Author: rangermann

The only problem I got with pizzas is that they do not respawn.

As I am not able to attend the E3, I’m always interested in watching video footages of game presentations held at the show. Recently, I discovered that there is a video download client at E3Insider.com which provides videos at a decent quality. Unfortunately, there is no Linux client and the one for Windows doesn’t work with Wine or other emulation kits…

This error message beats everything:

I’m wondering if there is another message if that error message also fails..

As previously mentioned in this blog, my graphics card is gone. I was pretty shocked when I came into the office last Friday, turned on the screens and saw a completely new screensaver. Here is a picture of the card:

We’ve been playing jPentris for some time now and nobody seems to be able to beat GA’s highscore. In my opinion, this block here is the reason why we all fail:

Programming all day is nice, but sometimes it’s necessary to turn off your brain. In order to do so, I started doing fitness sport again. Running, to be more specific. Although it often seems that the tight schedule does not allow such things, I think one has to take that time off. It’s a great opportunity to leave one’s brain with itself for a while so that it can recharge for the next programming session. And no hehe, it’s not that I just want to do something again a certain cliché.

Somehow, it’s a miracle that after running for an hour or so, when you are zapped and your body is toast, your brain starts being creative again. Problems you’ve been bugging around with for hours are solved in just a few minutes and you’re fully motivated to hack some code.

Off topic: Potato chips are definitely one of the greatest inventions of mankind.

Yes. It’s true. The good old coffee machine died a few days ago. Every morning it woke me up with some fresh brewed coffee. Every morning in the past months if not years. Actually, it gave all team members some caffeine rushing through their veins to survive all the dev-times. Finally, after 14699 cups (not a joke, the machine has a counter) it decided not to heat water anymore.

Somehow this seems a little suspicious to me. First, I got these problems (grml and grrr) with my cup warmer, but now even the coffee machine refuses to heat water for my coffee. There is something cooking…

…oh I hate it. Especially if it was written in a great hurry back then. Do you know the surprise when you look at old and dirty code, asking yourself if you were the one who wrote that crap? I’m currently in the situation of improving some things of pre-alpha stage software I wrote last year.

First, when you start reviewing the code and playing with it, no danger seems to emerge from it besides a strange feeling of uncertainty. Then, however, when you alter the first line of it, all hell breaks loose. The requested features for the new version depend on changing a lot of stuff in the old code, or updating the third party libraries results in messing up the whole thing. Or even worse, your own code just breaks apart and stops working and you have no idea why.

That’s the point where you start thinking of rewriting it from scratch, but then end up in just doing some patchwork to get it up and running again. For at least another year or until the next feature requests arrive.

For those of you thinking something like “oh no, we’re never gonna play a game by this guy” – no worries, I wasn’t talking about game related software this time, but of one of the software projects I had to work on during my studies at the Carinthia University of Applied Sciences.