Drew Clinkenbeard

    I have often thought about making movies and writing stories and all the rest. It has led me to notice things in films that I had never picked up on before. What comes to mind is an ending scene in a movie where there are two characters standing next to one another each of them holding a cup of coffee. The cups of coffee (well probably tea considering the movie, and no I am not going to say what the film was so there =-þ) cause the viewer to connect the two in a much closer fashion than would ordinarily be the case. I thought it was interesting.

I would be upset by noticing things like this except I usually don’t unless I have seen the film several times.

The reason I was watching the film YET again is because I like having something in the background while I code and I have spent most of the day writing php. Not for homework as I should have been, nor was it for a job as would of been nice but just for myself which is the best of all. Evidently I do like to code. I am in the process of making a database driven wish list for me, my family, and my friends to use. I decided this way we wouldn’t have to keep doing the whole “what do you want for your birthday/holiday?” crap. It’ll be great. The things it needs are:

• Individual user log ins
• anonymous ‘purchased’ notification
• easy item updating

and for the future:

• Email notification for list updates
• maybe an RSS feed instead of that

So far this whole thing has been kind of fun. It is enjoyable setting up the DB and the connections and learning about PHP and java script. These are all things I think I should have learned in school but we didn’t. All in all the programing curriculum at CSUCI is some what lacking.

So I am a computer science major, as such everyone expects me to love to program. Let me set things straight right now: I don’t. Well not really. I did enjoy writing a driver in perl that initiated a bunch of sorting algorithms and compared their times. I also like learning new languages I am currently working on learning a bit of Python. Python creeps me out because it does not use end of line characters, at least not that I have discovered yet.
example: printing Hello world!
perl:

print "\nhello world\n";

c:

main() { printf("\nhello world!\n"); }

python:

print '\nhello world\n'

GAA!! Notice the complete lack of semi-colon! As if this oft mis understood piece of punctuation hasn’t been trimmed from the english language enough now we must remove it from programing as well?! What will the future coders of America complain about?! Do you know how many hours of my life have been spent hunting for the missing semi-colon? or the misplaced semicolon? (interestingly enough demi, semi, and hemi can all mean the same thing),,, So I guess good riddance to the foul thing.

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Whew Boston, where to begin. Boston is a cool city, it is also a cold city. The ground was completely covered in snow when we arrived and Boston common looked like a Christmas card.

Boston is home to many of the USA’s “oldest” the oldest continually operating resturant (Unioin Oyster House) the oldest retail shop, the oldest ship in the navy (USS Constituion), the oldest subway system in the states, etc etc. Despite this it still didn’t seem as old as a european city. It was odd, although I guess since it isn’t as old as the european cities that would be why.

Boston Cream pie is good stuff.

I have always been a fan of the Doppler effect. If that isn’t nerdy I don’t know what is. Seriously though I always liked the sound a car made when it went by, the way the wavelength got shorter as it approached and stretched out as it went away, of course I didn’t always know that was what was going on, but still. Now I am writing a papers on it and doing equations involving Doppler shifting. It is one of those things that is really simple when you think about it but it took a long time to ‘discover’ I would imagine it didn’t come up until we had the ability to move quick enough to notice it. I mean it is unlikely in the extreme that some one on foot or horse back is going to notice that “hey, Olaf’s voice seems to change as I charge at him.” or “Hmm these arrows sure seem to sound different as they fly past my head.” generally not situations conducive to scientific thought.

Considering scientific thought: ultrasonic imagery is really quite fascinating. The idea that we can use sound to ’see’ things is really very interesting, it makes me wonder if things like the heart beat sensor from the Rainbow Six games actually exist. Or could exist in the future. I don’t know if a specific heart beat sensor would be possible but I am sure it would be possible to create some sort of essentially portable sonar type of device that could identify soft tissue in a house at range. It would not be necessary to distinguish features as specific as a malfunctioning aorta but it would still be a good idea for police and such to have advanced knowledge of what they were heading into. With more information they would be better able to defend themselves and prepare for an encounter. (more…)

designing levels is a bitch can be extremely challenging. Think about it you must balance the challenge to your players, you have to give them a reason to be there you have to keep it interesting. This all boils down to knowing your audience and, most importantly, knowing yourself. It’s a bit like dating, the hardest part is getting them to play the game. Once they are playing the game a lot of forgiveness can be had. Never the less the game must still keep their interest. If you make it to hard they will stop, if you make it too easy they will stop, if its too predictable, unpredictable, unrealistic, the list goes on the elements must be balanced, or at least close to it, in order to keep the players happy.

So suppose you keep all that in mind you balance everything you design your level; pouring heart and soul into a creation that at last is perfect. Then once the players are released into the level they run through destroying everything, ignoring your clever plans and plots, slaughtering your minions, and generally laying waste to hours, day or months of planning. It’s like watching some one take a flamethrower to the Mona Lisa. I am mostly thinking about DnD levels, but it applies to all RPGs as well as FPSs. There are pages and pages writen about this on the interweb so I am not going to go to indepth other than to say I have a great deal of respect for the people who do it for a living and make the games I love so well. The level design in games like the Half-Life series, Duke Nukem, Fear, Doom II, Quake II and Blood. Here I feel I should mention Doom III, it started out well enough but by the half way point the levels became formulaic, walk in the room shoot the monster, turn around, shoot the new monster that just spawned in, collect the item, lather, rinse, repeat. So what is the key? Hell if I know. Seriously though it comes down to knowing your audience. You have to make them want to play.
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I have been trying to get a nice plugin to display random images on this thrice damned thing for the past 3 hours. needless to say it hasn’t worked. The funny thing is: it WAS working bit the CSS was not configured correctly so part of the gallery2 page was being cut off. I was attempting to fix this and made things worse. I swear it is always easy until you try and do something the designers didn’t contemplate. Oh well maybe it will work in the near future.
[EDIT]: IT’S ALIVE! IT’S ALIVE!!! Whew it’s working! now to see what I did,,, I mean go to bed.