Tag Archives: Programming

Monkeying around with computer code

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Fun With Procedural Images part 2

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I’d love to say that the reason I haven’t made any posts for the past week is because I’ve been hard at work on my game engine, but no.  Actually what happened is that I started watching Breaking Bad, and while it wasn’t good enough that I would recommend it to anyone, it wasn’t bad enough for me to abandon it, either.

But that’s unimportant.  This post is in the “Programming” category, which means we’ll be talking about programming!

So as you can probably guess from the incredibly dry and unreadable last post, I’m not terribly happy with parts of my image generation library.  It’s monolithic, messy, disorganized, difficult to maintain, and lacking certain key features.  When faced with a challenge like this, most programmers…

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Thinking Out Loud

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When working on math homework, I would sometimes encounter a problem where either I didn’t know how to proceed, or I thought I had the process right but the numbers at the ends weren’t adding up.  When this happens, it usually means you’ve missed a small detail somewhere, and the best plan is usually to call for help.

The funny thing is that it doesn’t really matter who you get help from, because the first thing you’re going to do is explain the problem you’re having and the process you’ve been using.  During the explanation, you’ll typically discover exactly what you did wrong, and more often than not you could literally be talking to a brick wall and it would be just as helpful as a genius with multiple Doctorate degrees in the field of the problem you’re having.  So if you don’t mind, I’ll just think out loud for a while.  This is going to be pretty dry, and I don’t expect to post a lot of pictures, but we’ll see.

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Dependants and Dependencies

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Well I WAS going to come here and make another post about my procedural image system, which of course requires that I finish putting it back together after trying to make it load files properly.  Unfortunately, I also noticed that there was a new version of the D compiler out, so I decided to go ahead and update to that.

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Fun With Procedural Images

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Screenshot from Farbrausch's "The Product" 64kb demo

Screenshot from Farbrausch’s “The Product” 64kb demo

Many, many years ago, a German group known as Farbrausch created a rather impressive piece of software, known as The Product, a 64-kilobyte executable which produces, without the aid of a network connection or any additional files, a short, real-time rendered music video advertising all of the great things “The Product” can do.

The really cool thing is that at 64 kilobytes, the file itself is almost smaller than the download request, and it’s old enough that virtually every (windows) PC available today can run it flawlessly.

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LASER IS NOT DIFFICULT!

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I was inspired to start here partly because of Shamus Young, owner of the entertaining and informative Twenty-Sided Tale blog.  Seriously, go check him out.

Shamus is a good programmer, and like any good programmer, when he gets bored, he likes to write little experimental coding projects.  Currently he’s working on a game called “Project Good Robot,” which is shaping up into something I would REALLY like to play.  The cool thing about Shamus is that when he does these coding projects, he posts about them.  It’s all very educational, and a lot of fun to read, and Shamus really has a talent for explaining high-level technical stuff in a way that anybody can understand.  Reading through his earlier projects would really be a good way to gain some solid practical knowledge for beginning programmers.  Or anybody who would like to be a beginning programmer.  Or anybody who’s curious about the arcane arts of “Computer Science” and would like a peek behind the curtain.

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The Craving and The Fix

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At rest, the human body consumes around 1300 kilocalories per day.  That’s what it takes just to keep your body running.  If you can eat less than that, you can actually lose weight by channel surfing on the couch!

Your brain weighs about 3 pounds.  For the average adult male, that’s about 1-2% of your body weight.  For something so small, it consumes a gluttonous 260 kilocalories every day.

That’s a lot of energy.  Going to have to replenish it somehow.

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