This will only be funny to me...
(12:54:15 PM) jay: If dbaccess.Date is descended from java.util.Date, this code should work, shouldn't it? dbaccess.Date oneSecondFromNow = new dbaccess.Date(dbaccess.Date.TO_SECOND); oneSecondFromNow.setTime((new Date()).getTime() + 1); I'm getting the current second instead of one second in the future. (12:57:15 PM) gary: + 1000....getTime is milliseconds (12:57:34 PM) jay: Duh. OK, thanks.Read more...
So, I logged onto the Zyps forum today and saw hundreds of posts. I was very happy - had the forum finally been discovered? Well it had, by spam bots. They had created dozens of accounts, and the posts all had links to nonsense prescription drug sites of the same sort I’d been seeing in my blog comments.
PHPbb has “mods” to combat spam, but you have to manually edit the source files to apply them. I’d happily do that once, but I’m not re-editing every time I install a new version. Time to look for alternatives, I think.
Read more...Tucson is not a Place To See Before You Die...
…but it was cool. Palms and eucalyptus mixed with pines. A tree-lined downtown area with glassy buildings. Pedestrians everywhere. It was like a small town that stretched for miles.
Diana and I still hadn’t put together a wedding photo album after all this time, so our plan for our two-year anniversary was to get a hotel room, take the laptop, and hash it out. Tucson was just the place we happened to pick. We didn’t finish it, but at least now we have the photos (mostly) selected, we got to escape from the kids, and we got to spend a little time together. Not ritzy, but pretty romantic.
On the way there was an ostrich farm Diana had wanted me to see. It had the whole stupid-tourist-stop atmosphere about it - $5 gets you admission plus a cup of ostrich/deer/emu food, $10 for a giant jeep tour, lame gift shop out front - but it was a fun and unique experience. Their weird bald heads with big, glassy eyes snake up above the fence, you hold out some feed in your hand (or dump it in a dispenser if you’re not so brave), and they snatch it. The signs out front warn “yes, the ostriches bite”, and they do. More often than not my fingers were in their beaks instead of the food. It didn’t really hurt, but you get a little gun shy after the 100th time. (The emus’ beaks were sharper - one took some skin off. Hrmmm, my last tetanus booster was a long time ago…)
It was still the desert, but it was like a whole different region of the country - different people, different attitude, different atmosphere. It was good to escape city limits, I told Diana; good to see and do something new.
Rain the whole way home, which you may know from prior posts is a wonderful thing when you live in a dry region. Grey mountains, fading to white behind the rain, clouds clinging to their tops. Still raining out there now, in fact, and I just opened my window so I could listen to the drops. Wonderful weekend.
Read more...0.7.0...
Published the new Zyps on Wednesday…
This is a major release for Zyps. Most important is the switch from the Ruby-GNOME2 to WxRuby, which is available as a gem. This means no more manual installation of dependencies before you can run the Zyps GUI. (And a nice little rendering speed boost, too.) Behaviors now act upon all eligible targets in a single update, as well. This means more flexibility for your Actions and Conditions.
What I don’t mention there is the feature I’m most pleased with - window resizing. I’d intended from day one to have the playfield expand with the window, but I’m just now getting around to implementing it.
It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, but it was still kinda tricky. And I need to do an 0.7.1 release tonight: Alex Fenton notified me resizing wasn’t working right on OS X. (Actually, I’m just grateful it’s running at all on OS X, since I don’t have a machine to test it on.) Anyway, Subversion HEAD should be fixed as of last night, and I’ll roll it out ASAP.
Read more...Rabbits...
<a href=’http://jay.mcgavren.com/blog/archives/752/alexs-rabbits/’ rel=’attachment wp-att-751’ title=’Alex’s Rabbits’><img src=’http://jay.mcgavren.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/rabbits.thumbnail.PNG’ alt=’Alex’s Rabbits’ /></a>
About 24 hours after Alex Fenton (wxRuby maintainer) stated his intention to do a demo in Zyps, a complete “rabbit simulation” was sitting in my inbox. (With Behavior remapped to Behaviour, and Color to Colour. :) The little critters run around, eat grass, breed, and die, all in 300 lines of code.
This is exactly what I wanted out of Zyps - someone sees it, gets inspired, goes on a mad hackfest, and in a minimal period of time has a finished “game”. Hopefully once the library is sufficiently polished, many more people will be doing the same.
Read more...