Almasch

After some holiday and the first weeks at work again the new year can start. Due to the first month is nearly over best wishes for the next 11 month.

At my workplace we have started an advents calendar with famous computer scientist. Every day I choose a new entry I prepare it in the night before and tonight my choice was Alan Kay. He developed Smalltalk and object oriented programming systems. One famous cite of him:

„I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.“

I started with C++ as first object oriented language, too, and was pretty sure its a nice language. Its still an very important language but now I have seen some more object oriented languages and know that there are much better solutions… Thats why I can give full acknowledgment to his statement.

The last weeks I spend some time with moving to a new flat. Now its done and I feel quite well in the new environment. It will be the start of a new episode in my life.

You take care of your vegetables and removing all kind plants you never have planted. Having a blog is the same. The only difference is that the weed is called spam…

A nice feature of the iPhone is the ability to insert geo information to pictures are taking with it. Another nice feature is its mobility. And the greatest feature of all is that you can discover new places! Even if you have no idea how you have reached this places…

So far I only have heard of this bug and that it was already fixed. I guess I have taken these picture before the bugfix and I now I got lost. If everything goes right and the software does not exchange the eastern and western hemispheres than a trip on cruise ship from Europe to America must result in an interesting view on the world map with the location needles of your pictures.

For all who read this wishes. May all your resolutions last longer than the first week of the new year and may your work bring you there you want to be and let some of your dreams become true.
Now it’s time to start! Happy new year!

For this year I have planned to finish a runnable version of my long time ago planned little RPG game. So far it was a great experience in discover so many different technologies and test them and play around with them. 

Now, I have found everything (at least I believe) which can be put together to that what I want to achieve. In the first step I will implement the basic game server which handles a simple protocol to communicate with the clients and store the game data into a database. In the second there will come a graphical frontend which will be also the editor to setup the realms to play in.

For the server side I will implement everything in Java and use jdbc to connect to a mysql database. For the graphical use client the journey brought me to Irrlicht. A slim and fast 3D engine which is available for many plattforms with good support.

The story continous… Why I should start a simple hobby? It would not be funny for such a long time. 

The last month was the first one I did not wrote any single entry. Shame on me…

Beside the both extremes of enjoying some days of holiday and suffering the heat in my office I also found some time to think about some details of my hobby game programming project and started to read some books I have on my desk a long time. And  I started to discover the iPhone SDK to see what is possible to do with this little device.

The only thing I did not was writing something into my blog…

I found a very interessting article about software patents on http://webshop.ffii.de/index.en.html and I was surprised how many of  them are already granted.

I guess I will first call my lawyer(s) before writing any further line of code or think about a new feature I could add to any application I ever have written… 

This weekend I spend much time to install software to my new computer. And I even spend more time after installation while waiting for the updates.

I guess today I transfered about 3 gigabytes of data over my dsl connection. Why I used the installation cd/dvd before the internet update? It is really useless to copy first an application to the harddisk and after finishing that job you start waiting until the same amount of data is transfered via your network.

Why is the check for updates not done before the installation is started? What about a message like: “Dear user, the next 30minutes you will waste your time if you continue. Would you like to install the current version from the internet and enjoy it or would you prefer to install the not-working-anymore version from the cd and update at your first try to start the program?