CrisisSDK

Well, Australia has it’s first female prime minister now that Kevin Rudd has been forced out of his position.

It seems that the flash animation Parliament Deathmatch was rather prophetic…  And that was made what, last year sometime?

Last week I would have said that Labor would have lost an election if it happened soon, now I have no idea. Rudd did some good things as PM, but a fair amount of really stupid things too. It is no surprise he is no longer PM. (I still like the stimulus packages from the start of his term, they were needed and nice and stuff)

I’d say more, but I’m rather tired from staying up and watching that soccer match… Which we won!

Happy New Year Everyone! For 30 minutes ago…

And I hope you all saw some fireworks. The Google  homepage had a countdown and fireworks.

I didn’t get fireworks though. Here, I had lightning.  Lightning is nature’s fireworks!

Well, I’m sure most of you knew that Gmail went down Tuesday morning. They’ve pretty much all fixed it now though. Turns out they were doing routine maintenance when one of their datacentres overloaded. Which caused the next one to overload, and then the next, etc etc like dominoes. I really doubt they’ll let that one happen again.

Lucky for me I wasn’t affected as I was more interested in lectures than email.

Well, it’s Australia Day. The holiday we have for watching the cricket and tennis. It’s also the anniversary of the founding of Sydney (the first permanent settlement in Australia) and the Rum Rebellion (the only successful armed takeover of a government in Australia, although it didn’t last long). Also, the Beument Children when missing, which caused the largest police investigation in Australian history. It kinda scared everyone, especially since the case remains unsolved.

Now, which one we are actually commenorating during Australia Day could be open to interpretation, but it is usually considered to be the arrival of the First Fleet, rather than the Rum Rebellion. But, then again, we could be commenorating both of them.

Anyway, happy Australia Day. Especially to all the Aussies out there.

And: Advance Australia Fair!

Well, haven’t said anything for a while.

I did end up seeing Wall-E in cinema as it was such a great movie, but only got around to going once. I’ll buy it on DVD at some point I’m sure.

I think I might have got a job, which is good.

Second semester has been over for a while, hoping I passed.

And I have a new computer. And it is nice. I can actually play new games

And I might be making a game or three with various friends, which will be good if we actually get around to it.

And lots of other stuff, but I can’t really be bothered saying.

Well, recently I had the opportunity to watch Pixar’s new movie, Wall-E. I realise that the people over in America got to see it in June, but us over here in Australia are meant to have to wait till September.

WALL-E is an awesome movie. I actually had written a very long post here, and then I realised that I’d sumerised the plot quite well, and that I didn’t really want to spoil it too much for anyone who may not have been lucky enough to see it yet. The movie doesn’t include much dialog, but the characters all express themselves perfectly. It includes a lot of themes, such as with polution, overdependence on technology, etc, but most of that I think isn’t really significant to what the film is. It starts with the world post-apocolypse, but it ends with a message of hope. But the world being saved by the two main characters was really more of a side-affect: It happened because of love.

I can’t really say what should be said about this film, it’s hard to describe with mere words and I’m not all that good at this anyway, the only realy way to understand it is to watch it. But when you do, remember that this is a film about a little lonely robot left alone on Earth, who’ll do almost anything for love.

I have finally finished exams for this semester. This means that I will no longer procrastinate. Which is probably silly, because I could have used more study. Still, I have a decent chance of passing everything, so hopefully everything will be fine.

Although, over the last few years I have noticed something: I spend most of the time in exams looking around the room and thinking things that have little to nothing to do with the subject of my exam (mostly game ideas and how much time I waste in exams) and pretty much everyone else seems to work through them constantly. Maybe if I did that too I would go better in my exams.  That and if I could actually remember what I had studied. A lot of things I had reread only a few hours before my exam, and even wrote down and did example problems, I forgot in the exam. However, one piece of trivia that interested me for a few minutes a couple days ago because I couldn’t remember seeing it before I remembered quite well (I think I passed that question), so I don’t really get these things. Maybe I should try to figure out how my mind works, and then I’d know why I remember some things and not others, and that would improve my studying. Not procrastinating would also improve my studying, but that is too much like effort.

Until I wake up again (sleeping for a week to recover from exams is sounding really good).

A couple days ago, I downloaded ClanLib, a 2D graphics library. It also has support for networking, sound, etc.

Although it did take a little bit of effort to get working,from what I’ve seen so far it is a very good library, and I have already made a simple test game with it. I am thinking of expanding this game with a network mode, etc, although I am not sure if I will release it at all. Although I will have to leave it for a while, since I am in the middle of my exam period. After exams and I have completed my test game, I have plans for other games that I would like to make using the ClanLib SDK, some of which I have wanted to make for a while but didn’t have something I would want to make them with. Although I would like to get a few people I know together to make a dev team, and make one of them. If I actually get it done, I think it will be very good.

Anyway, that’s enough about ClanLib for now, although you could go to www.clanlib.org and have a look at it if you want.

Today (The 25^th of May), was Towel Day.

As I’m sure you already know, Towel Day is a tribute to Douglas Adams (that awesome guy who wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) So, on Towel Day you should take your towel with you wherever you go, because you should never forget your towel.

For more information, see http://www.towelday.kojv.net/ and http://www.towel-day.com/en/

I haven’t done much of anything for ages so I decided to write on this thing.

Things that are happening are, I’m about to start uni (which might be scary, I’ll figure that out next week when I start), the domain name needs renewing (I really should do that now…), I haven’t done basically anything I was going to do these holidays, And I realised that I haven’t read Alice in Wonderland or Winnie the Pooh (a long with various other books that everyone seems to know but not all that many people seem to have actually read), so I might go and get them out of the library while I still might have some free time for reading.

Also recently I started using the Irrlicht engine for 3D stuffs, and i’s pretty cool. Mainly because I managed to get it working easily, CrystalSpace, DarkGDK, etc, liked refusing to work. As in CrystalSpace didn’t like installing properly or didn’t want to be linked to, and DarkGDK was complaining that it wanted the August edition of the DirectX SDK…. I had the January and November ones, and I couldn’t be stuffed downloading the August one just to use an SDK I’d probably move away from anyway. And I also had problems coding directly to DirectX and OpenG (I give up easily when example code doesn’t work)
Anyway, Irrlicht is a cool engine. I got it working within 5 minutes (when I knew nothing about the Visual C++ IDE I was using), and within another 10 or so minutes I’d made my own 3D program of a character standing on a terrain by using bits from the tutorials. It was very nice and easy-like, and I might even make something with it if I’m not too lazy.