Hammer of Code

Well today was a rather frustrating today spent trying to find SOME way to represent territories and their connectivity internally. My first instinct was to use a 2d array to create an adjacency matrix from scratch. While a valiant effort, it was ultimately futile, and I began searching for some STL way of representing my adjacencies. Well STL is great and all, but I don’t really need to be doing a whole bunch of “data structure”-smithing, and hence I found boost’s rendition of adjacency matrices, aptly called… adjacency matrices. Yes, as it turns out boost has a ready to use adjacency matrix. With that problem solved I have only left to implement the use said matrices. In another turn of events, I happened to click through a link to something call “graphviz”, which, APPARENTLY, the boost/graphs library can parse directly. This may make the transition/inclusion of a map importing ability easier than it at first seemed.



As stressful and consuming as it was, I didn’t spend my entire day fretting over adjacencies and the like. Among other things I managed to submit my first bug report, grant planets static and sequential IDs (in preparation for adjacency matrices,) and rearranged the map layout a little so it is easier to tell where constellations end and begin.



I also wanted to rewind to last friday. I’ve been trying really hard to get a nail on my formatting and content for those weekly reports, and mithro informed me of one last thing I forgot. As silly as it is I haven’t really spoken in the reports about how I feel about things. I.e. how I felt the week went, did I spend enough time on things, what can I do to improve things next week, etc… Since I am running a little behind schedule on posting about it I have to resort to bullet points:

• I worked ~35 hours last week. That is pretty much full-time, and I am quite proud of that and hope my dedication doesn’t wain.
• It made me feel very accomplished to get a star map displaying properly. It’s always nice to have a visual product to hinge satisfaction on; and the star map is probably the biggest satisfaction I will get from visual changes. I would hope this coming week I can visually see some of my turns logic and orders come to fruition.
• I am satisfied with the difficulty of my project thus far. At first things seemed a little too easy but I am now seeing places where the difficulty and learning curve will be ramping up. It seems manageable but I will definitely need guidance here and there.
• I would like the pace to pick up a little bit in regards to coding. The first week was good, but I know I feel I should be putting out more work in the week. Mithro did tell me, in a round about way, that “administrative” style work like editing blog, etc, does count as work none-the-less

An Aside: What I did on the weekend:
I pretty much spent all the time I could (when I escaped from gardenning and yardwork) reading:

• TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac
• and Programming Ruby

I just have to say: The more I learn about TextMate, Ruby, TextMate and Ruby together, or TextMate + Anything (Blogging for example), the more it blows my mind. I’ve picked up at least 10-20 keystrokes over the weekend that I am using today to save time coding and writing this blog. There are even more shortcuts I can’t remember that I know will also save me time and energy. And then, Ruby, is just pushing my mind into some fascinating new paradigms about programming. Its scary going away for the weekend, learning some Ruby, and coming back to my C++ code and just thinking all day, “I could do this in Ruby like this, but how do I do it easily in C++?”