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!

Approximating Pi with Buffon's Needle

2013-03-18

I’m a bit late for Pi Day, but Programming Praxis had a neat problem on Friday that I wanted to check out:

Suppose we have a floor made of parallel strips of wood, each the same width, and we drop a needle onto the floor. What is the probability that the needle will lie across a line between two strips?

The House on the Hill - Postmortem

2013-03-17

It turns out that I won’t have any time this weekend after all. So technically, I have another day, but I’m not going to be able to finish this in 7 days. This actually works out, since in hindsight I don’t think that Betrayal at House on the Hill’s mechanics actually translate quite as directly to a Roguelike as at first I thought.

The House on the Hill - Day 5

2013-03-16

Not much in the way of screenshots today, but I did manage to add quite a lot of framework for content (which I’m going to spend tomorrow fleshing out). Now, the player has four stats (Might, Vigor, Intellect, and Sanity; I don’t think those were the original stats but I don’t have a copy at the moment to check). Each of them starts at a random value from 2 to 5. If any reaches 0, game over.

Also, to actually make use of said stats, there are two new kinds of definitions that you can stick in the data folder to automatically be used by the game: events and items.

The House on the Hill - Day 4

2013-03-15

Today was fairly productive, although even with that I managed to fall a bit behind. So it goes.

The House on the Hill - Day 3

2013-03-14

Today I’ve made it to where I optimally would have been back on Monday, had I actually planned what I was going to do (and not changed ideas and frameworks literally as I was starting to work).

The House on the Hill – Day 2

2013-03-13

The problem with starting with a (far) less common language is that you have to develop your own tools. That’s what I ended up spending most of the day doing in the case of Racket, although I think it ended up being a rather worthwhile endeavor.

The House on the Hill - Day 1

2013-03-12

This week marks 2013’s 7-day Roguelike (7DRL) challenge, a contest where entrants attempt to write an entire Roguelike in 7 days. Since I haven’t started my #1GAM a month for March (and since my successfully completed January game was a Roguelike as well), it seems like the perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

Knight moves

2013-03-11

How many ways are there for a knight in chess from the top left to the bottom right of a chess board in exactly n=6 moves?

Partitioning the Dutch national flag

2013-03-06

Yesterday’s post from Programming Praxis asks us to solve a problem known as the Dutch National Flag problem (attributed to Edsgar Dijkstra): sort an array of red, white and blue symbols so that all reds come together, followed by all whites, followed finally by all blues.

February #1GAM post-mortem

2013-03-01

Is it possible to write a post-mortem if you really only got about four hours into a game?

Well, let’s hope so. That’s all the further I’ve made it with this month’s #1GAM a month–and it’s pretty much entirely my fault. The whole idea was to start earlier in the month and spread out the work out a bit… That didn’t happen.