Good evening. Go-Gan is progressing, albeit slowly. It’s encouraging, though, to know that even though my job is largely programming, I still want to do it in the evenings.
So the Paint-by-Numbers project, named Go-Gan, is proceeding. Absolutely no interface has been coded yet, just the representation of the underlying puzzle. Tonight I’ll write the logic that creates the list of clues from a row or column of painted cells.
After that’s done, I’m going to skip over the hardest part of all, and go to the user interface and Cocoa bits. The hard part is a feature where a player working on a puzzle can get a hint.
I’m going to get started today on a new piece of software. It will be a multipurpose “Paint by Numbers” application. Paint by Numbers is a puzzle game (I am not yet sure whether this name is a trademark or not) where you are presented with a blank rectangular grid of squares, usually about 20x20 or larger (the bigger it is, the harder it is). The goal is to reproduce the picture by deducing which squares should be colored.
I’m starting to understand the news aggregator concept. It is the flipside of the blog. It addresses my earliest question about blogs: won’t everything I write just disappear into the void?
For non-geeks reading this, a news aggregator is a single program or web page that gathers together a generalized version of “headlines.” These can certainly include headlines, like from the BBC or AP wire. But they can also include postings or articles from any site that is “syndicated,” in a certain technical way, like this one is.
I HAVE AN E-BOOK OBSESSION! Did you know that? Let me explain.
E-book is obviously short for electronic book. This sounds like a nineteenth century name for what it is: a computer file. In such a computer file are the contents of a book. For example, a Word document with Pride and Prejudice in it is an e-book. So is a plain text file of the same book, or a web page or any other format.
Note, this was written before I had a blog. I recovered it from the Internet Archive. Back in graduate school I had a “musings” section of my site and those essays are in the same spirit as this blog so I’ve added them with retroactive datestamps.
I really feel that our society cannot sustain the “computer geek” model for very much longer.
Of course, I’ll now have to describe what I mean by that model.