BlackHC’s Adventures in the Dev World

Long ago (about three weeks ago to be correct) I still had lots of free time and no university lectures yet, so I decided to look at all - I repeat: at all 1000-something - Cyanide & Happiness comic strips on www.explosm.net and make a collection of the ones that I liked the most. Of course my collection isn’t complete and I got pretty tired at the end but I still think I’ve found quite a few gems among the strips.

I’ve stored them as a list of links in a raw txt file (it can be found here, if you want take a look a it) and it wasn’t really usable the way it was. I wanted to put it on my blog though to let others view it in a comfortable way but since I didn’t have enough time I postponed it.. till yesterday. Yesterday I’ve finally found enough time to sit down and think and code something nice to let you (and myself, too) browse through my favorites.

You can find the final page here: http://www.icculus.org/~black/stuff/explosm/explosmviewer.html

How does it work?

It uses AJAX! Well actually it only uses XMLHttpRequest to query the .dat file that stores a preprocessed list of C&H links (plus the respective image links) and uses that data to let you browse my favorites dynamically but it contains the code to create the said .dat file out of my raw .txt file.

Consequently if I ever update my list I can do so simply by updating the .txt file with a few links and regenerate the .dat file with all additional information.

I’m mostly using some RegExp to parse the Explosm pages and my .txt and .dat files. If you want to try the code out yourself, mind that you need to uncomment the compileList( true ); line and use Internet Explorer to run it because FireFox doesn’t allow cross-domain access which is naturally needed if you want to parse the pages on explosm.net. The result is copied into the clipboard and can be then saved and uploaded to the webspace of choice (if you adapt the links in the script, too).

Enjoy

Cheers,
Andreas

I think I’ve been talking about Edu2 a lot already and I don’t really feel like giving a huge overview again - probably I will end up doing so nonetheless. Edu2 is finished, over, done. I’m not going to touch it again - ever! That said, I think there are a few nice things and lots of bad things to say and tell about it. I usually paint bleak pictures and I won’t stop here, because I try to be honest with the negative side of things.

I guess this is going to be a bigger postmortem because there are many different topics that I should mention to give the reader a fair impression.

To begin with, a few links first for those interested in Edu1 and Edu2:

• http://www.edu-shooter.de/ Official Edu1 Page - only German though
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/edu2 Our SourceForge Project - you can even download an almost final build

Interesting fact: google for Edu2 and you’ll find a project that is almost about the same things that we worked on - except it’s 2D only.

Continue reading Edu2 Postmortem…

This is the final Java homework in our Java introductory course at university. Enjoy
Click here to play the game
Greetings,
Black

Today I’ve decided to work on BSS again - finally.

And I’ve even come up with a few neat bullet points to help me clean-up the codebase and I really feel like sharing them with the world today (although everybody can come up with them in a few minutes, too, but hey - now I can say that you’ve only copied my thoughts ):

How to fix and clean-up stuff quickly:

What do I want?

• remove unnecessary code
• clean-up the design
• untangle tight couplings

How do I do that???

Hack & Polish

• look at a specific code section
• rewrite it quickly while keeping the behavior the same
• don’t look at the overall design concepts - to KISS (to keep it simple STUPID)
• as soon as the new code actually seems to work, go and polish it slightly (to make it readable again)

Repeat these steps a few times..

Now look at the “overall picture” and try to identify common patterns and remove duplicate code again by writing generic helper code - but this time keep it decoupled and make it less messy!

Rinse and repeat…

OK… sounds great? Yes, it does! And it even works to some degree. I’ve tried it this evening and although I - like always - lose too much time browsing around and getting lost in the WWW, I still made some progress.

Here’s my worklog as proof (and to annoy Joshua a bit ;-P):

Enough for today. One more Dexter episode for me now (actually the first today) and then good night!

Good night,
Black