn’t enjoy this one, I do feel there’s a lack of good solid character driven thrillers these days.
Sledgehammer
The postman turned up at 8:04am this morning and apparently banged on the door with a sledgehammer. At least I fail to see how he created such a noise with his hands. Hard drive delivered, I went back to bed.
It installed without a hitch and so did Debian. In fact, it went without so much of a hitch that really I have absolutely nothing else to say about it. It’s Linux. It works. Yay. Or something.
Didn’t really do much else today, I’m having problems settling into this whole holiday thing, so I’m being decidedly unproductive. I think I put so much effort into thinking that I should be SOMETHING that I just end up doing NOTHING.
Dark
You wait all day for something and then you get ten minutes. In the dark. The suckage continues. :(
Anyway. On a TOTALLY unrelated note, I’m writing this from Mozilla running under Knoppix.
Tomorrow I plan (should my new HD arrive) to install Debian Sarge and have a bit of a play. I have a wireless network card, so I thought I’d go hunting to see what the chances were of me actually getting it up and running under Linux. I stuck in a Knoppix CD (since it’s based on Debian) to see if it would pick it up, which unfortunately it did not. Further investigation tells me it’s very possible using ndiswrapper, but that’s not something that’s going to be as straightforward as I would like. Especially if I want to use the Debian NetInstall.
I was just thinking how I really don’t want to run a cable from this machine to the router (I don’t have a long enough one anyway) when I remembered that this machine is already hard-wired to the Mac sitting to it’s left. Two clicks on the Mac and some entering of IP addresses in Knoppix and BINGO, full net access, all routed through OS X. Problem solved.
Now I just have to hope the postman delivers my new drive. And not too early either, some of us like to sleep on our holidays.
In
And in a not surprising turn of events, so did today.
*sigh*
Spam
I’ve been using Gmail for a good few months now, getting in early by having the balls to just email a Google employee and ask for an invite. I forward all my personal mail to it, completely replacing Mail on the Mac, which I used before. It’s great, excellent interface, really fast and solves the problems of synching mail between machines.
The problem I’ve had is spam. The filter has improved greatly over the time I’ve been using it, so much so that now most of my spam doesn’t even hit the Inbox. The problem has been that there’s been no way to permanently remove the mail from the Spam folder, meaning I now have over 24,000 emails in there, taking up the majority of my 153MB of used space. At the rate I’m going, I would have filled my account in under a year.
For a brief few days there was a “Delete All” link on the left hand menu, and I never did understand why it lasted such a short time. Then there was the “Permanently Delete” option, but it required that you select each page of email and then remove it. Since I have almost 500 pages of the stuff, this didn’t seem like much fun.
But finally tonight I notice the Spam folder has a new message at the top…
“Warning: Spam messages more than 30 days old will be automatically deleted”
Finally, a workable solution. And one that requires me to do nothing. That’s my kind of UI.
