I’ve been pretty busy with programming projects for school lately, and I thought I would share them. They are nothing to fancy, just something to play with and look at. The first program is a CAD style program, it allows you to draw different specified objects, move them, change colors, etc… It was to practice GUI and Inheritance in Java. The second program is a simple OpenGL program that displays a textured rectangle on the screen and moves it around using a sine function. It will grow if you right-click it, and shrink if you left-click it.

The source is included with the OpenGL program, but if you are interested in the source for the CAD program, contact me. Both programs are pictured below, CAD program on the left, and OpenGL on the right. By the way, the quote in the title is from my professor that teaches both my programming classes. He’s an awesome teacher.

A couple weeks ago I got the opportunity (finally) to play the new Battlefield game’s demo, BF:2142. It is created with the same engine as its predecessor, and is an OK game. BF2 has, for some unknown reason, progressively run slower and slower on my computer. And I seem to not be alone by checking some of the Battlefield forums occasionally. 2142 also runs fairly slow on medium-low graphic settings… Needless to say, I am disappointed. Mostly, because the game runs like crap-o-la on my machine, and it probably shouldn’t.

Some have griped that 2142 is merely a large “mod” for BF2, which is I suppose, a valid argument. Hopefully some of the bugs from BF2 will be gone, but I would have really liked to see this game in a different light than what it has shown so far. I will have to say, I have no idea why a company would push a demo of a product the way they did. The two days that I got on to play the demo, the master server probably kicked me 8 times. Not to mention, 3 times it took over 5 minutes to login or time-out. If the demo is supposed to represent the final game, I sure as hell wouldn’t buy it, but Alex says that the game is better than how the demo played… Sometimes it feels like good games are just too few and far between.

So just browsing digg, and found an interesting article about a fellow Ubuntu user.

“After a rather fine night out on the town, I came home in a rather inebriated state. Put the live disc in, and recklessly choose to install Ubuntu, and did so by wiping the entire hard drive (previously XP). This sort of switch has sortof thrown me in at the deep end, but I have no regrets and has to be one of the best drunken decisions I have ever taken…”

Ubuntu: It’s so easy to install, you can do it when you’re three sheets to the wind. Just goes to show how easy the install for Ubuntu really is.

On a completely different note, there’s a browser based MMO, called Travian, that I’ve been playing, and its pretty dang cool. Maybe some of you remember playing “Kings of Chaos” and “Dark Throne”, well this game is similar, but it beats the pants off of both of them. It’s a good way to be able to passively game, while not spending more than an 15 minutes to an half-hour a day playing. Of course you could play it more, but there is only so much you can do at the “passive pace” the game plays at. If you do decide to play, I’m on Server 2 in the South-East area.