Older blog entries for bytesplit (starting at number 69)

jimwelch, I hear that the Broken Arrow High School Marching Band is one of the best out of Oklahoma! My former high school marching band, the Harrison County High School out of Cynthiana, Kentucky, won the Class AA KMEA State Marching Band Championship just last Saturday...over perennial AA state titleist Adair County! A kid that I graduated three years before, now band director of George Rogers Clarke (GRC) won the Class AAA title. My former band director, Bob Gregg, just took over the Class A 2nd place finisher Williamstown High School. And, my former assistant band director Chuck Smith led his Class AAAA Lafayette High School (you probably have heard of them and GRC) to their unprecedented 13th straight Class AAAA State Title! So, if you wanna' talk marching band, I'm game :)

fejj, thank you for enlightening me on the whole "free software -vs - paid software" concept. Perhaps I missed it, but are you saying that because you are not being paid by the user of your free software, that you have the right to verbally dispose of that individual anytime that he or she has a complaint about the software that you are or were working on? Sure, I think that if he or she gives you the third degree, that it's only fair to give back "some of the medicine", but...

jameson, i find your writing to be of much interest. Admittedly, though, I wonder whether you would be happier leaving the United States. It bothers me when foreigners come into my country (in my case the USA) and compare it to their own country, in a somewhat belittling manner. I'm sure any native of any country would feel the way I do about this.

What you said about programming languages has been said for years, and is all over the Internet. Perhaps that is a project you could take upon yourself, writing a new language that has all the things you do like about C, C++, Perl and Java, and adds in the things you feel should have already be incorporated into programming languages at this stage in the game?

fejj, I am curious about your rantings. If you don't want to make Linux and Unix users happy, then why are you developing for the Gnome project in the first place? It's difficult for me to imagine that people just email you or chat with these god-awful messages that you say they do. I personally don't know any computer users who would act the way you are portraying these folks do. On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me to see a developer spout off with elitest-drivel, without ever caring whether it was warranted or not ... just because one felt he had the right to do so. I don't really think that computer users are all THAT bad, are they?

movement , in total agreement here. I admit that I don't know enough about politics to even come close to debating it, but I really don't think I even want to know. Personally, I enjoy coming here to read the tech talk.

have decided to focus on C++, tomorrow might decide to focus on Java. bleh :(

dyork:

I feel so sorry for your friend's sister. As much as I think hearing about this makes *my* life as a hard-of-hearing person that much better, there is an emptiness in trying to rationalize what your friend's sister is going through. It's just awful, and I am sorry to hear about that. May the final moments be pain-free and reminscent of happier moments.

Yawn ... zzzz

It's time to hit the books, something I should have been doing since the beginning of the semester. Why must I always come up with a good "system" for studying, doing homework, preparing for exames ... weeks into the semester ?!?

google isn't letting me know why I am getting that "no newline at end of file" warning/error when I compile a C++ program with g++ ... is it an error or warning? shouldn't something like that have been taken care long ago?

back to VC++ for me, it seems where formatting and locating of errors is better done than in gcc or g++.

NOW I see the importance of taking classes like Data Structures. Ya know, those classes that teach one how to design algorithms and understand already existing algorithms for use in programming. I've never written a game, and the first one I want to write is a Tic-Tac-Toe one. The problem is that although I don't have a problem with 2D and 3D arrays per se, I am struggling with how to check every single piece (in the case of Tic-Tac-Toe there would be 9 pieces) and its neighbors for matching pieces, to determine if a player has won the game with three matching game pieces in a row.

I figure that from doing that, I can scale the algorithm to handle "neighbor checking" in a game like Connect-Four.

The next thing that I want to learn in programming C++ from the console is how to erase input (the effect of pressing an invisible BACKSPACE key), which would make for some cool effects such as a timer in a clock program, or a count-down in a game like Space Invaders, or a type-writing tutor.

Lately I've been having daytime "sweats". I've never been one to have problems with sweating, so this is troubling me. Does it have something to do with the thyroid? Could it be that I am at my all-time in weight (5'6" 155 lbs which isn't much)? Could it be the stress of school? Or some other health related problem?

it seems that diary entries of numerous folks are not appearing in the "recent diary entries" section. this needs to be fixed.

At the moment, I am at a standstill in programming. I *still* don't have any projects completed. The positive thing is that I am not the only one who has experienced this. I am tiring of the scripting languages.

My choices for compiled programming languages have come down to C, C++ and Java. Java is too slow, but a beautiful language. C++ is very complex, especially so for beginner programmers, but a very powerful language. C is a very fast language, but lacks the OOP features (and I'm sure many other things I don't know about).

So, which one? Right now I need something fun to work on. I thought about trying to write a Tetris game, which would be my first game ever written. I can imagine the playing field as being one huge 2D array, and simply looping through the array on the dropping of each block, terminating the program when the very top/middle block is already full (thus meaning no more blocks can be dropped).

Which language would be best for learning how to program this game in? With the previous link I posted, that site does seem to be dead. The author highly recommends starting to write games in the C language, but if you listen to the many opinions out there, many say that C++ is the better language to start out with, because it contains all of C's features and more.

Please, some of the better writers and more experienced programmers on this site, put up an article about this very thing. I'm not interested in hearing "whatever suits the purpose", because if I knew that answer I wouldn't be asking. Besides, general statements are just that.