An iridescent tentacle

A new, brighter year

2006-01-05T06:57:00.000-08:00

Well, things have most certainly cleared up now, and I'm feelin' fine now. Getting lots of sleep probably helps :)

So, programming wise, I'm highly consideing writing my own editor. On unix there is vi/emacs, Mac has the incredible TextMate and Windows has...errr...well..UltraEdit? The problem is, there is just nothing that suits my needs (Visual Studio 2005 is seriusly close though). As nice as languages get, thers's only so much it can do for the programmer. A perfect editor can eliminate any repetition in code - and that's what I'm striving for.

TextMate honestly looks like it can do that, and is my main motiivation for writing my own. The tab macro-insertion stuff looks very polished (I know that VS2005 provides this). The problem with VS2005 is that extending it is not a task for the fainthearted. There's all sorts of things you have to do and getting synax highlighting, intellisense etc - not easy.

I want my editor to be generic, powerful and clean - if I won't be using a feature, why slow the app down with it? Anyway, gonna start it when I get home - wish me luck :)

Happy...New....Year?

2005-12-31T17:44:00.000-08:00

Well, that'd be nice but looks like this year follows the last few months of my life pretty well. But then, unless I know you, you won't understand. And to be honest, im too unhappy right now to drag myself down lower. Anyway, I'll give you an overview of things.

Last night (or would that be two nights ago?) I went to a dance/party thing called Unity. Its one where everyone is "free" and hippyish and I had a brilliant time. Sliently to brilliant, drank enough to be not walking straight or speaking at all correct (ask Ami.. I sent her a lovely incoherent email). Then, had that lovely morning of thinking "Urghh, why" and then realising that I have to do the same all over again.

So, tonight I got there, vaguely hyped up (heck, I'd just bought a 19" Acer widescreen monitor - who wouldn't be happy?) and chucked my drinks on the window sill and laid a tenner down for a bottle of southern comfort. I love that stuff, and if Im gonna drink - I'll enjoy it. Dan put some money down too, and Joe went off to the off license while me and Dan grabbed a damn tasty mighty meat pizza. Drinks went Dan and I just couldn't drink... I sipped a few shots of SC and felt nothing. I felt just as awkward as I did when it was Ami's birthday - and she was sick that night, and I had to nurse her better (lol, yea right - I phoned her parents and she hates me for it ^_^)

Dan was really putting drinks away, and we headed down to the Wendy House (small play house thing). We (all..7?) packed in, cramped and cold, eagerly awaiting the click of a lighter to start smoking a joint in there, and letting it get hot boxed (sorta like, making somewhere fill with smoke). Dan was pretty out of it now, lieing against the wall and whenever we asked him something we got a murmor. Then Tom came in, and then I looked at the floor. It was shiny - someone had split a drink? Wait.. no one had a drink... Yup, Dan had been sick - nicely into Tom's shoeless feet.

So, everyone starts bitching - its all Dan's fault, fucking Dan, what a wanker. Tom ,pissed off that there's vomit up his leg and coating his socks seeks revenge, and Jason pulls out a can of shaving foam (this is back in the house, with Dan left in the Wendy house). So everyone starts saying it'd be brilliant to cover him in shaving foam. JUST WHAT THE FUCK?! When someone is past the state of making there own decisions, unable to walk, stand, even fucking move - the last thing you fucking do is spray fucking SHAVING FOAM ON THEM.

So, now you know the story - onto why im pissed off and low. Basically, I spent from about 11pm, maybe 10:30pm to 12:30pm with Dan, making sure he was gonna be ok, helping him out of the wendy house and getting him to the bathroom, finding his shoes - sensible stuff, y'know? I don't give 2 fucks if its childish or "he can sort himself out." Whenever im sick, people activly helping me out helps the most - not invading my space or just starring (hugs appriciated if I really trust you). No one else does much but stare.

Well, I'm gonna call that a rap but lets look at a quick overview of the last 2 months. In know particular order:

Broke up with Ami. One of the hardest things I've done in a long time - and saddly out of my control. You can't make someone feel one way towards you, only show them how they feel and hope they can feel the same. Tbh, this lasted in worst state for about 2 weeks. Now I miss her, but understand she needs to make these decisions and I should support her. We're still so close, still seeing each other activly, and still sharing emotions. Hope is not lost!
Health conserns. A nice combination of late nights, emotion, drugs (I really don't mix well with marijuna - as much as I tell myself otherwise) had resulted in me thinking I had a heart condition, due to strange dizzyness and raised heart beat - just the prefix to the next point:
Illness - Isuffered a brilliant swollen uvula, stopped my speech completely (I would gag if I tried to talk), making breathing through my mouth hard, and eating equally complex. That lasted 4 days, and I felt like a bloody vegetable. I'm a talking person, and when you can't talk, its hard.
Well, this.

To be honest, things were really picking up until today, and I think they will get better. The new year is going to be the first time I change drastically, and Im really prepaired to do this. I'm sick of my lifestyle atm (sick is way an overstatement, im more mildly displeased). I want to stop disapointing and hurting myself and start having fun. MY fun, not over peoples fun.

So, to wrap this stupidly long blog post up here's my decisions:

Smoking is stopping. I hate every bit of it, and for a brief 30mins of minor upliftment, its not worth it. I have a nice period of days after thinking "Sigh, nice one, smoking again. Feel really good now? No, didnt think so" but I never learn. Now I've learnt.
Better work ethics. I've finished compulsary school, this is the real cheese now (did I really say that?!) and I'm doing what I want to do. So ffs, do it. Work thats set is going to actually be finished, well a good proportion of it.
A slightly new me. Gradually, im hitting a change in my life - normally I dont think about, them they just happen. I think the last change was a wrong path, and I want to pull myself back. I've started to become physically cleaner - more frequent washing, awareness of my appearence and so on. It feels good to think you look or smell good, even if no one notices.

So there we go. Good things come in three, and those are my three changes. So, with the end of pretty brilliant year being a huge drop, I can only come back stronger ^_^.

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In other news, I bought a Acer 19" monitor with my christmas money. I seriously cannot wait for this baby to arrive. Comes on tuesday, which is pretty good - go amazon!

Merry Chirstmas!

2005-12-26T11:46:00.000-08:00

Yay, Christmas! But its come and gone already. I hope that everyone had a brilliant time, and thank you so much for any presents you gave me :) Spent my Christmas in the Isle of Wight with my family, and their friends - twas great fun.

Highlights of presents: bonsai potato (omg!), some LOVELY eau de toilette (its not perfume damnit ¬_¬), Bonobo cd (ooo, 2 from ami!), 3d game engine architecture and design, southern comfort (mmmm) - but I love all of my pressies.

Anyway, merry christmas, and I hope you all had a great time and got what you wanted :)

Attributes: Part 2

2005-12-20T01:27:00.000-08:00

Ok, so you followed my last post ok - but using attributes hasn't really brought any benefits yet. It makes your comments a little cleaner, and people in your team understand what fields they need to fill out but other than that... whats the use? Well, in this part, I'll walk you through the generation of a tool that can be used to view these attributes.

The .NET environment is loaded with a bunch of classes designed to help you with the task of "reflection." Reflection is a concept whereby you can access classes at runtime and extract data regarding them. We are interested in getting to attributes, which is pretty much the easiest thing that you can do using reflection.

The Type Class

The Type class is the basics of reflection. All classes have an associated Type with them - which is unique. The Type class contains properties, methods, attributes and so on. So - how do we get at these types?

The best thing we can do at the moment, because we're only getting our feet wet, would be to use Assembly.GetTypes(). This returns an array of Types - every single Type in the assembly, regardless of access modifiers. This looks great! So - let's go:


using System.Reflection;

...

Type[] types = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetTypes();

Now that we have this array, all we need to do is go through these types - checking for our custom attributes:


foreach(Type t in types)
{
    ToDoItemAttribute[] todoItems = t.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(ToDoItemAttribute))
    foreach(ToDoItemAttribute todoItem in todoItems)
        Console.WriteLine(todoItem.Message);
}

And, as simple as this tool is - we now have a way of looking through all of our source code, and finding todo items. Neat! And that took a whole... 7 lines of code for the loop and a class + properties for the attribute. Certainly nothing big.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this has given you an insight into the power of attributes in the .NET framework and shown that correctly utilizing them and writing your own is highly beneficial - especially for management purposes. I'll be releasing my own tool for working with todo items tonight, which will hopefully help you manage your code better.

Attributes: Part 1

2005-12-19T13:29:00.000-08:00

Attributes are a very powerful and under used feature of the CLR framework. They can be used for all sorts of things, and boo features some incredibly cool uses (like whacking [Property] on a variable and having it automagically add a getter and setter) - but I want to talk about something different. Using attributes to extend documentation.

Documentation, whether you like it or not (and I'm certainly in the former grouping) is essential, and the more people you start to take on board your team, the more vital it becomes. With the increasing complexity of applications (sure, .NET helps - but it doesn't eliminate it completly!) your standard // and /* */ comments just aren't going to cut it.

Lets take the example that you've implemented a new feature but have found some bugs in it. You unit tested as hard as you could but still a bug got through - no biggy, you go to fix it. So, you go ahead and make your fixes and your tests passes and the bugs gone. But when fixing that bug you thought, "Geee, I better change xyz when I get some free time" so you stick a little "// TODO:" on there. I wonder how long it will take until you or another member of the team sees that todo?

Enter attributes

Attributes are small "tags" if you will, that allow you to tag members, classes - even assemblies. They don't actually affect that method, they simply add a bit more meta data into the IL. With reflection, we can get at this data - and use it a more sensible manner.

So, taking the previous example - we need to have a way to add a todo item. This sounds like a great time to use attributes! All attributes extend from the System.Attribute class and should be named YourAttributeNameAttribute. So, lets create this todo attribute. We need to give this todo item a priority, and a little message to go with it would be nice.
public class ToDoItemAttribute : Attribute { string message; int priority; public string Message { get { return message; } set { message = value; } } public int Priority { get { return priority; } set { priority = value; } } }

Thats it - dead simple (I know, I know - priority should be an enum)! Now, we can go ahead and use this:


public class Order
{
    [ToDoItem(Message="Check that the item is in stock", Priority=1)]
    public void DispatchToCustomer(Customer customer)
    {
        isDispatched = true;
    }
}

In my next post, I will show you how we can create a tool to view this data - which really shows the use of attributes. However, I hope this has helped and made you think about using attributes for things like this.

Blogs again?

2005-12-14T04:13:00.000-08:00

Pah, what IS IT with me and blogging? I seem incapable of keeping a blog ¬_¬' This one however, I plan to keep. Honestly, I really do! Anyway I don't really have much to talk about life wise so I'll blabber on game development. Probably should introduce what I'm up to at the moment.

Ok, the project is a fantasy style role playing game. We're aiming for some seriously cutting edge technolgy - HDR lighting, powerful physics and more, but then, everyone wants that. Anyway, its bobbing a long quite nicely. Me and my fellow coder, Nathan, practice test-driven development, a concept rarely associated with game programming. It works quite nicely once you get the hang of it in a game-dev context, and I highly encourage people to at least give it a shot.

So anyway, I've just finished my first few tasks - get engine creation going, create a logger and stuff but now I'm onto the proper hard stuff (no, not cocaine ¬_¬). I have to create a scene graph that allows for logical associations, state management and spatial awareness. Basically - position, materials and culling. I've opted to have multiple graphs for each operation and think that this is likely to be the best way to do it.

I've coded up a 2d program that uses System.Drawing in a very crude way to start implementing this. Today I added the transform and material stuff - tomorrow I start work on spatial stuffage. Fun. Anyway, Noel's engine has scripted generation, so I gotta add that before I go to bed >.>