February 12, 2012

Doing Stuff

The school and my life is trotting along. I'm handling the extra course fine, but instead I've left the standard math course behind a bit. Actually more than a bit but hopefully I'll correct things later.

No my life is going along just fine, it almost feels like my life is runing ahead and leaving me behind. What have I done lately? School work I guess? Can't think of anything else the last month to be completely honest, which is pretty far from optimal. I set out this school year with the goal of programming a lot more, but so far that has been pretty dead. Sure I made a lot of progress on the new site during the christmas break but since school started I have done nothing, nothing! So sad.

Yesterday I did something else though. I went and bought a bunch of stuff. I bought a birthday present for Veronica which I'm very happy with, and I bought some rubber bands for training the oblique muscles among others. I tried but I couldn't find a protective condom for my new phone, yes I have a new phone! A white, shining, wonderful Samsung Galaxy S2 which is blowing my mind. I can now surf, watch starcraft and read manga in bed, in the bathroom and in school! Yay! And umm... New boxers.

Apart from all that I also hung up Veronica's two paintings and a white shelf I've been meaning to a while. I realized I had no idea whatsoever how to hang up a painting! I bought a big box with screws and stuff but there where only one of them I knew how to use. Now I know how to hang up a painting like the leaning tower of Pisa!

You call that leaning? You should check out my paintings!

I finally got them sort-of straight, but it took a while.

You know your life is running fast if you're savouring hanging up paintings. But now I will do something about that: I will go to Taekwon-do practice and later maybe going to the children's practice, yay!

January 29, 2012

Speeding Ahead

Life is slowly settling down over here. School has started with some pretty interesting stuff this year. Firstly we have a math analysis course in multiple variables which is ok. I'm not a fan of the previous analysis courses but maybe this will be a bit different. We're contining with computer hardware, microprogramming and such, and I enjoy it a little.

When I started programming the big question was how did the code I typed into my editor become something the processor could understand? I've got a good feeling for different programming languages, and now including the assembly for 86k processors. Now the basic hardware, from logical gates to ackumulators, and code are being connected together which feels very nice indeed. I still like to construct and make stuff in a more high level way though.

We're also having a new course, it's been totally remade since last year, about software prototyping. I'm quite used to prototyping with my games but as expected a university course about the subject is a bit more structured and dare I say more boring? The course book, Effective Prototyping for Software Makers, is pretty good as it explains the design process in a formal, but not mindnumbingly boring, way. I need to investigate more but I'll definitely use some of the ideas.

The last course for now is the advanced course in linear algebra which me and a friend chose. Linear algebra was probably the hardest math course we've had but at the same time I think it's the most enjoyable and useful so far. And finally I hear it's very useful for programmers in computation and 3D programming so it's something I really want to understand.

Life with Veronica is also working out, mainly because she's awesome, and I went to a Taekwon-do training this week. Feels good to practice again!

January 4, 2012

2011 in Review

It's time to wrap up the year that's been. Be warned for slight ego boosting here.

2011 Geek Achievements

1. Wrote three games this year:
   1. My-Minions
   2. Grand Thief Arto
   3. Sat-E
2. Bought a new computer!
3. Bought a mechanical keyboard.
4. Bought custom Starcraft 2 keycaps for the keyboard.
5. Learned 68k assembly.
6. Learned about algorithms and data structures.
7. Bought a lot of programming books.
   1. The Pragmatic Programmer
   2. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
   3. Introduction to Algorithms
   4. Modern Perl
   5. Effective Java
   6. Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!
   7. Land of Lisp
   8. Maybe something more...
8. Read a lot of programming books. Modern Perl and The Pragmatic Programmer were my favourites.
9. Learned some Ada.
10. Learned a lot of Perl.
11. Learned a tiny bit of Haskell.
12. Learned some emacs
13. Got a hint of design understanding thanks to Design for Hackers

2011 Non-Geek Achievements

1. Went to a dance course with Veronica.
2. My stumach is in good shape!
3. Read and loved A Song of Ice and Fire.
4. Achieved 7 kup in Taekwon-do.
5. Read a lot of manga. Some recommendations:
   1. Bakuman. A nice slice of life manga about... making manga. Surprisingly captivating.
   2. Gamaran. A slightly brutal battle manga with loads of weapons.
   3. Vinland Saga. A bit more brutal battle manga about vikings and war.
   4. Beelzebub. Battle manga but with a ton of light hearted humor.
   5. The Breaker. Another battle manga, a bit more direct perhaps.

2011 Failures

1. Didn't produce enough games.
2. Didn't write enough code.
3. Did not learn enough Haskell.
4. Have a lot of books I haven't read yet.
5. Did not have enough free time.

Plans for 2012

1. Keep Veronica happy!
2. Make more games.
3. Code more! Much more!
4. Blog more!
5. Learn more Haskell (yet again)...
6. Transform my site to something new, something that I don't dread to use.
7. Improve in Taekwon-do.
8. Be more disciplined in studying, coding, training and cleaning.
9. Read the programming books I have but have not read yet.
   1. A book about Erlang.
   2. K&R C Programming language.
   3. SICP, all important for every programmers. I hear.
   4. Probably missed something... Damn I've got many.
10. Get good results in school.
11. Try to be a bit more social (it's hard).
12. Get more free time somehow.
13. Complete a larger personal project.
14. Learn more mathematics.

December 7, 2011

Finishing Stuff

I haven't done much blogging or game programming in a while but instead I've finished some school stuff. We completed the assembly course labs, which were pretty fun actually, and I managed to finally complete the electronics course I've been holding off on for like forever... But now it's gone, yay!

There's not much left before christmas either, we have some sort of exam on tuesday (very boring course) and one the 20th (very fun course) but other than that I'm free to do whatever I want.

• I'm planning on entering Ludum Dare next weekend, finally getting some game programming done.
• I need to recap this year and plan some for the next. I fear this year wasn't as productive as I had hoped.
• I've been thinking that I know my tools (Vim, the command line) but I need to get a little bit better. Especially with emacs as I feel like a monkey on a typewriter when I'm forced to use it at school. Not cool.

And some more smaller stuff I don't have energy to type out (or maybe you're interested in reorganizing my home folder?).

November 21, 2011

A Nice Weekend

I've had a pretty nice weekend. On Friday MLG Orlando began and I've been staying up to 2 and sleeping until at least 10 the last days. My inner night-owl is very happy about it, my early-rising girlfriend perhaps not as much, but I think she's a bit understanding?

On Saturday we cleaned the house for Christmas and hung up a star and stuff like that. It was brutally hard work (laugh if you like) but I pulled through without dying too much. Saturday night was full of StarCraft again though so it's fine!

What about Sunday then? Even more StarCraft of course!! IPL had some grand tournament, which Stephano won of course, and MLG had it's final day. In the middle there somewhere we had some taekwon-do and I did some laundry. With that done I sat and shouted at my chosen ones in the tournament and they did do okay, not like I had hoped but still. Leenock managed to win MLG which is pretty damn awesome.

Now I need to adapt to a normal life again, with school and Ludum Dare coming up.

November 5, 2011

Done this, done that. What now?

Finished and uploaded our java game Grand Thief Arto, done an exam (didn't quite go as intended) and starting some new courses in school. I'm liking my choice of Computer Science more and more. Data structures and Algorithms was a super fun course, I actually ordered a new book about the subject just yesterday. Linear Algebra is really fun now as we're getting deeper into it and we're looking into assembly and processor structures now too. Awesome. I can't believe I considered doing physics or electronics when I could take these courses. Now if I only could do operating systems, compiler construction and language design...

In the meantime I've finished Design for Hackers and it was a really nice book to be honest. I never knew there was so much about design and now I keep noticing funky stuff like what font a particular website is using, what colors and how they direct the reader. I also see a lot of inadequate stuff on my page and I have a few things I'd like to try.

I also read Watchmen, the comic, and it was absolutely wonderful. Sadly I saw the movie before but, naturally, the comic was a lot better. So wonderfully dark and ah... Simply awesome.

October 19, 2011

Design for Hackers has arrived!

It's here! After about a month of waiting I've finally gotten the book that will make me a design god! Or at least make me aware of something called design. Joking aside I'm really terrible at design and making things look good. Admittedly my programming art for my games has gradually improved but I honestly don't know what I'm doing, I just mess around until I get something decent. Maybe this can be a small aid? I even have some websites I want to design, and while I'm at it I want to try the Perl web framework mojolicious which looks totally awesome!

October 19, 2011

The End of the Tunnel

Lately I've been feeling like there's been a shit-ton of stuff going on, quite a turn-around from the last time.

One course about data structure and algorithms (super fun to be honest) has wrapped up. We thought we were ahead with the assignments but in the end it got very stressful. I sat up pretty late trying to optimize our code from 0.16 to below 0.15 seconds and it almost drove me crazy...

My last resort was to convert all strings to integers and do some funky bit shifting operations but it got too late so I had to go to sleep before making it work correctly. Of course I couldn't sleep and I lay and thought about all the things I didn't do or where I could've messed up. I woke really early, couldn't sleep, and I went to fix it before our presentation that morning and look and behold! It was fixed in less than 15 minutes and it was blazingly fast! It's funny how sleep or a nice shower can solve almost any problem you have, except hunger I guess.

While this was going on I also took part in a competition of some sorts in connection with the course. There was a programming problem after each lecture that we had to complete and the goal was to get as few hours as possible after the problems were released. Most problems were quite easy but there were a few hard ones. One I also lost some sleep over! But again I woke up and had to run to the computer to try to solve it... At least I won some money for some lovely new books so I guess it was worth it.

We're now finishing our other course, the one with the Java game that spurred me to wanna make more games, and I think I spent a bit too much time on that... The game turned out pretty cool, I will make a post about it tomorrow I think, but it was a level or two above the actual demands I think so we could've chilled and not stress that much. And now we only have to document it! Describe how all the classes work with UML and some blocks of text... Sigh.

And oh yeah, we had totally forgotten to write a project specification that was supposed to be handed in over a month ago and we had completely missed the deadlines for the other assignments in that course. Luckily the deadlines were only suggestions and our assistant was cool about the specification too so we survived with our head still intact.

It just seems so silly though. Why did we wait with the other assignments, I think I did them in one day or something, until the very last second? It seems like I've been here before, and I don't like it. This time I had a bit more control over the whole situation but it's still not quite good enough.

Anyway now when this is all finishing up I can start to relax again. But then the thought creeps up on me: what's next?

I'm probably gonna program, make a game or two, go through a language, read some books, train a lot... Urr I'm getting all stressed out just thinking out loud like that!

No I need to relax. Maybe read some more manga? Yes, that is indeed a good idea...

manga...

September 30, 2011

Being Productive

School's been going on now for... Is it a month and a half maybe? I don't know really but it's all going so fast, week after week is disappearing and I don't know where they go but I know that I'm at least not wasting them like I did most of last year!

Last year I managed school sure, but without doing anything special. Well if you don't count watching nearly every GSL live (from 06-09 or 11-13 on weekdays) which is pretty awesome. But that's also taking away a lot of time when I could've (and often should've) studied - sadly I skipped a lot of school last year. I admit GSL can't explain it all, I was lazy okay!

This year I'd like to a bit better and it has started out fine. I haven't skipped a single lecture yet (Java doesn't count!!) and I'm not too far behind in anything and a bit ahead in others, in summary I'm doing great, heh.

Aside from school though, which is almost even more important, I'm feeling good and getting things done. Our home hasn't burned down yet so that's some success right there, but I'm taking it even farther and taking care of some cooking and stuff too, of course with Veronicas help but anyway. I'm also increasing my Taekwon-do training, doing some reading and a bunch of other stuff. Programming too!

I took the advice of Cal Newport and now I actually plan my days, every day, on the morning or the night before. Here's an example:

• 0730 - 0900 Program
• 0900 - 1000 Call OnOff, electric company, DN, corren
• 1000 - 1100 Program
• 1100 - 1130 Food
• etc..

Of course I don't really follow it to each and every point, but it helps me know what I need to get done this day. Often I skip and I reorder and I do other stuff a lot but if I've done at least half of what I set out to do I've been more productive than I'd usually be! And I even remember to do stuff like make a prenumeration on DN which I would never had otherwise.

Something else that's helped me is a regular and healthy sleeping pattern - go to sleep and wake up at the same time, every day.

I'm feeling good about school and everything but I've got stuff left to do so don't see it as a perfect example - far from it to be sure, but it's a step in the right direction I guess.

September 16, 2011

Design for Hackers

I get these.. urges sometimes. Not like Dexter no, but sometimes I just have to buy a specific thing. It happened again yesterday (or was it the day before I don't know) when I saw this post on hackernews.

It's a book this time, again, but this is something a little different - it's about design. Now I know nothing about design but I've enjoyed designing some sites and I really like to design games but I don't have a clue how to do it in a structural manner. I just try different colors and different stuff until "hey that looks kinda good" and it's done! That's not how you make something useful or something that looks good - good design. But this book seems to teach you just that!

It's a book for hackers, in the original non-journalistic definition, and it explains stuff in a logical manner! Now I might get a feel for why I think something looks good and I might even be able to improve on it? Happy times!

The only issue is that I promised myself to not order any more programming books until I've gone through the ones I have - but this isn't one so it should be okay! So now I made myself to promise that I'll do the math assignments for the week and then I can order!

Instead of writing this I really should do them then.

Hrrmm...

September 4, 2011

Back to Training

Five days of school now and things are starting to settle down a bit. The courses are pretty cool; we have linear algebra which is pretty interesting, we have a java course where we're going to make a game (!) and one about structures and algorithms. Pretty promising but we'll see how things pan out.

Taekwon-do practice has started and it's awesome. In the beginning it's so hard so I always wonder why I continue, but in the end it's really fun and it feels good after. If you haven't tried it you really should, or some other martial arts cause it's pretty cool.

It's a perfect training for both mind and body. You might think it's just mindless hardship thanks to all the martial arts movies/anime/manga with crazy training, but you're also training your awareness, your creativity and decision making and more. Especially when sparring it's absolutely paramount that your head is with you, doesn't matter how fast or strong you are, if you don't fight with your head you're pretty screwed. That's what I really like about it, it's a pretty smart training.

Easy! Or maybe not?

What I don't like however, and this is totally unrelated to anything, is the rain! I went to school five days and I got soaking wet five times! Hrblr... That's why I've decided to do absolutely nothing today, I might watch some GSL and read a bit. I've got Learn you a Haskell for Great Good, Effective Java and Thinking in Java who can hold me company a bit.

And then there's Taekwon-do training of course!

August 28, 2011

Getting Comfortable

So I physically built the computer and now I've been using it a while, configuring stuff and getting used to my new screens. I think they're about three times wide as my old laptop and now I have this one huge vertical space which is absolutely wonderful for surfing forums and reading code. Damn I love coding on it! When I go back to the laptop I feel cramped..

And while we're at dissing the old - I can never ever like another keyboard again! Well, at least not another rubber dome or scissor switch one.

Rubber dome and scissor switch

No this day forward I'm a mechanical keyboard fantast. You might think I'm crazy but the difference is pretty huge, before my fingers got tired but now they don't and it's even fun to type again!

If that got you interested you need to read this geekhack post, it's nice to say the least.

Back to my screen setup again - yes everything with my new computer is either the monitors or the keyboard - I wanted to use xmonad without relying on xfce this time. I like xfce as a truly lightweight window manager but a tiling window manager is just vastly superior, and the xfce statusbar is pretty ugly..

I set up a nice looking statusbar and some stuff on the desktop with conky. I've been wanting to set up a todo list and while I was at it I put up my assignment due dates and my schedule too. And never forget the ever so important manga updates!

My dual screen setup, click to enlarge

A nice little feature I added down on the right is the time in various timezones, they adjust to summer time on their own dates and they change the abbreviations too - from CEST to CET and so on.

Something that didn't go smooth at all is the gaming - I couldn't ever get any games to work with wine! After a while I found out that an older driver solved the problem, but most games still don't work with dual screen. So I kinda have to switch between two config files, but that works too I guess.

All my config files are up on github as well if you're interested.

August 21, 2011

New Computer!

I briefly mentioned my new computer in the last post and I thought I'd make a post about it, as it's awesome (as all new computers are).

Firstly, the specs:

GPU: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 550Ti OC 1GB
CPU: Intel core i5 2500K
CPU cooler: Zalman CNPS-9900NT
Motherboard: MSI P67A-C45 REV B3
Ram: Corsair 4GB (2x2048MB) CL9 1600Mhz XMS
Harddrive: 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ
PSU: FSP Aurum 400W 80+ Gold
Displays: 2 x Dell U2211H ultrasharp 21,5" widescreen
Keyboard: Das Keyboard - Ultimate Model S Silent
DVD burner: Samsung DVD±R/RW/RAM
Case: Fractal Design Define R3, Black

Secondly, the look:

I wanted the computer to be fast and silent and I had to have two screens. I had a budget of 12,000 SEK and almost managed it too.

The screens I chose are two fairly large widescreen IPL screens, very solid, but they quickly ate up about a third of my budget... In hindsight it was a good investment, they're absolutely wonderful!

The processor was fairly straightforward to choose - the i5 2500K is a beast for it's price. I don't really need 8GB ram, I think I've used 2GB max before so I just stuck with 4 this time. The motherboard is nothing special but I don't need it to be either.

I've got about 4TB of storage laying around here so I don't need any more really, but I chose a relatively fast and silent 1TB disk. I'd love to get a SSD but I couldn't squeeze that into the budget.

Although you can say you don't need a DVD reader/burner in this era of usb sticks it's still nice to have, especially since I've got a few installation disks I'd like to use. A small fee that saves time I'd say. Floppies are dead for me though.

I also wanted it to be quiet and according to some who probably knows better than me by far the biggest noise source is the stock CPU silencer - so I threw down one which looked good. In hindsight it works great too.

The case looks good and it was also solid, no qualms there. But the one big issue I had was the graphics card, oh how hard it was! I wanted something silent, something from Nvidia (Ati drivers used to suck on linux, but maybe not anymore), something that's reasonably powerful and also cheap. Not a bad combination I say! I think I chose something reasonably good - the fan is very silent, it's a good chipset and it wasn't all too expensive. However I haven't gotten any games to work with it on linux but that's probably a configuration issue, annoying anyway.

Keyboard, Das Keyboard

The keyboard, oh the keyboard! I got it in my head that I had to have a mechanical keyboard, they're supposed to be a lot better than the "regular" ones. And oh yeah it's absolutely wonderful, it's a joy to type in and I'm already irking when I have to go back typing on another keyboard. But it is a tad too load according to Veronica, and it was oh so expensive.

My workspace!

Overall I'm very happy and I don't think I would've done anything different if I were to buy it today, except maybe try an Ati card, some say the drivers aren't bad at all anymore.

Finally some more pictures:

August 18, 2011

Resurrection

Aah what a nice summer!

It was nice to be back in Övertorneå, doing nothing in particular. Just not having to make lunch and dinner every day is such a relief, and if you do slip up food with grandma or Veronica's parents is only a phone call away. I watched TV, played rollercoaster 2 and simcity 4 and just killed time in front of my beloved (PC).

The only real work I did was clean the house a time or two and made food for my little brother Filip and did some exercises with him when my parents worked. But it was a pretty small price to pay as my mum helped me invest in a new computer! Of course dad couldn't find out but that wasn't so hard - I do live about 1400 km away from home anyway.

But now things are moving back to the way things were before the summer break; I'm back in Linköping cooking (lunch, dinner and breakfast), trying to remember watering our plants and generally enjoying life. Everything is almost set for Veronica's return so I need to take it easy a bit before she storms into my life again tomorrow...

There's a lot of stuff I need to reboot again; studying obviously but I also want to make more games and program a bit which I completely neglected the last months and taekwon-do is starting again! My first practice went to hell though, I almost managed to get a blackout as I didn't drink nearly enough but oh well.

But the first step is to write a bit more here, I hear that's a useful skill to have. Instead of taking a boring class I can just write stuff here I guess.

April 22, 2011

What's up

It's been a while again since the last time we met mr. Blog. I've been busy with school and other stuff. I've thought about you but I just never really picked up emacs to write to you. I know it's my fault but I beg of your mercy mr. Blog. You know that I had laid off school for a bit but now I've caught up with almost everything. I've got a bit of electronics left: 2 labs and one project assignment. It's a pretty damn hard course but now when I've taken my time to sit down and go through everything it's quite fun! It's also a course over the whole semester so it's not even done yet. The other thing I'm behind in is math. I chose not to do the last exam, so I can do it now in about a week.

I'm home in Övertorneå again and it's fairly chill here. It's pretty nice to eat food someone else has made, and I don't have to think about holding the apartment afloat. Admittedly Veronica is a great help (I might actually be the help).

I've been meaning to program a bit but I've only done it a little, I've been watching starcraft and just chillin' for the main part.

I'll be sure to update a bit better for you mr. Blog.

March 21, 2011

A Four-Eyed Update

Wow it's been a while! Almost a month and a half since my last update. There I complained about my almost constant headaches which hampered me a lot actually. Luckily now I have joined the rank of cool.

Glasses: makes the cool cooler

I took home three frames I think and tried them out and I settled some I thought were fairly good looking, nothing special mind you but at least they didn't look horrible on me. Then I went back and I settled on the semi-expensive ones and then I waited. And waited. Then I went back and asked but the glasses didn't fit into the price class I'd chosen, something about the frames being too bent, so I had to pay some more.

Then I waited again, and a little bit more... until I called once more, now I was getting pretty pissed, but they should be here this Friday. They called on Thursday and finally I had them! It's funny, I was going to demand some discount but even the pricier glasses didn't fit and so I got some really expensive ones. Fair enough I thought and so I left.

The first few days were pretty disoriented, but man oh man what a difference. It's funny how you don't realize how bad your sight is before you get a pair of glasses and that really fit me well. Suddenly I didn't have to stick my nose into the screen to see the text and today I was at school the whole day! Sure I'm a bit lazy sometimes but I also couldn't concentrate like this before.

Life is good.

February 9, 2011

A Week of Headache

This was supposed to be a productive week with lots and lots of Perl and Ada but instead I've had this big headache all week, and some the week before and it's gotten pretty bad so I can't really concentrate on anything really. The electronics assignment was a bitch and it took a looong time to complete, even if all I had to do was to rewrite some stuff. You just love when the result is completely wrong just thanks to a misplaced minus sign.

So now I'm a bit worried, luckily not as much as my girlfriend, and what's the cause of this? The lack of water is probably the source of 90% of my headaches but now when I drink and drink it only eases of a bit and then it's back. Painkillers help a bit but I don't want to turn into a junkie just to be able to act normally.

Luckily I think I've found the reason, but sadly it's not the very best one. I think I need glasses. I squint all the time in front of the computer and I'm getting headaches when I'm reading. So this Friday it's judgement day. I dunno what I'm hoping for, if it's glasses then fine at least it should be better, but if it's not then it might be a bigger problem somewhere.

Me of tomorrow?

February 3, 2011

The Little Things in Life

It's the little things in life that makes it extra special. Sometimes it's the luxury of coffee together with the morning paper and other times it's just a small simple smile from a random stranger, kid or dog. Today when I got this bad headache I got saved by a two hour nap and my Programming in Ada book. It was quite a pleasure to just read it and not worrying about anything else. I even think my headache disappeared a while there.

And if that wasn't enough, my long lost Modern Perl is finally here! I've skimmed a little and boy I think I'm going to like this one. I'm soon up to two digits with my programming books and I really do like them. Even if I'm not doing anything in that particular language it's still fun to just read about. There's always something you'll learn and even if not I still find it soothing.

Reading books, threads, blog posts or random forum rants/wars about programming is sometimes coffee for my brain (I don't actually drink coffee or anything with caffeine. I'm almost feeling like an endangered programming species).

If the book is actually worth reading we'll see and I'll report back when I've gone through it.

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 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...

December 18, 2010

Christmas break

So school is on a break and I welcome it with all of my heart. The semester has been pretty fun and I really enjoy studying here. We had lisp the whole time which is a pretty sweet little language and if you haven't, give it a shot. Then we had math and I do like math, although I wasn't really motivated this time around and I dunno why. Maybe because I think I got it pretty fast and that didn't really motivate me to study when the test came around and I got far too many dumb mistakes I think.. Not good, not good.

Speaking about math then I took an extra course, mathematical statistics or something funky like that but meh it wasn't all I thought it'd be. In fact it was almost a bit boring and when I got problems with my stumach again (dunno why, but I think it has to do with stress or my irregular eating patterns, or both) so I kinda dropped it. But nothing's really missed: we're gonna have something similar later on anyway.

Now I haven't made anything game related in a while which sucks. A month ago or something I was poking at some prototype but it hasn't gotten anywhere yet. I was going to enter ludum dare 19 but then I kinda just didn't, and now it's too late to do anything. And I have like a thousand ideas I'd like to do, but I don't seem to have done anything.

Argh!

And then there's my other programming interests of course. I've been poking at Haskell a few months ago but now I actually want to learn the damn language and the best way to do that is to make something real from scratch, so I've started my own (atm extremely simple) irc bot. Then I've bought the classical K&R C book and some book about Erlang and I'd like to get going with those too.

Add to that we're gonna do Ada in school after christmas which could be pretty darn fun too. There's surely not a shortage of stuff to at least!

October 6, 2010

Going to University

I mentioned in the last post that I'm going to the university, which might explain my lack of activity here and for that I'm sorry. It's not as hard as I had imagined, and I don't have that much in school but there's still a lot that's going on. For example now how to make something which doesn't focus on pasta or meatballs and I've also done the laundry a few times. These are all thanks to my girlfriend and without her I doubt that I would eat anything other than pasta and I would constantly wake up just to find that I don't have any clean underwear left.

There are still a few homework things I need to do from time to time, but those are often either math or lisp which are pretty fun so no harm has been done to me yet.

I should really begin with the game making again now when my schedual is opening up a bit.

A secret preview of my latest game project.

September 19, 2010

The great Hochstapler

Hey there. A lot has happened lately since my last update and my last game here.

I'm now a pretty happy student at Linköpings university and I'm reading something similar to Computer Science or Computer engineering, but I guess it'll become whatever you make it to be. For starters we're reading a bit math and a bit common lisp, which is fun but hopefully this is just the beginning.

Me and Veronica are now living in a fairly nice apartment and I think I've increased my cooking skills a few magnitudes since I got here. Admittedly that's not a too big of an accomplishment...

I haven't had any time, or energy, to focus on game development. There are a few things I'd like to do but we'll see what happens. My friend on the other hand has been productive and he has just finished one of his big game projects: Hochstapler.

Hochstapler, the epic production from Gridlock Games

It's a really fun game with some inspiration from the old commodore and I really recommend you to give it a try. The only downside is of course that I just can't beat his highscore!

April 16, 2010

Before the Games: The Site

I've got some things I want to do before I start with my next game and they're all about improving the site. The last week or so has been extremely productive with me throwing out a lot of wasted code, speeding up the site and adding/removing features and I want to continue with that and get the things done now when I'm in the flow.

You can find the whole source for the site, excluding a few security related files ofc, on github where I've also uploaded a small to-do list and some ideas I might want to implement.

Here's a small summary of the stuff:

1. Allow editing all the information pages without doing it through phpmyadmin, merge it together with the post editing.
2. Change the layout of adding comments and it's preview, try unhide it.
3. Fix the layout of search and possibly tweak the inner workings
4. Revamp archive page, maybe use it as a sitemap?
5. Add read next/previous posts on post and older/newer posts?
6. Make comment editing work, for guests too.
7. Statistics!! I have third party statistics but I want stats for the most active commenter and other stuff.
8. A greater 404 page
9. Refactor, remove garbage code and refactor some more.

I'm itching a little bit about a new game, but first thing's first.

April 10, 2010

Widening the horizon

This is a game making site but where are the games? What gives?

I've been slightly less motivated in making games lately and I've been doing different things, just to get my ideas and my motivation up. As I said in an earlier post I wanted a break from Experimental Games and I want to spend more time on each game just to get the quality of the games up.

Lately I've been using vim and I really like it but the learning curve is really high, so why not make a game about it? To make the learning progress easier and hopefully even somewhat fun. I haven't come up with a great idea yet, and thus I haven't started, but I'm pretty optimistic.

I also mentioned Ludum Dare but as the looks of things it ain't gonna happen this time. I've got a massage course the whole weekend timed on just as the 48 hour game making competition is and I don't think I wanna stress myself to manage the both of them.

Instead for a game I've been focusing on learning Haskell and on improving this site. Trying out different stuff like trying a new paradigm and trying out different languages is a really good way of Sharpening your Saw. Yes technically he meant doing things not related to programming, such as math, but I still see it as doing something completely different and improving while doing that.

For example Kohana, the framework this site is built on, has made me think more about tools and frameworks instead of just language features as it transformed my awful, hackish site into this beautiful little thing literally in the blink of an eye. Or take jQuery which took my epic cross-browser checks and transformed it into beautiful code. These two seemingly small changes made the boring web developer process really fun!

Yeah that's what I've been doing; I've been widening my horizon and I've been having fun at the process! Wooo

April 6, 2010

The games that make me who I am

I read an article the other day where he met someone who didn't read fiction:

He suggested that fiction was a waste of his time — he read to learn, not for "mere" entertainment

I don't agree with this view and neither did he:

Fiction allows you to be part of situations that are unlikely to happen otherwise. You can experience thousands of years worth of events by reading fiction. Yes, it is true that what happens to you in real-life — with it’s finality and incomparably richer stimulation – out-weighs that of a book. However, the course altering moments in life are infrequent. Fiction provides a means of accelerating your “personal growth.”

He then gives us a list of fiction characters who has made him who he is, many small pieces of trait that has become a part of him.

Interesting I thought and I began thinking of what characters I could identify with (Lincoln Rhyme and Robert Langdon comes to mind) but then I started thinking of games. What games has made me who I am? It's not an easy answer and it'll never become exhaustive but it's interesting to think about and here's my try:

Worms
I played the demo of Worms 2 to death, I ran to my friend all the time to play Worms Armageddon and I've been addicted to blasting ugly worms with banana bombs ever since.

RollerCoaster Tycoon
I love rollercoasters and I love to build stuff so naturally I played the games a ton... I'm still tingling with excitement when I think of building a super-coaster. The builder that is me was born with this.

Hospital Tycoon
Another constructor game with hilarious humor and I'm still harboring thoughts of resurrecting this beauty as a new game. I think it was one of the first games to make me think about actually making games instead of just playing.

Counter-Strike Source
The best anger management there is. Or well I'm not really civil when playing it but it lets me went out pretty damn good, but don't sit near me when I'm playing - it's not good for your ears.

World of Goo
The game that opened my eyes to the wonders of Indie Games.

Supreme Commander
Introduced me to the world of competitive gaming, or rather the competitive mindset. It also helped me become a better person by helping and being a part of a great community.

Evil Genius
Humor + Base Building = Epic Win.

These are just a few games from the top of my head, some had big impacts and some slightly less so.

We started with a quote and that's how we'll end it:

I am the product of my parents, my friends, my life, my experiences…and my teachers.

April 2, 2010

Death to the Forum

Well it was fun while it lasted, but now it's gone and it'll stay gone for a long time I think. It was mainly a test to see if I could do it and I'm really proud of my styling of it but it's deader than in a grave, which isn't really surprising, and it bothered me that I didn't write it myself - like really bothered me.

phpBB is fantastic in many ways; easy, fast and easily managed but it just didn't feel right as I hadn't done it. Kinda the same as why I'm not using any popular blog tool but I've rolled my own. It feels pretty good to use a site you've written completely yourself...

And no I don't want to write my own forum now, for now I'll stick with a tweak here a tweak there on the site.

January 18, 2010

My Dream Game: The RTS

Even if there are a million great games there's one that has a very special place in my heart: Supreme Commander. It's not the game I've played the most and there might even be games which are better and more fun but supcom was the game that introduced me to competitive gaming and it made it me feel like no game had done before. I took gaming seriously for once; sure I had played online with cs but I was never serious. I did nothing to improve myself, I didn't really care - as long as I didn't have 1-10 or a silly just-beginning-stat.

Before supcom I always cheated my way through an RTS game (I still remember that pepperoni pizza gives food and quarry gives stone in age of empires) or just gave up when things got rough. Now I'm happy to give it my best just to beat guitar hero on expert and someday I'm sure I'll do it! Getting beat down by a lame rush? Before I would just whine and shout "lamer" and throw out the game but instead I saved the replay, copied his moves and presto! Now I got to be the one who got shouted at!! And I can tell you - it felt a lot better...

All this effort I put into the game really got me involved on a very different level than in any game before. I'd never even thought that SimCity, the great 4th edition, was imbalanced. But when I think about it: the huge apartment-building with a couple of thousand inhabitants it always, always without fail clogged down all the transports even when I dedicated everything around it just for transport. Later I found out it was bugged and there's a fix, somewhere, to download which will fix this and some other bugs. Now I started to find things I didn't like in supcom, things that was... wrong. No matter what you did, and no matter what the really good guys did - you couldn't beat a certain strategy. It ended with everyone playing the same faction, spamming the same units in game after game... Not really fun. I participated in discussions and believe it or not I think that I was right more often than not. I was improving!

But hey! Why did they do this? What if they had done this instead? If I had made a game it would have done this and thus been a lot better...

And here I am. I have this dream of making the best RTS game ever... Staying true to my play style from supcom: copy the good things from others, improve them and make them my own, my plan is to mix in the great things from all the RTS games I've played throughout the years. Obviously the most prominent would be supcom but also StarCraft, kknd, TA and CnC among others...

December 21, 2009

Now we have a Forum

In a burst of random energy I made a forum for madeoftree. Well okay I just made an awesome style for the awesome phpBB - the forum itself was up and running in say 10min and the rest of the latest days has been all about customizing. Now it's finally kinda complete so here it is!

Making it was the easy bit - now we need to generate some content! Where is the almighty sundb00m when we're in a desperate need for spam?!

November 2, 2009

An invisible Remake

What does a guy like me do when not working on a new game? Except living my life, being a coach for my little brother's hockey team and eating strawberries? The last week or so I've been working hard with my webpage, yes this page. If you've visited my site before today you'll know what I'm talking about.

NOT

There's practically zero visible difference. You might notice the 'Quick n Dirty File Download' or the little line of text towards the bottom of the page, or even the ability for multiple tags! That's kinda freaky stuff eh? And only +1 week to do that! :D

The big thing was actually a complete rewrite of the whole site. From really bad and random spaghetti code I managed to produce some half-nice code. I wrote the site with Kohana which was a blast to use! If you're making a page of some sort I can heartily recommend to give it a try.

Soon it's time for some game making again, I just need a good idea... hm.

September 28, 2009

Why make games

Why did I start making games? Because I like to play them of course. Think of all the fantastic games; Super Mario, Lemmings, Tetris, GTA, The Sims, Counterstrike, Theme Hospital, SimCity and Rollercoaster Tycoon... Damn - when you count them like this you'll see how many great games there are out there. And I can honestly say each and every one of them has inspired me and made me wanna create something similar. No - something even better!

I also like to program, that's almost a must if you should make a working game from scratch, so I figured why not use it to make something productive and hopefully something fun?

August 25, 2009

Going into Being Busy mode

I'm in the civil service atm and, sadly, we're going to be extremely busy the coming... two months or something? So I can't promise a game the next two months. Kinda beats the point of this site doesn't it? I'm really sorry and that's all I can say really...

Hopefully I'll get a week somewhere with enough spare time to create something. It's a damn sure I'll have to make a game about submarine warfare!!

July 21, 2009

The first (worst) post

Well, here it is: The opening post. What will come here? Here's where I'll outline what the blog will be about and maybe, if I'm dedicated, it won't die before Christmas you think.

And sure, you're right. I will run away to the corner in about two and a half months crying I never got the traffic I'm fantasizing about but I can try to summarize the site in one sentence: I'm going to make a themed game every month. There, I've said it. Tired and scared of wasting my time with a monster-project I've decided to use the experimental project model. Basically I'm going to make a game in 7 days, kinda like God made the world. And I'm alone making these games, all the gfx, the sound and the code.

If this got you interested check back regularly for some cool (I hope) games and read my about section.