Games are fun

There's something really great about working at a game development company. You actually get to play the game you're working on way before anyone else does. Yesterday we had a test-playing session. It turned out to be quite funny, although I clearly showed to everyone that I'm not really good at playing realtime strategy games - again. Anyway, I hope to get better and better so that when the game is finally released I can kick major butt in multiplayer! ;-)

If you don't have anything to say on your web page...

I recently noticed that my ex-employer has a completely new website. The funny thing is that now it's even more difficult to find anything. The menu structure and navigation are horrible. Also it seems completely devoid of any useful information.

My theory is that whenever a company really really wants to be noticed but doesn't have anything useful to say (or even sell!), they start creating lots of diagrams that state the obvious, but in a way that makes everyone go "wow" on shallow inspection. A great way to waste web space and to confuse potential new clients, if you ask me.

It's the lawyer...again

Today I received another e-mail from the lawyer I mentioned earlier, concerning my ex-employer. It seems that it took him more than two months to find out that he didn't receive the legal document I was ordered to send him in january. Are things really that slow at a lawyer's office? Or did my ex-employer finally decide to ask him about the document? I don't know, but I'll keep you posted.

Programming course

My girlfriend lately said that she's interested in learning programming. So I decided to write a small programming introductory course for her.

My language of choice for this topic is Euphoria, a BASIC-like language that has some very likeable properties. For one, it is dynamically typed, which is good for a beginner. The syntax is very clean and easy to read. Also, it has an extremely flexible (though easy-to-use) dynamic array, which is called a sequence. It seems very natural to use. And it's rather low-level, since a string, for example, is represented as a sequence of chars (which in turn are just ascii codes and thus numbers). So, to get a part of a string, instead of using cumbersome functions like left() or mid() as in BASIC, one can just write:

a_string = "Hello World!" -- same as {'H','e','l','l','o',' ','W','o','r','l','d','!'}

? a_string[7..11]         -- yields "World"

I think Euphoria is a really nice language, and definitely worth looking at. It's also interpreted and it features comprehensive error messages as well as a comfortable single-stepping feature that is invokable through code. There are lots of third-party libraries that extend the language (such as a Win32 library that allows one to write windows apps, an OpenGL library, an SDL library, and so on).

Have fun with this nice little language!

Back online..

Finally, after almost a week, this domain (as well as its sister domains, saintbox.net and IvyLas) ist back online. Apparently, there was some trouble at my provider's accounting department, and they insisted I hadn't paid an invoice, which I had. But now everything is sorted out and everyone is happy again.