Programming & Gaming

And We're Back!

2010-02-15T23:24:00.000-05:00

Wow, talk about a slow start! School has taken up a lot of time and recently I've been playing and just finished Dragon Age: Origins for my new Xbox so I've been slacking a little bit when it's come to programming and gaming.

I'm currently trying to make better use of the Dell server I bought a year or so ago. Right now it's just a place that I use to play around with virtualbox and my Ubuntu and Windows 7 virtual machines. I bought another Netgear router and set it up for bridge mode so that it could talk with the router downstairs that's hooked up to the cable modem. So now the server is wireless! This was also useful for connecting the Xbox online as well.

Today I started copying my music library from my laptop to the server (only 13 hours more to go!). Once that is done I plan on setting up rsync to sync up any changes on my laptop to the server. Then I plan on playing around a little bit with iTunes and seeing how easy it is to use the music library on the server instead of my local one. My iPod has had the same music for years now so I'm attempting to get some new music but since we have a few laptops and desktops around I am hoping that our server can be the central hub for all media so that it can be shared throughout.

So far I've set up Samba sharing using this link and the rsync daemon using these links - one and two.

Hopefully all of my music will be there by tomorrow!

JHU Online Class and Self Training

2009-05-24T22:01:00.002-04:00

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

2009-04-25T22:22:00.000-04:00

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!

2009-04-25T22:16:00.000-04:00

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!