First off, GTA is one of my favorite and I do think its the best out of those sandbox games. So this “GTM” project was the very first game I decided to review. Since its a text-based game, I didn’t expect to see too many text-based images in the gameplay, and drawing those images using symbols would take just too long considering they are going to come up with and implement a story line. But what has impressed me is that they did have plenty of graphics implemented and they all look wonderful while still having a great story line that contains four challenging missions. Also, the source code is well organized and commented. Everything is named intuitively so I was able to find and hack the weapon damage in 2 minutes :P. The game does need some polish on balancing and gameplay experience. However, we are not expecting a group of professional game designers here.(And they did fixed most of the issues that I posted on github) So in programming perspective, they have done a wonderful job within couple of weeks.

First of all, I like this game and I think this game is done very well. The code looks intuitive and efficient. It is a good idea to create different classes for game ball and bricks — good manner for object oriented programming. I agree with you guys on that using Qt and its QWidget is a easy way to implement it. I’ve used Qt for so many projects and I did believe it’s a great tool to build programs with simple GUI or even small games. But I do think Qt is way too large to install for those guys who don’t use it regularly. The game itself looks good in spite of some trivial glitch such as it is possible to knock the ball through the wall in some extreme situation. Overall its a great game with smooth game play but I do think you guys can work a bit more on graphic and key input logging. I do realize that it is hard to solve the key pressed delay since all key inputs are handle by OS and key press will be interpreted as a sequence of repeated key hits. However it is especially uncomfortable for this kind of game that requires fast reaction of the player.

Imagine that your multi-core android phone becomes a real PC. Ubuntu is now developing a ubuntu desktop variant for android phones. It is not a simplified or portable version of ubuntu system remade for cell phones. The ubuntu for android will be the real ubuntu system running on your phone.
If this upcoming feature is finally introduced, your phone will be able to run Android and Ubuntu at the same time. This means no dual-boot or virtual machine is required, they are running simultaneously since both Android and Ubuntu use Linux kernel. For more information, check out: http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/ubuntu-for-android

Finally the midterm is over and I felt I did well on it. This was one of my favorite types of exam that I’v ever had. Not because the test itself is not brutally difficult but the test provided a quite good reflection of what skills we have learned in this class. We had to practically write python codes, bash commands and some regex expressions in a certain amount of time. Even the test submission is through the git. That’s what I thought a programming class should be, but so many of them have failed. They ask you to write up bunches of paragraphs to explain a single concept instead of testing your actual coding abilities. I finished this test in an hour and 20 minutes but I double checked every problem very carefully so I think you all should be able to finish the test on time. Anyways, this is a great test and hope you all get a good score on it.

Are you tired of typing every single git command into terminal? You may want to check out SmartGIT on its website: http://www.syntevo.com/smartgithg/index.html

This is program that allows you to manage your git directory in a GUI environment. It supports all platforms (windows, Mac and Linux). However you can only use it for free for 30 days.

Here’s another git GUI app called git-cola. This one is completely free to use, and I would recommend this if you are looking for a real compact git GUI with ease of use.

git-cola: http://git-cola.github.com/

git-cola screenshot

Hello everyone, welcome to my ECE2524 blog and this is my first blog post. Taking this class and installing Ubuntu is my first Unix experience. It did take me a while to make it installed successfully. I was planned to make a new partition and install the new system on it. However, creating a partition requires an unallocated disk space that can only be obtained by shrinking an existing partition which, in that way, will cause the disk type to be converted from basic to dynamic. I had no idea about the cons and pros of doing so. Then I was introduced to Ubuntu Windows Installer — a desktop version that needs no free disks or CDs but some free space in your existing partitions. You would install it just like how you install an application on your PC, easy and fast. It works as exactly same as the ordinary version but runs slightly slower.

I had no problem when I installed Ubuntu Windows Installer. However, the initialization was stuck at 100% about 10 minutes when I first ran the system. I did a search on the official forum and it seems like a good amount of people had experienced the same “bug” as they chose this version of Ubuntu, but the problem can be easily fixed by a force reboot and your Ubuntu would work as it is supposed to.

I will be making another post soon to talk about the Unix shell-level commands and, hopefully, some python experiences.

See you all next time.