Nerdcore 4 Life

besides showing the work of bizarre japanese artists and forwarding leftist drivel. One of their new sponsors is Safari, the guys who put O’Reilly books online. If you go here you can get access to one of 3 books for free. Yay free.

So I started my project over 2 months ago. In that time I’ve learned a lot, mostly from my horrible, horrible mistakes. So now I have a rather built up library and a good deal of it has been built up wrong and must be corrected. Lacking any underlings to assign this task it’s looking more and more like I’ll have to fix the code myself(when are they going to invent goblins that know C++ I ask you?).

So I know that I have to go through every file in the project and implement the following:

1. RAII so my code is safe
2. Documented using the Doxys standard so my library is accessible
3. Variables written in my own Hungarian Notation so my code is more consistent/correct

In addition to being, well, finished these are the things that must be accomplished before I’m going to feel comfortable putting my code out there for all to see(all being potential employers you see).

It’s not that difficult really, simply list which files have been verified to conform for each of these tasks and then go through the ones that haven’t. The problem is the mind-numbingosity of that task. The reason you never leave these kind of things to the end of a project is that we’d rather chew out our own eyes then sit there for 2 weeks renaming, checking for exceptions and documenting.

Luckily all these tasks are easy to do in pieces. Whether I’ve documented files X and Y has nothing to do with documenting Z and vice versa. So then I just need a schedule to get this stuff going and make sure I don’t try and put it off to the end.

Which presents an opportunity to solve another problem I have. Getting fucking started. If I walk in, sit down and get right to work I know it’s going to be a great day. If I check my email, my RSS feeds or(God forbid) start a game of Portal I know getting anything accomplished is going to be a struggle.

Often how fast I get started in the morning is in direct proportion to how clear I am on what I have to do. Hemmingway used to stop mid sentence so when he came back the next morning he never had to wonder what to start writing. I think updating my project code presents the same opportunity.

So for the next week here’s the plan. I’m going to come in and spend the first hour trying to update my code to my new standards. I can even make a game out of it, trying to beat my previous record(it kept Skinner alive). Hopefully that will help make sure my whole project is ready for prime time at the same time and allow me to bypass that destructive urge to see what popped up on Fark the night before.

The nice thing about being behind in your game playing and TV watching is goofing off feels like you’re accomplishing something.

Watched this wonderful little Fallout vid:

and then watched the Mousetrap episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles. As soon as I heard a scratchy radio playing an old timey dance number I knew some bad shit was going down. I tensed up immediatly. Which begs the question, does that music still do it’s job? If I expect something ominous every time happy music plays then why not just play ominous music and be done with it?

By the way, love that Fallout footage. This game is going to rock my balls off.