On the Inside

Ok, I found Scratch and toyed with it yesterday for a bit and vowed not to stay up as late tonight dinking around with it. Well, I'm heading to bed a full hour earlier than yesterday...

I made an actual game this time, and I encourage you to check it out, beat my high score, and favorite it. The challenge was just too fun... create a game in a limited system with a language that functions differently in your test environment from the production environment (as in, some code just breaks and the speed is all wiggedy-whack when you upload your projects).

Check it out! http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/rszrama/3338

So, seriously, I was headed to bed after talking with Christina when a BBC news headline caught my eye. I don't remember the exact words, but it said something about programming. I guess it could've said "You're stupid for reading articles about programming" and I still would've read it, so the actual headline isn't important. What is cool is that it was just some little announcement/interview about a project MIT has had going to broaden the field for programmers and game creation. To be clear, I don't think this is really a good idea. I remember the old days where Klik 'n Play games were a dime a dozen and worth every penny... this doesn't promise much more yet, but it sure has potential. At least it's got staying power if MIT is behind it. They just might do something nice. And judging by the timestamp on this post, they've already done enough to keep me toying with it for 2 hours and shamelessly putting out sample code for how to make a platform game character jump. See the project by clicking here, and forgive me for how stinking difficult it is. The timing is different between testing on your computer and playing online.

Well... I'm up to my knees in Javascript sites and reading. The latest articles and pages refer to using Javascript appropriately and well in your websites. Interesting stuff! (If you care.) I'll post a few links here:

http://www.digital-web.com/articles/objectifying_javascript/

http://domscripting.com/blog/

http://adactio.com/atmedia2005/

In need of sound effects for games? Check out the following:

http://www.smithcosoft.com/sound_library/

Hopefully I'll be beefing it up with files of my own... I just need to find them on that spare HDD.

(This repository was setup by a member of the FreeBASIC community.)

Gotta prove I'm still a geek... here is a link to a handy resource I've found for understanding and protecting against SQL injection. Don't know what SQL is? Didn't know you could inject it? This might not be the link for you...

http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/sql-injection.html

cha0s has released a snippet for "true" generic linked lists. It's true that following this link will show you some generic code, and if you can make sense of it you're a better man than me. This is mostly here for myself when I get back to coding in FB. ^_^

http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4880

They call these things in programming regular expressions. You get the impression that it will look like something regular. It may even resemble some expression you've seen before. But then they throw something out at you that looks like this:

^([0-9a-zA-Z]([-.\w]*[0-9a-zA-Z])*@([0-9a-zA-Z][-\w]*[0-9a-zA-Z]\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,9})$

And you begin to wonder what sort of expressions they regularly look at. In any event, this link contains a cheatsheet of sorts to help you begin to maybe understand these "regular" expressions:

http://regexlib.com/CheatSheet.aspx

That expression above is an email filter designed to detect a properly formatted email address... in case you wanted to know.