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Very recently (in 2006), a lot of things changed in my environment which allowed me more time and helped me to re-prioritize my life. Life should be spent at least partially in pursuing one's goals, and programming allows me to pursue many goals. More than goal-reaching, though, programming can be fun and satisfying to me, because I am an intrinsic tool-maker and meta-tool-maker. Perhaps I am also a good designer. I am not sure, because I tend to design things which are quite difficult for me to build. For a while, I thought it was trying to over-design in order to somehow discourage myself; but the more research I do, the more I find that the tools which programmers use are just so poor that you have to design a lot of your own if you want to get anywhere. It is possibly a rite of passage from moving from "good" to "great" programmer.
I'm not sure how to explain where I am going, or even if that is a good idea... but I am determined to get there. So, slowly but surely, this website should start to reflect the progress that I've made in more recent times. Since it's mostly tools, though, and tools which are mainly useful to me as a way to learn, say, C++ and STL, and ways to build better tools, then I'm not sure how much of that I'll really release... but we'll see, okay?
28 July, 2006.
So, I've recently been working on learning the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer), since Chip recommended it and it's what he uses to do stuff cross-platform on Windows, Mac OS X, and Dreamcast... but for me, I like the "Simple" part. So far, though, the SDL hasn't been a problem to learn...but working with C++ has been a bit of a bother. It's not that it is a bad language, but it's just that using a language without the right tools can be a lot more tedious than it needs to be. I think the inventor was complaining about this too, because he expected more C++-aware editors to be available to help take the tedium out of working with the language.
Anyhow, I will keep working on it... besides my "hello, world" app, which is obviously something I threw together after just reading a couple of tutorials, I'm still not sure what to do for my first big project but in a way it's too early, I haven't even gotten the animation engine done yet. To this end I'm planning to do a C64-ish console and a set of editors to work on the animation and sprite sheets and so on, and on that foundation probably do the list of small projects that I've been writing about on LJ and whatnot.
On a personal but relevant note, I've been fighting a lot of fatigue recently. I think because I tend to be naturally unhappy and bored; programming isn't an intrinsic help but making ideas into reality helps a lot... the lack of money is a big obstacle for me now, but not as big as it could be... what bothers me is that I don't seem to be working on moving any of my obstacles very much, which is not at all like my true self. I want the freedom that comes from clearing out a backlog of stuff.
Lord Granitor. 28 July, 2006.