John Zeitler

A couple of things worth discussing today, folks, all of them rather brief. The first is that I think my tweaking of my main habits is just about finished. I spent a little bit of time setting up GeekTool to close Firefox for me if the computer’s been idle for longer than ten minutes. I then went ahead and set THAT up to disable the monitoring as needed. The net effect is that if my attention wanders, I don’t have a zillion tabs open to wade through and re-distract me once I get done. Conversely, if I’m using Mahoro to look up code while I do coding on the Windows machine, then I don’t have to worry about wiggling the mouse every so often.

Let’s move on to the new project, then: the second XNA engine. Yesterday I got it set up to sort through sprites and render them in a specific order. Today I went on to create a collision-detection engine that handles layers very elegantly. I did, however, encounter a really interesting bug that I’m going to have to figure out a better solution for, involving two sprites on the same layer having the exact same position. Right now it works on a “last in gets rendered” order, but that’s not gonna work if the sprites have different sizes. On the plus side, though, my idea of setting up each ‘logical’ map layer as a physical tile layer and a ‘pawn’ layer worked splendidly, and I may have figured out a solution to moving sprites between layers as well (but that might need work too). It’s getting there, bit by bit– but given that the system was able to handle 10 layers without a hiccup (that would be along the lines of 1700 sprites at 80 by 80 pixels, filling a 720p screen) it’s doing better than I expected.

Finally, I decided to re-start my XM radio. I have to admit that the service isn’t as bad as I had believed it to be on the day they transitioned to the “XM/Sirius” setup, but there’s still some disappointments. For one thing, I still think that they should have kept the guys doing the election coverage rather than ditching them unceremoniously. For another thing, while it’s close, Area is no replacement for The System. And the audiobook station is almost completely useless now, with most of the shows being rescheduled to oblivion. However, there are some bright spots. One of the more annoying glitches in the system was fixed: now, when the radio powers on, it’s authorized for all of my stations immediately, rather than a two-minute delay (at times) to let me tune into football games. Really, that’s how I justify it: I will be getting new music and such during the week and during the summer, but I wanted to have every football game and every hockey game at my disposal once more.

That’s the plan. I haven’t done any Japanese studying today, but I’ll be doing some later tonight (before bed)… and probably in the morning I’ll do the kana drill again. I’m also going to start up the morning exercise routine as well, but we’ll see how that works out.

Catch you folks later.