Thu, 26 Apr 2007
Wanna see something brilliant?
- Time
- Money
There are so many amazingly smart people out there. I think part of why I’m looking forward to going back to work in software. I really like working with bright people to solve difficult problems.
This is just one of the amazing demonstrations given at TED.
Jeff Han and Multi touch Unser Interface Design
I love this kind of stuff.
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Tue, 30 Jan 2007
"Back in the day" (I can’t believe I’m using that expression) I use to love to program computers. I started out in Jr high school writing games in BASIC, I went to High School and had a blast playing on an IBM 360 mainframe that was timeshared to our school.I remember when the Apple I came out. It was a kit that you had to build yourself. It came with 4k of RAM That’s right boys and girls, 4000 bytes! Total!. If you wanted an additional 8K of RAM you had to buy an additional circuit board for $200.
Then the Apple ][ came out. Then the Amiga, the Coleco Adam, the Texas Instruments TI994A, the PC Jr, the Apple Mac and so on.
Let’s see how many of the old programmers remember this: "Back in the day" (Dang, I’m saying it again!) there use to be these books that you could buy with 101 computer games written in BASIC. You would have to type in the code yourself. Of course, you’d usually make some sort of typing mistake so you’d have to debug your code. Then you’d play the game (after you saved your code on a cassette tape. Damn I’m feeling old!) If you were a real geek then you’d modify the code to add some feature that you wanted it to have and you’d make the game your own. That’s pretty much how I learned to write software, by copying other people’s code. I can’t begin to count the number of times that I was typing in somebody else’s code and said to myself :"Wow! I didn’t know you could do that!"
So now it’s coming up on a year since I’ve written any code for a living. And the last couple of years at my last job were pretty frustrating because I was essentially the liason between an atrociously bad vendor and my company. In the last 2 or 3 years at that job I probably only spent 3 months actually being a programmer. On one hand I was being told that I was a great programmer, on the other hand, they wouldn’t actually let me write any code. But when things broke I was right there fixing the problem and getting things done. So I knew what I was doing, but for some reason they wouldn’t use my talents.
In any case, I was browsing the internet and found something that reminded me of those good old days of building your own games in BASIC. It’s started to rekindle my love of programming.
Robocode is a game I’ve played with in the past, but I just started messing around with it again. Basically, you have a tank. Then you write some code that describes how that tank will behave. The code you write is in Java, my favorite programming language. Then you put your tank in an arena with other tanks and let them fight it out while you watch the carnage.
Yep, that’s good clean fun.
Robocode was written as a tool to help people learn the Java programming language. After a year off from programming and with the few years before that being pretty light I found myself making all the newbie mistakes all over again. Forgetting to import classes, messing up my package structure, using classes that I havn’t defined yet and so on. If there’s a way to mess up I was doing it.
So why was I having so much fun?
It brought me back to the days when you could actually write a game on a tiny computer in your bedroom and it would be fun and interesting enough to play. This was before the days of 3D graphics and CDs and games that took up gigabytes of space. I mean Geez-Oh-Petes! Gigabytes! I remember sitting in a car with a buddy as he was browsing through a local computer magazine when he said "Hey check this out! 2 gig hard drives just dropped below $200! " Now you can get 250 gigs for less than $100.
I guess Moore’s Law still works.
Robocode is so old now that a lot of the tutorial links are broken and web pages that use to support it have vanished. But it’s still a fun way to play with some computer code. So go geek out, get Robocode and bring yourself back to the days when we "hand rolled" our own games and wrote the code ourselves.
Those were the days.
[edit] It turns out that there’s a brand new version of Robocode as of YESTERDAY. Go get it.
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Sat, 25 Mar 2006
My new favorite Go server is the KGS Server It’s a very friendly place. Once you get use to the interface it’s actually quite easy to use. Also, there seems to be more users on KGS than on IGS lately. My user name there is also DruLeePars so look for me and maybe we can play a game of Go.This story is from the
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Sat, 18 Mar 2006
Many years ago when I was just a lad, my Uncle Rex was stationed in Japan with the Navy. During Christmas he and his family came back to the states to be with the rest of the family. My gift that year was a Go set he brought back from Japan.
Go is a very old Chinese game and it’s extremely popular in China and Korea. In Japan the Manga and Cartoon series “Hikaru No Go” has caused a resurgence of the game among Japanese kids. I tried to learn the game back then but it was difficult because I didn’t know anybody else who played. So after a half hearted attempt to teach my friends how to play the Go board went into the closet and stayed there.
Actually, there’s a bit of a funny story about that Go board. My Uncle bought it in Japan, where Go is much more popular, and brought it back to America. On the box the set came in was the name of the company that made the set. “Hollywood Game Company”. So that board and those game pieces were made in the US and sent to Japan only to be brought from Japan back to Southern California about 20 miles away from where the game was manufactured.
In any case, I was in the book store a couple weeks ago looking at the poker books when I noticed some books for Go. I bought the first two books in the “Learn To Play Go” series by Janice Kim: A Master’s Guide To The Ultimate Game and The Way Of The Moving Horse These books are quite good at explaining this amazing game and I found myself wanting to learn to play this game once again. But that old Go board of mine is packed away at the house up in Northern California and we’re still down here for a couple more weeks. So I went to Janice Kim’s website www.samarkand.net and bought their Club Set. When it arrived I was really pleased at how nice the set looked. It’s much nicer than my first Go board and, like chess, it’s just nicer to be able to play with a decent set.
When I was playing tournament chess I was playing at a low average strength. I was rated about 1200-1300. In chess a rating of 2000 gives you the title of “Expert”. At 2200 you become a Master.
In Go there are Japanese and Korean ratings. In the Japanese rating style you start at 30 kyu and move up to 1 kyu. Then you become first dan or “shodan”. The dan levels go up to 6th dan for amature players. Then, if you’re really good, you can take the test to become a “professional” player. The professional players go from 1st dan to 9th dan.
Since I work with a bunch of Chinese programmers I thought I’d ask them if they played Go. My friend Chaoming looked at my books and said “Oh, that’s ‘Weichi’ in Chinese”. I play a little bit, but Henry plays a lot.” I asked Henry (which is the Americanized version of his Chinese name) if he plays. It turns out that Henry is a 5th dan player. So he’s really good. In fact, when I play computer Go against the GnuGo program I set it at the easiest setting and take the biggest handicap and I can still only win about half the time. I watched Henry play against the computer at the maximum strength with no handicap and he absolutely crushed it!
So now I’m studying Go and playing on the Panda Go IGS Internet Go server I use my standard on line identity of “Dru Lee Parsec” but my name got shortened to “DruLeePar” on the server. So if you’d like to play a game of Go against a total newbie player then look for me on IGS.
After all, it’s my latest addiction.
What we’re listening to today : The Album Leaf
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Mon, 23 Jan 2006
Just a quick note to say that the new www.gbguitars.com website is up and running on it’s very own server. I’ll be moving almost all of the music content away from the www.brouelette.com site and onto this new site. So go check it out.This story is from the
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