fixing holes

There’s an old Beatles song that starts “Fixing a hole where the rain comes in, that keeps my mind from wandering where it will go”.   That pretty much describes what I’ve been doing for the last while – taking care of non-programming related stuff.   So now I’m sitting back and warming my projects back up again, figuring out what to do with them.   Mostly – not sure yet.

As a bit of a reminder of the old days – and to help get back into practice again, I’m attempting a mod player and may attempt to port one of my favourite demos to Android.   Once there’s some usable samples and I figure out where to post them, I’ll link them into this blog.

Observations:

• It’s good to practice old style coding every now and again – one is reminded what was worth pursuing (speed and efficiency for instance).   One also is reminded by how much things have improved – such as having reliable device drivers.   An added bonus (although not sure where to go with it) is many of the older approaches work very well in embedded designs.
• Android: good platform.  Not perfect, but good enough.   Also, the phones are accessible even to unemployed folks like me.
• Google Chrome : I like it.  I kind of wish there were better bookmark management and a bit more control over mouse behaviour – but it’s very nice otherwise.  The code is clean (as much as can be said) and I can’t think of any way I can help as of yet.   Am looking into running it within a 3d environment though – that could be a nice challenge.
• Visual Studio : switched back to Eclipse, better support for SVN, git and other repository systems.   Still, it looks pretty and the documentation is nice to have.
• Unity3D : This is an excellent environment to build 3D environments.  I’d like to work more with it in the future.

Now back to figuring out archaic file formats, while considering more presently useful projects.

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