Fuzzy slippers and carpets! A puzzle platformer based on electrostatics!

Play it now! Feedback would be most excellent: http://www.kongregate.com/games/Craig_M/staticly-mad

Some friends and I made this as part of our games capstone at the University of Washington. It was my first real experience with Flash, we used Starling and Box2D.

I'm playing with a Kinect for a school project with some friends, and we're looking at doing a plugin for a 3d modeling package to allow for some gesture-based control. The Kinect isn't nearly precise enough for a lot of things, but as a supplement for specific tasks I think there's some interesting potential (camera control, testing animation rigging, perhaps sculpting etc...).

I'm curious if this is something that anyone would find interesting or useful for 3d artistry? Any ideas or opinions?

This is for a more business-oriented CS class, so opinions from the target audience would be awesome for the planning stages here.

This lass snuck into a Russian military rocket facility and took pictures:
http://lana-sator.livejournal.com/160176.html#cutid1

Whoa, awesome pictures. I approve.

I started using Solarized recently, and it has been most excellent.

Engine:

Code:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C++                             97           2079           2601           8596
C/C++ Header                   113           2346           3054           5987
CMake                           14             78            158            476
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                           224           4503           5813          15059
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Current project:

Code:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C++                             13            399            369           1933
C/C++ Header                    16            312            274            950
CMake                            2             13              4             73
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                            31            724            647           2956
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bias for floats obviously. Ints use two's complement, but the exponent portion of floats uses a bias.

Bug of the day: I had an instance of a class (let's call it class B), derived from an abstract base class A. Class A spawns a thread that calls a function on itself, and this function may call some virtual functions that are defined by B. The virtual destructor for B (called before A's) does some simple cleanup, and A's virtual destructor ends the thread.

In the time between B's destructor being called, and A joining the thread in its destructor, the running thread does one of a few things:
- Exits gracefully without issue (>90% of the time)
- Calls a virtual function, which _was_ defined in B, but now that its destructor has been called, the object is no longer considered an instance of B, and so it crashes on a pure virtual.
OR, if it happened to enter a virtual function defined in B _before_ B's destructor completed:
- Attempts to use some resources that were being cleaned up in B's destructor, and segfaults.
- Attempts to lock a mutex that was defined in B, but is now invalid, and throws a boost::thread exception.

<3 C++

Grrrrr... one slight tweak that should have no significant effects causes my lighting algorithm to run 4x slower. There's only one difference in the generated assembly (incrementing one memory address by a word), and it shouldn't be causing any more actual instructions to be executed, so it looks like a cache performance issue...

I'm starting to slowly work through Volume 1 of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming.

The Ocean Marketing website is some excellent web design (gradients, man! and look at those buttons, so shiny!): http://www.oceanmarketinginc.com/

CS Books!
- The Art of Computer Programming - Volume 1
- The Pragmatic Programmer
- The Mythical Man-Month
- Code Complete
- Programming Pearls

- ~$100 from various relatives
- New wallet
- iPod case
- Random food and small stuffs

Internship offer from Google! With a team doing cool low-level Chrome/Android graphics stuff!

Also: finals almost being over is pretty rad.

rosetta@home is a pretty cool protein folding boinc thingy: http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/rah_about.php

Though I'm a little biased, since it's made by a lab at my school and I work on Foldit (protein folding game that was born from rosetta@home)...

Fixed a segfault in Foldit that I'd been hunting for quite a while.

Getting a job! (and a games-related one at that!).

I'm starting as an undergrad research assistant at my school's Center for Game Science, I'll be working on Foldit, a scientific discovery game about protein folding (it was recently in the news for being used to figure out the structure of an AIDS protein).

Also: Facebook university hackathons, my team failed miserably, but I wound up with a big ol' pile of FB swag.

Dropped my linguistics class and got a refund on the ridiculously overpriced textbook.

Now I'm taking only CS classes, yay! And now I have more time in my schedule for a research job.

Here in Finland when one has broadband, one can use internet as much as one wants with static monthly price.

That's how it is in America most of the time.

My connection at home (Comcast) is capped at 250gb/month (if you even hit the cap once I think they cut you off permanently, unless you pay for a pricey business-oriented plan).

Also Markham, my student flats has similar system except we have 1000 Mbps connection shared between about 30 people. That leaves a bit below 100 Mbps per person normally.

I believe my school does this too (but that 1000mbps is almost certainly shared by more than 30 people...).

Dorm internet.

They capped it this year (14GB per week, which I suppose is reasonable under most circumstances, but downloading a large game off Steam could screw you over...). Luckily it still gives you unlimited on-campus access, so I can proxy through a CS lab machine if I absolutely have to...

Someone also plugged their ethernet cord into the wrong port on their router, and cut off a good portion of my floor's internet for a while (it was stealing DHCP requests from the dorm's hardware, which poses a pretty nasty security risk if someone were malicious...).

gcc in Linux, VC++ in Windows.

I use CMake, so I can generate various flavors of makefiles, Visual Studio projects, etc, depending on the platform. I work in Linux with vim and makefiles 99% of the time, but it makes porting really convenient...

Mingw's always been iffy for me, it seemed to generate rather large binaries compared to VC, getting random dependencies to compile was always a little less straightforward than VC, and last time I used it I had problems with a bunch of random runtime stuff that I'd always forget to include (though I suspect that was more my fault for misconfiguring something somewhere).

Uncanny timing... I've been working on this for a few days as a little programming challenge:

Two clones in one!




As I said it's mainly just a programming challenge, and will probably end up abandoned in a corner of my hard drive soon enough... I might experiment with making a game of it though (minus Minecraft textures and whatnot of course), a Portal-style physics puzzle game with easy Minecraft-y map editing could be interesting...