Still waiting for Raspberry Pi

This wait is killing me. All I want is a nice little computer running quietly on my desk/ceiling/wall/whatever with all kinds of specialized sw/hw.

• I want my very own shell.
• I want a portable thin client.
• I want remote controlled lighting.
• I want Nginx and Stackless Python.
• I want a battery backup using 18650s or capacitors.
• I want to use those temperature sensors I have in my drawer!

But as far as I know my luck, there'll be some kind of obstacle preventing me from acquiring this wonderful piece of equipment, or at least greatly hinder my plans. Still missing a video adapter, a quality power source and a memory card. Oh, and my network infrastructure is bit lacking, too.. but on that some other post.

Of the importance of simplified web page system

The last few months I've been more or less actively doing site&stuff for lumicraft.fi, I've realized that the way the site can be edited has a huge impact on the amount of edits one does. (sürprise..)

Back in dea.fi and lannukka.fi for example, LCS is being used, and they are quite 'repulsive' to edit. First logging in and then using that anemic, but still syntax hilighted text area to do the edit embedded HTML(not the whole page, only the content area) and then publish the edit and have the revision show up in the changelog. But what if you made a typo? New edit, new changelog entry :(

But on lumicraft I went back to a simpler system, there's just a directory containing normal text files with WikiCreole inside. Beautiful and fast-to-type syntax. Nothing fancy required. Just edit the file and voilà!

Of course I could have continued to just use HTML, then it would have been only a matter of include(), but seems I can't get around experimenting :p

Ok, I must admit. There is no way to keep track of changes to see how the site has evolved. No way to notify people that an edit has been made. Of course a cronjob could be made to diff the files etc, but it's just kludgy. Although a daemon came to my mind, listening to file change events and acting appropriately. Might actually work, but still bit of a kludge.

But the point: as transparency increases in editing, so does productivity.

Global/Finnish game jam aftermath, Sommerkopter

Well, that was interesting. As you might know, the event was about writing a game in 48 hours. I must say that it is not too much.

I was in a team consisting of me and five older students. Felt bit out of my league, considering we had decided to use C++, a language I had only a little experience in.

But everything exploded better than exceptions! This Game Jam was first real coding project for me involving other developers, and I learned much about working as a team. First of all, it was incredible to be able to work with like-minded people. People who actually also knew how to code, and with this particular language even better than me. When coding my part of the game(terrain generation), there was few particular challenges with memory management and syntax, but now I could verbally ask for help! I might not have been very productive, but at least learned a lot.

And what was wildly different from coding by myself, I could actually concentrate on only part of the project. No need to code everything by myself. Not even the graphics, those were made by the two 'highly skilled' artists in our team.

But actually, in the end there was only two other people in our team coding. Other two were on the graphics dept and one had to fight with our version control system for the whole weekend. But those two other coders, they made the bulk of the code needed to make this happen, I thank thee.

But I thank the whole team also, we all made this weekend amazing. I had great fun brainstorming and socializing with you (me socializing, o.o). And we actually created something very nice, didn't we? Something that actually might appear again in the future. (winkwink)

So I present you Sommerkopter: Global Game Jam project page and a gameplay video! A game where your objective will be flying logs from hills to a collection area, with a helicopter. Heli-logging at it's best.

And for the future: if you, the reader, have a chance to participate next year, please help yourself and do so. It will be fun.