I’m now back in Newcastle until Christmas. Lectures have started and I seem to have been given the shit timetable, with 9AM starts every day of the week (very unlikely to happen).

On the plus-side, one of the modules is all about SQL, specifically MySQL which gives me a huge boost considering the number of hours/databases I’ve worked with in the past few years. Some other topics include more Java (oh, joy) programming, hopefully some C and a ‘team project’. This is going to be a killer.

For this team project we are given some kind of software application to build. Knowing the Computer Science staff the application will be something uninteresting and dull, but I still remain hopeful. We won’t be told for another two weeks. The second problem with this team project is that the teams will (most likely) be randomly assigned. The assumption is that we’re all at the same level with each aspect of the course/project, which is bullshit.

The supposed aim of the module is to help us learn how to develop in a working environment. I sure as hell hope I never have to work in a team where meetings are ‘formal’, as in they have minutes and an agenda. Maybe this works in a dull business meeting where numbers are the topic of discussion, but in a development environment you want more open discussions than meeting, where you can bounce ideas of one another.

So it’s looking like another year of nothing-like-real-life computer science.

It’s been a busy day today; I got back from America yesterday and so as planned I put both my micro-PHP framework & PK Russet online. Both are on my github. PK Russet is currently only playable once I (manually, via phpmyadmin!) change the user rank to alpha-tester level.

FD-Core is the more important release, it’s what I use to power my OpenID/FB connect web-apps. I personally believe 99% of apps should be created with OpenID/FB connect as a base; I hate having multiple logins, especially for things such as forums. Why there isn’t a PHP framework focused around this yet puzzles me. I threw together some documentation, except I only got through a few classes before getting bored, check it out here.

Now that I’m riding a new design I can post more than one at once! Obligatory star-wars dump (they’ve all been collecting dust on my hard drive for way too long):

…time for a re-design. I’ll release the old thing too.

http://pkrusset.com/

It’s about time I coded something for fun, so here we go a long lost dream of a game. Having never played any of the official games properly, I’m more interested in the style and function of the games. I’ve no idea why Nintendo/GameFreak haven’t built their own, because there’s potential here. And the current ones aren’t exactly inspiring.

• full screen, large scale maps
• battles as original, effects and all, at 4x size
• basic stats/etc as close to original, and hopefully battle mechanisms
• most likely less detail (we’re dealing with a game where people drop in/out at random, for short periods of time, unlike the originals)
• built for fun on a web-time scale, but hopefully with longevity and an endgame