Day 116: Line10k

I finished my compulsory two hours of work today two lines of code short of 10,000, so I went on to work for another two hours. If you look at the summary to the right, you'll note that in that two hours, I wrote a whopping 10 lines of code. This was because there were tons of bugs and it required a lot of subtle fixes that were also wrong.

All four hours were spent on #125, the ticket to put in saner text editors. As it was before, you could only change the last bit of anything you were typing. So if you'd made a typo a paragraph earlier and just now noticed it, you'd have to delete your way to it, fix it, and then re-type everything.

Today marks the second time I've had to sit down and do some work on paper. It initially seemed easy to figure out where a cursor should be drawn; I was iterating through each line of the input, adding the size of that line to a running total, which I would then compare to the caret's position. This was error prone and hard to tune.

Then, after writing down an example, I figured out that I could determine which row of the input the caret was on by counting the number of newlines before it.

Later, I kept getting these strange off-by-one errors. I'd been thinking that the caret - an index pointing to where in the original string any changes will be made - was off from the displayed string because the display had extra newlines put in there from word wrapping. It wasn't until I wrote down a sample situation that I realized the extra newlines were replacing spaces (because that's where the words would wrap) and my intricate correction code was causing the off-by-one problems.

Additionally, because I want 'home' and 'end' to be valid text editing keys, I had to change the "emergency end the program" key away from 'end'. It's the backslash now. I accidentally ended the program twice today anyway.

For those interested, the 10,000th line of code is:

      <child name='flags'/>

Day 85

Programming Tip of the Day: If your sprite isn't rendering, try actually adding it to the screen!

I got a new server yesterday to replace the one that used to house my trac and SVN repository. I installed Ubuntu on it and tried to upgrade, only to find that this is taking forever. Turns out a new version came out mere hours before my server arrived. Not only was the install I had out of date, but due to everyone hammering the servers, it'll take forever to get up to date!

This gave me extra time to think about the blog post I made. I sat down with an actual honest-to-gods pen and paper and drew what I wanted the mission editor to look like. Then I was like "Hey, I can do that! And it'd be hugely useful to other objects, too!"

Thus, I introduce #117: THE MINIBUILDER!

As terrifyingly powerful as the old build dialog, but bite-sized!

All the functionality isn't there yet. I was halfway through writing up the subclass that would deal specifically with adding/removing weapons from ships (they have special methods to do this) when I thought to myself: Haven't I done this before?

Yes, I have. I made special subclasses of the old builder to handle weapons for ships... and cargo for ships... and addons for ships. The way ships handle them is different from the way planets handle them is different from the way that you'd just throw them in a list. Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, to have a unified API and then just adapt anything that doesn't conform to it?

Thus I created an Adapter class! It has an 'add_item', a remove_item, an 'items', and a 'constraint' (the type that goes into the list). I only have to write a 'Adding weapons to ships' subclass once instead of for every GUI element that does so. How useful, I thought! Then I went online to make sure I was spelling the word 'Adapter' correctly and discovered that my invention already exists and is a pattern. I still felt proud, having independently discovered it.

My server is currently formatting a 500GB disk whose reliability has been called into question. Thus I'm formatting it with the most slow and careful of bad-block checks. I do not recommend this unless you have a great deal of time on your hands, it's taken nearly 24 hours now. Still, if the disk is dodgy, this will find out. And if this doesn't break it, nothing will.