Voyaging Mind

So the past few days I finally feeling like I am starting to pick up momentum again. I have decided on a game idea and it is one that I will be able to produce the required artwork for but is not so simple that I will bore of it. Well hopefully anyway. I have also decided to brush up on my Android programming skills. I learned to create apps on android quiet a while ago - android version 1.6 was new at the time. It would be fair to say I have not kept my skills up to date. There are whole areas of android development that I have barely touched that are now need to create a well rounded app. Originally learning android was also a minimal cut approach to learning. I would learn just enough to be productive in that an area without really taking on the mind set/ideas of the area. I gradually built up a working model of what was going on, but my mental model contained bugs that would slow down my development speed until I updated it. This can be a good way to learn and I really enjoy it but

I have spent some time with rust over the past few days. It is quite an interesting language and I kind of like it even if I am not sure I have fully got my head around the way the whole own/borrowing of memory works when I am actually coding.  It is however pre version 1 and that always worries when it come to a programming language. Things in the actual language can change and of course the eco system has not had time to build up around the language.  I don't think I will spend anymore time with it until after version 1.0 or perhaps 1.1 to give it time to mature some more. Of all the contenders to take a bite out of C++ this looks like the most promising in my mind.  Why do I say this, well it core values just screams at C++ programmers. It doesn't use garbage collection, the compiler will help you find a whole new class of errors and many C++ programmers like the upfront cost of coding compared with the dynamic language proponents. It will target mobile as well as desktop. O

After my post about how I would like vim to head in the direction of being an operating system just like Emacs:) I decided that perhaps it was time to take another drive into Emacs and see how it feels, it has been a while. Now I really like vim so my first idea was to install evil and just use it like vim. I initially did this but then realised that I would not learn much about Emacs. Like learning vim I feel it will be best to just start with a pure install and gradually add to my .emacs file as I find things annoying or need a plugin for a certain language or workflow. That way I will end up at an optimized set up for myself rather than having an optimized set up for someone else. That may or may not include vim emulation. Vim has excellent navigation keys. However once I installed easy-motion I stopped using many of them except for during the creation of macros and movements within about three lines of my cursor. Emacs navigation around a file is a bit how shall we say less easy on

In the past I have attempted to use the Android WebView component embedded in a simple Java application to run a HTML application but without much success.  Creating simple games was a bit of a pain and things like JQueryMobile just did not work very well. Just not up to the standard I wanted and my standards are pretty low. Although then again my web dev skills are pretty low. The reason I want to develop using JavaScript and HTML was partially speed of iteration you get from using a desktop browser and partly because I thought it would be a fun experience. At the time I was not enjoying Android Dev that much although later I grew to like it again. I digress. Android 4.4 (Kit Kat) brought in a host of changes to WebView, that is they started to use Chrome as their base but it still seemed to lag behind in terms of technologies. Android 5.0 seems to have brought in support for WebGL, WebAudio and WebRTC and this is all good stuff.  The best thing about the update is the innocent lookin

During my undergrad days we always seemed to have 3 courses on the go at any one time. Well we also have to turn up and do Lab days as well but usually we were learning about 3 distinct parts of physics at any one time. Later when I am trying to do coding projects at home and perhaps learning something new having up to three topics on the go is manageable but the moment I hit 4 things will invariably fall apart.  Yes the context switching on three is quite high and probably the optimal number is one. Having a technical book on the go along with a programming project means I am already up to two and then maybe doing an update/bug fix to an android application and yep up we are up to three. Three is the magic number when if comes to topics on the go. Well at least for me. The only question I sometimes ask myself is if at Uni we had done four topics simultaneously then would four be the magic number? 

The latest versions of Emacs has been released. Version 24.4 if you are reading this in the future. I tend to use Vim a lot but really want Emacs to be a success.  While the design philosophy of Vim goes along the lines of Vim is a text editor and we don't bolt much else on. Emacs takes the view of anything goes and as the joke goes it is really an operating system. The latest version of Emacs now officially includes a web browser, previously it was a plug in. I would like Vim to evolve in this way. In-line images would be a nice step forward as this would start to enable many of the cool OrgMode features. The ability to display math equations would also get a small cheer from me. Again as a move towards OrgMode features. Being able to check my twitter feed or email is not a big deal for me but to be able to say send this text I am typing in Vim straight to Blogger would be nice perhaps using the secret email address that Blogger provides? Now that would be nice. Basically I like t

One of the joys of having young children at school is they bring home illness's. The joy of having 3 young-ish children is the illness can gradually move round the house from one person to another. While this is happening you just have to wait patiently for you turn. The best bit is it usually takes long enough to go round everyone that a new cold/illness is entering the house while the old one is just finishing the round.  The past couple of years this has been the pattern for October and some of November. We now expect it and plan accordingly.  Anyway this week it has been my turn. Since Friday I have been pretty ill and am now only just getting over it. In my book that rates as a bad illness. It does mean I have done pretty much nothing except watch some episodes of Breaking Bad. It is a series I have not watched but also managed to avoid the spoilers on. Yep I agree with most of the planet that it is very good. Even if I still think of the guy as the Malcolm in the Middle Dad w

I have started work on my next mini app built in dart. Again this is going to be small scale with the aim of getting it done fairly rapidly.  I am going to create a text adventure game. Yep talk about old school. Well it is a clone of one published in a magazine in 1984. Yep really old school.  Originally written in Basic I am just taking the design and implementing it in dart. I am pretty sure Dart does not support line numbers and goto so a straight conversion of the code is off the cards. I have previously ported the game to JavaScript and it used to be up on a website that I owned. I think it got lost in a purge of old stuff I seem to regularly have. This little project is not really about writing perfect Dart code or about re-inventing the text adventure (Interactive Fiction as they now call it) but more about me personally output some more lines in Dart.  I continue to feel a little frustrated with the Dart editor. Browsing around it seems even some of the people on the Dart team

Another night another update! I doubt I will keep this pace up for long but while it lasts it has to be a good thing right? As part of learning Dart I wrote a small clone of the worm game from the 1980s. Not the version made popular on the Amiga but the one where your tail grows longer when you eat apples. My version uses simple geometric shapes which totally avoided the need to draw anything. It is  really a bit of learning code as I look to churn through a reasonable amount of Dart code to get a better feel for coding in dart. I have also been taking a look at Web GL in dart. It would be fair to say it has been a long time since I did any proper GL programming. I am talking about when most hardware had very limited support for shaders. It is good fun updating that area of knowledge even if I am not sure what I am going to do with it.

Well the newly redesigned website for voyagingmind.com is up. It doesn't really look that different and that was kind of the goal... Well the real goal was to make a statically generated website that is really easy to add content to. So easy in fact I can leave the site for six months and just pick up where I was. The leaving it for months at a time is an important part as it means I don't want to have to worry about maintaining something like wordpress which is very easy to use. This led me to using site generators to generate the site. The trouble is each one has its own way of working and if you only touch the site once every six months you are constantly relearning the tool. So I wrote my own very small python script to do exactly what I need. So small in fact it is easy to read it to discover its features. Of course have now optimised for times when I come back to the site after a six month break I will now probably find myself updating the site regularly...

Wow it has been a long time. I seem to like writing that sentence as I sort of wrote it in the last post. This time however it is true. I have apparently had this blog since the beginning of 2007 and so far have about 33 posts (not including this one). What has really happened is I have often rebooted this blog and deleted all my posts. I guess I don't like a digital trail into my past or something. That or I am not a believer in the long tail. Anyway I think I am going to get back into it as lets be honest winter is a good time to code and write blogs posts. It is nearly winter. I would say this year so far I have been pretty unproductive in producing things to show. I have done a fair bit of learning and prototyping just nothing has stuck, in some case that was because of my lack of skill when it comes to artwork but honestly it was more down to what has seemed like a series of life event that just got in the way. Each one was fairly minor in scope but sapped productivity on the

Wow long time no post, I have actually been quite busy. For starters My primary machine is now Linux. After about 10 years I have finally moved back to owning a desktop and put Linux on it. I have not used Linux for a couple of years but am quite happy to get back to it. Of course I still have Window laptop but most of my time is now spent on my Linux machine. To be honest it took a few installs to get a version of Linux I like, yep ended up with Mint. Installing all the tools and then reinstalling them when I decided this Linux was not for me took some time. But finally I feel like I am heading in the right direction and starting to make progress. As I was in a tinkering phase I decided to have a look at the Julia programming language. I really like it. No where near the complexity of Scala and seems quite fast. I have only written a few trivial programs for the moment. I don’t intend to use it as my workhorse language but I have been looking around for a language to code up