George Smith, Take A Bow

We’ve been long time fan-people of George Smith. He’s about to hold the Australian record for most tests for a forward.

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(Taken from www.foxsports.com.au/rugby)

Kudos to you George. We’ve barracked since that 21st birthday of yours, when you man-o-the-match’d the Lions in 2001.

Are You A Man’s Man?

This list is very cool. Go read about the manliest Super Heroes.

Speaking of manliness, I discovered today why rugby players strap their thighs. It really helps the hamstring. At least, it did for me. I’ve got some kind of short-ish hammies, linked to a wierd lower back muscle thing, apparently. Anyway, ends up they can snap and strain easy, specially in the cold. And it’s cold at training.

But the _manliest_ part of strapping your legs is taking the tape off. Oh the joy. You can’t just do the one motion bandaid rip, because it’s a couple of times around your leg.

Ahhh, the underside hairs. Let’s you know you’re alive.

Output Generator (Project Dimes)

This one is so simple to understand. But would get reasonably complicated to implement.

The system (web or desktop, probably both) would take in any kind of file (doc, image, blah blah).

It would then Output to ANYTHING.

What’s the purpose of this? Let’s say you had a bunch of images, but need them in a document. How hard is it to just plonk a bunch of images into Word? Not very. But this is what it would do.

The logic would take the files you give it, examine them, and see if the output file could be a container for those files. If not, then it has some nice practical rules for dealing with things.

Let’s say you give it a Doc, and Excel sheet, and a WMV file. You feed them in. You _can_ tell it what you want back. OR you let it do it’s business.  Which is to give you back a single file with the inputted files in sequence (or however they would be moulded together, based on contextual default rules, or indeed rules of the Users making).

So the DOC and XLS and WMV files would be joined in beautiful unison into ..

Well, how would you do it?

New Patches On Old Coats (Independent Game Development)

A few weeks ago I put three or four nights worth into making a Snake game (in Clarion no less).

snake-001

Along with the snake game, I stumbled over some larger concepts. Profiles, Games, Stats .. I’m gradually building a very simple statistics application that holds games within it.

Here’s the plan:

  • The primary focus in on the Profile.
  • You must select a Profile before you play a game.
  • The stats are linked to the Profile.
  • The stats can be sent up to the servers for global rankings (again, very simple).
  • The game(s) respond to various intelligence on the stats.
    • Haven’t played the game, get Message 1
    • Have played the game five times, get Message 2
    • Have played the game a hundred times, get Message 3
  • There are a number of simple games. Clones of existing ones to begin with. The Snake Clone is mostly done. Tetris. Jezzball.
  • The Snake Clone
    • Has completely modifiable levels. These are incredibly simple though.
      • Food needed to finish Level.
      • Number of Walls in the Level.
    • Levels are built within the database (Official) OR from XML files (Non-Official).

Of course, these are really simple elements. Trivial.

The point is to get complex pieces of functionality done within a simple system. In a simple and clean manner. Without hundreds of variables.

At least, that’s the plan at the moment. Might be different tomorrow.