Voyaging Mind

You could say I entered fragment onResume hell last night. In my android app I am using a ViewPager to scroll between various to-do list for a given project. Each list is a Fragment pretty much as set up in one of the starting skeleton apps defined in Android Studio. This is all well and good except for one of the features is you can move items between various lists. Making it disappear is pretty trivial as you have easy access to the ArrayAdapter for the ListView you are working with. At that point you don't really have a way to tell the list that has just got a new item in you list and you need to redraw. Eventually I hatch the idea that I will use the onResume() method on each fragment to update the view with any changes. That is call the notifyDataSetChanged() method on the ArrayAdapter class for the ListView. The weird thing is onResume was not being call as the fragment was being brought into view. Rather it was being called when we moved to the tab next to it. This mea

Yay for having a couple of evening free to code over the weekend. It felt good to get two consecutive nights of coding. I have continued to work on my next android app. There were 5 large items left and then I thought of one more. So there are six... That is about to be reduced to 5 as I have nearly completed one of them. I am not planning on allowing much in the way of feature creep. Ok that last paragraph was pretty dry sounding and to be honest fairly dull. What I have actually been doing is working on adding support for multiple projects. Once complete you will be able to have separate to-do lists for different projects, or just work, home, hobby lists. I would say I am about half way though adding this feature. It is something that could probably have been dropped for a first release but I really want to have a reasonably complete app at the release stage. The reason for this is the android market place it now a big place, releasing into a crowded market is quite different t

To my surprise I have manged to get my head down a bit tonight and progress on an android app I am working on. Ok it is a pretty basic app To-Do list task manager. I am adding my own slight twist onto it but it is definitely a simple app to write. This is my get back into android app. At the moment I am quite enjoying, I either remember a fair bit about it or when development in android is greatly eased by making use of the internet. I have five major tasks outstanding and as one of them is polishing so I suspect I still have a fair bit of work ahead. It is also looking much better than many android apps that I have written in the past. The Android Studio is looking pretty good at the moment and my productivity is gradually starting to go up. In fact I am enjoying it so much I am actually considering using intelliJ when I code in other languages. The text editing part is pretty nice.

Well we still have about 60% of the boxes from our move left to unpack but it is fair to say we are starting to settle in. The summer of stress, as we now call it and not just because of the house move, is now over. It was having a massive affect on the amount of code I produced at home. I would not say I am anywhere near back up to reasonably productivity levels in part because I don't yet have a place to sneak off to when I want to code. I am now working on a small android app. A To-Do list manager of sorts. Yes this has been covered many time on the market place. It is something I have had in the back of my mind for a while. So I consider it a purging of wanting to write to-do list manager and a get my skills back up to speed with android programming again. I have been using Android Studio as my IDE. Even though it is still a beta it is pretty easy to use. I am not a power user of it but I think I prefer IntelliJ approach to UI design over Eclipse. I reserve the right to c

Well it has been a while coming but we have finally moved house. This is the last of the stress factors in our live so gradually we can get back to normal, we except for the having to decorate and fix up a new house. For the most part that means a proper return to programming in my spare time. Oddly I find myself less motivated with JavaScript game development at the moment. I seem to be motivated to create some new android stuff. There are some app ideas floating around in my brain. I am going to go with the flow on this one and shift back to Java/android for a while and see where it ends up. When creating games for android I tend to use LibGDX and that has a route to HTML5 so all is not lost on the web side. I have also been reading a bit about Scala. I looked at it a few years ago and drifted away from it, returning to it now and it seems quite nice. Having written all of about 10 lines in it I am obviously qualified to comment on it. This is really a background task, I was lo

I think the past couple of weeks of my life can be best described as extremely stressful. We are still attempting to move house as we have for the past 6 months. Combined with a large workload at work and many other minor stresses, none that I actually want to dwell on, I have been feeling pretty burned out. That means I pretty much have not open my laptop for coding in quite a while. My spare time has been taken up with some generic android gaming sessions and generally chilling. To be honest that is starting to get annoying and I am feeling the urge to get on and create again. On the plus side I finished the book "Natural Language Processing With Python". I admit I did not do any of the questions so my take away knowledge is not as great as it could have been. I am not sure what to make of the book, some parts I really enjoyed and others I found less interesting. Perhaps that is an indication about my own interest in the topic rather than a reflection on the actual writ

What are blogs for if not for the random mumbling of a confused mind. Yep you are in for one of those posts again. I am actually writing this post in Emacs. Yes I usually use Vim but though a series of events I had the urge to mess with Emacs. I like them both but found Emacs to be RSI inducing and have been settled on vim for some time. However I kind of like how Emacs makes the REPL style of programming so easy where with vim I just can't quite get it set up correctly (on windows), honestly I probably just want to play with Emacs again. So I installed Emacs. The first thing I did was to install Evil. Evil is essentially an clone of vim inside Emacs, ok, it does not quite go that far but you do get all the nice functionality you find in the default vim installation. The joke is Evil finally creates a good text editor for the Emacs operating system. So far I have not put much else onto my Emacs install. I customized Evil a bit to get it closer to my vim set up. I think I wi

I am part way though a coding up my next article for voyaging mind  but I will admit progress is pretty slow at the moment. This is why has not been many posts here recently. A couple of things are contributing to this. I am training for a half marathon and have been starting to ramp up the miles I run. This has left me pretty knackered out and just wanting to eat and relax. Over the summer I have also flipped to running in the evening. I really enjoy it and at first it did not eat much time. Now that I am heading out for one and a half hour runs it can be quite late before I actually sit down to code. Factor in Taekwondo training two nights a week and suddenly I don't have much time. Summer time is always a strange as the children are at home meaning the things are a whole lot more fluid in what we do. We are much more likely to head out to the beach or take an evening walk somewhere if they don't have to get up for school. We are now heading into autumn so schools ar

August is usually a bad month for productivity. This August is not exception. I figure to regain my motivation I should write a meandering post that covers some of my thoughts about stuff. This won't go anywhere in particular and most of my views expressed here will have changed by the time I click publish. If I ever do. The real goal is the get my mind back in to tech stuff. I find a good way to do this is to write long winded posts that lack any real meat and don't really inform! This one is slightly different as it contains the advice that writing long blog posts that no one want really wants to read actually benefits you by helping you get back into the flow. If you stop reading now, you could pretend it was a short post with a small take away item to think about! So you didn't stop. I did warn you. I read the whys guide to ruby. Ruby seems pretty nice but really the book was enjoyable mostly because of the guys writing style. Well recommended if you want a tri

Last night I finished off another article for the voyagingmind.com . I have another one in the pipeline that will complete my mini series on parsing. Once this is done the pace should drop as the pipeline will be empty. In my mind I want to write two types of articles for the site. Long form what I have been up to style articles. So over a period of a month I can collate together the interesting bits of a project I am working and write about the problems that needed to be overcome. I want to focus more on the take away lessons rather than the finite detail. Tutorial style articles. Here I want to avoid writing an article about how such and such technology works, so I won't be writing an introduction to the web audio API, rather I would want to write something the will still be interesting in 10 years time. Of course it is about programming so will require code and I imagine any language I use will look quite different in 10 years, still I want the article to be interesting to

Ok I have a very early version of voyagingmind.com uploaded. As you can see it is pretty simple and only contains one article at the moment. The tech side is pretty standard. I use wintersmith  as the site generator. There is not particular reason for choosing this static site generator over the many others. It just seemed to gel with my brain a little more than others. I am using disqus for commenting on the articles. Again for no other reason than I had heard of it and I needed comments on what is effectively as static site. I plan to put pretty much every meaningful thing I write or create on it. That means eventually contain some games, maybe some apps and articles on a fairly wide range of topics. Pretty much if it interests me it will eventually appear on the site. So to surmise, mostly for my own clarity. It is not a blog. Articles will tend to be longer form and when discussing development of a project I will focus on the algorithms/problems solved rather than how it

Another aspect to brands that I did not cover in the last post is that if you are a lone developer or small team you can make yourself/company the brand. People will pick up you latest game because it is made by you. This is an indie advantage as it is hard for large companies to retain the personal feel that is needed for this. It seems to work, many indies games developers do it. It does ever so slightly limit the games you can make as it is hard to make something that is distant from your previous game as people that like your brand may not like it, meaning your brand reach will gradually reduce in size or perhaps just alter. Given you are unlikely to succeed in this unless you are making games you love and it shows through via twitter/facebook/plus then the idea of limiting the games you make to the ones that you want to make is on the whole not to bad a deal with the devil :) Honestly if I was trying to build up into a full time indie game developer then this is the route

I don't consume much news as most of it equates to noise for the brain. Much is designed to evoke reaction rather than inform or educate. I consume just about enough to not be clueless about events in the world but not too much for it to consume much time. I would rather spend my time in different ways. One piece to tech gaming development news that filtered through to me is the discussion of brands in the mobile market. Brands are important to games companies as they provide a bed rock from which to base your company or pull it out of troubled water if an experimental idea goes wrong. Madden hit 25 years old I think may have triggered some of this discussion. Will people still be playing Angry Birds in 15 years time? How about Candy Crush?  I suspect because of their limited style of play they will follow the path of worms back in the 1990's. They will get follow ups but none will match the success of the original but they will remain profitable for years to come. I a

So over the past week of so I have been putting together a new website for voyagingmind.com . At the moment it is a googles sites website and looks pretty awful to say the least. It is possible to make nice google sites web sites but in the instance I have failed. After much searching and trying out I have settled on using Wintersmith static site generator. For the type of site I want to create there is no need for something more dynamic. The idea is to put stuff on there - yep that simple stuff I make or write will just go on there. I am planing a few articles and where appropriate I will probably hook in Disqus to get commenting on there. Honestly I am not really sure how this is all going to turn out. It could be it ends up not being maintained or it could be I get really in to it. I guess it depends on how productive I am in making stuff... One thing I would like to do is practice my longer form writing a little bit, So there will be some articles, probably about programmin

It would be fair to say I have been going thought a bit of a reboot as they say in the film industry when remaking the same comic book stories just in a grittier way. Last weekend I managed to get a couple of nights where I slept for 11 hours, this compares with my more normal 7 hours. That was a sure sign things were not quite right. My productivity at home was nearly zero. In the UK it has been pretty sunny so we have been hitting the beach, body boarding a fair bit. We are also in the process of trying to move but that did not really take account of my lack of motivation. A reboot was needed. First I signed up for a half marathon in a few months time. This has kicked started my exercise routine, I had been on a bit of a rest for a few weeks but really needed to get back into it. I seems to get more done when I am exercising a quite a bit. The next thing was to take stock of what I have been developing at home. I realized I was attempting to create things I thought people mig

Over the years I have used a fair number of text editors and IDEs, from Emacs to Eclipse and all those in between it is fair to say I have been round the block when it comes to dev environments. I have gradually settled on Vim. Although when I do Java I do use Eclipse. So why have I settled on Vim, I thought about this a fair bit and even though about showing some of the great things it can do in the world of text manipulation. The truth is that is not the reason. It is highly configurable and that lets you slowly grow what is effectively your own custom text editor. I was recently fortunate enough to use vim without my customization and it was a frustrating experiences. If you are new to vim don't judge it until your vimrc file is a few hundred lines long. Again that was not the reason. I use it because it is different from other editors and IDEs. It is not some weird desire to be different rather a desire to make my coding at home not feel like coding at work. Even though

Over the month of June and partially for the month of July I did a small experiment into Time boxing. I do admit that I like the idea of time boxing so I approached it with enthusiasm. Of course no plan survives first contact and it became clear that the idea of using time boxing to managed some larger projects was just not really doable. I had planned to have three streams but switching between streams 3 or 4 times an evening just did not really work out. I originally planned to start creating a game targeting the android platform while at that same time working on some simple HTML5 games as well as boxing of some time for learning new things. Switching between the two game dev projects was just a little bit too much. I found myself only really thinking about one or the other for an evening even when trying to focus on the topic at hand. The learning new things went a little better, practicing drawing and improving my inkscape skills did happen and was relatively easy to flip in

I have been blogging on an off for a fair while and have learnt a fair bit about myself during that time. My blogs have never been very popular to say the least. This blog for instance got less than a 100 uniques last month. It used to get more before I rebooted it to a more general blog. A different blog I have get a little over a thousand uniques a month. It has been going for a number of years. The other blog is a little bit more focused on programming so it falls into a more niche subject (good for blogs). My main downfall is I am not that social on the internet. I always feel I should be getting on with other stuff like coding rather than messing around with the internet interacting with people. As one of the main bits of advice when starting a new blog is network and get links to your blog, blogging and me are never going to be a perfect match! I took a look at the visitor stats for the past couple of years and it shows a steady trend upward, with some noise. As I have no

One idea I have been experimenting with is a type of time boxing. The basic idea of time boxing is it's a productivity technique where you box off a certain period of time and work exclusively on one task. One example you might have heard of is the Pomodoro technique. Personally I don't have a problem getting going in a task, my bigger problem is stopping and get a balance between the various things I want to get on with. I would like to read more books but find I slip into programming in a evening and do not stop. I would like to write a larger game for android but find myself hacking on small HTML5 games (also something I want to do). There are other desires in there as well. It is the classic problem of wanting to do more than time can possibly allow. Not progressing is a cause of annoyance or perhaps even stress for me. To combat this I have decided to try time boxing. Using a round robin algorithm I will just go from one task to another. This will lets me progress

As I have been gradually writing a very simple game using CoffeeScript and HTML5 I have re-imersed myself into HTML5 game development. This pretty much means I have been lurking on forums and reading news items more attentively. I have probably had a break of between 6-12 months since I last took a good look at the HTML5 game development world. It is fair to say things are changing fast. Asm.js looks pretty cool. The number of game development libraries seems to be exploding and some seem to be getting quite good. If/when I write a second game I may move over to one of them. I think I am over the I want to hack out a gaming library moment I had. People are starting to make money. For now it seems smaller devs are going the licence their game to portals. Anyone who has heard of flash games will know this model. It seams mobile is a big deal - not a surprise. Rumours are Internet Explorer will support webGL, this would be awesome! Much of this is not surprising. What did surpri

Well May is nearly over and I have not go half as much done as I should have but that is half the fun. I have been sketching a fair bit and am now planning on working through a book on drawing to attempt to increase my skill levels. After a month off I have the urge to return to some game creating. I have a couple of designs floating around in my head, one is pretty complex so should be fun to write and gradually develop. Others are a lot simpler. I would like to dip my toes back into the HTML5 game dev again. It has been a while and browsers are moving at quite a pace at the moment when it comes to their development. My plan for June will still be a bit of a month of experimentation but I will start to regain focus. Getting a bit of a design together for a longer game I want to write a long with some artwork. While at the same time developing a simple game in HTML5 just to dip my toes back in and get a feel for it. The longer game is going to be a mech based game, where mech

Love Letter is a simple card game for 2-5 players with a back story about trying to court a princess by getting your love letter to or closer too her than the other players. The back story is exactly that and is not relevant to the actual game. The real goal is to attempt to get the card with the highest possible number by the end of the game. You can only hold one card at a time so each round you must take a single card and discard one. The discarded card has an action associated with it such as being able to guess what another players card is. Often this results a player being knocked out of the round. As you can always see all cards that have been discarded it adds to a fair bit of strategy trying to work out what cards other players are holding. It is pretty fast to play the game taking only a few minutes for a round. The winner of the game is the first person to win 7 rounds. As a quite light family game that is fast enough that being knocked out of a round is not an issu

May is meant to be a bit of a do different stuff month, that means anything except coding on projects. So practicing my art work and churning through some chapters of an interesting book. So far I am quite happy to report that I have made some progress. Well on the art side anyway. It is pretty simple to pick up a pencil and draw. I have taken the approach of just drawing what comes to mind. This is a bit weird for me as I usually attempt to follow tutorials, we have many learn to draw books kicking around our house. What is weird is the topics I have chosen to draw about. I fully expected to be making bad attempts at drawing mech. A game design I have been pondering is a mech based one and that means my brain was full of mech, not drawing about mech made me reflective. Is this a hint that perhaps my mind is not fully engaged in mech stuff at the moment? Instead I have been drawing some buildings and other objects such as fantasy style hot air balloons (with propellers) , alon

Until this week I had never cooked a tuna steak. Occasionally I had them in a restaurant but never at home. While out shopping I noticed in the frozen fish section they were priced at a reasonable price. Ok it was Asda and they were £3 for four. I thought this is a good price to experiment with them. I admit I had fairly low expectations.  The image above shows what I managed to throw together in about 20 minutes. While lots of recipes marinade the tuna or add a sauce I decided that for my first go it should be simple. I am sorry but when I am experimenting I forget to weigh things but here is the recipe. Ingredients A frozen Tuna Steak. A medium size sweet potato. A handful of french beans (I used frozen). Seasoning and oil. A big handful of salad. Peal the sweet potato and slice into thin circular sections as per the picture. Place the oil in a large pan and heat then add the sweet potato. Fry for a couple of minutes while you cut the french beans into an inc

Note: This is written with the context of at home projects in mind. I have a lot of ideas for things to build, far more than I could ever make in my life time even if I worked on them full time. The lure of a new idea is strong. It offers a new challenge  unexplored fertile territories for my mind to explore. This makes them more compelling than what ever project I am currently attempting progress with. I keep a list of ideas for things to develop and as many of them are simple ideas I once foolishly thought that I could churn though many of them and thus be free to work on bigger and better projects. Alas as you try to develop an idea that should be a week long break from my main project the idea starts to suffer from feature creep and before long is taking over a month to build or more. As many of the ideas are little more than wouldn't it be nice type of app I am not wholly committed to them, meaning I am much more susceptible to another new idea taking over from them

A pattern I have noticed is I am pretty productive in January and February but March and April seem to tail off a fair bit. Each year seems to have a different reason. This year is has been getting Netflix and suddenly having access to lots of TV series that we have missed over the past decade or so. Netflix is starting to wear off on us now so I am expecting to start to get a little bit more productive. Next year I will make an attempt to not loose my momentum quite so much. I am probably about halfway though my next game and to be honest I am at the point where it is not much fun to work on. Most projects I really need to push past this and aim for completion soon. My mind has been turning over what to do next. It is possible I may take a few weeks out of game dev to work on my art skills. Basically draw as much as possible. Improve my Inkscape skills and perhaps learn a bit of blender. Stuff I have been meaning to do for ages. Without a doubt being able to draw better wil

Over the weekend it was my birthday. Yay for surviving another year. Boo for a total lack of productivity as long weekend always produce. It did give my brain a bit of a break from coding. That does not mean my brain stopped working. I added a couple of game idea to my list of ones I would like to make at some point. My children are on their Easter break and all promptly came down ill. The oldest did show me what the scratch project he has been working on. We did a bit of pair programming to add a couple of features he wanted to add. Until then I had not looked at scratch much - well at all if I am honest. My eldest two had shown a slight interest in programming (them being 6 and 8 years old) and I showed them a bit of java. Printing out times tables and so on and that amazed them that it could work them out so fast. They even tried making it do the 17 times table to see if it would struggle! A little while later (about a month) we installed scratch on our computers and purcha

Technically the title is wrong but tradition often beats the truth. All blogs should start with a title called "First Post". The reality is I used to have a bit of a tech blog here that fell to the wayside a long time ago.  As I still like the title I decided to re-purpose it for something different. Well different from what it was but not really different when it come to the internet.  It is going to be a bit of a life blog. Nothing special and if you are reading this then you may well be lost on the internet. It is probably late and you would be better off asleep.  Seriously I am totally writing this for myself as an outlet for my small but  persistent  desire to write. A desire that exceeds my ability to compose interesting  narrative . I desire to write as it helps to think with clarity. I am not really sure on the cadence of the post or really what will be posted. knowing me it will probably involve some recipes. I like cooking. It is also bound to get a bit me