Another General Update

Well things have been going fairly slowly. I have nearly completed a small  game for android. It is not great but I want to churn out a few games for a number of reasons.

Partly because it is great fun making small games and it lets me gradually build up a library of code which should help create games faster. I also get too practice in inkscape, nothing too complicated. The game nearing completion is a clone if a game I used to play a long time ago when I was a child. It fits squarely into the puzzle genre. Given its number based theme and my poor artwork I am not expecting a huge success. I will be happy if I 1000 downloads and incredibly happy if it gets a 3 star rating.

The point here is I want to iterate and get back into thinking about games, their mechanics and producing them.

As I write this I realise the reasons I have felt things are slow is in actual fact I am doing lots of different things.

Gwt is something I have meant to take a look at for a long time. Over the past week I have finally got round to downloading it and giving it a try. Not having any experience in web development I cannot really commment on whether it is good or not. It does let me re-use my Java experience. The API seems nice I think I have seen enough Java UI api's that learning another seems a relatively simple task.

I have not touched on the talking to the server bit just yet. This sort of thing is really an unkown to me but hopefully over the next few weeks I will be able to learn some more.

One odd thing that sticks in my mind is that the development mode is not supported in chrome. It is a bit annoying having to fire up firefox. Support is apparently comming and it is more about needing certain features in chrome rather than the gwt team doing something odd.

Looking at/learing gwt is not just an academic exercise. I do have in mind a web app that I would like to create. Well it was an idea I had for android but I could not figure out how to create the UI in a way that would be intuitive. I am not sure if gwt is capable of doing what I want either, not because of the UI but for other reasons (performace). Sounds exciting but is isn't really exciting, things are exciting when they start to become real rather than an idea floating around in some ones head. In a few weeks I should have enough experince with gwt to work out I have something I want to commit time to.

Another thread in my life is learning scheme. Having finished watching the Structure and interpetation of computer programs lectures on youtube I dropped some little hints as to what might be a nice book for fathers day. I now have the book that goes a long with the course and am slowly working my way through it. I plan on doing most of the exercise to really drill into my brain the way lisp/scheme should be used. Currently it is a lunch hour task as if I was to allow myself to tackle that book in the evenings I would not get anything done until I had finished the book. So yes I am enjoying the book but that my be in part because the lectures motivated me.

In other news I have taken back up Taekwondo after a 5 year break. I had been meaning to get back into it for a while but always seem to be training for or recovering from a marathon and did not want to have a few weeks of aching legs until I adjusted to the high kicks again. It is great fun and even after 5 years there are bits that I remember as if it was last week and bits I am not sure I ever knew.

July marks the month I need to get running fit again as I am running a half marathon with various members of my family. Not having run a half marathon for a while my hardest task is tackling my pace issues, I have become a bit of a plodder. It should be interesting try to figure out how to fit in taekwondo training and distance running.

In some previous posts I talked about being on a bit of a restricted diet, avoiding anything with sugar. It is going well, after a rapid 8-9lb loss in weight I am loosing about 1lb a week. More importantly I am feeling a whole lot better. At night I sleep so well compared with when I was on caffiene. I do miss coffee and can see myself adding it back into my diet at some point but it will be considered a treat rather than something I have 3 days a week. I am also thinking longer term that I will attempt to stick to the diet reasonably well but have the occasional "blow out" day where I eat anything I want. I do miss some of the things I have given up but I do appreciate the amount of energy a healthy diet gives. Like everyone, I guess, the hard part is finding the balance between eating as a pleasure experience and eating to give the best fuel for living.

To top all that off I am totally addicted to Slay on the ipod touch/iphone. Great game look it up if turn based strategy games are your sort of thing. There is a window version as well, google is you friend.