The last month or so

April 3, 2006 on 8:27 pm | In Computing, Life, School |

Wow, I didn’t blog for almost a month! And I didn’t even get a single message about it, either. I feel so unloved! People forgot about me on tt-forums after 30 minutes as well :o But more on that later.

I’ve been busy working on my project for school, an auctioning site a la eBay. Turned out pretty shite, because

  • we were forced to write it in Java Server Pages, with the administrative application created in, *shiver*, Microsoft Access
  • the people who were making the website were, well, incompetent, really.

The code is horribly inefficient, the design is terrible (I think the fact that the average page contains between 4 and 6 <html> tags says more than enough…) and the functions are anything but safe from hackers and idiots alike.
The administrative bit of the project turned out great though, regardless of the horrible tools we had to use to create it.
So I’m glad that’s over now, I just have to hold a presentation regarding the product and talk my way through the assessment. The latter will probably be quite interesting too, because one of the now-ex-team-members was so incompetent and so lazy that we gave him so much criticism that he ended up going home crying. After which we had a lot of meetings where people that were supposed to be looking at it from an unbiased point of view pretty much said it was all our fault and we would have a lot of trouble with our assessments.
Still, I think I’ll manage.

What else happened over the last month?

An image rendered by my program
Click to Enlarge

Well, I’ve been writing a program in Python that renders a command and conquer map. I’m quite proud of it and it’s proven to be extremely educational to me, so that’s nice. I made it better today, by finally making it relatively fast. The problem is that I wrote it very sequentially and never stopped to refactor, so what started as a program that just read some data from a file, became a horribly slow and inefficient renderer. Managed to cut the execution time from ~18 seconds to 8 seconds and then from 8 seconds to 2.2 seconds, so that’s nice. I mean to expand/fork the program into a map editor for C&C (and possibly Red Alert). I might even devote a page (or a scripts entry) to it one day! Kudos to Thomas for giving tips and helping me :)
(Note: All the bits on that image that look like glitches are in fact not glitches, All the stuff that looks silly is just outside the actual playing area of the map. My guess is that it was either a bit of a visual aid for the level designers or a way of making sure units could move in or out of specific areas of the map, although that makes little sense to me)

Furthermore, I recently left TT-Forums, after nearly 4 years of loyal membership and something like 2-3 years of being a fearsome moderator. I was growing more and more annoyed by some members and members I used to have respect for were starting to disappoint me, so I finally decided to leave once and for all. My intentions to write a confronting and impressing goodbye speech failed miserably. That plus the fact that a lot of people appear to be thinking that I’ll come back have made my departure a very light subject, which is not what I had expected or hoped, selfish as that might sound.
But I’ll still be in #tycoon, unless people start annoying/disappointing me there too, after which I will not have anywhere to go and lead the life of a hermit.

4 Comments »

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  1. you will always have #buff.needed you sexy beast!

    Comment by Xenomorph — April 3, 2006 #

  2. And don’t forget about #tycoon! Since we’re wonderful!

    Well, you’ll have me, anyway. Aww.

    Comment by Owen Rudge — April 3, 2006 #

  3. I told you to blog all the time!

    Comment by Kopa — April 3, 2006 #

  4. I was actually about to leave a message asking whether you were going to do a blog. And as regards tt-forums I really was hoping you’d return but I didn’t say as I’ve been a bit preoccupied with things at the moment. But you are (were) one of the most decent people on there. Please don’t decide to become a hermit!

    Comment by Martin — April 3, 2006 #

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