CrisisSDK

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/

Well, second week of Uni, and I’m on the computers because I got bored waiting for my next class. I think I’ve started out ok, but you can never be sure until you get your marks back.

A few interesting things (a part form uni) have happened, like shearing sheep, but not all that much.
Also, text books are really expensive. Like really expensive. And the lines in the bookshop are really long… Well, those lines should have gone down a lot this week, so getting stuff will be easier.

I have been able to maintain contact with most of my friends since starting Uni which is good, I even have a couple classes with some of them, which is better. I’ve also met a few new people, which is also better.

And some other random stuff. Anyway, I should probably go to my tute…..

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.

Happy new year!
I hope everyone has had a good year last year, and an even better one this year!

It’s also the 25^th anniversary of the TCP/IP protocol, which is the protocol that runs the Internet. ARPANET switched over to TCP/IP as their standard on January 1^st 1983, and the Internet hasn’t looked back since.

Since it’s TCP/IPs 25^th anniversary, maybe it’s a good time for the world’s servers and clients to finally make the switch to IPv6. We’ve been using IPv4 for 25 years now, now not go to the next version?
The difference between IPv4 and IPv6 is the number of valid hosts that can be connected. IPv4 addresses are 32 bits, which is equal to 4294967296 unique addresses. IPv6 addresses on the other hand, are 128 bits long, which is 4 times that, which is 2^128 or 3.4028236692093846346337460743177e+38 (that e+38 means times it by 10 38 times)

So, we aren’t going to use up the IPv6 addresses in a hurry. But don’t think we won’t use up the IPv4 addresses for a while. In 2003, the director of APNIC stated that the available space would last until about 2023. Personally I wouldn’t be surprised if they only last until about 2014. So the quicker we switch over to IPv6, the less hassle it will be in 5 to 20 years time. And don’t worry about having to wait for all the servers to switch to IPv6, IPv4 and IPv6 have been working together without the public seeming to know anything about it for some time now. I just think everyone should be using IPv6 a lot more than IPv4, since as much as we may hate to think about it, IPv4 isn’t going to last much longer as the main protocol of the Internet.

But still, hope you had an excellent New Year, and perhaps make it a New Year’s Resolution to start using IPv6 if you haven’t already

Well, on Saturday 24^th of November I had to vote in a Federal election. First thing I have to vote for has to be country wide… Oh well.

And I went to see  Hastings Caves since it was free admission on that day, and it was really cool and good and all that stuff. If anyone decides to visit the southmost parts of Tasmania, go to Hastings Caves.

And I got my PICAXE working. Haven’t made anything with it yet, but at least it is talking to the computer now

Well, I thought I might update this again. I’m about halfway through exams, and have a party to go to around now (isn’t going to help my marks…), I have received my PICAXE, although I haven’t got it talking to the computer yet since I got a usb cable not a serial cable and the driver that is meant to trick the software into thinking that it is connected to the serial port not the usb port isn’t working properly. I’ll fix it up once exams are over, because I won’t have time until then.

There’s other stuff, but I won’t bother posting it on the internet.

Yesterday was Dec 25… ah sorry, Oct 31. (I’ve been converting octal to decimal too much recently… yesterday wasn’t Christmas)

Anyway, yesterday when driving home I saw a group of little kids all in costume walking along the street with a couple adults trying to look after them. I thought “Party? But why walk along the street like that?”
It wasn’t until I mentioned it to a friend of mine today that I remembered that is was actually halloween (well, to tell the truth was told that it was halloween). And I thought, “That explains the kid in the supermarket asking his dad if he could go trick-or-treating…”

Personally I couldn’t care less about halloween, I’ve always been under the impression that in Australia we have no need for trying to scare away all the evil spirits with little kids. My friend on the other hand complains that we don’t do it here, saying that it is done in England, US, etc.

Anyway, I should have probably had more of a point when writing this post, except for saying that I don’t really see the point in halloween. It isn’t a holiday, so why go around annoying people? Fair enough running around town in costumes, but you can do that at any time of the year.

Oh well, other people think differently to me,but they’re allowed to.

Well, I was bored today and I checked my MSN Space thing. Apart from a lot of boring things like messages about updated spaces and people asking to be my friend, I also set it up so it would get a feed of my latest blog posts off here.

I was bored.