Diamond Maze on Tempermanent Hold

So, the new XNA Diamond Maze is checked into SVN, but now entering tempermanent hold status.

The word tempermanent is one of my pet words, like complexibility. In the case of tempermanent, it means “something that is meant to be ‘temporary’ but will in all likelihood become ‘permanent'”, which is kind of like income tax and the tolls on the freeway in Chicago.

But! The code is there if I should ever want to pick it back up.

Speaking of backing up, I am still missing a crucial step in my backup scheme. Yes, I have a repository on my external HD, and I keep my stuff checked in. If my computer takes a dive, and the external HD doesn’t I’m good. If the external HD takes a dive, and my computer is fine, I’ve got the local copy I can revert to, and make a new repo on a new external HD.

But! If both fail, then what?

The Final Cut (for now)

After a final tweak (namely switching which color shows up if you decide not to differently color dead ends), I have decided to be DONE with Connect!

http://www.playdeez.com/JSConnect.html

Enjoy.

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What’s next?

Well, I’ll have a new computer in about a week, and it’ll have a XNA able video card, it’ll run Vista(so I can make a gadget), and it’ll be able to run WinterMute in something other than super slow software mode.

And all of my source code is now safely tucked away on the external HD in an SVN repository, so it is a simple matter of plugging it into the new machine and installing a handful of things.

I still haven’t gotten sick of javascript programming, and  I’ve progressed beyond my initial primitive usage of the DOM (as can be found in Pipes!) into a more “sophisticated” usage of a handful of rather versatile HTML elements with some heavy manipulation of styles.  At this point, I use <div> <img> <input> <button> <p> <a> and occasionally <span>, and I’m just not seeing a need to use others at this point.

New Backup Scheme and Other Tales

The title of the post may be a little misleading, as a “new” backup scheme implies that I had an “old” backup scheme, and I didn’t.  Yes, shame on me.

Yesterday, I got an external 160GB USB hard drive, and have since migrated my SVN Repository to it.

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Today I was working on Connect!, especially the main menu and now the sub menus (the new game menu for instance).  When I was first putting together the main menu, I made images for each button’s up, down, disabled, and hover states. With 7 buttons, that’s 28 images.  I then changed one button today, and it was rather a pain to do, so at this time I am making a decision to switch from image based buttons on the menu screens to <button> tags.  Yes, to a degree I lose the consistent look and feel across browsers, but I do still have the ability to manipulate styles.

I will be leaving the imagebuttons on the navigator, however.  Mostly because they are “done”.

SVN Repository

I started putting together an SVN repository on my computer.

It turns out that I’ve got a bunch of stuff that could really be dusted off and shown.

It also turns out that I’ve started a port of Space Trader more times that I thought, to as almost as many different platforms as I have ever worked on.

The purpose of my Repository is, of course, to make it easy to backup in one place, as I figure I’ll be getting a new computer in about a year.

But also, it’d be nice to be able to version control my stuff.  Plenty of times I’ve wished I could go back to a version just a few hours before.  This way I’ll be able to.

I’ve also had a chance to clean out the stuff I really don’t need (like the aforementioned stubs of space trader).

So, yeah! I’m tired of losing stuff, and tired of rewriting stuff I don’t need to. I’ve generated lots and lots of code over the years, so it is time to reap the benefit.