The earliest memory I have of ‘programming’ is in the early/mid 90s when my father brought home a computer from work. We could play games on it … so of course I took the spreadsheet program he used (LOTUS 123, did I date myself with that?) and tried to modify it to print out a helpful message for him. It … halfway worked? At least I could undo it so he could get back to work…

After that, I picked up programming for real in QBASIC (I still have a few of those programs lying around), got my own (junky) Linux desktop from my cousin, tried to learn VBasic (without a Windows machine), and eventually made it to high school… In college, I studied computer science and mathematics, mostly programming in Java/.NET, although with a bit of everything in the mix. A few of my oldest programming posts on this blog are from that time.

After that, on to grad school! Originally, I was going to study computational linguistics, but that fell through. Then programming languages (the school’s specialty). And finally I ended up studying censorship and computer security… before taking a hard turn into the private sector to follow my PhD advisor.

Since then, I’ve worked in the computer security space at a couple of different companies. Some don’t exist any more, some you’ve probably heard of. I still program for fun too, and not just in security.

But really, I still have a habit of doing a little bit of everything. Whatever seems interesting at the time!

Sandbox Battle!

2014-08-24

Ludum Dare 30: Demo mode

2014-08-24

Quick update this morning: I managed to get a ‘demo mode’ working. Now when you first start the game, the boxes will be whizzing around in the background giving you an idea of what you’re about to get yourself into!

Ludum Dare 30: Programmer art and simple AI

2014-08-23

A few hours later and we’ve already finished (or at least made good progress on) two of the goals that I was hoping for:

AI players; at the very least one that moves randomly, but optimally several different kinds
Pending the previous, a selector on the options screen that can turn each player either off, on, or to any of the current AIs
Stylings around the page; probably some sort of thick border that bleeds a little in and out, looking different per player

Ludum Dare 30: 24 hours

2014-08-23

Here we are, 24 hours into the competition.

A lot of the last few hours has been spent doing a fair amount of restructing. Before, I had a single ’thread’¹ for each of the tiles, along with another thread listening for user input. Unfortunately though, that lead to all sorts of race conditions. Specifically, whenever two tiles overlapped, it was often the case that one was doing the falling step (which copies from one internal buffer to another) while the other was in the swap step (which copies from tile to another). Then after the first finished, it would copy the second buffer over… overwriting anything that had been swapped.

Oops.

Ludum Dare 30: Hints of a game

2014-08-23

We’re getting there. 18 hours in and I have the first hints of what might actually be a game…

Ludum Dare 30: Sandbox Battle

2014-08-22

And here we are again. Ludum Dare. Taken directly from their about page…

Ludum Dare is a regular accelerated game development Event. Participants develop games from scratch in a weekend, based on a theme suggested by community.

More specifically, the goal is to make a game from scratch in 48 hours. You’re allowed to use publicly available frameworks and code libraries, but no art or other assets. Previously, I missed the original start time. So although I made my game in 48 hours, it didn’t qualify. This time around, I’m starting on time.

Chess Puzzles 1: Get moving!

2014-08-21

Here’s something I haven’t done much¹: chess puzzles! I’m still not sure entirely what I think about the game in general. There is certainly quite a lot of strategy, which I like, but to really get good at chess, there’s also some amount of memorizing openings and closings. That’s something I’m a little less thrilled with.

Still, it’s the perfect sort of came to work out programming exercises with. It’s a game of perfect information, so you don’t have to deal with what a player knows and doesn’t. The pieces have well defined, regular moves² There’s a fairly intense branching factor, but not insurmountable–Deep Blue (chess computer) proved that.

Anyways, enough chatter. Let’s play some chess!

Minimal palindromic base

2014-08-13

What’s this? Two posts in one day? Well, writing a static blog generator can do that. 😄

Another easily phrased challenge:

We have a simple little problem today: Given an integer n > 2, find the minimum b > 1 for which n base b is a palindrome.

– Minimal Palindromic Base via Programming Praxis

Number words

2014-08-13

Today’s five minute post brought to you via Programming Praxis / Career Cup:

Given a positive integer, return all the ways that the integer can be represented by letters using the mapping 1 -> A, 2 -> B, …, 26 -> Z. For instance, the number 1234 can be represented by the words ABCD, AWD and LCD.

Onwards and upwards

2014-08-08

Huh. Things suddenly look a bit different around here, don’t they?

Long story short, I finally finished a project that I’ve been working on off and on for the better part of two years: converting my blog to a static website.