JHU Online Class and Self Training

Board Game Buddy (BGB) hasn't made much progress in the last few weeks but I'm hoping to get back to it soon when I get some free time.  In the meantime, I've been reading some of a Lisp book from an AI class I took back in college which has been pretty interesting.  We've also gotten our book for our first online class at JHU - enterprise Java.  Looking forward to seeing how our first online class will go - I think I will like it but I'm not sure yet.  JHU uses Sakai for their online learning - as opposed to Blackboard or WebCT.  I haven't used Sakai but it's cool it's open source and the demo seemed pretty good so I am looking forward to using it.  The only downsides we've heard about our class so far is that it will be a lot of work and that the teacher isn't very good.  The work we probably won't mind that much since we'll have the extra time that we don't have to spend driving to/from class but we'll see how the teacher is.

On our California trip over here, I prepared by getting all of the Oracle 11g self training CDs that I got a few months ago.  I was supposed to take a class for it but instead we went on this vacation =-).  So, I have been doing the self training to see how that goes and I hope one day to take some of the certification exams since those should be covered as well.  The self study has been going well - I may still take a class or get some other material but I think I am learning a bunch just with the CDs.  I can also play around with 11g from just downloading it too.  I tried to start installing it on the Mac but ran into a few issues so I will have to try again soon.

Board Game Buddy

Along the lines of this blog, I have started a project (since I have so much spare time) that also combines programming and gaming.  It's called Board Game Buddy (BGB) and its intention is to provide a framework for other developers to easily create board game programs.  It will take care of all of the hard work of setting up players, the board, the pieces, etc. and the developers will just have to program in the logic specific to the game.  

Although I hope it is useful someday to someone, I anticipate for the near-term that it will be mostly beneficial to me.  I intend on writing the framework in multiple languages to help me gain some familiarity with each language (this is supposed to be a trait of a good developer).  I also intend on having a good amount of sample games written for the framework which should be fun as well since they will be actual playable games!  I'm also thinking later on to incorporate some AI capabilities to allow the computer to play the games too.

I am planning on starting with Python since my brother is currently taking a class for it and it's gotten me interested in it as well.  I am planning on implementing tic-tac-toe for my first game.  A simple one, I know, but probably good to start small and then work my way up.  I also plan on using languages such as Ruby and Java along with some front end languages like Flash and some of the cool javascript libraries.  I'm guessing that the front end will be one of the harder parts but I'm hoping to learn a lot from it.

The project is currently being hosted at Google code - you can check it out at http://code.google.com/p/board-game-buddy/ .

New Blog!

In addition to the excellent Buddies blog I am contributing to, I have decided to start this one as well.  My two major hobbies are programming and gaming and so I thought I would have a blog devoted to those.  

It was somewhat hard coming up with a name for the blog (or at least for the URL).  I guess since Blogger has been around for a while a lot of the good names were taken.  I decided on "programprogame" to try and be fancy and combine my programming hobby with my "pro-game" attraction as well.  So, maybe one day it will change but for now that's the way it's going to be....

Hope you find the blog interesting!