Shared Illusions

The difference between 'simple' and 'easy'

2010-04-17T17:30:00.001Z

This is an annoyance that has come to the forefront of my awareness recently and basically revolves around someone calling an easy thing 'simple', or a simple thing 'easy'.

To me, the distinction is that an easy thing doesn't have to be a simple thing... it could be an extremely complicated process (such as retrieving a web page, or walking) but it has been set up in such a way that performing it is extremely easy. A simple idea is extremely easy to comprehend (such as addition) but doesn't do any 'uncomplification', for example when you're trying to add up a hundred, or a thousand, numbers. Now, in the case of addition, there are some processes that can be put on top of addition to make adding up large amounts of numbers easy, but the ideas behind these aren't anywhere near as simple, and I find this occurs in a lot of the cases of easy vs simple.

The area that got me mostly riled up on the subject though was a recent discussion of PHP and Ruby on Rails. I was talking to someone online, who called PHP 'easy'. Now, PHP is pretty simple as web development goes, but it doesn't really attempt to do any of the hard concepts for you. If you want to connect to a database, you need to do all the effort, same for if you want to cache your pages, or have data validation and any of the other thousand and one tasks that a decent web application needs to do. This makes PHP very simple, deceptively so for a new web developer.

Contrast that to the Rails situation. Here, everything is made pretty easy for you. If you want to connect to a database, you just give it some details. Data validation is as easy as writing a couple of lines. It isn't as easy to get up to speed, there is a lot to learn to use Rails effectively, and it has a higher barrier of understanding required to start working within the environment. However, once you're there it's much easier to get things done. PHP lets you start putting stuff on a web page very quickly and simply. Rails isn't anywhere near as simple, and it takes a bit more effort to get running with it, but once you're there then doing things becomes a lot easier than the plain PHP counterpart.

My life, the nulliverse and nothing

2009-12-07T21:19:00.001Z

Well, time for an update from my little corner of the universe. It's a shame there's nothing really happening at the moment. It's been that usual boring period between halloween and christmas where everything has been busy (work and home). Still, everything seems sorted for christmas, and work is looking like I'll be on a new project soon so all good there :)

In other news, my reading of the Road to Reality has kinda petered off again, as I got innundated with a set of books to read for work. I put a quick review of the cream of that crop onto ReflectiveCoder here. The other books (Advanced Rails, RESTFul web services and The Rails Way) have all been reasonable reads, but Enterprise Rails definitely stood out as a must read, both for it's clear, concise and readable style and for the wealth of information contained within it's covers.

So popular!

2009-11-06T15:33:00.002Z

I feel like I've gone party crazy! I ended up at yet another small party yesterday, this time going next door for their small fireworks display. Two parties in a week is unheard of for Anita and myself!

It was a nice small party, only the neighbours and some of their friends and family and a small bonfire and fireworks. They helpfully burnt an old fence panel of ours that we couldn't get rid of as well, so it was a bonfire + cleanup :)

Other than that, nothing much has happened this week. I think we have a free weekend for once, so I may try and get some work done on a couple of personal projects. If I do, I'll probably end up writing about boring stuff over on Reflective Coder so if you want to read my ramblings on random Ruby on Rails related subjects, keep an eye out ;)

Post party

2009-11-03T16:17:00.001Z

The Halloween party turned out to be not too bad. I did end up going as a strange cross-dressing ogre, although for about half the night I was just a cross-dresser as the mask and gloves were extremely hot and uncomfortable :) Anita went for just being a witch as messing around with a wig to go as Susan was just annoying.

Pictures:
Me trying the costume on the night before:

Me on the night:

Anita:

Sheryl and Rob (The friends we went with):

Images were taken from Anita's gallery here and Sheryl's gallery here

On life and Halloween

2009-10-29T12:43:00.002Z

Well, this is the first 'life' update for a while, and as is typical for me I haven't really done much :) I guess the biggest event was a family holiday at Butlins down in Minehead that was fun. Spent time with some members of the family I don't see much (my Dad, my step-mother and my brother, sister, step-brothers and their partners) and had a fun time. One of the more fun things I did was convincing Anita to allow me to spend out for the time on their climbing, hire-wire course thing (I have no idea what to actually call it, so it's a thing :)). Anita took some pictures of me doing this, and probably the best one was:

(hosted on my sisters Picasa gallery)

This was me making my 'leap of faith', where I had absolutely no faith and asked for the trapeze to be moved as close as possible. I didn't realise until I saw this picture just how close that was and how cowardly I was. All I can say is that up on the top of that totem pole, the trapeze seemed completely out of reach and I was worried I'd jump off into nothing!

So, that's my current life covered so onto future events. Anita and myself are going to a halloween party this weekend and have been told that fancy dress is required. We both have our costumes mostly figured out but I'm trying to decide on the last part of mine... what to wear underneath the mask I have (of some hideous ogre). My current consideration is to go as a cross-dressing hideous ogre and borrow a skirt and tight black top from Anita for the occasion :) I'll post pics up of my final outfit (and of Anita's, who is going as either a witch or as Susan D'eath depending on which she feels like explaining through the haze of alcohol) and if I don't chicken out, feel free to poke fun of me wearing women's clothing :P

Back on the road to reality

2009-10-29T12:31:00.000Z

As happens every few months, I'm attempting to get my head around the content of 'The Road to Reality' again. This time I'm taking the more sedate approach though, reading it on the way to and from work and putting the book down when I find I'm getting distracted and not concentrating on the content. So I'm not reading it when I'm too tired, like when I tried reading it before sleeping at night (which also means I'm not getting odd looks from Anita :) ), and I'm not just looking at the pages without the content making it through to my brain as also frequently happens.

The result? I'm not sure yet. It's certainly taking longer as it can be 2 or 3 days before I get through a chapter, and as such I haven't yet really progressed beyond my normally familiar territory of complex numbers and the real number calculus. I think I have a better grasp of hyperbolic geometry from this re-read, and I also think I've grasped the explanations of power series and the like better.

I guess it'll be a little while before this style of reading pays off, but if it does then I may finally grasp some of the more interesting maths in a much more in-depth fashion. Whether this will be useful, I don't know but at least I'll feel like I finally learnt something more from this great book :)

Updates, updates, updates

2009-07-21T16:35:00.003Z

Well, I forgot to blog at all last week... I think it's understandable though, as I'm still getting used to the commute from the new house, me and Anita were painting over the weekend and I'm working a few days a week now out of an office where I don't have net access (everyone else does, just I haven't been set up on the network yet :( ). That said, a missed week is nothing new in the world of Shared Illusions ;) (neither is a missed month, or possibly even a missed year...)

So onto the updates... well, the new house is slowly getting sorted and we have done a chunk of painting (well, Anita did the toilet and bathroom and we both did the kitchen). That's all we have paint for currently though so there's a break coming up.

I'm going to try and take up a martial art again. We've found a school close by, and I have an intro session on Friday. Should be fun, and I'll hopefully start to lose some of this weight I've gained over the last 6 years of uni and work :)

Me and Anita also saw Harry Potter last weekend. I have to say, I'm getting more and more disappointed with the films. This latest one seemed almost unintelligible with the parts cut out, and some strange additions into the film sequence that added nothing and took screen time away from sections that could really have used it for exposition. I'm very tempted once the last film is done (or 2 films as I've heard they are going to split it into two parts) to sit someone who hasn't read the books or seen the films down in front of them, get them to watch all the films and see if they end up with even an inkling of what was meant to have been happening :)

Moving, a psudo-final update

2009-07-09T13:10:00.002Z

We've moved, we have furniture and we have a decent amount unpacked... it's starting to look like a home rather than a slightly (well, very) run down unoccupied house :)

I need a break though, and so does Anita... she is getting fairly ill from doing too much and my legs feel like jelly two days after the majority of the moving... if I ever consider a first story flat again, I'll shoot myself. I went up and down those stairs at least 100 times over 3 days, and there were 17 steps each way!

More moving

2009-06-30T17:09:00.002Z

Well, the furniture arrived today, and pretty much all the hassle I mentioned earlier has been sorted out :) We have a decent collection there, just need to move some old furniture out the way to get the new stuff sorted.

Then just clean, finish moving all our stuff from our current place over the weekend, clean the old place, hand back keys...

Why is moving such a hassle? :(

Not really got any other news at the moment... work progresses as it normally does, life goes on and so on.

Oh, and our new broadband connection is connected up on Friday, which should mean we don't have a hitch in our connectivity over the move... can't ask for better than that :) We've switched to Virgin for phone and broadband... mainly because we get more bang for our buck (faster broadband and digital tv for the same price as just broadband with BT) and because BT wanted to charge £120 to get an engineer out to move the line, simply because there hadn't been a BT line at our new rental for 2 years. In a glowing recommendation for Virgin's sales team, when I told them that I then got free setup :) I can't guarantee it would work for everyone, but it just goes to show how important good customer service is.

Moving time

2009-06-28T12:45:00.002Z

Well, it's getting close to the time when me and Anita are going to be moving out.

We've gotten the keys for the new place (with a truckload of hassle that's still being sorted), a load of furniture, etc. from Newcastle is arriving on Tuesday to fill the place up and our junk in our current flat is being moved next weekend, ready for us to clear out of here and put this small flat behind us :)

Oh, and in between this, I need to keep up on the work front, keep looking after the hamsters, help anita pack up this place and, somewhere, somehow, find some time to sleep.

Oh, what fun life is...

General updates

2009-06-12T10:32:00.002Z

I should have posted this a while ago, but then I'm never the fastest at blogging updates in my personal life :)

First: I'm gainfully employed again. I have been since the Monday after I was made redundant, I just haven't updated here. More usefully, I have a pay rise from this new job and more importantly, I feel like I'm actually involved in everything again (which I am... there's only 2 of us and probably enough work to keep 4 people fully employed so I'm involved in book purchases, hardware purchases, I have an interesting and pretty sizable project all to myself and am involved in the management and testing of another one). I've been updating at Reflective Coder on things related to my new job (XML and Python stuff mainly so far. I'm planning a Pylons post soon).

Second: Anita and myself are moving... finally! We've been stuck in our small, 1 bedroom flat for the past 4 years and finally found a new place that's worthwhile - a nice three bed semi-detached house out in Wythenshaw - and within our rent budget.

That's pretty much the important news from the last couple of months. Also of note though, I'll be at the first DrupalCampUK tomorrow, which could be interesting or at the least have some decent loot to bring home :)

Star Trek

2009-05-10T21:06:00.002Z

As a non-trekkie sci-fi fan, I was initially skeptical of seeing the new Star Trek film. The premise seemed a bit shakey and of all the Star Treks it was TOS that I liked the least.

After watching it today, I admit I was wrong to be doubtful of this film. It was just about the right mix of humor, action and drama for a decent film and it also had a nice bit of 'darker' drama in it that I find missing from most Star Trek branded films and series and is more in line with Farscape or Babylon 5. The humor was mediocre at the start (although some lovely product placement for Nokia there :)) but went up several notches when Simon Pegg (playing Scotty) got introduced about halfway through the film, and I think he was one of the best cast roles in the film.

I was a bit shocked by the ending (I was expecting an almost typical Star Trek ending, with everything being put back to status quo for the film end) but it worked. It also gives them a good branching point for future films and possibly even a new TOS series which may be just what the franchise needs around now.

It wasn't perfect by any stretch though, but it was a decent film and the usual Star Trek 'utopia' message was more subdued than usual (which I class as a good thing) making it an enjoyable film and worth watching at least once (even if, like me, you aren't a trekkie but like sci-fi :))

Redundancy

2009-03-13T17:35:00.000Z

Well, I've mentioned it on twitter and on the forums I frequent, so I guess it's time to blog about my change of situation.

EMCC Software (the company I've worked at for almost 2 years) has unfortunately gone into liquidation, leaving me and everyone else still employed there unfortunately redundant. Given the current state of the job market, this isn't exactly ideal.

Hopefully there is work on the horizon though. I've thankfully already got my CV out to a lot of places and got a fair bit of interest. I was also going through negotiations with a former lecturer who may have a position for me as well. That should hopefully be decided one way or the other by the end of the coming weekend.

Till then though, I have officially become a statistic of the credit crunch. +1 unemployment :(

Reflective Coder

2009-02-14T08:38:00.003Z

I've just added a second personal blog to my repertoire, over at Reflective Coder. This is to function as a blog purely about coding (and my thoughts on various subjects along those lines). I'll keep shared illusions going as a posting place for all my usual rambling diatribes though. Probably at the same frequency as well (one or two a year if I remember :))

Animal blogs and other things

2009-01-31T11:47:00.001Z

Well, it's time for a good old rant I think. The subject is something that got asked on a forum I frequent and is basically 'do you think a Hamster should have their own blog?'

My emphatic answer to this is 'NO'. It is trivial banality at it's worst and lessens any sort of authoritative impact any blog may ever have. Worse, it is an extreme form of anthropomorphism that I regard as frankly unhealthy. It is pure fiction being written by someone who truly believes that what they are typing is what their hamster is thinking... I could probably go on like this for a long time, but that's probably enough for now :)

Now don't get me wrong, I like having pets. I like having hamsters (something that Anita has gotten very into since we moved in together, as some may know :)) and when we have a bigger house want to get more and even get other pets (cat, dog, baby... you get the picture ;)) but a pet peeve of mine is this whole animal empathy movement. I don't quite get how some people can project complex emotions onto an animal that is clearly not capable of feeling it... well, I can get how it happens (basically assume that their feelings on the observation are the animals feelings) but I don't see how so many people manage it to such an extreme extent that is almost beyond the rational.

I guess it is just another case of evolutionary empathy going to the extreme. I don't seem to be afflicted as much because I appear to have less empathy than most (still not sure if this is a good or a bad thing...) but it definitely seems to be the path of the world at the moment. For every person that speaks up in defence of science, rationality and adhering to ideas that as far as we can tell are real, there seem to be a dozen speaking out for some far-fetched belief and asking us to become irrational and take it on faith. It's like people think that rationality has no craziness to it (anyone who has ever looked into quantum mechanics knows otherwise... pure craziness that is experimentally proven) or that there is no beauty to a 'cold, stark, scientific view' (again, I would strongly argue otherwise, and against the 'cold, stark' part, as I have done previously).

Still, I seem to be in the minority nowadays, especially on this subject if I continue to frequent hamster forums :) Just had to rant a bit, hopefully I managed to get some form of point across :)

Stop Software Patents

2009-01-27T07:05:00.004Z


An email regarding this dropped into my inbox again today, prompting me to resign the petition. The problem the petition is for this time is to try and stop patent offices granting patents for software, even though they are technically not allowed. I can see this is definitely required as if the patent is granted then entities (companies/individuals) can threaten law suits with it and probably get out-of-court settlements even if the patent would be thrown out as invalid in a court case. Allowing them to be granted even if they'd be invalid if challenged is as bad as making them legal in many ways.

So, once again:

Another week

2009-01-15T23:48:00.000Z

And another lack of real progress. I've gotten started slightly with my redesign, and am doing things 'properly' this time (read: using SVN, spending time thinking about things and looking for decent ways to do what I want rather than hacking it in when I think of it) but my recoding isn't going very well. I've got the weekend coming up, so I may be able to get a decent amount of design and setup done then though.

Other than that, it's been a fairly dull week. Not done much other than work, eat and watch Angel. Considering what phone to upgrade to as I'm due one, but none of the options are particularly appealing. The phone is going to Anita, as last time she upgraded we went for the cash option to pay some bills, but there just doesn't seem to be anything worthwhile :( Was half tempted by an iPhone, but the only way we could afford it is to have a reconditioned one. I'm also now considering getting her onto a Nokia 5800, especially as I've grown fond of S60 v5 over the past couple of months working on it. But that depends on the cost of the phone on a tariff I can afford when it's released in a couple of weeks. I'll also hold off after that to make sure it has decent response time etc.

Still, that's about it for now. Got to get to bed. I'll try and get a more informative and interesting blog post done over the weekend, although it'll most likely be extolling the virtues of Ruby plugins at the moment :)

And its that time again

2009-01-12T08:24:00.000Z

Time to actually do some of the development I keep on meaning to, namely start work on the complete redesign of my online entry system for hamster shows.

The first version is currently in use, but it's got issues and is already in such a state that I have trouble modifying it. All my own fault I know as I was the only person ever doing stuff on it but then I only really ever intended it to be a prototype proof-of-concept. As is always the case though, I showed it around (mainly to my wife, who was the main person who wanted it :p) who then started using it and asking for new features... and I then never got around to productionising the system and it's now a complete shambles behind the scenes. It works fine as it is, but I've finally gotten around to starting again, and I'm going to take what I learned previously, apply Ruby on Rails best-practice as much as I can and hopefully end up with a code-base that doesn't make me ashamed every time I look at it :) (at least, not for a year or so, when I'll suck less as a programmer and everything I've done will look awful).

I feel I've made a good start though. I spent yesterday getting up to speed with the newer features of Rails (mainly focussing on REST based design) and created a project stub in SVN. I then added the plugins I wanted (restful authentication, acts as state machine and railspdf) and this morning I created the show model and set it up as the state machine I wanted... all good :) Now onto the actual work... after going to work that is :(

The Emperors New Mind review(ish)

2009-01-08T21:34:00.000Z

Well, I finished reading this about a week ago now and most of the information I'm going to absorb from the first reading has just about sunk in now. So I think it's time for a quick review of what I thought:

Firstly, some background on the book for those who haven't come across it previously. It is a popular science book written by Roger Penrose and details his (fairly speculative) arguments about why a computer can't truly think. Rather than the usual approach of arguing with just prose and hyperbole, Penrose instead gives a brief tour of the maths and physics involved in both computing (including the concepts of Algorithms and Computablity) and of the mind, with brief detours into quantum mechanics and relativity.

With regards to the actual content, Penrose makes very clear that the ideas he is conveying are frequently very speculative and are not in line with the general consensus with the scientific community at large. This doesn't stop his arguments being compelling and interesting,although I don't fully agree with all of the arguments. The main thrust of the argument is that the mind is seemingly capable of doing tasks that as far as can be ascertained are non-algorithmic and thus can't be performed by a computer. He ensures that the reader is fully aware of what is involved in algorithms and computablity, which lends weight to his arguments. He also attempts to explain his view on what is required for being conscious and able to think with a highly speculative detour into the possiblities of a theory of Quantum Gravity (based on the inconsistencies in quantum mechanics) as pertains to the brain.

To wrap up (before I ramble on for hours) the book is informative, entertaining and a good read. For someone with an interest in the issues involved in AI, this is a good start for a more scientific discussion of the topic. If you have a desire to expand your knowledge of general maths and physics then this book is also a good starting point (with a possibility to move onto a book like 'Road to Reality' afterwards, which gives a much more in depth look at the maths and physics of our present understanding of the universe). If you aren't fond of mathematical treatments of topics then this book probably isn't a good choice though. I personally enjoyed reading it a lot and would recommend it. Not bad for a book from the tail end of the 1980's :)

New year, resolutions, etc

2009-01-03T11:33:00.000Z

Well, it's a new year and a new update (I'm getting them done more than once every 6 months... this is almost scary :p). The christmas and new year period have been mostly uneventful thankfully, with the most major issues being that I headbutted a wall (accidentally) and that both me and Anita have been ill with a cold for the entire holiday.

The usual selection of dvds, books, shower stuff, etc for christmas, although some gems were:

The Emperors New Mind (Roger penrose book. Very good so far, although I'm still a bit confused on the quantum physics stuff... but who isn't? :p)
Guitar Hero World Tour, on the Wii. Pretty good fun, although I'm still busy unlocking songs and getting guitar rank. I'm looking forward to getting a drum kit to try those out and giving the online play more than a quick once over :)
Star Wars The Force Unleashed, again pretty good fun. The Wii version isn't as graphically capable, but it's still a star wars game, you get to swing the remote around pretending it's a lightsaber and you force lightening EVERYTHING :D What more could you want?
3d Game Engine Architecture. Hopefully this will get me on the home programming front again. I have some stuff I want to play around with here as well (such as investigating the Hamiltonian framework as the heart of a physics engine)

I'll try and update more frequently this year (although it would be hard to update less). I've got all sorts of crazy science and programming stuff buzzing around my head at the moment, so I'll probably end up doing some more articles on those lines.

That's it for now. To the 2 or 3 people who bother reading this, I hope you had a good christmas season (even if you don't celebrate pagan festivals that have been hijacked by christianity ;)) and a happy new year.

Updates

2008-12-07T12:38:00.002Z

Well, it's been a while since I've touched this. My previous post was started in july and got finished today, so I guess I should do an update as well.

Important things:
- I got married. Back in August :) It wasn't a big wedding, just close family and friends. Pictures are available on my wifes gallery here.
- I got my wifes website set up. If you fancy reading about hamsters then go to noobooweb. If you fancy a comic with 'stick-hamster'-esque drawings, then try here and read through Anita's HAMIC archive :)
- I've almost got a site for myself. I'll update here once I've finished off the last few details
- Work is going well. There's been some bad times and some people had to be made redundant :( Thankfully I wasn't one of them and I have since been moved onto a project where I'm able to do some real (C++) development. Which has been fun :)

And now it's approaching christmas, so got the holidays to look forward to. My first christmas as a married man :D

I hope the one person who actually reads this will have a good holiday too ;)

Reality is an illusion

2008-07-03T22:15:00.004Z

So then, it's been a while since I've posted anything here. There's no particular reason for this, other than because I haven't really had anything to say. I feel I finally do but it isn't about programming or gaming, so bear with me.

Right now, my mind is of a scientific persuasion and I have been contemplating the nature of scientific enquiry. I know this isn't anything particularly new but I have an urge to write about it and I may have something to add to the age old description of what makes a scientist (or I may not... I don't know yet :)). So on with my ramble. I may wander to a point eventually.

I think I need to start with the title. It is part of one of my favourite quotes from Einstein and the full quote is 'Reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one'. It was part of my choice of name for this distinguished blog :) I've had a reason to think on it some more recently though and I think I have come to a line of thought that is at least new to me and relates this illusion not just to reality (which can easily be seen from just a quick glance over both quantum physics and relativity) but also to our description of reality, the laws and theories of physics. These are in a sense the ultimate illusion of reality as they give us a way of predicting things, making observations and generally increasing our knowledge. However, the only way we come up with new theories and laws is by questioning the currently established set and saying 'are these correct?'. Our description of how reality works is only ever expanded upon by attempting (and succeding) in showing that the current description is merely an illusion that fits the current observations of the greater illusion.

So, with the idea of reality as an illusion, and our description of reality as a higher-order illusion I turn now to the question:
'Is this correct?'
This question can be applied to any form of opinion, belief, idea or theory. It is this introspection that a scientist constantly requires and that a faith lacks. A true beliver starts from the assumption that they are correct and bases all ideas and conclusions on that. Even if they are later shown by evidence to be wrong with their initial assumption they will have become so used to the idea that they are right that it isn't themselves who are wrong, but everything else. A scientist starts from the assumption that they are wrong. If later on someone else (or themselves) shows that this is indeed the case, there is no shock or disappointment because they already knew that. It can just be taken in stride, examined and a better (but still wrong) idea can be put in place.

Applied to this post and my ideas, I have to say that no, I am not correct. What I'm saying is most likely complete nonsense, and the furthest I could possibly get from the truth. However, it is a starting point and it explains some things. So why bother? Curiosity and the thought that even though you are wrong, where the idea takes you may be interesting and, more importantly, slightly less wrong than the previous explanation. And it is this desire to be less wrong that expands the knowledge of the human race.

p.s. I know this post is kinda weird. It also doesn't flow particularly well. It was just something I was trying to get sorted in my own head and I think it's succeded on that front. If anyone wants, I can try and clean this up at another point but for now it's been sitting in my head for months and I'm gonna leave it as it is ;)

A weekly check-in (almost)

2008-04-18T09:56:00.002Z

And as a complete surprise, I've actually been doing some game-related programming this week :)
It isn't exactly interesting programming, but it's been fun doing it. I've been recreating my event-dispatcher and input manager code around SFML and, due to how easy SFML makes creating thread-safe code, I've even turned it into a threaded system while I was at it.

I've still got a bit left to do with my input-action code (namely, actually re-write it :)) but so far it's been going well. It took me very little time and effort to wrap an SFML event source (i.e. a window) into a class that would translate the event structure into a series of Event-derived classes and dispatch them to registered listeners. Then a little bit more to write listeners that would let you register multiple other listeners (multiple dispatch) to get events around the entire system.

I've almost finished with my input code as well now, with a keyboard and mouse class that can be registered as event listeners and give you input references to check if a button or key has been pressed (request a key input, it gives you back an input object that is bound to the key... a nice amalgam of polling and events I reckon :). The last section that I've just started on is to bind the inputs into named actions, which will allow a config file to load a set of actions and key mappings into the events and check for the actions by name rather than by key. It should be nicely configurable by the time I finish, unless something shiny distracts me sometime in the next week and I abandon it again :)

After that, I'll start working on some graphical stuff, although I am also thinking of some network engine stuff that I want to add to allow for even more ease of use with networking. If I do that next, I'll do a review on the SFML network package.

Other news: Wedding is getting closer and closer, and I have a hamster show to attend this weekend. Lots of fun :P

SFML - Getting back on the wagon (A brief review)

2008-04-09T09:09:00.004Z

It's been a while since I've updated. That's mainly due to a lack of time to do any personal programming as I've been busy at work and organising a wedding (My own :D).

Still, I found myself with some free time yesterday and took the opportunity to try out a new framework mentioned on http://gpwiki.org/forums called SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library). It's an Object Oriented C++ framework designed to speed up development of certain types of applications (games being one of them) and I have to say, first impressions are good.

Coding wise, the library is definitely simple and fast to pick up. It is organised into logical packages (system, graphics, windows, audio, networking, etc.) and can be used with either a package include (#include ) or at a class level (#include ) allowing fine control of dependencies and coupling. Using the items couldn't be simpler either. The classes are typically designed along RAII principles and when they aren't (as is the case with mutexes) then an RAII wrapper is provided (in the previous case, the wrapper is the lock class). The interfaces to the classes are clean and simple to use and if you use a code-completing IDE such as Visual Studio then you also have easy access to the comments when browsing for the correct method (at this point it almost goes without saying that the comments are simple, but not too simple ;)).

Still, it is only a simple library so it must have some things it ignores or doesn't do well surely? Well, it only provides it's interfaces for 2d drawing operations. This doesn't make it useless for 3d though as once you have created a window (a single line of code, can't be much simpler eh? :)) then you have access to OpenGL for all your 3d needs. That's it, you include the headers, link it, open a window and you can use OpenGL. None of this messing around with creating a window with different parameters that is so common with other libraries. That makes it about as simple as possible for 3d development as well as 2d (if you have an engine that uses just OGL and requires a window set up for use, then it should work with SFML with almost no fuss). How about 2d and 3d together? Again, simple as can be, you just create a graphics RenderWindow (used for all SFMLs 2d api drawing) and you can mix and match OGL and SFML.

That last point needs to be taken with a slight pinch of salt though. After a very brief play with the library, I've already noticed that there is a slight speed issue with this. I've yet to track down exactly what is causing it (I'm using boost lexical_cast for an fps meter, so it could be that being called 20 times a second that is the bottleneck) but with a simple rotating cube and aforementioned FPS reading I was only getting 20fps. I wouldn't hold this against the library though. Mixing their 2d API with arbitrary OGL calls would always be a tricky operation. I believe it is made easier by their use of OGL under the hood for 2d API operations (or so I believe) but that introduces a problem of it's own, namely state management. With their 2d drawing, they will need to maintain both their state and your OGL state and switch them at the start and end of each function that relies on it. Even with the best algorithms this is a costly operation. It is recognised by the library creator though and they provide a way to turn off the state management if you use SMFL exclusively (or wish to manage the state yourself, as then you can store and manage state on a more sensible level than 'in my code, I must save your state').

I have yet to explore their sound or networking libraries, but I expect more of the same from them. The sound package is built upon OpenAL, so I would expect a fairly decent wrapper around that judging by the rest of the library. Networking is on the level of class-wrappers for network sockets etc. and so is probably the most low-level API available in the library. I'll comment more on them when I have used them more though.

My first impression is one of good, clean design and a decent implementation. Some possible speed issues that I haven't confirmed yet admittedly but even with that I have no problems recommending that anyone thinking of writing games and multimedia applications in C++ at least look at this library for their initial development period.

The Usual Progress Report

2007-09-20T21:04:00.000Z

Which is of course: Nothing to report :(

That is mainly because this week has been work hell. I've been finishing off one project and getting properly stuck into the next, and it was Anitas birthday yesterday. Coupled with not much free time last weekend has ended in a week where about the most I have managed is to uninstall VC++2008 and install VC++2005 in its place, which is a slight improvement except that I now need to recompile my dev libraries (SDL and Glew being the main ones) and problems are occuring from that.

Ah well, another weekend is looming and I should be able to get some free time over this one to at least sort out my libraries. I will attempt to get something on screen for about mid-way through next week (until I post next Thursday with more procrastination and excuses anyway ;))

Midweek update

2007-09-12T08:58:00.000Z

Well, this is mainly because I am currently bored at work, and feel I should do a quick progress update due to the problem that I'm not going to be available over the weekend to do so.

So, my current update progress is: Nothing on screen yet.
The reason? Because I'm being my usual self and spending too long on my input code system. I must have written something similar to this system almost a dozen times now, and each time I get fed up and then lose the code. This time, I'm going to write one extra class (I currently have mouse and keyboard) to handle 'actions', but that will come after I have thought a bit more about how to design the actions. I will write a quick, hard coded wrapper around my current input code to create a window and have something moving around over the next few days, and then you may get a screenshot towards the end of the week of a badly drawn sprite or a simple teapot or something :)

But for now, I should probably attempt to get some work done.

Race to Saturn - Update and Setup

2007-09-08T14:24:00.000Z

Well, I'm getting started with games stuff. I have a couple of ideas as to what I would like to develop and I have set my computer up as a fairly comprehensive (to me anyway) development environment. I currently have set up:
VC++ Express 2008 (I may downgrade this to 2005 express at some point. it is still a beta version after all :))
SDL
SDL_Image
SDL_Net
SDL_TTF
FMod
FreeType
GLEW (for opengl extensions, in case I ever want to go into shaders and stuff :))

and just because I'm interested:
C# 2005 express and XNA 1.0 refresh

So I think I am set up for most of my development needs.

As for other stuff, I have put a bit of thought into my roadmap, but it is in no way finalised yet. My current thoughts go:

Set-Up (completed)
Refresh knowledge on SDL and OpenGL (in progress)
Develop first game/demo
Learn sound and networking stuff
Develop second demo
Learn how to use TTF font rendering effectively
Add some menus etc to previous demos
Advanced OpenGL
More impressive demo (graphically anyway ;)
Some physics stuff (possibly look at havok, or possibly develop some demos on my own. Depends on how I feel :))
Start designing/implementing an engine
See how things go from there

Now, I've dabbled in a lot of this stuff before, so I hope that this initial set of things won't take me too long. I'm going to set an initial timescale of 6 months for it though, just so I can feel better if I go faster (and so I don't feel bad if I act like a lazy bum and find myself entangled with work more than this ;))

So, with that, I'm going to sign off for the week and update next sat/sun with any progress I have made towards relearning SDL and OpenGL :)

A Race to Saturn - Initial posting

2007-09-07T08:13:00.000Z

Well, its been a while since I posted here, although not much has changed. I've gotten settled into my job and have almost ended my probation period. I've helped out a lecturer on a research project and should be doing some more for him soon. And I've entered a competition called 'A Race to Saturn'.

A Race to Saturn is an interesting idea for a long term project/competition. The basic idea is to improve an entrants game development skills by having a weekly progress posting (which will be here for me incidentally, and probably on a Saturday or Sunday) with releases of any small games/tech demos that the entrant has created. The final end goal is to have created a commercial level game and sell 100 copies of it, although this could be some time in the future (I'm guessing a year or two probably :))

My motivation for entering it was mainly to provide myself with motivation for continuing to develop my game development skills. It also gives me a reason to post something here at least once a week (even if its a 'work has been hell, nothing to report' posting which will happen more than once I expect. Just a warning up front ;)). When I do my first competition post I'll provide the entry details I am required to for the competition and will also do a quick roadmap of what I would like to do in this competition and (very) rough projections for how long I think each item will take.

Thats about it till Sunday. Now I'm off to do some work :/

Working man

2007-06-04T17:41:00.000Z

It finally came.... I've started my job now. I'm now a graduate software engineer developing stuff for mobile phones :) Or at least, I will be once I get a computer at my desk at work :/ They ran into build problems with the machine supposedly for me, and when they got it sorted, it got requisitioned by someone higher up, so I have to wait till tuesday or wednesday for that slightly vital piece of equipment :)

So, my first day was spent reading the notes for the '3 day Symbian OS Essentials course', which is essentially the minimum required knowledge for my job. Hopefully it will make more sense once I have a computer and can do the exercises at various points along the way.

Otherwise, news is pretty much standard. Anita is ill again (or possibly still), so I've been taking care of her as much as I can, and I've finally managed to borrow a copy of Design Patterns and have been reading that for a bit of extra insight :)

End of an Era

2007-05-24T11:22:00.000Z

4 years of my life have almost reached their conclusion... finally. This time next week, I will have just handed in my last piece of coursework for university, and will be relaxing before I start my new job as a Graduate Software Engineer the following Monday. Before that, I need to get through a presentation tomorrow, and the wedding reception of my Step Brother over the weekend. I'm envious of Anita now, as she is ill and can't get down to it :P Hopefully the bar will be free though :)

The business plan is finally handed in though, and I think it turned out better than most of the group thought it would. Should get a mark back for that sometime in the next few weeks and see for certain.

Other than that, I've been making sure my C++ knowledge is pretty comprehensive by reading the Thinking in C++ books, which are a nice and fairly comprehensive C++ guide.

Its been a while - Update time

2007-05-04T08:07:00.000Z

Not posted for a while, even though (or perhaps because) I've had a lot going on.

Firstly, all my exams are over, and I have only one bit of coursework left for my entire degree. Its a big one though, a full business plan with feasibility studies and everything :/ Not the most interesting stuff in the world to me, but its all thats standing between me and graduation.

Secondly, I have a job that I'm definitely going to be taking, as opposed to my first job offer that I wasn't too sure about. This time, its with a Mobile Phone application developer company based nearby, so I don't even have to move (which is a good thing, both for me and Anita). Its a 'bit' less in salary terms (almost half the salary :/) but the atmosphere seemed friendlier, its a lot less cost in living expenses to stay where we are and overall, it just seemed like the nicer offer. Anita isn't exactly thrilled, as it is a huge drop in pay, but I think she understands.

Finally, I'm finally getting back into playing games more :D I had a bit of a dry spell in terms of computer games (I was only playing mahjong and freecell... they seemed the most interesting for a while), but I'm coming out of it and wanting to play more and more. At this rate, I may even be able to get up to my old level of skill at games like UT, and then I won't be embarrassed to play it online again :D Will just have to wait and see though.

Well, thats my life updated in not very much time. I guess less happened than I thought, either that or my life is boring enough that all that seemed like a lot :) Expect a couple more posts soon as I complain about my coursework though ;)

My first taste of Ostrich

2007-03-30T20:53:00.000Z

Had quite a nice meal this evening. My sister came up for a visit on her way up to newcastle and her, her new boyfriend and my aunt and uncle that live close by took me and anita out for a meal at a nice chinese restaurant. Very nice food all the way through. As we were leaving, my uncle looks at the menu and announces that one of the starters was ostrich meat. Kind of surprising, but the meat was quite tasty :) Slightly like beef according to Anita.

So, my first taste of ostrich.

SOGL Update 1

2007-03-30T17:15:00.000Z

Well, after a couple of days of thinking and coding, SOGL has gotten another stage towards being something useful. This latest improvement is to have a decent input system, built to be included into the Event system programmatically using boost function pointers. As such, my input system can exist entirely independently of SDL and pretty much any other part of the system. All that is required to drop it into another application is for that application to have some way of updating the state of the components. I think this is pretty good for an input system :) I will just have to see later on if it can cope with a heavy input load though.

The other nice thing about the input system is that it lets you register actions, assign keys and button presses to them (either 2 keys, 2 mouse buttons or a combination at the moment) and then query the status of the action, which will perform the necessary checks on its assigned keys. This will allow me to write a keymap config file later, arong with a loader for it, and have a configurable key configuration. I have also steered away from making the EventPump class or any of the input classes singletons, which will allow for seperate input configurations at different points in the program simply by changing which event loop or action manager is active.

The next stage is to start wrapping the OpenGL calls into either classes with some state (such as for textures) or simply overloaded function calls. Once this is done, I can start showing off some examples next to the code producing it. Expect screenshots in a week or so ;)

Current Project - SOGL

2007-03-27T13:36:00.000Z

Well, I'm finally kicking myself into actually doing some game development work, and I'm starting with a framework that I can use to ease my way into larger projects. I'm building the library around SDL and OpenGL and I am currently calling it SOGL (soggle) :) My current plans (probably slightly ambitious, but we will see) are to have a more polymorphic and easier syntax for OpenGL and SDL, with some callbacks for events to make an initial project setup easier with almost no boilerplate code.

I also intend to make some classes around OpenGL style objects for certain things that are almost always done in the same way, such as textures and shaders. The intention with these is to ease the code required to set them up and run them, and also some small scale optimisations internally so that requests to change textures are only carried out if the texture isn't currently active and so on :)

There is also some vague idea in my head about some nicer maths objects and classes that I can integrate into the various areas, such as vectors and matrices that can be more easily used to shift between the more efficient opengl vector commands and a nice, object oriented approach to these ideas. This may be replaced with another open source package.

Anyway, my current status is that I have a window class that can create a window, and an event pump that can take SDL events and pass them out to various callback functions as long as they are defined. My next stage is to create a nicer interface to check keys and possibly to generate a system to assign named actions to keys and key combinations.

My ultimate aim is to build an extra layer of abstraction on top of SDL and OpenGL that will allow me to not end up worrying about the mechanics of how they are doing things. I'm doing this myself rather than using an existing framework is because I feel like it :) If I get the code into a decent state then I will probably release it to anyone who is interested as well, but currently this is not really an objective. I will be building some examples and little games as and when I can though, and hopefully they will be easy to understand.

First Semester Results

2007-02-23T23:23:00.000Z

Results came out today for my exams from just after christmas. Overall, I did okish, with an overall mark of 54.8% (or 2.2 standard). With my other degree marks in (from 2nd and third years) this goes up to just over 58%, and I need an average of 63% for the rest of the year to get a 2.1 mark overall.

So, while I can wish that the results were better, I can still realistically get a 2.1 degree.

In other news, I've almost finished my last 2 modules, and they are both starting to pile the work on :( The next week is going to be exhausting as I need to create a bliki system as part of a group coursework for one module and prepare a group presentation with a different group for my other module.

After that, its just 1 piece of coursework and 1 exam though, and thats almost all my uni work done forever :D

Post Birthday

2007-02-18T15:34:00.000Z

Well, my birthday is now over and done with. The day was pretty good, as me and Anita got in a load of nice snack foods, and lazed around eating and watching things :) My recieved gifts were:
Some better smart/formal clothes from my mum (I've had them since christmas time, but they were a birthday present)
The next book in the Sword of Truth Series (book 4 if anyone is interested :P) from my sister
Some small items from my mum for on the day... including some nice smelling air fresheners that smell like sweets... having to resist eating them :)
Money from: My Dad, my aunts, anitas gran, my gran.

So, not too bad, although having only had it for a day, I've already almost finished my book... I have a book token from an online survey that I'm going to use to get the next one soon though... unless my brother sends it as his gift...

Next thing to come will be me complaining about coursework deadlines I think :) Oh, and possibly links to various rails stuff I am using to learn in order to do the coursework for Interactive Systems Design

Birthday Time

2007-02-15T10:56:00.000Z

Its coming up to that time of year where I will get another year older. I think I'm just gonna stay in and relax on the day with Anita this year as I
a) have no money (and neither does she) and
b) I'm starting to lose sight of why I wanted to drink in the first place

So, its going to be a nice quiet day relaxing with my fiance, playing Guitar Hero and probably watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer :)

And so it begins, my decline into maturity. Farewell youth, it was nice knowing you... and I really shouldn't be feeling this way at only 22 :(

Winter-een-mas has started

2007-01-25T09:15:00.000Z

Today marks the first day of this years Winter-een-mas. For those who don't know what it is, then go and read Ctrl-Alt-Del, one of the best online web comics around created by Tim Buckley.

In short though, winter-een-mas is a week long celebration of games and gaming. You can celebrate by doing anything to do with gaming that you desire. At the moment, I am just playing copious amounts of games as a celebration and relief at the end of exams.

For more information about winter-een-mas, head over to http://www.cad-comic.com and start reading the comic archive.

Exams are over

2007-01-25T09:12:00.000Z

Well, thats my exams over and done with for now. I had 4 of them, of which 3 went fairly alright and 1 went pretty badly. I will post up some breakdowns of the exams when I get the results back :)

In other news, I'm about to start on my next 2 modules for my final year of university. One of them needs me to have a blog set up as the main area they are looking at this year is social applications. If you fancy heading over there and looking at my coursework submissions on the subject of Interactive Systems Design, then feel free :P The link has been added to the side bar.

New Year, New Blog

2007-01-04T12:58:00.000Z

Well, its now 2007, and I decided I would finally get around to starting a blog. I have no idea what will appear here yet, but I expect it will consist of several long rambling posts about my views on sci-fi, games programming, fantasy books, and just about anything else that catches my attention for fleeting moments of time (such as, at the moment, this blog :P)

Chances are that, if you are here, you already know me. If you dont then be warned: I am a 21 y.o. computer science student in the last year of my degree . I am pedantic, opinionated, and very very geeky. Please bear that in mind while making comments and reading any other articles I may get around to posting ;)

Thats it for now. Hopefully I will think of something more interesting to post soon though :P