Weekend

Spent Saturday helping a friend prepare for programming exam, not sure how well it went, but he seemed satisfied enough with the progress. I have forgotten how I learned it, which things were the most difficult to understand for me, and how much everything seemed like magic at the beginning. My first experience with programming was Commodore 64 basic, and I never wrote very much at all, I played around with it, but never enough to really grasp it. I made a few short programs, mostly menu systems with fancy colors, and a little disk access, but that was it. At some point, I discovered QBasic, and a nice thing about that was the built in documentation, it could be searched and there were examples for everything, so I spent a lot of time messing around with that, and wrote a bit more code, but nothing substantial, I think the biggest program I wrote was a tic-tac-toe game, which would draw the board with characters. I remember it was basically just a bunch of if statements, so it would play every game the same way. Next up, I somehow got to run an apache server, and wrote some HTML, which is not programming, but, this was a great time, because I was spending a lot of time on IRC, and there were people willing to help out.. I remember letting a guy connect to my (windows 95!!) server via VNC to configure apache for vhosts, and I found a guide showing how to install PHP.. Now, PHP is a hated language, and I see its flaws clearly, but, flawed as it was, it allowed me to achieve real results quickly enough that I didn't loose interest or give up. Together with MySQL (another hated product), I was able to do quite a lot, I built a my own website, and was lucky that nobody killed it with SQL injection before I found out that was something, and I secured my SQL code :) I built a +20kloc image-board software which ran for some years before I shut it down. Then I started looking at C/SDL/OpenGL, which also allowed me a quick success.. Getting a window with a triangle on screen was enough to motivate me to write a bit bigger program. The triangle became a space-invaders inpspired game with no end, called "simplevaders", and after that, I set out to write an alternative for DX-Ball for Linux (at the time, LBreakout2 was the best around, and it didn't suit my dad). I didn't read up enough on how OpenGL worked, so I took a very practical approach to it, and just kind of tried out stuff until it looked right enough on the screen (very clear if you check the source). But the game is still a pretty good DX-Ball game for Linux I think, and my dad still plays. Then I started on Wizznic! and I often think about finishing it.. I feel that it lacks content.. But content is boring and difficult! Anyway, I got a bit sidetracked, what I wanted to say, is, that I think a simple language, like C, or PHP is a lot better to start out with. My friend has to start out with C++, but except for cout, strings and the injector/extractor operators, everything is plain old C. My friend gave me the Neon Genesis Evangelion 1,2,3 Manga book, I am very grateful for that! I am a huge fan of the Anime, and have seen all that there is to see, even read the fan-mangas, but I am proud to own the official manga as well, and even though I know the story well, I will read the book and appreciate the art. There's nothing more to say today, except I visited another friend and watched some spiderman movie which was very well made, but lacking in everything but visuals. - Out.