Lack of Updates
By Ravenhawk | October 15, 2007
I must apologize for the lack of updates lately, been busy with class, work, and generally being a lazy ass. However, I should be getting my arse back in gear soon and reverting back to at least a weekly update. (Aiming for the weekend times, but, you know, I float around generally)
Now that I’ve got a new job in the university records center helping to reprogram their database, I should be posting some more things about the wonderful Horrors of Visual Basic (Haven’t had any of those post in about six months) and the greatness of SQL programming. Besides this, I have a few games that I’ve been jamming out to like crazy that hopefully you’ll get to hear about.
In other news, I’ll give a million kudos points to anyone who can make up a good slogan for me. I suck and the slogan game and keep getting game overs whenever I try to play it. ’tis quite sad.
Tags: Uncategorized, Blogging, College, Programming, SQL, Visual Basic
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Learn to Program with Hackety Hack!
By Ravenhawk | June 21, 2007
I was Stumbling around the internet awhile back when I came upon a program called Hackety Hack. The basic idea is that there are not enough people in the world who know how to program: Normal people should be able to do it too, not just the technically inclined. To this end, they aim to teach normal people how to program in an easy and fun way.
Their language of choice for starters is Ruby, because the creator of Hackety Hack knows it. They hope to spread out to other languages at a later point in time. Looking at the Manifesto page now, it also mentions Gecko. I don’t remember if this was there when I downloaded it, however, they have gone up a .0.1 version since I downloaded it, so who knows what they may have added.
At the moment there are seven lessons, of which I have gone through three. The language is simple, even playful as they explain how to do basic things such as printing words on a page, and retrieving user input. Next we geared up to pulling RSS feed and sorting them, then writing tables.
I’ll feel really achieved if/when I make a post on this blog using a blogging program I’ve written myself. =)
I’m not done with it yet, but Hackety Hack seems like it’ll be fun. Ignoring the fact that their web page seems to be geared at younger people, it’ll be an entertaining way for me to add another programming language to my arsenal before I go back to heavy university classes in C++.
Tags: Programming, Gecko, Hackety Hack, Hacking, Ruby
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Minor fixes
By Ravenhawk | May 7, 2007
For some reason my Review of Puzzle Pirates was turned into a draft instead of a post. It’s been fixed, along with a few spelling errors within the post itself. I know I missed a post earlier in the week, but I was rather buried with programming work (Which I didn’t end up getting done…) and the interviews and stuff.
However, my failed work did inspire me a bit and I have a rather entertaining post which I’ll be putting up later in the week. And by entertaining I mean “It’d be funny if it wasn’t true or wasn’t applying to me.”
Until Next time, Comrades.
Tags: Programming, Blogging
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The importance of program design (Again)
By Ravenhawk | April 22, 2007
Now, this was a lesson I thought I’d learned. That is, until last week when we were given an assignment in CS 120 in which we did not have to program, but merely to design it. I scoffed, thinking this assignment would be easy. I wrote up what I thought to be a good design: A general outline of each function and struct I would require in the program and what they would do. However, having been told that the design was not to have any code in it, I didn’t opt to plan out how I was going to do most of those functions.
Most of them were simple but one, where I needed to do Bubble sorting, confused me completely for days. And so, when you’re planning you programs, remember that, while your design should be just that, a design, and not be filled like Psuedocode (Or actually code as mine usually were) they should explain exactly how you intend on doing things. That will make thinks much easier for you, and even more so for any partners or team mates you may have while programming.
Tags: Programming, Design
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Welcome to the land of Perry
By Ravenhawk | March 25, 2007
David Perry is a name I would expect to be at least vaguely familiar sounding to a lot of gamers. He’s been in the biz quite awhile and made a lot of games including the Earthworm Jim series, smash TV, and (one of my favorites) Cool Spot. (You played the 7-UP dot).
Currently, he’s moved his works completely into the Massively Multiplayer Online spectrum. He’s running 2Moons, which is your typical clicky MMO, Bots, which is kind of like Medabots, only MMO, Dance (think MMODDR) and a project known as “Top Secret Project.”
Top Secret Project is basically, a community designed project. Everyone gives input and ideas and eventually, one person will be selected to actually run the creation of this MMO. Its like a big “Who wants to be a Gamer Designer” contest.
It’s pretty cool, the ideas going around are pretty rad. He decided to make the theme a “racing” mmo.
You could check it out over at http://topsecret.acclaim.com/
He’s also got a rather cool wiki for those of you who want to be game developers. Like all Wikis, its open source. It’s a collection of articles, resources, and tips for would-be game developers of all types. Designers, Programmers, Graphics, etc.
If you want to check it out, head HERE. (Emphasis obvious enough?)
You probably have a good idea what I’ve been looking into the last few days, eh? I doubt I’ll win the Top Secret Project, but it might be a nice place to make some contacts. And I’m always pumped to get good programming tuts.
Until next time, comrades.
Tags: Game Design, Programming, Acclaim, David Perry, Top Secret Project
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Attention to Detail while Programming in C++
By Ravenhawk | March 9, 2007
Now, obviously paying attention to the details while you’re programming is always important. I hate getting reminds of this however.
I’m currently working on a simple program using functions for my C++ class. It reads characters from a file, analyses them and then prints what type of character it was from a short list of categories.
I spent an hour trying to figure out what was wrong.
No matter what I put in it kept saying my character was a lowercase vowel (the first option).
I sprinkled cout’s all over the place trying to figure out where it was messing up between the functions.
Finally, I realized I had used = instead of == so I was setting my variable to 1 instead of comparing it.
I’ve done this in the past with an assignment, so hopefully this time lesson shall be learned and I shant do it again.
Until next time, Comrades.
Tags: C++, Programming, C
Topics: C++, Programming | 1 Comment »