Going Off In Tangents.

I seem to be going off at tangents at the moment. Life is just really busy. The past few weekends have been really busy but fun. It has meant a great deal of not being focused on very much. This is part of the reason I sorted out marblemice.com. I had an evening free and not wanting to get in too deep I figured it would be fun to move marblemice to the google app engine and make a bit of a fun site. This weekend we  have snow!

For a lunch hour project I decided to write a little text adventure to for on the revamped marblemice site. Well it started as a how do I create a command line interface on a web page. Once this was looking reasonable I wondered what to do with it. My mind turned to text adventures and I figured I would write my own. If MathML had been better supported in browsers I may have made a simple math equation parser/viewer.

Well the design of the text adventure is not my own it is a clone of a mini text adventure published in a magazine in '84 or '85. I have not dug out the orginals yet so it is all done from my memory. It will be interesting to see how my from memory clone matches up with the original.

This is not exactly a hard programming challenge but it is fun and helps me drive javascript further into my mind. I still think about the language a bit which means I am not yet fluent in it. When I code in C++ I rarely think about the language just the problem I am trying to solve, I hope to reach this level when programming in JavaScript. JavaScript is simpler language so should not take too long to assimulate it.

I am gradually learning more about CSS and in particular the transform you can do with it. It is really quite powerful if only all browsers supported them. I guess it is getting better. For now I test my marblemice with Chrome and FireFox but develop using Chrome. Internet explorer I stuggle to test regularly as I am a Linux user. The site does not really work in IE8, perhaps IE9 will be better. I should probably be a little concerned that I am excluding 60% of the market but for now given the number of visitors is still single figures I am not that worried.