Built this today as an example of a quite cool, debugger with spotlight stylee message sorting
Basically open up the sender and the debugger in different browser windows, send a few messages, then try sorting through them
Ant
I’m quite scary how accurate they’ve been getting recently, seriously how do they know these things …
It’s official I can now ‘Do’ AS3, after banging my head several times over packages, public classes, public constructors, the needs to import nearly everything you ever needed to, and of course the fact the AS3 compiler messages are written in greek, whoope!
I’ve done a hello AS3 example
Found this little email from a guy to his tutor over the mark he got for a essay about UML, it’s a rather funny look into this rather funny little language.
I think the curse of UML is pervasive in all large IT companies, proberly as it offers easy “time and resource” management of a thing which is quite hard to do “time and resource” management in.
The idea that you can encapsulate an working, debugged, fully tweaking algorithm and program on paper is a false one to say the least,
To anyone who thinks otherwise I would have to offer the “mythical man month” as a excellent lession to the contray.
The only upto date api in projects are those actually those compiled from the code, of course that’s not to say planning out code is a waste of time or not neccassary on big projects with lots of people, just that I feel that the full rational unified process with lots of UML doesn’t improve the situation, it just makes things slower and the final code less adaptable,
I’ve had a growing feeling I just can’t shake that a big blackboard with a piece of chalk seems to do the job best, perhaps backed up with the now obseleted forms of communication and coordiation of: mail v1.0 (eg paper and a pen); and amessenger v1.0 (eg actually talking to the other people involved in english),
Little story on the evils of commities and UML thinking
I recently had an interesting conversation with a boss, over the new version of a product,
I was about day 2 of the example build of a product when it was declared that the product I was modifying was the wrong version,
I was told the steering commity involved in the product had just released a new version that week, complete with a new design and feature list.
I was cusirious to see this new product, given I was building the example from scratch having not seen any code or compiles lying around.
The next day I was given the latest version of the “product” also with all the wiki/specs and other info
New “product” I had been given was a jpeg (badly) pasted into another jpeg of an html page,
When I informed them of this needless to say they were a bit surprised,
I continued work on the example, and based on I had learnt, I noted some improvements that could be made,
Of course none of these improvements could be made you see, as they would require changes to the functional and design specifications, which had already started the process of being finilised, months earlier…
remember when i was at uni i had to login in through telnet to some secret server,
since then times have moved on … due to the wonders of the internet it’s now on a webpage, huwarr!
Seriously the best acsii art piece ever, incredible to think this thing was done by hand
Here’s my talk I did as part of the “why we shouldn’t use silverlight because it doesn’t work yet, despite microsoft’s sweet sweet meaningless words” campaign
Accessability Conference Talk
Another talk i did, only the cliff notes this time
Normally i try be fair to every company that pitches stuff to the bbc, even microsoft, but this times they really took the biscuit, at a Accessablity R&D conference for disabled users, where IBM/Semiens/BT/Red Bee/BBC all sent their best and brightest scientists and showed off some really amazing cutting edge R&D stuff, mircosoft sent in it’s crispest and sharpest… sales people, demoing (badly) vista and it’s obviously non-functional accessablity features. tisk tisk … really microsoft that is low.
Built this text adventure engine for gaiden, actually got used, ended up building my own xml based language, which functions and objects, if statements etc,
I quite proud when I think it only took 3 days to make this one part markup, one part lisp, one part procedural, crazy little text adventure language, was hoping to show it off on the site and get the fans to make their own games etc, but we didn’t have time… alas such is life
also the producer deleted my crash command, I mean come on, who it their right mind types “crash” into a text adventure game, and doesn’t expect the 4th wall to come crashing down with their os.
Needless to say I got a bit carried away, everything is dynamic and pretty, ended writting alot of the AS2 zap engine code well in zap, so in the codes there loads of xml strings that are being ran at runtime.
It was also fun learning about english grammer and how messy it is, after reading this really old book about ad-verbs and conjunctions etc just ended up implementing a simple verb noun matching system, with a substuition table to swap ambuious terms, eg bread food munchies all subtiue to the same term.
If anyone can be bothered i recommend downloading the source and making your own game, it’s dead easy and quite fun, left some of my tests in there for a bit of a basis, the go north/south mechanism is a bit clunky you need to create a item in the room called north which has the verbs “go” “head” “walk” etc, which the absolute sutitues of “go n” “n” subtiuting to “go north” etc but it works, if i was to work with it again, that would be the first place to optomoise the writing process
Ant
After flash on the beach ’07 there was a big “show and tell” session,
here’s the slides from my talk “how we can do projects better”
basically it’s a 5 mins talk on how to do Software Engineering Better
Notes:
sorry to grant, craig and etc for putting your names next to some of the ideas, it’s a blantant lie, but your names carry shed loads of weight with the brass
Heres some more experiments I did for the “captain fight hard forever” game, wanted to make a panoramic fps shooter, using fish eye on the panoramic movies for side stepping,
Unfortunately project as with the rest of the gaiden experiments, development time was cut so I could go on html duty to help out that side of things, alas the experiments went unused…
however we’ve got a 3d camera, so perhaps these experiments will see the light of day in another project,
Note:
I apoligise for the shoody cubic panoramic movies, attached 4 digital cameras to myself to test the effect much to the confusion of my colleagues , also the 3d spherical panormaic test movie is stolen from some other website cant remember which, sorry to who ever shot the movie
