Design outside the box
These have been the best 28 minutes of my week. The following video has Jesse Schell (a CMU professor, game designer and imagineer) take us through games as they are today and as he envisions them tomorrow, where the entire world will be a potentially huge RPG. This trip is a bit about technology, but a lot more about psychology, sociology, economics and business, so I think it’s a must-see for everyone. Enjoy!
The path from being able to program, to learning how to program
I found this post to be wonderfully insightful. Enjoy!
Using Facebook feeds to advertise your new blog posts
I’ve been wanting to do this for a week or so, but only now got a minute to look it up. It’s actually really simple. Here are two different websites that explain how to do it:
Text&Images:
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/22/how-to-import-your-blog-into-facebook/
Video tutorial:
http://everything.typepad.com/blog/2009/01/how-to-add-your-blog-feed-to-your-facebook-profile.html
It seems to work, the only disadvantage I see so far being that the link to your actual blog doesn’t seem to show up in the notes. I guess you could fix this somehow, but I haven’t looked at it yet.
Debugging C with print statements
This is the most basic tip I can give all students that have to start working in C. Use: fflush(stdout);
If your program crashes, the output stream just gets dumped instead of well.. outputted. So then, even if you use printf statements to figure out where your program crashed, the last print statement you see might not be the last one that was executed. BUT, if you put fflush(stdout) after your debug prints, then they will be immediately shown, so you know what’s going on. That simple!
Windows makes me flip… again
So here’s me, in my office, deciding to actually step up to the greatest challenge of my day: print stuff. My office connection is a simple network connection, no domain as far as I can tell and at some far end of the network there’s a printer.
Long story short, I tried everything for connecting to that printer. Tried adding a network printer by its address, hostname and a lot of silly attempts that probably made no sense. Tried installing it’s drivers from the CD. I tried everything I could think of for more than 30 minutes. Nothing worked. So then, I googled my problem and after a few minutes this is what I found:
http://uis.georgetown.edu/software/documentation/winxp/winxp.network.printer.html
You will probably be as amazed as I was to read how – in order to connect to a NETWORK PRINTER – you need to use the option “Local printer attached to this computer” not “A network printer..” as, well, you would think. I know, mind-blowing isn’t it? I thought it was a joke, even Windows can’t be that wrong!! But no…
It actually worked. So here’s to MS for creating an OS that makes every simple task an adventure. Great job guys!
