Changes
March 27, 2005
I put my money where my mouth is and moved the projects section of this site to dev.brautaset.org. I’m quite happy with how it has turned out so far, though there are more changes in the pipeline. One of them is that the picture section is going away; I don’t have the time/inclination to maintain such a section, so I’m going to use my Flickr account until something better pops up.
Out and about
March 26, 2005
I admit it. I broke down today and went to the office to pick up my power supply. I took the oppurtunity to meet up with Dean and go for a drink; we agreed to meet at a pub in Liverpool St. station. Naturally, this watering hole closed for refurbishment yesterday, so we spent some time enjoying the sun in a nearby park instead.
The daystar dissappeared and we got hungry after a while; one thing lead to another and we ended up in the New World for Dim Sum. Again. We’ve been here many times; it’s one of my favourite restaurants. After a lovely meal we went on to the Spice of Life for a few drinks, moving onwards from there to a Starbucks near TCR, as Dean got the urge for a strawberry Frappuchino. It became obvious that Starbucks staff is trained to serve only what is on the menu; it was very difficult to make them understand that I wanted a mix of caramel cream and caramel coffee something or other. I got what I wanted in the end though, and pretty damn good it was too.
We hung out for a couple of hours chatting and spotting fruitloops (has the world really gone mad, or have I had a blind spot for the lunacy all this time?) before heading off home, stopping at Virgin Megastore so Dean could pick up some singles on the way.
Short of power
March 25, 2005
I’m currently kicking myself for leaving my PowerBook’s power adapter at work. As a result, I now have a completely useless piece of shiny tech on my desk. It had to happen on a long weekend, didn’t it?
The Incredibles
March 23, 2005
I saw The Incredibles last night. It was great.
Revision control system experimentation
March 20, 2005
I believe in being pragmatic and to use whatever tool is best for the job. I’m not always successful in this, however. My main problem is that I tend to get a bit too comfortable with my tools and reluctant to try out new things. Take for example revision control systems; I’ve been using Arch for years–I’ve not really tried any of the alternatives to see if they fit better.
Not so anymore; I’ve been using Subversion since I changed jobs a few months ago, and for my latest personal project I’ve been experimenting with Darcs. I’m planning to write an article comparing them once I’ve got a bit more experience.
GGTL2 status update
March 20, 2005
I’ve mentioned before that I have been working on plans for a complete rewrite of GGTL. I did the first commit 10 days ago, and things are coming along nicely–Test-Driven Development (TDD) has been a great help.
The core of the library is fully implemented, and I’ve spent much of today writing documentation. I’m rapidly approaching a decent manpage, generated from POD embedded in the library source. I used to use Doxygen in the past, but POD is a lot more pleasant to work with.
Pending site change
March 20, 2005
Since I’ve been rather quiet lately, let me share some of the plans I have for this site. I’m planning to break it in two; the main site will stay where it is, but the projects section will be moved to its own subdomain.
The main reason I’m doing this is that I want to be free to update my site in any way I see fit, but the projects section really wants to have stable, permanent links. Additionally it contains a lot of automatically generated documentation which is a pain to integrate nicely with the rest of the site.
Last, but not least, the projects section of this site is in dire need of a rewamp. The structure is unintuitive and inconsistent, and the paths are rather deep; I plan to change that.
New Mac
March 9, 2005
I have a shiny new PowerBook G4. It has a 1.67 GHz cpu, 1 GB ram, 100 GB disk. I can now procrastinate really quickly and efficiently.
A new look
March 6, 2005
I have given my site a little facelift. The pages now have a more consistent layout; there is no longer a cloud of links to the right of some pages. Also, some of the less interesting cruft has dissappeared.
Towards GGTL2
March 5, 2005
I have been meaning to address the warts of GGTL, my generic game-tree library, for some time. Firstly, it has no business dictating how users define their datastructures. Secondly, it is not flexible enough.
I am also wondering if GGTL is currently trying to do too much. Should GGTL2 also worry about save and resume, or should it focus only on the game-tree search? I am currently in favour of dropping those particular features. If that happens I will probably end up renaming the project to reflect the narrower focus.
I plan to use Test-Driven Development (TDD) to develop GGTL2 (or whatever the name will be) using. Unfortunately, the C implementations of xUnit I have seen all suck; there is too much work writing the damn tests.
Luckily, there are alternatives; Nik Clayton has written libtap, a C library implementing the Test Anything Protocol (TAP) as used by Perl’s Test::Harness.
