Projects that took off (in C++ and Haskell)

I originally was going to work on three projects, but I've only been working on two, because...it's summer ;)

Anyway, here is what is actually going on. My development rate increased significantly when I started using a revision control system (Mercurial for now):

Name: Not Yet
Description: A journaling program that specializes in recording Lucid Dreams (look it up if you don't know what those are), written in C++ using the FOX GUI toolkit (which I very highly recommend). I'd say this project is about 30% complete, but I'm going to have more time to work on it n the next month or so before school starts, so hopefully I'll get something working.


Name: Doesn't need one
Description: An XML parser written in Haskell. Not much to describe here, except that Haskell is awesome for writing parsers. More on this later.

Summer! (again)

So it's summer, which is cool. I have a new list of things to accomplish, which will hopefully go better than last year. I'm sure it will though, as I've already started on a few of these. Anyway, stay tuned for any stuff I end up posting regarding any of these projects. I mean, I am involved in them, so they must be awesome ;).

Name: Doesn't have One Yet
Language: C++, using the FOX GUI toolkit
Description: Journal/Organizer software, will store files in an XML format.

Name: N/A
Language: Haskell
Description: Write an XML (or possibly other type) of parser in Haskell to learn how it works. So far it's been awesome. Defining and using a binary search tree in 3 lines is pretty sweet.

Name: Doesn't have One Yet
Language: Javascript, PHP
Description: Web-based organization app (because of course there aren't enough of these yet). Just a basic idea at this point.

Looking back at this, I need to come up with some names for stuff. I'll work on it. Stay tuned for developments.

OpenGL Programming

So I'm currently taking a graphics programming course, and its pretty intense even though we just started. Apparently it really helps to learn Linear Algebra even though it's not technically a prerequisite. So I'm giving myself a crash course in Matrix operations. WOOOHOOO.

Anyway, you should check out OpenGL. It's not object oriented, but it is awesome. Their site has some really good documentation as well. A helpful library to have when using OpenGL is glut. If you use Windows, here is a pre-compiled DLL of glut for you. Otherwise you probably know how to compile it yourself, or can at least find instructions on how to do so much better than I could write. If you use Visual Studio (which seems to work pretty well for some strange reason), you can check out this site which includes instructions on setting up OpenGL and glut in Visual Studio 2003, but it can be adapted to work with 2005 quite easily.

So when you have some free time, try some OpenGL programming. It's easier than you think and a lot of fun! I'll be posting some of my projects up here in the near future.

"Prey" - An Awesome Game

If you haven't played Prey, you should. It's seriously one of the best games I've ever played. It's got a lot of stuff that makes it unique such as wallwalking, gravity switching, "spirit walking" and "death walking". I wouldn't do these features justice by talking about them here, so why not check out the official website. It has screenshots and in-depth descriptions of all these things.

The game also as an awesome story, which I like. Multiplayer isn't everything. So if you have some time, go check it out.