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. That’s about where I am today!

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

User space continuation-based thread pool

2013-04-23

I’m perhaps a little late to last week’s DailyProgrammer challenge to implement a user-space threading system, without using any sort of built in thread library, but it just sounded too interesting to pass up.

Racket Roguelike 3: Rats, rats, everywhere!

2013-04-18

So far, we’ve worked out our GUI and I/O and created procedurally generated caves. So what does that leave for today? Something to fight!

A prototype object system for Racket

2013-04-18

As I seem to be wont to do, I needed something to work on my Roguelike in Racket tutorial series–so I wrote it! This time, we’re looking to add a prototyped-based object system to Racket. I’m sure that someone has rigged up something similar before, but it’s often more interesting to work things like this out for oneself.

Adventures in optimization, re: Typed Racket

2013-04-16

Last Thursday I wrote a post about generating Perlin/simplex noise in Racket. Later that day, I posted to the Racket mailing list asking how I could make it faster. What resulted was a whole sequence of responses (primarily about Typed Racket) and a bit of a rabbit hole that I’m still trying to wrap my head around.

Racket Roguelike 2: Infinite caves!

2013-04-11

When last we met, we had a working GUI with the player’s @ walking about. Today, we’re going to add somewhere for the player to wander about¹.

Perlin and simplex noise in Racket

2013-04-11

Many games need noise. No, not that noise–this noise. Or better yet, this noise. More seriously, noise in this context refers to psuedo-randomly generated images that can be used for natural looking terrain generation¹. Something like this:

Cyclic equality

2013-04-09

In today’s post from Programming Praxis, the goal is to check if two cyclic lists are equal. So if you have the cycles ↻(1 2 3 4 5) and ↻(3 4 5 1 2), they’re equal. Likewise, ↻(1 2 2 1) and ↻(2 1 1 2) are equal. But ↻(1 2 3 4) and ↻(1 2 3 5) are not since they have different elements while ↻(1 1 1) and ↻(1 1 1 1) aren’t since they have different elements.

Racket Roguelike 1: A GUI, screens, I/O, and you!

2013-04-04

Last time, we started with writing the ascii canvas we’ll use as our GUI. Now we get to start the tutorial itself. Toady we have a four part goal:

Create the initial GUI, including an ascii-canvas
Create a ‘screen’ abstraction to handle the current game state (menus, inventory, and the game itself)
Deal with input from the user and changing between screens
Draw an @ on the screen that can move around (the Roguelike equivalent of hello world)

So let’s get to it!

(If you’d like to follow along, you can can see the full source code here: just day 1, everything so far)

Writing a roguelike - in Racket! (Day 0)

2013-03-28

Back when I finished my 7DRL, I said that I was going to try to write a full tutorial series on writing a Roguelike in Racket, modeled somewhat on Trystan’s excellent series in Java: roguelike tutorial 01: Java, Eclipse, AsciiPanel, application, applet.

Path to philosophy

2013-03-28

Yesterday, the daily programmer Subreddit had a post that mirrored a problem I’ve often seen before: the idea that if you follow first links ((With some caveats)) on Wikipedia, you eventually end with Philosophy. For example, if you follow the first links from Molecule, you get the following path:

Molecule → Atom → Matter → Rest Mass → Invariant Mass → Energy → Kinetic Energy → Physics → Natural Philosophy → Philosophy