Archive for the ‘Code’ Category

It has begun…

Saturday, June 27th, 2009
World Map

World Map

More soon…

Posted in .NET, Projects, RPG | No Comments »

MonoDevelop 2.0 released

Monday, March 30th, 2009

Just a quick note to say that the MonoDevelop has released it’s second version. Go download it and check out what’s new.

Mac OS X users still have to wait for the native build to be online, which will be what my next post is based about :)

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Posted in .NET, Projects | No Comments »

Learning a new programming language

Friday, July 4th, 2008

It’s common sense in the programming circle that programmers should make an effort to learn a new language every year. Some make it their New Year’s resolution, some just do it for the fun of it, others do it to enrich their experience and their CV. So, today, I decided to grab a new language and stick with it until I MASTER the damn thing. I only had a requirement before choosing it: it had to be fun!

So, what language did I choose? None other than LOLCode.

I know what’s going through your mind now. “Why the eff is this guy even thinking about learning a new language?”, “useless”, or even “OH HAY I CAN HAS CODEZ?”. There’s a reason for that.

I tend to browse lolcats whenever I need a bit of extra motivation, romance, feeding or even inspiration. So, whenever I look at bits of code that read:

  1. HAI
  2. CAN HAS STDIO?
  3. VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
  4. KTHXBYE

or even

  1. ON CATURDAY
  2.  IM IN YR BED
  3.   I IZ SLEEPIN!!10
  4.   VISIBLE "Z!"
  5.  KTHX
  6. KTHXBYE

I can’t stop thinking that it’s PURE GENIUS (right before bursting into tears of laughing so hard). So, for starters, I’m going to try to understand a Brainfuck compiler written in LOLCode. Want to tag along? ;)

Found at http://forum.lolcode.com/viewtopic.php?id=51
  1. HAI
  2. BTW This is a BrainFuck interpreter written in LOLCode
  3. BTW It accepts as input a BF program, followed by a "!", followed  by any input to the BF program.
  4. BTW Since BrainFuck is turing-complete, this proves that LOLCode is too
  5.  
  6. I HAS A INSTRUCTIONS    BTW Array for BF instructions
  7. I HAS A IPTR            BTW Pointer to first empty element in INSTRUCTIONS
  8. IPTR R 0
  9. I HAS A LOOPZ            BTW Array of loop start/end addresses
  10. I HAS A LOOPSTACKZ        BTW Loop stack for building the above two
  11. I HAS A LSPTR            BTW Pointer to first empty element of LOOPSTACKZ
  12. LSPTR R 0
  13.  
  14. BTW Read in BF instructions, terminated with "!"
  15. IM IN YR CODE
  16.   GIMMEH IPTR IN MAH INSTRUCTIONS
  17.  
  18.   BOTH SAEM IPTR IN MAH INSTRUCTIONS AN "[", O RLY?
  19.     YA RLY
  20.       LSPTR IN MAH LOOPSTACKZ R IPTR
  21.       LSPTR R SUM OF LSPTR AN 1
  22.   OIC
  23.  
  24.   BOTH SAEM IPTR IN MAH INSTRUCTIONS AN "]", O RLY?
  25.     YA RLY
  26.       I HAS A STARTPTR
  27.       LSPTR R DIFF OF LSPTR AN 1
  28.       STARTPTR R LSPTR IN MAH LOOPSTACKZ
  29.       STARTPTR IN MAH LOOPZ R IPTR
  30.       IPTR IN MAH LOOPZ R STARTPTR
  31.   OIC
  32.  
  33.   BOTH SAEM IPTR IN MAH INSTRUCTIONS AN "!", O RLY?
  34.     YA RLY
  35.       GTFO
  36.     NO WAI
  37.       IPTR R SUM OF IPTR AN 1
  38.   OIC
  39. IM OUTTA YR CODE
  40.  
  41. BTW Variables for BF's tape
  42. I HAS A LTAPE
  43. I HAS A RTAPE
  44. I HAS A LPTR
  45. LPTR R 0
  46. I HAS A RPTR
  47. RPTR R 0
  48. I HAS A CELL
  49. CELL R 0
  50.  
  51. BTW Reset instruction pointer to start
  52. IPTR R 0
  53.  
  54. BTW Start interpreting
  55. IM IN YR LOOP
  56.   I HAS A THING
  57.   THING R IPTR IN MAH INSTRUCTIONS
  58.  
  59.   BTW Move tape head right
  60.   BOTH SAEM THING AN ">", O RLY?
  61.     YA RLY
  62.       LPTR IN MAH LTAPE R CELL
  63.       LPTR R SUM OF LPTR AN 1
  64.       BOTH SAEM RPTR AN 0, O RLY?
  65.         YA RLY
  66.           CELL R 0
  67.         NO WAI
  68.           RPTR R DIFF OF RPTR AN 1
  69.           CELL R RPTR IN MAH RTAPE
  70.       OIC
  71.   OIC
  72.  
  73.   BTW Move tape head left
  74.   BOTH SAEM THING AN "<", O RLY?
  75.     YA RLY
  76.       RPTR IN MAH RTAPE R CELL
  77.       RPTR R SUM OF RPTR AN 1
  78.       BOTH SAEM LPTR AN 0, O RLY?
  79.         YA RLY
  80.           CELL R 0
  81.         NO WAI
  82.           LPTR R DIFF OF LPTR AN 1
  83.           CELL R LPTR IN MAH LTAPE
  84.       OIC
  85.   OIC
  86.  
  87.   BTW Increment
  88.   BOTH SAEM THING AN "+", O RLY?
  89.     YA RLY
  90.       CELL R SUM OF CELL AN 1
  91.   OIC
  92.  
  93.   BTW Decrement
  94.   BOTH SAEM THING AN "-", O RLY?
  95.     YA RLY
  96.       CELL R DIFF OF CELL AN 1
  97.   OIC
  98.  
  99.   BTW Output produces numbers instead of ASCII characters
  100.   BOTH SAEM THING AN ".", O RLY?
  101.     YA RLY
  102.       VISIBLE CELL!
  103.       VISIBLE " "!
  104.   OIC
  105.  
  106.   BTW Input doesn't work because we can't convert characters to integers
  107.   BTW Oh well, it doesn't stop it being turing complete
  108.  
  109.   BTW Start of loop
  110.   BOTH OF BOTH SAEM THING AN "[" AN BOTH SAEM CELL AN 0, O RLY?
  111.     YA RLY
  112.       IPTR R IPTR IN MAH LOOPZ
  113.   OIC
  114.  
  115.   BTW End of loop
  116.   BOTH OF BOTH SAEM THING AN "]" AN DIFFRINT CELL AN 0, O RLY?
  117.     YA RLY
  118.       IPTR R IPTR IN MAH LOOPZ
  119.   OIC
  120.  
  121.   BTW End of program!
  122.   BOTH SAEM THING AN "!", O RLY?
  123.     YA RLY
  124.       GTFO
  125.   OIC
  126.  
  127.   IPTR R SUM OF IPTR AN 1
  128. IM OUTTA YR LOOP
  129. KTHXBYE

Fun times await.

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Posted in Code | 2 Comments »

How to build your on-demand video site with PHP

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Browsing DZone today I found an interesting article from IBM’s developerWorks site, which supposedly teaches you how to build an on-demand video site with CakePHP.

My first thought was that, being Belacena built with the same technology, I could learn one thing or two and make it run 10x as fast (OK, maybe not, but you get the point). So, I signed in (AKA got a user and password from BugMeNot), and started reading part 2 (part 1 covers the basics about video optimization for the web, creating the database tables, and extracting CakePHP). Let’s just say I was disappointed, because I have big expectations on everything that comes from IBM.

So, in sum, their 3 part tutorial teaches how to scaffold in CakePHP, tweak the views a bit, and that’s pretty much it. You can see the resulting site here. If you feel that article is worth reading, you can start here.

If you have any suggestions on more advanced topics, let me know, and I’ll consider writing about it.

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Posted in PHP, Rants | No Comments »

Rails, migrations and validations

Friday, May 9th, 2008

Well, it was a busy day for me in Ruby on Rails land. After picking up on a few new requirements for a project I’m working on (Agile Development rocks eh?), I’ve decided to refactor a lot of the existing codebase to make it a bit cleaner and, while I was at it, migrate the project to Rails 2. It wasn’t hard or very time consuming, thanks to Ben’s tips, since it took me about 20 minutes to go through the offending lines.

One of the things I was able to extract from that refactoring was validations. Some models have to validate data that can’t be validated by a simple regular expression, and since these validations are specific in Portugal, I thought I’d share them with the portuguese Ruby on Rails developers. You can grab them following the link in the end of the post. After dropping the file on your project’s lib folder, all you have to do is add the following line to your environment.rb file:

RAILS_ROOT/config/environment.rb
  1. require 'validations'

And you’ll be ready to go. Documentation is included in the file (in Portuguese). Feedback is appreciated.

Download ActiveRecord validators for Portugal

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Posted in Projects, Ruby | No Comments »