January 30, 2011

Focusing Attention: Programming

These last two weeks have been a small attempt at clearing up my head a bit. I have far too many things I'd like to do and even if it's not possible to do them all at once it didn't stop me from thinking of them. One minute it's that and the other it's something completely different. This is really not good as it messes with the top idea a lot so I decided to do something about it. By focusing on one single thing each week I've been trying to remedy the situation.

Now I haven't really spent a lot of time with the things I've been focusing on, but I've been a whole lot calmer and not as stressed up as before. So I think it's good for me.

This week I'm gonna focus on something I haven't really done so much, namely programming. The little I've done is some stuff for school and it's fun and all, but it's not really the same as working on your own project. Now I think I'll try to complete the assignments for the course, but that's not really a priority and if it's even a little bit stressful then I'll cut back on it. We've got plenty of time left and it's not worth it to get stressed by something like that.

No I'll focus on Perl (my new Perl book should arrive this week) and making something fun: an IRC-bot. A simple bot isn't much of a challange so I need to add some cool functions to it. I'm really annoyed that a friend of mine is always ahead of the latest manga releases so I think I'll automate that one. I've actually already made one in both Perl and lua, but they're pretty damn bad so this time I'll make it right. Naturally I've got a ton of other stuff to add but we'll see where we end up.

The point isn't to make a bot with a million features, but to start hacking on something fun. Hell I'd be happy if I just stick to the new book and learn Perl a bit.

January 30, 2011

Poking at Emacs

I've been a vim vim fan for a while now and with some recent configs I'm starting to feel pretty confident and happy with it. For those who don't know it's basically a text editor, like notepad, but with a lot of keycommands which allows you to edit code (and text in general) faster. For writing a simple straight up text it might not be worth it, the learning curve is pretty steep, but for someone who codes a lot it's really good in the long run. Here's an article I read when I read when I started with vim.

The thing is that I need to work at school too and everyone there use emacs. Emacs is in many ways similar to vim, but they're a bit like bitter competitors and if you're a vim user, like me, then you're not an emacs user and vice versa. Also I haven't gotten vim to work as I want to at school, meaning it doesn't work exactly like I'm used to (I'm quite picky with that). So what I've done up until now is that I've been working from home and trying to avoid emacs as much as humanly possible.

It's been working okay so far, but I don't think it will for much longer. When we're declaring our labs our teachers use emacs, when I need to collaborate with other students then they most likely will be using emacs and when we have our exam. It was pretty ridiculous yesterday when we had to show our lab and I got really, really nervous on how to open multiple files in emacs... It feels like something I should be able to do in my sleep and if there's anything like a nerd ranking somewhere I think I just hit rock bottom.

No this shouldn't be allowed to continue so now I'm going to give emacs a try. I doubt that it'll replace vim but still I think it's quite nice. In theory it should be just as nice as vim, with really fast code editing once you get used to it. Here's a better comparison of the two. I guess I just don't like the idea of having to climb another intimidating learning curve.

January 26, 2011

Focusing Attention: Study Hacking

A week of drawing is over, but I didn't draw that much. It was a little bit of a fail from my part.

But the past is the past and this week I'm going to be study focused. Not that I need to study, but I really need to rework my study technique. I've been going on like a classical student, in the bad sense, by skipping class and getting super stressed when the tests and deadlines are over me. Somehow you manage with some last-minute studying and all is well.

Well not really. I already have a bad stomach and stress makes it a lot worse. Even if I didn't have this problem stress is never good, especially not when you need to take this test or finish this assignment for tomorrow. It screws with my health, my study results and it intrudes on my free time far too much I'd say.

This is when I dusted an old bookmark I found a long time ago: Study Hacks. It's some guy who writes about studying and study technique and he's got some pretty good ideas. This is what I'll focus on this week: to change my routines and take control over my studies and don't let them control me.

Here's a little rundown of the main principles from Study Hacks as I understand them;

Do fewer things
Sure it makes sense. When I signed up for an extra course last year I felt pretty damn stressed and I couldn't really focus on my other courses knowing I had this extra class I missed to catch up with. It was even on my mind when I tried to do other things and when I got my stumach problems I decided to drop it. That was seriously a pretty damn good decision: I felt a lot better with it gone.

Do them better
Also what are good grades? They should show your skill but if they're good they should also impress. And what are you most impressed by? Someone with straight-A or someone who's read 40 points more but with slightly worse grades? I think we're more impressed by deep knowledge in a smaller area (better grades in fewer courses) than by someone who's a know-it-all but specialist-in-nothing. Maybe it's a good idea to focus on getting really good grades instead of trying to do too much at once and risk to spread out too much?

Know why you're doing them
Lastly it makes sense why you should know why your study technique works (or doesn't). So we can change and adapt. After all what is the definition of Insanity?

"Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results" - Albert Einstein

January 19, 2011

The I'm Great quote

A new semester at the uni and so far it looks promising; I got a hold of some new books even though the bookstore had a snakelike queue similar to the Jörmungandr (the snake that encircled the earth in nordic mythology) and our new programming course started. This time it's Ada's turn and as always it should be interesting. At a first glance it doesn't look like it's introducing anything completely new from what I'm used with. I guess it looks like a cross between C and Haskell's type system spiced up with some other stuff.

It's funny how I notice all these little, syntactic similarities (haven't done anything real with the language yet so I'm a bit shallow now but whatever) from different languages. It was a long time ago I came across a language that distinguish between functions and subroutines. I think that was the case with Visual Basic, my oh so dear first language a few years ago. Might've been five years ago?

Anyway quite enough of that, I don't want to derail too much. What I really wanted to write about is when our new teacher, who by the way is completely awesome, asked us who thought they were a great programmer. Most of us laughed it off but I think there were two, maybe three, who raised their hands.

I thought about raising my hand, but who do I think are great programmers? Knuth, Thorvalds, Djikstra, Stroustrup Silverman and Carmack comes to mind. They're probably not the greatest, but they've done some really notable things. Do I think I'm at their level? What a laugable question, I'm miles away. And I'm sure there's some epic bearded fellow somewhere out there who's even higher on the programming skill ladder.

Now what is a great programmer then? I have no idea. But I do know that with all the things I don't know, I couldn't be one. Sure I've done something in about 10 different (some not so different) languages. But there are hundreds more. I've done nothing low level, I have no experience with op codes or assembly and I'm not up to date with the latest scripting languages. There are a few new interesting languages like Rust, CoffeeScript or Go which I haven't even looked at yet. Of course the number of languages you know doesn't make you great, but it just feels like I'm missing stuff.

Sure these guys could be great - who am I to say otherwise? But you'll have to wait a long time for me to spill the I'm great quote. Hell, maybe even a lifetime?

January 17, 2011

Focusing Attention: Drawing

In my last post I wrote about some ideas and projects I have and how it's a little bit too much at a time, so now I'm going to try something new here. In the beginning of every week I'll declare something I'll be focusing on and then that's the only thing I should focus on on my free time. Just so I don't drift off from irc bots in haskell to opening a new Erlang book or starting a game and then move on with another.

Not really so I don't work on several things at once but so I don't think about the other things too much.

This week I think I'll be focusing on drawing. I kinda like to draw and I drew a lot when I was little but then it wore off a bit, I dunno why. I think I was pretty good too, well I didn't think so then but when I look back at the drawings I'm sure I at least had something going for me.

Recently I bought the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - I'm not really sure why but so far it's been pretty darn good. Hopefully I'll have some progress, but I'm sure I'll have fun whether it's a success or not.

Of course there are some amazing stuff around and if I could get a tenth or even one percentage of his skill it'd be cool has hell!

January 14, 2011

The Top Idea

Recently I've been having a dozen ideas and projects I've been poking around with:

1. I wrote a simple lua, later perl, which announced when a new day9 episode has come. Later I expanded it to search for new manga episodes, but now it's broken and unfinished.

2. In an attempt to learn Haskell I began writing a simple irc bot, but I never did come far with the language and now I'm a bit stuck. I have the bot itself working but I want to restructure it with plugins instead of hardcoding every command and I'd like to have some interactivity like saving state and fetching info from internet. But I haven't come that far and now it's on a stand-still.

3. Totally not related to the other two I want to learn how to draw. On a little whim I bought the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and I was totally blown away. I was a bit sceptic at first but she's explaining everything so scientifically and the results look amazing. Almost too good to be true. But as always I started but I'm not there yet, in fact a pretty long way from finished.

4. Back to the programming business. I'd like to update the backend of this site, but to be fair it's not that important. Just something that'd be nice to do.

5. What's worse is my game projects. What projects you ask? Well I started a few much bigger games this time and they have just faded away from my brain little by little and now I'm not that into them. I mean the ideas are amazing, but I haven't done anything with them.

The issue here I think is that I'm trying to do far too many things at once. Back when I wrote all my experimental games I didn't have these many things going on. In fact they were the only thing on my mind - you know the thing you think about when you're in the shower or before you go to sleep. Hell I've even woken up, all sweaty, and had a solution but the very problem I had struggled all day with!

Paul Graham wrote a nice article about this a while ago. He's more focused on startups of course but the core of the article very much applies to me. I'm not keeping the right idea on the top of my mind, instead I think it's changing - I'm doing too many things at once. One time I'm focused on say learning Haskell but the next day, or even the very same night I'm all wound up about a game I'd like to make! How will I ever get things done if I'm floating around like that?

Of course Paul points out that I'm in good company, even Newton fell into this trap and I have a feeling many more have this problem.

January 6, 2011

2010 in review

I saw a post on briancarper where he reviews the past year and it sounds like a great idea actually.

2010 Geek Achievements

1. Wrote a few games earlier this year;
   1. The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afros
   2. A Geek Valentine
   3. Beebop The Island Hopper
   4. Where's Teddy?
2. Updated this site a bit.
3. In the process I learned a lot of PHP, Javascript, mysql and design. Fun and useful.
4. Switched to Slackware which I like a ton better than Ubuntu.
5. Learned a lot more linux. Thanks Slackware.
6. Learned a lot more git.
7. Learned a lot more vim.
8. Tried out and configured uzbl which I still use.
9. Learned a bit of Haskell.
10. Tried out Perl a bit.
11. Learned a lot more Lisp.
12. Switched to zsh. It's fine after a bit of config
13. Rebuilt a custom Kernel a few times, some failures but learned a lot. And got starcraft 2 to work!
14. Read a lot. This years high were One Piece and Jefferey Deaver. Real World Haskell scores the highest Geek score.

2010 Non-Geek Achievements

1. Moved to Linköping with my girlfriend Veronica and I didn't just survive but I also liked it!
2. Enrolled in a Linköpings University in Computer Science. We'll see if it'll get geeky later, atm it's a breeze but we have a ton of seemingly fun courses to go.
3. Took a massage course.
4. Learned how to cook more than one dish.
5. Did the dishes, expertly maneuvered our vacuum cleaner and did the laundry. More than once!
6. Started Taekwondo and after a few months of hard work I even got a yellow stripe for my white belt!

2010 Failures

1. Didn't produce enough games.
2. Didn't write enough code.
3. Got worse in my stumach towards the end of the year. Too stressed and not enough regular meals I guess.
4. Didn't blog enough. Sorry :(

Plans for 2011

1. Get good results in school.
2. Make more games.
3. Code more!
4. Blog more!
5. Learn more Haskell (again). This time continue with the small irc bot I'm writing.
6. Learn a few more languages and expand my knowledge. Maybe some low level stuff with C or assembly? Or some more higher level?
7. Get a better sense of algorithms.
8. Try to be a bit more social
9. Get a new belt in Taekwondo.
10. Be a bit more disciplined with training, coding and school.
11. Loosen up a bit more so the stumach won't mess anymore.
12. Last but not least, keep Veronica happy and help around at home.

I thought I didn't do anything this year I guess it's been a productive year anyway. But in 2011 I think I'll do a lot more still.

January 5, 2011

My Dream Game: The Tycoon

I've been playing Starcraft 2 a little this christmas. It wasn't dead serious 1v1 which really is my favorite but I've played 2v2 with some friends and I actually played the campaign a bit and it was pretty fun! Usually I never play the campaign on RTS games but this one I liked. I even bought it to my little brother and he seems to like it.

But it's funny - yesterday when I went down to check on him he was playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 3!

One of my absolute favourite games (the whole series in fact) and that got me all nostalgic again. Tycoon games are so good; SimCity, Theme Hospital, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Evil Genius and more! I'm not surprised to see him playing this old game, I replay these games myself from time to time. I'm almost through Theme Hospital for the fifth time or something. You just don't seem to get tired of them you know.

Of course I'd like to make my own tycoon game. Not entirely unlike Jonas IceCream Stand but with actual building of course. I wonder how it'd look like though.

evil genius' traps/base planning + rollercoasters + theme hospital's hilarity + simcity's economy = ?

The best of the best games should make something good. That's only a theory though...