In my experience (nephews) Programming with Dark Basic gives them an instant ROI.
It's the best modern equivalent to the Sinclair Basic that I started with.
OK. Basic is a bit like programming with the training wheels on, but surely that's the point!
The well intentioned posts talking about syntax etc. don't really matter and you already know that yourself.
Dark Basic is a simple syntax that will allow games to be written.
There are sample programs for most standard game types that means he's got a jump start into making fun stuff straight away.
not much help to you, but I find the glossy screen on my MBP to be superior to it's non glossy counterpart. The only real problem I experience is fingermarks being tricky to simply rub off.
Visit http://www.delcamp.net/forum/en/ and become a member, you need to make some posts to "win" the right to download.
The prof has put up 848 Works (2116 pages) of Classical sheet music in pdf format ranging from absolute beginner to performance level pieces. Many have associated MP3s and the site has an area to post your own efforts for critique.
The music is arranged specifically for classical guitar, but it's worth mentioning.
Good helpful community too.
My roles to date were always in the analyst/programmer camp with a little web design. I've noticed the salaries dwindling over the years and then at contract I got 2 years ago, I had the opportunity to be the code monkey for the Business Analysis team, basically my job was to reorganise and index their massive quantity of requirements specs in word format after that was completed, I was kept on to produce an end-to-end requirements management solution for analysts including modelling, textual descriptions, classic specs and verification and validation of requriements. The solution was built out of a bundle of 3rd party tools (RSM, Casewise, DOORS, Word, Test Director, Gorilla Logic) and my job was to script them all up so that the analysts could have an end-to-end workflow. Interesting contract that lasted 2 years and was a lot of fun. Something happened to me though, I realised that being out of the business programming business and going into the analysis tools business. Had to spend a lot of time thinking about the process of business analysis and then training the analysts to use the new tools made me realise that business analysis was the only place to actually make significant changes to an organisation's IT. My new role is as a Technical Business Analyst working on the interfaces between a billing system and all of the other components within a pretty major corporation. Definately a career shift from programming/web design into business analysis. One that I didn't take lightly, but one that was effectively forced upon me because the salaries available for Business Analysts are about 30% higher than for programming contracts.
as an aside, I've started development of my own Requirements Definition tool since I now have free mental space from a programming point of view, might as well put everything I learned to good use.
Since I spent 6 months extending the publishing capabilities of doors to make it produce documentation that was suitable for sending to external vendors, I wouldn't be promoting the native "Export to Word" capabilities of Doors. It's really quite horrible, basically a database query pumped out as rtf.
a bit of dxl to export as xml and a few xslt stylesheets to transform to wordml, then a bit of ole to put in the images (you can't export vector graphics (i.e. visio, rational rose)) properly without using ole) produces a nice document.
Telelogic's problem is that DOORS is the master and why would you want to have a "classic" requirements spec anyway... Great until you've got 3rd parties who need to read the specs!
The history stuff is quite good I suppose, but you can only view diffs between minor revisions. As soon as you create a major version for release, you lose your history (well it is still there, but you can only see diffs for minor revisions to their last major version, not ideal).
Creating a version is a bit tricky too, with a nasty interface that needs an admin. It's easy to miss something when you're working with multiple modules across multiple folders.
Oh and I just remembered - major limitiation when creating versions. DOORS allows you to create "projects" - shown as blue folders. They're a special kind of folder that give you some extra features, but you cannot create a version across projects. Everything needs to be in one project - understandable from a technical standpoint (a project can be treatead as an atomic item), but terrible from a version management perspective - where you'd like to split out business requirements and system requirements for example. Especially when you have multiple systems supporting the business requirements all handled by different teams - you'd ideally want each set of system requirements in it's own project, but forget being able to version manage that whole thing.
I deployed doors for a major client and I can tell you that the version management really sucks - no branching for example, which is a real problem with multiple development teams releasing software in parallel
Telelogic's answer to branching is to copy the requirements to a new folder (yes, really!) - not good at all!
it's not too terrible an interface (I understand the new version looks a lot pretier than the old one), does linking and traceability quite well
Best thing about it is dxl, a C like language that you use to extend the basic tool (though in the latest version, they've switched to vbscript (yuk!))
> because that is where the cold "fall" in to the room.
this reminds me of a TV show I saw a while back about government advertising to old age pensioners to stay warm at winter. The basis of the campaign was "Keep the heat in". It was a complete failure because the old dears didn't understand basic physics. They changed the campaign to "Keep the cold out" and it was a big success.
I run a business (admittedly I'm a one man band contractor). My server is ubuntu and my laptop is ubuntu. Both very nice and easy and quick to configure, it wasn't completely painless, but neither is a windows server/desktop solution.
I've also just upgraded my in-law's aging P2 300 win98 machine with ubuntu. They're very happy with it. Their needs are limited admittedly - web,mail,digital camera,chess,patience. Ubuntu passes with flying colours. I showed them round gnome in a matter of minutes and they were up to speed in no time. Now they keep saying things like - it's _so_ much faster. it looks _so_ much better. No surprise really since win98 is now 7 years old and ubuntu 5.10 is 1 month old. The point is that they would not have had the same experience had I tried a WinXP upgrade on that old hardware.
For a home desktop, I can recommend Automatix - that installs all that "other" stuff for a desktop system.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=66563
Capabilities: 1) Installs multimedia codecs 2) Installs all Firefox plugins (java, flash, etc) (except Adobe reader and mplayer) 3) Installs RAR, ACE and UNRAR archive support 4) Installs skype 5) Installs Acrobat reader 7 and firefox plugin for the same. 6) Installs Gnomebaker (CD/DVD burning s/w for GNOME) 7) Installs gftp (FTP client for GNOME with ssh capability) 8) Installs DC++ , amule and Limewire (file sharing progs) 9) Installs multimedia editors (Audacity (audio), Kino (video), EasyTag (ID3)) 10) Installs DVD (dvdrip) ripper 11) Installs Mplayer and mplayerplug-in version 3.05 for Firefox 12) Installs totem-xine, VLC and Beep Media Player (with docklet) 13) Installs Opera Browser 14) Installs Debian Menu (shows all installed applications) (this kills and restarts your gnome-panel without warning u!) 15) Installs Bittornado and Azureus (Bittorrent clients) 16) Installs Avidemux (Video editing tool) 17) Enables Numlock on (turns numlock on Gnome startup) 18) Installs Programming Tools (Anjuta (C/C++ IDE), Bluefish (HTML editor) and Screem (Web Development Env.)) 19) Install GnomePPP (Graphical Dial up connection tool) 20) Installs MS true type fonts 21) Configures ctrl-alt-del to start gnome-system-monitor (aka windows) 22) Installs Streamripper and Streamtuner 23) Installs NON-FREE audio and dvd codecs 24) Installs ndisgtk (WiFi configurator Graphical user interface) 25) Upgrades Open Office to 2.0 (final version), installs openoffice clipart and installs OO2 thumbnailer. (no support for AMD64 and ppc packages) 26) Adds 3 nautilus scripts (open any file with gedit as root; open a nautilus window as root in any folder; open gnome search tool in any folder (Right click in a nautilus window and look under "scripts") 27) Installs SUN'S JAVA JRE and JDK version 1.5 28) Installs wine (u need to run winecfg manually after installation) 29*) Installs firestarter (GNOME firewall frontend) and adds firestarter to GNOME startup 30*) installs gdesklets (GNOME eyecandy) and adds gdesklets to GNOME startup 31*) Gamepads (Makes USB gamepads work) 32*) Turns DMA ON on Intel and AMD machines (needs a restart) 33*) NVIDIA cards (Detects Nvidia cards and installs drivers) (Needs a restart) 34*) Adds midi capability to your Ubuntu box (test by playing a midi file with timidity or pmidi from terminal)
* --> These options require manual intervention and clicking. Please stand by!
PLEASE DO NOT INSTALL (23) IF YOU ARE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. IT IS ILLEGAL TO DO SO.
Re:What's with this "geek" stuff?
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Boffin
"The word appeared during World War II, where it was applied with some affection to the people who invented radar, early digital computers, the atomic bomb, and other technologies that gave the Allies an advantage over the Axis during the war." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boffin
I've always prefered and will continue to use Boffin. It's a good word that encapsulates all the good of geek and nerd, is a bit more academic. It also has none of the baggage, except perhaps for absent mindedness.
When it matters (e.g. life support machines) software is guaranteed and the license has no waiver of rights - even if it had it wouldn't be held up in court - look at the Concorde guys in court just now, not precisely the same, but basically they said their design was OK, even when they had evidence to the contrary, now they are being held accountable for it. Truth of the matter is that desktop software is good-enough TM, I'd rather go with the current licensing (free&closed) than hamper development further by introducing the chance of litigation. And the thought that something given away for nothing can ever have a license that accepts liability is laughable, if you don't like it - don't use it. This is typical of the nonsense this guy spouts
Always have, i suppose this aim stuff applies there too now... I understand this if people have AGREED to the use, but I don't remember getting a new TOS sent to me when AOL took over icq
Oh dear, learning C at college on a DEC Ultrix terminal (in the early 90's for me so 20 years later), I came to the same conclusion, of course it only took about 10 minutes to write. I did write it and even stole a few passwords that I didn't use for anything except for hosting the password collector... It was fun writing it though. When I wrote it, I reckoned that was the first person ever to have done it. I didn't have the benefit of turning to a sharper coder than me - I was the best in class!
You're thinking in terms of your implementation, your method sounds suspiciously like you already had all of your globals and thought, hey I can save these easily, rather than a concious design choice.
how can I save all of these parameters and their values so that I can later restore the state?
Restating it as a use case you get,
Player resumes game at the point they stopped last time.
This simple change in thought process lets you see that the saved game is no difference in essence to a word processor document, a spreadsheet document or a text file.
You've identified that a secondary user goal in addition to playing of the game is in the saving and restoring of the state.
The approach you've taken in using global vars is decent enough, but wrap them up in a class to make things easier to manage.
If you think of each variable as a global you're limiting future expansion options - say your game supported multiple players over a network and they each want have their own state stored, your global method would need heavy modification to allow that change.
Several people have called for a singleton that the rest of your objects talk to, this option, as I understand the term singleton, seems a good way to convert and future proof your existing code.
Btw - what game is this? Can I download it? Is it GPL?
actually UML can be executed - creating verifiable diagrams - where the requirements are validated and screens are created and verified by business people during requirements phase. This is the crux of MDA (model driven architecture).
One company I know of that takes XMI input from XDE/Rose/RSM and creates an executable model is Xactium.
They have flash demos for those interested. (yes, that's eclipse!)
Check out their Free Book on metamodelling (it's good if you are insomniac or acronym obsessed!) from Xactium's website (free reg required)
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience (nephews) Programming with Dark Basic gives them an instant ROI. It's the best modern equivalent to the Sinclair Basic that I started with. OK. Basic is a bit like programming with the training wheels on, but surely that's the point! The well intentioned posts talking about syntax etc. don't really matter and you already know that yourself. Dark Basic is a simple syntax that will allow games to be written. There are sample programs for most standard game types that means he's got a jump start into making fun stuff straight away.
not much help to you, but I find the glossy screen on my MBP to be superior to it's non glossy counterpart. The only real problem I experience is fingermarks being tricky to simply rub off.
Visit http://www.delcamp.net/forum/en/ and become a member, you need to make some posts to "win" the right to download. The prof has put up 848 Works (2116 pages) of Classical sheet music in pdf format ranging from absolute beginner to performance level pieces. Many have associated MP3s and the site has an area to post your own efforts for critique. The music is arranged specifically for classical guitar, but it's worth mentioning. Good helpful community too.
My roles to date were always in the analyst/programmer camp with a little web design. I've noticed the salaries dwindling over the years and then at contract I got 2 years ago, I had the opportunity to be the code monkey for the Business Analysis team, basically my job was to reorganise and index their massive quantity of requirements specs in word format after that was completed, I was kept on to produce an end-to-end requirements management solution for analysts including modelling, textual descriptions, classic specs and verification and validation of requriements. The solution was built out of a bundle of 3rd party tools (RSM, Casewise, DOORS, Word, Test Director, Gorilla Logic) and my job was to script them all up so that the analysts could have an end-to-end workflow. Interesting contract that lasted 2 years and was a lot of fun. Something happened to me though, I realised that being out of the business programming business and going into the analysis tools business. Had to spend a lot of time thinking about the process of business analysis and then training the analysts to use the new tools made me realise that business analysis was the only place to actually make significant changes to an organisation's IT. My new role is as a Technical Business Analyst working on the interfaces between a billing system and all of the other components within a pretty major corporation. Definately a career shift from programming/web design into business analysis. One that I didn't take lightly, but one that was effectively forced upon me because the salaries available for Business Analysts are about 30% higher than for programming contracts. as an aside, I've started development of my own Requirements Definition tool since I now have free mental space from a programming point of view, might as well put everything I learned to good use.
Since I spent 6 months extending the publishing capabilities of doors to make it produce documentation that was suitable for sending to external vendors, I wouldn't be promoting the native "Export to Word" capabilities of Doors. It's really quite horrible, basically a database query pumped out as rtf.
a bit of dxl to export as xml and a few xslt stylesheets to transform to wordml, then a bit of ole to put in the images (you can't export vector graphics (i.e. visio, rational rose)) properly without using ole) produces a nice document.
Telelogic's problem is that DOORS is the master and why would you want to have a "classic" requirements spec anyway... Great until you've got 3rd parties who need to read the specs!
The history stuff is quite good I suppose, but you can only view diffs between minor revisions. As soon as you create a major version for release, you lose your history (well it is still there, but you can only see diffs for minor revisions to their last major version, not ideal).
Creating a version is a bit tricky too, with a nasty interface that needs an admin. It's easy to miss something when you're working with multiple modules across multiple folders.
Oh and I just remembered - major limitiation when creating versions. DOORS allows you to create "projects" - shown as blue folders. They're a special kind of folder that give you some extra features, but you cannot create a version across projects. Everything needs to be in one project - understandable from a technical standpoint (a project can be treatead as an atomic item), but terrible from a version management perspective - where you'd like to split out business requirements and system requirements for example. Especially when you have multiple systems supporting the business requirements all handled by different teams - you'd ideally want each set of system requirements in it's own project, but forget being able to version manage that whole thing.
Telelogic's advice? Don't use projects!
I deployed doors for a major client and I can tell you that the version management really sucks - no branching for example, which is a real problem with multiple development teams releasing software in parallel
Telelogic's answer to branching is to copy the requirements to a new folder (yes, really!) - not good at all!
it's not too terrible an interface (I understand the new version looks a lot pretier than the old one), does linking and traceability quite well
Best thing about it is dxl, a C like language that you use to extend the basic tool (though in the latest version, they've switched to vbscript (yuk!))
> because that is where the cold "fall" in to the room.
this reminds me of a TV show I saw a while back about government advertising to old age pensioners to stay warm at winter. The basis of the campaign was "Keep the heat in". It was a complete failure because the old dears didn't understand basic physics. They changed the campaign to "Keep the cold out" and it was a big success.
>Gnu (General?)
Gnu = Gnu's not unix
it's a recursive acronym
I've also just upgraded my in-law's aging P2 300 win98 machine with ubuntu. They're very happy with it. Their needs are limited admittedly - web,mail,digital camera,chess,patience. Ubuntu passes with flying colours. I showed them round gnome in a matter of minutes and they were up to speed in no time. Now they keep saying things like - it's _so_ much faster. it looks _so_ much better. No surprise really since win98 is now 7 years old and ubuntu 5.10 is 1 month old. The point is that they would not have had the same experience had I tried a WinXP upgrade on that old hardware.
For a home desktop, I can recommend Automatix - that installs all that "other" stuff for a desktop system.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=66563
Boffin
"The word appeared during World War II, where it was applied with some affection to the people who invented radar, early digital computers, the atomic bomb, and other technologies that gave the Allies an advantage over the Axis during the war."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boffin
I've always prefered and will continue to use Boffin. It's a good word that encapsulates all the good of geek and nerd, is a bit more academic. It also has none of the baggage, except perhaps for absent mindedness.
--
Colm
>OSX/Wine surely it would be Darwine
When it matters (e.g. life support machines) software is guaranteed and the license has no waiver of rights - even if it had it wouldn't be held up in court - look at the Concorde guys in court just now, not precisely the same, but basically they said their design was OK, even when they had evidence to the contrary, now they are being held accountable for it. Truth of the matter is that desktop software is good-enough TM, I'd rather go with the current licensing (free&closed) than hamper development further by introducing the chance of litigation. And the thought that something given away for nothing can ever have a license that accepts liability is laughable, if you don't like it - don't use it. This is typical of the nonsense this guy spouts
of course there was... sigh - To paraphrase Dilbert, we're all Bill Gates towel boys we just don't know it yet!
Always have, i suppose this aim stuff applies there too now... I understand this if people have AGREED to the use, but I don't remember getting a new TOS sent to me when AOL took over icq
Oh dear, learning C at college on a DEC Ultrix terminal (in the early 90's for me so 20 years later), I came to the same conclusion, of course it only took about 10 minutes to write. I did write it and even stole a few passwords that I didn't use for anything except for hosting the password collector... It was fun writing it though. When I wrote it, I reckoned that was the first person ever to have done it. I didn't have the benefit of turning to a sharper coder than me - I was the best in class!
no, it shouldn't be old, it's new to science, unless you want to create some from scratch, it's all old...
new to science... there is nothing new under the sun, just our knowledge of it, so yes, new is fair.
Oh No! Maybe it's Ice 9! http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/014028560 1/qid=1109004878/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_2_1/026-0720765-3 344450
how can I save all of these parameters and their values so that I can later restore the state?
Restating it as a use case you get,
Player resumes game at the point they stopped last time.
This simple change in thought process lets you see that the saved game is no difference in essence to a word processor document, a spreadsheet document or a text file.
You've identified that a secondary user goal in addition to playing of the game is in the saving and restoring of the state.
The approach you've taken in using global vars is decent enough, but wrap them up in a class to make things easier to manage. If you think of each variable as a global you're limiting future expansion options - say your game supported multiple players over a network and they each want have their own state stored, your global method would need heavy modification to allow that change.
Several people have called for a singleton that the rest of your objects talk to, this option, as I understand the term singleton, seems a good way to convert and future proof your existing code.
Btw - what game is this? Can I download it? Is it GPL?
What if you are a cross language programmer just trying to make things talk nicely to each other?
Apparently I'm a mad idealistic primative extinct vulgar aristocratic highly evolved alien being with a high IQ.
Do I get a badge or something?
--
Like anagrams? Love Anagramarama!
Although it's not mentioned on the OP, a new version was released on 31 January 2005 so it is news and not exactly a dupe
> Ok, I'm a geek and I love to have the Internet wherever I am but why in the kitchen?
Delia!
When they first launched, the T's & C's had a 4GB daily download cap...
now it's four times better, but note that this only allows about 30 minutes of full speed access a day!
I noted it on my rarely updated blog - Fatal flaw in 8MB Broadband
Anagramarama!
> or executed...
actually UML can be executed - creating verifiable diagrams - where the requirements are validated and screens are created and verified by business people during requirements phase. This is the crux of MDA (model driven architecture).
One company I know of that takes XMI input from XDE/Rose/RSM and creates an executable model is Xactium.
They have flash demos for those interested. (yes, that's eclipse!)
Check out their Free Book on metamodelling (it's good if you are insomniac or acronym obsessed!) from Xactium's website (free reg required)