B – satisfied? Well, yeah. My own ass I didn’t spend enough time prepping it 
Last one this Tuesday.
Work, ho!
Project scored
January 23rd, 2012Gun Ray
January 21st, 2012I know of Squall Lionheart’s Gunblade, but what would a Gun Ray be?
For a moment I thought it would be the perfect gimmicky artsy weapon thing for a western jRPG. Then I came to my senses.
Out.
DIEB
January 16th, 2012Graphical user interfaces. Aced it with an A. I’m satisfied.
Out.
First of four
January 11th, 2012An integer 10, equal to the B. I’m fine with that.
That is all.
Boring
January 5th, 2012Exam preparations. They’re hell. Only good news is that the prof’ posted 50 pages too many and cut them away from the reading material. Goody. I’m grinding my teeth, staring down the damp white page as I’m trying my best to actually retain the words upon the surface, not just really ugly stick figures. It’s not easy, but it’s not as difficult as reciting the x86 instruction set while trapezing across a lava pit full of rabid bears and sharks – with lasers. That was my last exam (pause for effect). Almost all of the terminology will come almost naturally to anyone who has involved themselves in object-oriented programming, but never gave a rat’s ass about the actual early design.
This course is all about that early phase. That awkward step when you’re trying to goad a company into giving you money for an idea you have that will arm their managers and sales people with a precious seventeen extra buzz words meant to pacify shareholders and pit workers alike.
There’s two very simple extremes to the book, which everyone at Aalborg’s Insitute for Computer Sciences has dubbed “Red Aalborg” (the authors are from town). On one hand, it is extremely bite-sized. Each chunk of the material and concept is split into a nice chapter of 20 pages (give or take 5). Very lean, very smooth. However, it hasn’t seen a revision in over 10 years. All technologies and sciences move forward, and Computer Sciences are almost at the fucking forefront of that particular motion. Why on Earth are we basing all of our knowledge of abstract systems design on a book written a decade ago? Not even the C++ base handbook goes that long without an errata or two. I figure the prof (actually one of the authors – hm) considers himself one of the fathers of the modern world of IT design. Granted, he was among the first (Wikipedia lists him as one of the top 10 authors of Danish research on the subject of systems design). But instrumental? I’m not so sure. The book could use a going-over, just to consider the advances and changes in development (for example, the powerful rise to agile methods).
Anyway, the short of the matter is that this is my reading material until this Wednesday. Then hopefully pass. Then move on two the next of three exams.
I so look forward to February
The last of times
December 28th, 2011Alright, dismiss the terrible headline. I sat down to write up the past few months and started instead to consider this a New Year’s post. Stuff has happened. Nothing serious, nothing big, but stuff slowly seems to move Real Life’s XP bar up until you ding another age. Then it struck me that we’re on the verge of 2012, less than 365 days from doom as it was foreseen by the Incas. Should be an interesting year. Here’s my prediction: nothing’s going to happen. There. I said it. Now I probably also jinxed it. We’ll see 
First off, work. My contract with one job is up, and my other employer decided to offer me “new opportunities in other parts of the company”. As with any phrasing that contains that much nuspeak and neutrality, they wanted to boot me back to where I started, almost five years ago, citing necessary cutbacks during restructuring. To be frank, I didn’t much care for that company any more and the news came more as a relief than anything else. What did bug me was who else they were trying to pull a quick one on, and how. Besides me (a nobody part-time employee) they had picked out five people to be given the same treatment, each from their team within the department (almost). At a glance, their argument was that they were cutting away the weakest link. One of them is missing an arm – way to level the playing field career-wise, idiots. Another, a close friend and colleague of mine (we started in the same team on the same day and followed almost the exactly same career path at the exactly same time until I started studying last year) was booted – he and I were the two oldest (in terms of employment) members of our team, beating the other members by anything from 6 months to several years (the two newest members by less than 6 months). Apparently loyalty means fuck dibble to these people. The second half of my gripe is more conspiracy than anything else. The six of us combined represented the most critical people of the department. We would always rise up and try to pick apart new ideas or products. Not to destroy them, mind you, rather to make them more solid (I mean, customers aren’t dumb cattle, they’ll see stupidity if it’s staring them right in the eye). Probably paranoia, but I can’t shake that they tried to get rid of “meddlesome” elements. Anyway, the short of the long of it, is that I decided to quit instead of being put through the humiliation of going several steps down the ladder, particularly as my boss had advertised this position as a magnificent stepping stone upwards in the company. We believed him and now he betrayed us. Wonderful.
Ludum Dare. I wanted to join in but it was a crucial moment of our semester project. We spent the weekend correcting the report before submitting it monday, so LD was just plain out of the question. I’ll be back in next time, probably AS3 again but with fourth semester (Programming Languages and Compiler Construction) coming up I want to move into C++ and get good and friendly with it. In parallel, I guess.
Anything else? Oh yeah, I’ve got two solid and one interesting web projects up. One very simple CMS (CodeIgniter), a slightly more complex web page for a sports club and finally continued work on our semester project. That last one is a long-term investment. The larger project (named “GIRAF”, from the Danish word for giraffe) is targeted at making a software platform that improves the lives and communication with autistic children through web sites and custom Android software. Last year, about a dozen students created an Android-based platform (a restricted Home environment, two apps and an administration interface) for developing applications targeted at children with autism. This year, six of us created a web-based MVC framework to supplement it, allowing remote administration of said Android devices. I want to continue working on that framework for future projects within the concept.
I guess that nicely wraps everything up.
Happy New Year!
Crunch
December 4th, 2011Christ I feel busy.
Almost just finished up a three-week crunch to meet a project deadline, and I’m continuing the work before our final submission on the 20th. Busy. Busy.
Anyway, I had a perverted thought. I watched Conan the Barbarian. Terrible flick. Then I watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Less terrible flick. THEN I thought, what if the two were mixed? You’d have a barbarian race of apes that took women hostage as slaves. Which is almost what Conan is about anyway.
Panda?
October 21st, 2011Phenomenal… more than 14 months clean and in one fell swoop, the people at the former Silicon Synapse manage to instantly hook me, once again.
I think it’s true. Their game boxes are lined with addiction-inducing drugs.
Dass Pilgrim
October 17th, 2011Watching Scott Pilgrim while trying to sleep.
Screw what people are saying, calling this stuff mediocre. I rarely call movies super-fucking-mega-untrivialised-awesome-ness-ness. But this movie is. Chock full of excellent actors in everything from lead roles to short single-scene appearances, combined with retro video game and anime references and near-perfect representations of my preferred female prototypes.
Johnny likey.
Death of video games?
October 16th, 2011Slashdot linked an article – an essay, really – about the intricacies of social video games. Their own flavour text did it no justice, but I went ahead and read it.
Food for thought, my friends. Do read. I’ve always contended that social games were the bane of all things decent, right before the anti-socialising advent of both Facebook and the dominance of online multiplayer over local forays. We pretend to be social without actually meeting people… or something like that.
Cheers.
