Wing Commander: Academy turns out to be the best science fiction cartoon series ever, with classic overacting from Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, Tom Wilson et al, battling the evil Kilrathi in the classic WC1/WC2 era.
Conan the Adventurer remains my favourite fantasy cartoon of all time, although I’ve made no effort to find it on BitTorrent, so it might actually be rubbish. I remember it fondly though.
Categories: TV
Tagged: cartoons, conan, wing commander
It seems that one of the central rules of the 15-minute project is that nothing is ever shameful. So I will try not to lose sleep over this next thing.
If time had allowed, I wanted to create a complete solver for the Kevin Bacon game. You know, that thing where you pick two actors and try to work out the films that connect them. Well, this doesn’t do that. I had some code in a console application that I thought did it (it’s just a simple breadth-first search, right?), but it quickly got itself in an infinite loop and died. So I got rid of that, having already spent more than the 15-minutes I allotted myself, and you’re left with this.
If you extract everything and then find and run WindowsClient.exe, you should be able to enter an actor or actress’s name and click on the toolbar icon next to it. Double clicking their name gets their films, double-clicking a film gets its cast, and double-clicking members of the cast gets their films. And so on. It’s all driven by some dreadful screen-scraping of IMDB, and doesn’t cope at all well when your search matches multiple actors (or none at all).
I’m sorry. This is a form of therapy.
Categories: C# · Code · Programming
Tagged: kevin bacon
This should be bearable, no?
I’m not really a holiday kind of person. I don’t find it hard to relax at home, I just need TiVo and the interweb. And maybe some wine. We have a balcony, and with the Sun lately and my new olive tree, you can sort of screw your eyes up and imagine you’re around the Mediterranean. But somehow every other person we know has been to Lake Garda, and they all think it’s grand. So while it makes me feel unoriginal that everyone else in the world seems to have been there, I’m pretty excited.
All I have to do is not worry about work.
Lucene.Net sometimes gets on my tits. I shouldn’t say that cos we’ve got one really cool site that uses it, and we’re helping build another (hopefully cool) site with it. But it’s one of the .NET ports of a Java project that could really do with, like, a .NET port.
For example, why not support at least one of .NET’s collections interfaces? Would it really have killed you to let me do a foreach on a Hits collection’?
And what about IDisposable? Every important class in Lucene needs to be closed when you’re finished. Isn’t there a pattern for that?
Grr. If it wasn’t a useful and genuinely inspired piece of code I’d go on (and probably start with the lack of a IndexModifier). But I might grab the source and see what can be done in 15 minutes.
Categories: Uncategorized
I get two 15-minute breaks and a lunch hour every day. While lunch is sacred, I decided recently that I could put the 2 * 15 minutes to better use than catching up on feeds and playing chess. And thus I have decreed:
In every break, I will create a working Win Forms or ASP.NET project, compile it, run it, and never ever work on it again - however naff it seems.
And so my first 15-minute project is the Tragic 8-Ball. Run it, drag it to randomize things, middle or right click to close it.
I think the concept should be that you’re learning a new thing on every project. Here I suppose I’m demonstrating shaped windows in Windows Forms. Forget about TDD, forget about good design, just imagine you’re one of those lucky MSDN events people who gets to demo the drag and drop features of Visual Studio as if you’ll use them in real life. It’s fun!
Categories: C# · Code · Programming
Tagged: C#, win forms
Clippings