Happy New Year to all and best wishes for 2011!
Why bother posting this when no one except me will read it in any relevant period of time? Because one of my new year’s resolutions is to make significant progress with at least some of my projects, and I’d better bloody well remember that. Tune in for serious updates from February onwards!
Just in case someone happens to read this while there’s nothing much happening, I’d just like to say that there is A LOT happening, just not on the site. Work is getting increasingly important, and Christmas (among other important dates) is coming up faster than I might like.
I haven’t had much change to work on the projects I’ve had listed all this time, but there is a new project under way, with the working title of Hario. Not surprisingly, Hario is something to do with Mario; it’s a little more than something to do with it though, since it’s basically a clone. I’m working on making a very simple game with The Artist Currently Known As DK, just so we can settle into actually trying to work on something together while simultaneously learning about all the tools we’re using. Hario is being written in C++ using Haaf’s Game Engine, and after a pretty full day of smashing against a wall, we’re set up and ready to code!
I get the feeling that actually working with someone will significantly increase my own productivity, especially once work my internship is over and done with. I’m going to be doing a whole more personal work next year so this blog should get much more of a workout. For now though, rest assured things are turning over behind the scenes. There will be results! Eventually.
I just finished moving my Taboo content over from the old piemaster.net, while simultaneously filling in the blank pages. To find out what on earth Taboo is, you could do worse than to check out the Overview page. In short however, Taboo is a drum tablature editor designed by a drummer for drummers who are sick of hacking around with Word and Notepad to put their tabs together. It’s intended to put the relevant tabbing commands at the user’s fingertips to allow fast and easy transcription. It is however still very early in development, and there are plenty of fancy features planned for the future. Just as soon as I get some time…
It’s also free (and super lightweight), so feel free to download it and give it a spin. Bear in mind it will probably throw a few errors at you since I haven’t fixed it up for a while, but it’s safe to ignore them all. Restarting after opening it for the first time helps.
Anyway, it’s just another step towards filling this site up with content which is a little exciting. I’m also transferring the piemaster.net domain over here as we speak, so it should hopefully be much easier to get here in the near future. Hooray!
EDIT: Scratch that, the domain is still registered at GoDaddy for another year, so I’ll just try and get the DNS info to redirect. Same result, $9 cheaper.
So I figured some things out, and I can now host all my stuff on here! Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t want to let me embed things in pages, but I can happily store them just off to the side, leaving them accessible from a nice, static URL. I’ve quickly put up two examples to show them off before I get down to business, which you can see in the Projects menu above, but just briefly:
Forgbook (working title) is my primary project at the moment, though it doesn’t get nearly as much development love as it should. It’s the result of many factors, the main one being when I decided I had stop leaving loose ends everywhere and actually DO those little things that make the big things come together. It is in essence a glorified to-do list (especially in its current form), but it has a very exciting future ahead of it. It’s still in a very early alpha stage, but it’s at least fairly usable. Check out the version roadmap for a preview, and hit up the feedback form to land yourself in the credits!
Treetris (also working title) is something new that I came up with yesterday while waiting at Parliament Station. The idea is a survival-strategy game based on growing out tree branches, inspired by Tetris and another game I failed to coalesce a while ago. I want to keep it simple in rules and mechanics, but have a bit of depth in how it’s actually played. The Java applet I’ve got up is just a couple of hours of work and is more of a teaser than a preview; it’s just a tree that keeps growing out until your computer grinds to a halt :). It should give you some idea of what I’m going for though, and me something to work off.
It’s exciting enough at the moment to just see these two out in public on a decent web host, but there will be plenty more to come now that the foundations have come together. If you’re even a little interested in any of this, you can subscribe to any (or all!) of the RSS feeds up the top-right corner there to hear about future developments, and I promise there will be plenty. I rather like this site, and I’m itching to dump my mind on it as soon as I get the time!
A couple of things before I run off to bed again.
The About page has a little more info on what to expect. In short, just about anything, so long as it’s interesting, at least to me. Or technical. Most things probably tend not to be both to you.
One of the pillars of the personal stuff for a while is going to be The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. I’ve been reading it for only a few days, but it’s saying exactly what I need to hear in exactly the right way. I’ll be reviewing each of the habits in time, but the second (which I’m just digging into now) is to “start with the end in mind”, to know exactly what you want in the long run and to work with that in mind every day. It seems so obvious, even cliché, but who really does it? He makes clear things like the futility of misdirected efficiency, and the universality of it; its application to personality, parenthood, and organisations. It really seems like one of those chapters that’s going to spawn a lot of jotted notes and sketchily-imagined futures.
I’m also starting to feel out which will be the first habits to be locked in, and we’ll see how they go. Healthy sleeping, eating and exercise patterns, and general proactivity to get the little things done. It’s all about building up a string of small, private victories. Private victories must precede public victories. There are no shortcuts to the Character Ethic. It holds a long-term focus, like a sensible investment, and has the same kind of accumulative, compounded returns. Life is always going to be work, so living smart is working right and having fun doing it.
Hi! I’m Oliver Lade. You may remember me from such sites as https://piemaster.net/, my dump of Uni work, or a certain other site that no one that knows me seems to know about, despite it being by far the largest. It is the first of those, my old personal home page (more personal in that it was practice coding a web site from the ground up rather than the content on it), which is of most interest, since that is the site that is being shifted over here. “Here” refers to a new account with NearlyFreeSpeech.net, an eminently reasonable hosting provider that charges for usage, making it especially cheap for a small site such as this, so a big thanks to them.
As fun as the old Piemastery was, I simply don’t have the time to keep extending the primitive functionality, and I needed a site I could use easily. Why did I need such a thing? The reason is one I can’t discuss in detail right now because of the reason itself. Also because I don’t entirely know myself what that reason is. Ultimately, I plan to use this site for hosting various bits and pieces that I develop, but I also intend to make good use of the blogging strength of WordPress to get a few varieties of idea out of my head. I don’t expect anyone to read them, but I’m happy to be talking to myself, because then it just becomes a journal which is helpful enough in and of itself.
Some people may read some thoughts if I point hard enough, but at the very least, this will become my new staging ground for web development. The first item you will see is (a link to) (a properly-hosted) Forgbook (alpha) (working title), but more things great (hopefully) and small (definitely) will follow in its wake. Hopefully I can centralise the development coverage of these programs and applications with some project blogging, as well as clear my mind with some more personal content. How reality unfolds may well be a different story.
For now, it is the time for the sleeping. I’ll be back with more when there is more to be back with. There’s a lot of work to do around here, and I am honestly looking forward to all of it. See you when I see you.