Weekend Warriors

Friday, October 3rd, 2008 | News | No Comments

Accidentally had buttons update late this week, switched PM for AM. But that’s okay because Star Trek deserved a little more time on the front page.

Ah, stats. I know I probably shouldn’t care about them, but it’s sometimes fun to check out the traffic of this burgeoning site. The first thing I notice is that There is a predictable peek in traffic every 7 days. Seems like a lot of people do their surfing on Sundays. Either that or my weekly post on RR is still driving the lion’s share of traffic. However, RR is not our only beneficiary.

We’re getting linked to! While the site is still starting out I’d like to make my appreciations known on a personal level to a few folks. StackOverflow apparently liked my homework suggestions. Star Trek is a big draw for a couple of German websites; ich spreche kein Deutsch so I have to rely on automated translation tools, but I think they said positive things. And a big shout out to the Abras (whoever that is) for a lovely post on the Ubanatu Forums. You rock. That’s what I’m talking about.

As there are new people trickling into Cymon’s Games, let me recommend you check out the games, download a few, and be sure to vote on them. Make a few comments. And if you decide to try your hand at programming, load up CodeBlocks with MinGW, maybe actually type in a few beginning programs, check out some learning resources if you need them.

(I like that so much I think I’ll add it to the about page.)

The book is ready for your digestion! It’s still in its early stages, but I am soliciting feedback. I should probably make a bigger deal about this, but at the moment I’m doing this because I’m really feeling the bite of the programming bug, but I feel obligated to give you something.

If you like what you’re seeing here let me again encourge you to encourage me by contributing to the success of Cymon’s Games.

Learning Curses by Example

Saturday, October 4th, 2008 | Resources | No Comments

David Brady, this is for you. And for me.

When you install PDCurses is comes with some demo programs, which to me is better than a tutorial. Somehow I got a hold of some other demo programs that I thought came with PDCurses but apparently didn’t (the fact that they all #included ncurses should have been a clue) and now I don’t know where they came from. Specifically I found ballgame.c to be most instructive when writing shox (which I’ve re-written with more useful comments). Rain.c is also informative and fun to look at too. The rest were less informative, but some were kind of fun like firework.c, shuffle.c, tt.c (typing tutor), worm.c (not the game), and xmax.c. If anyone can tell me where these came from I’d be grateful.

When I write my curses book I’m going to reference Norman Matloff’s online book about Curses, but mostly because it’s so square.

So until I make a curses tutorial these examples will have to do.

Tags: curses