02.19.09

Makefile tips

Posted in Software, Colen Stuff at 2:48 pm by Colen

A cunning trick I discovered today. To suppress error reporting for a command in a makefile, prepend it with a dash character. For example, this command will fail and stop the build if the directory already exists:

mkdir c:\somefolder

However, this command will ignore the error and press on - perfect if you don’t care if the directory is there or not, you just want to make sure it gets created:

-mkdir c:\somefolder

The only change is the addition of a dash at the start of the line.

(This doesn’t change the fact that makefiles are horrible and that I hate them.)

Permalink Comments

02.16.09

Words

Posted in Uncategorized at 8:00 pm by Colen

Bad Scorponok, never updating any more, etc.

Hopefully people are using RSS feeds to view this, so they actually see that I’ve written something. So what have I done in the last year? Let’s see…

My apartment is now even more of a mess than it was, although I’m starting to clear off my desk at least. Receipts and papers are being categorised and organised.
My US work visa ran out, and I switched to a different visa with the help of my ex-boss, some friends, and an immigration lawyer. This involved writing a 40-page business plan and starting my own business. Yuck. Hey, at least I didn’t get deported!
I got my tax stuff sorted out. This had two sub-steps: 1) Start own business, do nothing, worry for 6 months. 2) Pay accountant to do taxes. Next year I plan to skip step 1 for efficiency.
I visited my family and friends in the UK twice, once in January and once in July. It was nice to see everyone, as usual. Unfortunately with my current visa, I can’t leave the US for a while (long story). Hey, at least I save on air fare.
At work, I finished 2 major projects and muddled through on a bunch of other stuff. I’m really proud of the Mutants & Masterminds game system for Hero Lab - it’s selling really well and I honestly feel that it’s delivering a great user experience to the people who buy it. (Obviously Management helped a lot, and I couldn’t have done it without Green Ronin’s support either.) The other stuff worked out ok, but I don’t feel like I gave them everything I could have.
Planned out some new features for our next major project (Army Builder 3.2) on the horizon; that’s a much-needed upgrade, as it hasn’t had an update for too long. When I sat down to look at possible improvements, there were so many obvious places that could be changed. Pretty amazing.
Played too much World of Warcraft. Enough said.

So, work-related stuff. I feel a little like I’ve been in… freefall almost for 2008. It’s interesting because I definitely feel like I’ve “added value” to the company by doing my work, but it always feels like doing the more “interesting” solution would take too much time / be harder than doing the other one. Maybe I’m looking for trouble? Not sure yet - we will have to see what this year brings.

In the last few months I’ve also started getting distracted very easily from stuff - it’s really hard to focus on things, and I find that I go off and start reading forums / blogs at the drop of a hat. Hopefully it’s just the sameness of work getting at me, which will be less of a problem this year; alternatively, I’ve contracted ADHD from spending too much time on the computer. Ritalin prescription, here I come!

And then of course there was the visa - thank goodness that’s all done with, because it was keeping me awake at night.

Personal life. I don’t feel like I really got anywhere in 2008. Part of that was because I spent a lot of time trying to distract myself from the visa stuff, and wasn’t really interested in original thought; part of it was just my addiction to World of Warcraft. Now, I’m honestly not sure what else I’d be doing if I wasn’t playing WoW so much; I’d be spending money on other computer games, watching more TV, etc. I just can’t think of anything else I want to do.

Maybe I’m simply reaching unprecedented levels of laziness? Is this some sort of biological mechanism that’s intended to make you settle down and have children, because you’re not doing anything else? What a horrible thought…

Permalink 1 Comment

09.13.07

Windows Vista

Posted in Software, Colen Stuff at 11:32 am by Colen

So I’ve been using Vista on my new development machine for a couple of days, after spending the entire weekend getting it set up (ugh). Here are the good things about it so far:

Breadcrumbs - In explorer, it shows that you’re in “c:\Xxx\Yyy\Zzz” as before, but if you click on “Xxx” it switches to that directory. You can also switch between directories by clicking between them. Overall: Excellent.
Search ‘as you type’ - just like find in firefox, where there’s a little bar at the top of the explorer window and it filters the list of files as you type into it. Wonderful.
Start menu keyboard support - hit the windows key and type the first few letters of a program name, and that program runs. It’s like Windows+R on steroids.
When you hit F2 to rename a file, it selects the filename but NOT the file extension. Oh, this is so nice.
Windows Aero is very pretty, and the start menu looks nicer.
The new volume control (with a separate control for each application!) is awesome, and the new clock is very pretty. You can also set up multiple clocks to appear, for different time zones etc.

Bad things so far:

iTunes bluescreens my machine when I try to import my song library. Waah!
Apparently I can’t use my geforce 5500 as a secondary graphics card now? It also bluescreened my machine when I tried it.
Visual studio 2005 doesn’t install properly and needs a patch to work, and complains when you run it. Get with the program, microsoft - can’t you get your flagship IDE working properly on your new OS?
User Access Control (or whatever it’s called) is annoying sometimes - why should I have to press “continue” 4 times when creating a folder and renaming it? Stupid.

So some good, some bad. However, almost all the good things… those aren’t really “woah we need a new operating system for this!” features. They could easily have been added to windows XP.

The jury’s still out… hopefully service pack 1 will improve things.

Permalink Comments

09.08.07

Best analogy ever

Posted in Colen Stuff at 12:31 pm by Colen

<al-qadim> I need a program for my blackberry to roll all my dice for 40k
<al-qadim> so like when 2 squads of fire warriors rapid fire it just shows me a chart of my 48 shots
<scorponok> but that’s not as much fun as rolling lots of dice <:
<khaine_> gaming is a tactile experience
<khaine_> its like saying why have sex when i can watch porn

Permalink Comments

08.16.07

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition coming out

Posted in Colen Stuff at 5:48 pm by Colen

So we just went to the Wizards announcement of D&D 4th edition. Here’s what I remember:

The new Player’s Handbook is coming out in May 2008. MM in June, DMG in July.
The core classes are going to level 30, not level 20.
Classes are going to have more clearly defined “roles”. I’m not even sure what this means, I guess clerics aren’t healing enough or something.
They committed to fixing some stupid things, e.g. Wizards not being fun at 1st level because they only have 1 spell, and the party camping whenever the cleric runs out of healing spells.
They said it’ll still be d20, so presumably it won’t be totally different than 3.5 edition.
There’ll be a whole set of tools - 3d virtual tabletop, 3d visual character creator, “mechanics” character creator. They showed some pretty videos of these. It looked like a 3d version of maptool, pretty impressive if it’s not faked.

The audience reaction was mixed - some things were cheered, other things (e.g. Dragon and Dungeon going online) were greeted with dead silence.

Also they gave out free t-shirts (good) and USB sticks with images on them. The USB sticks also had an autorun program that crashed when I tried to exit it.

Permalink Comments

08.11.07

Things I Hate, #2

Posted in Colen Stuff at 11:45 am by Colen

“Your download will begin shortly. If it doesn’t, please click here to start it now!”

Why? Why do I have to click anything? I’m a busy man, I don’t want to wait 10 seconds from when the page loads to download your stupid file. Why can’t you just give me it NOW? Are you afraid I’ll forget what I was doing? “Jings, I clicked on the download link and Firefox asked me to save something! I wasn’t expecting that! What’s going on!”

Just give me the file before I stab you in the face, and we’ll all be happy.

Permalink Comments

07.26.07

Hmm, upgrades

Posted in Colen Stuff at 9:43 am by Colen

Just updated Wordpress and installed Akismet to deal with a sudden influx of spam. Let’s hope this fixes it…

Permalink Comments

07.10.07

“Trackbacks” need to die

Posted in Colen Stuff at 10:38 am by Colen

So I was reading this post about the chap at Verizon who turned down the iPhone, resulting in AT&T picking it up instead and selling 700,000 of them:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/06/the-verizon-guy.html

The post is relatively short, but just look at the comments. Instead of useful comments like “no u r rong”, “I agree with your insightful thoughts” or “lmao wut a newb”, almost every single comment is a “trackback” from another blog. Guys, I just read the article here, I don’t need to see your stupid spin on it as well. Having a trackback URL is fine, but I don’t care about reading the first two sentences! Just stop. Please.

Permalink 1 Comment