is a blog by Brendan
Man, Blizzard rocks. I didn’t realize they made The Lost Vikings AND BattleChess too, back in the day, under a different name. It doesn’t surprise me, though.
Note: Brendan Adkins and Xorph Conglomerates Ltd. do not in any way endorse the practice of writing code while your wife is giving birth to your daughter. Unless you’re, like, right in the middle of something.
Could’ve saved a line if he’d written it in C++.
Update 1636 hrs: Or five lines, in PHP.
Update 10.5.03 1745 hrs: And Leonard points out that unless he puts a newline character in at the end there, it won’t look right at all.
Yeah, this didn’t actually turn out all that terse.
Also! Webcomics are maybe the one source of content with the biggest conflict between proposed and actual posting schedule, which makes them PERFECT for RSS feeds… except nobody has one. Okay, Penny Arcade does, but they never miss a day anyway. Even Keenspot and Keenspace, the people who get probably half of all webcomic traffic in the world (and write the software that implements probably 80% of all webcomics), don’t have any kind of update feed.
So they should, basically, is what I’m saying. It’s called Really Simple Syndication, you know, it can’t be that hard to add in.
(Yes, I realize that my comic probably needs it more than anyone’s. I do plan to add one, once I have the time to rewrite my entire site apparatus. But again: I’m lazy.)
Seriously, why not just add two more dots to Braille and make it match ASCII? Somebody should have been thinking about that.
I guess you could just have one abstract class binaryAlphabet and Braille and ASCII could both extend it, and fill the remaining abstract spaces with their own oh no my brain went object-oriented.
And I pulled another all-nighter (bringing our running total for this week up to–yes!–two) and I finished the whole thing this time, and it works, and it’s 18 pages of code and 10 pages of report in fourteen hours, and I am fuck yes proud of it.
Actually I’m mostly proud because last night, I learned Java. Like all of it. I’d never written anything besides a Hello World in the language before, and last night I sat down and implemented polymorphs and overrides and extensions like a fucking Sun cowboy. I’m thinking I probably won’t go to my last class of the day too often anymore, because it’s basically How To Do Java When You Only Know C++, and I think I just made that whole concept call me daddy.
It was a long night, but hell, I know a new language now. And although yes, I took a half-hour nap that turned into a one-hour nap and I was late for the class where I had to hand it in, I biked like a demon (on one hour of sleep) and got there without being too late at all. My professor didn’t seem to mind, at least. He’s bland, but he’s awfully nice.
Tonight I clean and nap and clean some more, preparing for my mother and sister to descend upon my apartment and find it wanting. Then tomorrow it’s Ian’s birthday. Happy birthday, Ian! I didn’t get you anything.
Turns out I actually can eat lunch, read under a tree, come home on the bus, do miscellaneous home activities (like exchange heavy books), and still get back on campus in time for my afternoon classes.
Huh.
Pulled my first grad school project all-nighter last night. Because I’m stupid. I didn’t quite finish it (I wrote a predicate logic unification package, but not its extensions), but from the classroom buzz this morning everybody who did finish didn’t have the first part working, and I did. Maybe I’ll get Mickey Rooney Happy Fun Time Points.
Fun With Iteration
Jon once proposed that Will Smith produce a franchise of songs in the same vein as “Miami,” ranking each city in order of preference:
“Miami, my second home!”
“Los Angeles, my third home!”
“Dublin, my… 467th home.”
More Fun With Iteration
This morning, TARCing in ten minutes late to my advisor appointment, I managed to correctly get his office extension by picking a known number down the hall and trying each subsequent number.
I know, I know, this is kind of boring lately. Now that I don’t spend five days a week staring at a computer screen in an isolation cube, I just don’t have as much free brain with which to think up overly cute observations. It’s a conundrum. Well, it’s not really a conundrum.
I don’t actually have any promises that it’ll get better, although if I ever get this AIM-as-a-MUD-client idea off the ground, I’m sure I’ll bombard you with stupid nerd posts about its progress. I’d be using it mostly as a project to learn about Java (I’d probably try to turn Jaimbot into a communications layer), so I could justify it that way. Think I could get it approved as a class project for Object-Oriented?
The day went very well, actually. Object-Oriented Software Development is going to be hard and a lot of fun; AI and Algorithms are going to be hard and… well, basically just hard. I managed to buy my books and a lunch and backpack. Oh! That’s a great excuse for a gimmick, because I was actually buying said backpack for Maria, and I had biked to class and had only one way to carry it. That’s right: for a few hours, mine was a metabackpack.
That biking was the first time I’ve ever actually done a real bike workout, and it was pretty cool. (It’s also longer than I thought; now that I’ve scouted the route, I think I’ll mostly TARC it.) At times I felt like an escapee of TRON, whizzing through lightfields with limitless dexterity. At others, such as when I ran into a chain link fence within five minutes of leaving my apartment, I did not. And at still others, I tried to stop, ha ha, whilst riding with a misaligned brake pad and fifty pounds of new textbooks. The other thing I learned today is “inertia.”
Also! I returned Sumana’s call and ended up talking to Leonard, who was gentle and solar-powered, the way I imagine dimetrodons. I babbled a lot, at one point, I think, engaging in extended discourse on the subject of avocados.
Yeah. I lived through one day, and tomorrow it’s already my weekly Hump Day Vacation, wherein I do nothing but hang out with Ian and get excited about secret projects. Also, try to find a longer CAT5 cable so I can get Yellow Puppy out on the interweb. Ph34r! My… vastly underpowered new computer!