YakYak

Hoy you there. I'm a huge Paradroid fan and that's got my influence droid juices flowing....finish it now.

Gah. I feel like I'm spreading myself too thin. How do people manage to stick with one project?

I've got a small way into writing a DHTML sprite library, but the finickiness of JavaScript and annoying quirks of CSS are pissing me off already.

But I'm finding that I'm using lots of different computers, not all of which are set up to be dev environments. What I want is some kind of web-based development system. I figured that Codepress was a good start, so I thought I'd set up some kind of framework to manage it. My host seems to have nerfed the PHP setup since I used it last (CGI module, still stuck on PHP 4.3, no PEAR) and my framework code no longer works as a result, so I thought that I'd look for someone else's. Cake looks like a sort of "PHP on Rails" but although it runs on backward virtual hosts, it's not as simple as the site suggests and not quite at the same level as RoR, from what I can gather.

I've got back into Scheme due to all the Lisp talk and I've dug up an old dry AI textbook that uses a defunct dialect of Lisp. DrScheme looks to be quite nice, and so does Pocket Scheme, which I now have on my phone.

But then Lisp/Scheme/whatever isn't a silver bullet. A lot of the more interesting AI stuff heavily uses the Actor model, and it seems like something like Erlang would be much more useful. And Haskell - that looks interesting too, and probably something I should learn eventually.

So in the last three weeks, in my own spare time, I've been trying to learn two esoteric languages, refresh another, write a library in a fourth and learn a new framework in a fifth. Needless to say, I'm not getting far in any of them.

Jesus christ on a bike. That sounds like a really gnarly way to get around a problem that could be more easily solved with a bootable cd containing the relevant devtools, and a thumbdrive, surely.

No, not really. The target platform is a web browser, but the development would take place on various PCs, at least one iBook, and possibly a smartphone (for when I'm in Starbucks). Assuming I could get a dev system that worked across all those platforms, I'd need to remember to take all the dev tools with me everywhere and then I'd still need to upload and sync the results. I'm a big fan of Google Docs, by the way.

Codepress simply overloads a <textarea> and adds syntax highlighting and completion, so all you need is a standard web form to load and save the file. A working IDE didn't take me long at all. The hard bit is all the security and user management that all this entails, and my cowboy web host has removed all the useful bits of PHP I want to make life easy.

After months of pissing about with different physics engines, 3D packages, and some pointless porting to XNA, it all came together yesterday - so I managed to actually write a couple of hour's worth of game code today!

It's called Kick Puppy, and it's reminiscent of Bill's Tomato Game. Position gadgets to blow/kick/prod/boing Puppy to the Exit.



There's a little demolet here.

Obviously, those are just the collision boxes - time to get an artist to do summert!

Great choice of genre Oaf. I love the Rube Goldberg type stuff

Bill

teamonkey, I did just what you're talking about. I went with a sort of wiki approach, where each wiki category was extremely specialized. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but I figure a few more iterations and a couple tear-down-rewrites after figuring out what works what doesn't, etc.

Anyway, it's definitely doable. Also, I wouldn't be so quick to blame JavaScript and CSS. Generally, I only suffer when I'm in the midst of ensuring that it works on IE, as IE has the worst fucking JavaScript environment evar. Firefox has the lovely Firebug extension, which if you're not already using it, I urge you to install *now*!

Also, a small present:


There, now you can spam error messages to a console instead of a g-d modal alert box

Agreed. And IE Tab with Split Browser are pretty cool too.

I don't know how you'd deal with the smartphone, to be honest (although I can't imagine doing anything sensible on a phone anyway, even doing code dev on my Newton was painful, and that has an external keyboard)

You could fit a stripped down "developer" linux install on a CD with plenty of room for your favourite OSX editor and associated tools on a separate HFS+ partition. And then all you need is a network-accessible subversion server and a thumbdrive with your code on it. I don't know if you can make "non-installed" software work on Windows, that would be a win otherwise.

The reason I'm so anti what you're suggestiong is that I've been forced to work with a system that did exactly this (for uploading and edting scripts on a server, although it didn't have completion). If you're restricted to a browser environment, you *will* go mad when you realise you can't do x, y or z.

I'm not sure about windows, but for OSX it would be relatively trivial to make a disk with 2 filesystems on it, one containing user-level tools and one containing any tools you need at the "system" level, the first having a script to unmount and remount the second "union" at /usr (or even /), thus giving you a machine that looks exactly like a machine with the tools you want installed by default.

For windows machines, I'd be strongly tempted to just use a linux liveCD, but that of course means you need reboot access (or VMWare / VPC / similar). Carrying a couple of CDs and a thumbdrive isn't too arduous, after all, and you get the benefits of a full developer set rather than something cut down and shoehorned into a web context.

Just a thought.

Simon

Hoorar, finished (well, enough for the comp anyway)!

Ooh bung us a copy! (I'll swapsie you for a Blobbit)

You spelled it wrong btw. It's either doppelgänger or doppelgaenger. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppelg%C3%A4nger

Yeah but I'm just common...



I'll release a demo as soon as I fix the last couple of bugs (gfx glitches). I'll try and add ps2 pad support too.

That looks great

Bill

Groovy la roo, Paul!