Game development club at Seneca

Did you know there's a game programming club at Seneca? Check out the unofficial website.

Actually, the club is in its neonatal stages. The founding students still have not found a faculty advisor and, from what I can gather, they are trying to get the Arts and Animation faculty in on it too. Sounds like a big project! However, if they can get enough students to join, the ball might actually start rolling and things will be organized in time for the fall semester (less than two months away!).

Hope to see some of you there!

Container Classes

IRC meetings have become so slow that Fardad Soleimanloo has now decided to try using voice conferences through Skype! Though OOP344 is not an open source course (like OSD600), the project for it sure is starting to look and work like one. (Just this morning I had to chuckle at my team--scheduling a meeting that works with everyone's schedules is a nightmare.) I find the course incredible because in all my years of studying, I've never seen a teacher put so much time into a course or students asked to put so much into it either. In university for Economics, I mastered the art of cramming for every midterm and test (those were all you were getting marked on, after all). I studied strategically and aced most of them, but I didn't retain much info in the end. I'm finding that in college, with weekly due dates for each course, you have to keep at it or fall behind if you let things slide even by a week.

Anyway, the real point of this post was to share a couple of nifty little webpages about container classes. In our last IRC meeting, my group had a bouncy, yellow question mark over our collective heads because we just didn't grasp the idea of them soon enough. But the fact is, container classes really are how Fardad described: they are an array (another kind of container) for objects. Here is the webpage, complete with a sample class, from learncpp.com. I haven't read this one from parashift.com yet, but the writing seemed pretty funny, especially after learning the basics of a container class.

I haven't read the textbook section for stacks and queues yet (and yes, that means I haven't coded how a queue works yet, either), but the above webpages really helped me understand the basic idea for them. I hope they help someone else, too.

Mystery solved

Mystery at the HQ Solved!

Two of the three new Coding Rangers have been identified in class. From first impression, one looked a lot friendlier than the other, but yours truly is trying not to be judgmental because the wind blew the wrong way on her face when she was pouting. Could've happened the same to the other dude.

Coding Styles

The Coding Rangers had their first (informal) meeting last Thursday to decide on the most basic coding styles. We agreed on most topics without trouble, like tabbing instead of spacing and placing the opening curly bracket on the same line as the condition or function that opened it. (I like Cindy Laurin's style of placing the opening moustache on the next line by itself. I think it looks neater, but I was defeated in this discussion.)

My professors have tried to sell students on their preferences. Last semester, a classmate lost marks in an assignment for using spacing. Mark Fernandes told her to use tabs. Now Fardad Soleimanloo is telling us to use spacing. (I think his argument is that the length of tabs differ between editors.) Anthony Austin wants everyone to use vi and ssh. Use ftp or telnet and you're going to find "YOU R OWN3D" in your home directory. (He's pretty darn serious. He spent 10 minutes on the topic.)

I've personally made up my mind to use vi and do 2-space tabs for programs and spaces for html.