Author Archives: Armin

Dark Imax and Wii.

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This past Sunday some friends and I went down to the Imax theater and saw the Imax The Dark Knight. After hearing from some other folks that “you have to see it in Imax”, I did, and I have to say: not all that impressed by Imax. Sure, the screen is bigger, and I liked that in some scenes, but I was really annoyed by the fact that the movie didn’t use the whole screen the whole time, and every time it shifted one way or the other, it annoyed me. I don’t think I’ll be spending my money on any more Imax shows, as I don’t feel the premium price is worth the return.

After seeing The Dark Knight, those friends and some others met up at Jon’s house for some dinner and some Wii. Gen made us some salmon for dinner, and some blackberry pie for dessert. Yummy nom noms. Steve brought a cake, and I brought cookies, and Jon already had cookies and ice cream, so we also had lots of sweet snacks. Luckily we also had a veggie plate, or the sugar may have made our heads explode.

So, we hooked up my Wii, and proceeded to spend many hours Wiiing together. Between myself and Kevin we had four Wiimotes, so we could get a lot of four player action going. I only had one Wii wheel, though (Kevin had two), so when playing Mario Kart one person had to use the Wiimote as a handlebar instead of a wheel. I am definitely not a great kart driver, but it was a lot of fun, definitely more fun playing with others than playing alone. Later, after about half the group left, we also played some four-player tennis in Wii Sports, and that was also much more fun than I’d have expected. I apparently exerted myself a little too much doing that, though, and have some soreness in my arm.

I’ll say that the commercials are pretty much right, and the Wii makes for a fun party console.

Basic work.

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I mentioned previously that I’m working on getting up to speed with both VB.Net and REALbasic, and that REALbasic (RB) seems like a more comfortable fit for me. Well, today I was working on actually getting a real program, if a small one, working in RB, and I accomplished that goal. It’s mostly a simplified (if you can believe that) version of my Dice! die-rolling application, without support for custom die types. It’s now working, and able to roll dice and do math and such things. Wooo!

There was actually a lot of work involved, since the application doesn’t just roll dice, but does math as well, so you can add multiple die rolls and bonuses and such all together at once. That meant I spent a lot of time and effort converting my evaluation engine to work in RB. (And that conversion may not be finished; a few places were very clunky because I don’t know how to type cast, of all things; and I haven’t tested all the features.)

I think I’ll continue working on this app to flesh it out more like the VB6 version of Dice!, which will let me work with objects, other windows, and various other things. It’s a nice learning tool, doing this conversion.

There are a number of things that I’m really missing, though:

  • The Debug.Print system of VB, to better follow what’s going on inside the app at times. I don’t know if there’s anything like this yet in RB, or if I’ll end up writing my own to plug into my various future apps. (I cheated around it this time by writing to an extra edit box on my app window.)
  • Being able to do my own indenting. RB does a decent job, but not entirely in my style. I also don’t like not being able to use the Tab key to move my comments one tab-stop off the end of the text I’m commenting next to.
  • Type casting. It has to be possible, but I haven’t figured it out yet. Probably should search through my book.
  • More useful searching in the Help system. (Searching in VB usually brings up tons of utterly useless stuff; in RB it tends to bring up . . . nothing.)
  • More robust If evaluations. Instead of treating anything non-zero as True, I actually have to make sure that I get a valid boolean result, which is annoying.

I’m pretty sure there were some more, but I can’t recall them now.

For the most part, not too bad a day at all.

Og fix confuser.

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I spent most of my day today trying to replace the two hard-drives (striped in a RAID set) in my workstation with a single larger drive. Thankfully I had a full and complete backup, because things did not go smoothly, due to the annoying RAID stuff built into this machine, and my inexperience with it. 

At least it’s all done now, everything seems to be working fine, and the RAID controller should vex me no more. For the curious, the new drive is a Western Digital VelociRaptor (replacing some older Raptors), and Norton Ghost worked like a charm in simplifying the upgrade process. (Ghost would have worked even better if I hadn’t screwed things up at one point.)

Miscellaneous Stuffs.

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It’s a light week for blogging, I guess, at least since the new blog. Not a lot new to talk about. I am trying another variation on the blog theme I’ve been using for a while, though.

I’ve been spending most of my programming time split between VB.NET (with the lion’s share) and REALbasic, which I’m also trying to get up to speed on after having owned it for several years now. REALbasic seems to feel more like what I’m used to, although I think I’m going to have to use VB.NET for a number of work projects, regardless. If I can come to terms with some of the feature differences between VB6 and REALbasic, though, I may use REALbasic for a future GCA version. Nothing definite, yet, although I’m pretty happy with a lot of what I’m seeing right now.

I saw The Dark Knight on Monday. It was very good. Nothing profound to say about it. In recent weeks I’ve also seen Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Hancock, and Wanted. Enjoyed all of them. I may be easily pleased; not sure.

Brain Gone Wild.

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I seem to have lost control of my brain, lately. I’ll be tired, and I’ll go to bed, and then my brain will start churning away on work, or a potential side project, and I will “wake up” more, and subsequently be unable to sleep. This would not be uncommon for me, except that over the years I’ve developed a routine for dealing with my brain, and now it seems to not be working. Normally, my routine goes like this:

  • First, I take Melatonin supplements, because my brain seems to be short on that (and I had a seriously messed up sleep schedule, for many, many years, to go with it).
  • Second, I try to watch at least a couple hours of television, up until I go to bed (sometimes a book will work, but not a particularly thought-provoking book). This helps crank down my brain.
  • Third, while in bed trying to sleep, if I’m not tired enough to fall asleep quickly (which is rare), I set my brain to work on a regular “project” that allows me to think on something repetitive that I never really progress with (for ages, this has been how I want to work out my homebrew RPG).

These steps have served me well for many years, but lately I can’t seem to get my brain to deactivate enough to avoid jumping onto issues that keep me up, and putting my brain to work on the “project” isn’t possible when my brain is racing around wildly on its own. This is annoying me greatly, and causing me to get up later in the day than I’d like.

Sometimes, I dislike my brain.

Programming silliness.

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I started to rant on this a bit in a comment, but changed my mind. Why not make a bigger issue out of it, just for fun?

One of the things that really bugs me about programming, because it’s so damn silly, is starting indexes at 0 instead of 1. Maybe there’s a historical reason for it, but I can’t fathom what it might be. Does this make sense to anyone? Try this:

A: “How many items are there?”
Z: “There are 3 items”
A: “Let’s start with number 0, work through to number 2, and we’ll be done.”

WTF? Nobody thinks like that, ever. Nobody starts counting with 0, because zero is nothing. Yet for some reason, that’s exactly the way you’re supposed to think a lot of the time in programming. How is that useful?

Visions.

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I’m probably going to play around, apparently randomly, with some other themes for this here blog. I may or may not stick with any one of them for any length of time, but we’ll see. Customizing them will be a bit more of a chore than I’d like, so I’m going to try to find one I mostly like, first. So, do not be distressed if this place doesn’t look like it did before, it probably won’t look like this for long, either.