It’s been an interesting and exciting first month, settling into life in Brighton and working at Zoë Mode. I’m working on a cross-platform title for Wii and PS2 which has a small team and a short development cycle. In some ways this is nice, and close to what I’ve been used to during my time at Virtual Playground, but there are some very definite differences! The most dramatic of these is probably the experience of working for console rather than PC. I’d never appreciated just how limited these machines are, especially with regard to memory. That and the lack of an operating system make for quite a different coding experience.
It’s nice though; fun. You get the feeling you’re much more “close to the metal”, and you have to be much more aware of the machine’s resources.
Of course, the other major thing that’s happened is Christmas and New Year. This year – or I should say last year, on December 31st – I went to Oxford Services for the annual Oxford Services New Years Eve celebrations! Started a few years ago by Dave Shearn, this small gathering of friends grew this year to include 59 attendees (and a puppet). Shearn’s dream is that at least once every year we will have the opportunity to see all of our friends. It’s a lovely idea, and our Welcome Break certainly made for a great way to round off the year. I saw some old friends, and I met some new ones – whom I look forward to seeing again next year at Oxford Services.
I did make one New Year’s Resolution this year, though I only thought to make it on the 4th, and that involved keeping closer track of my money. That doesn’t necessarily mean spending less, I should note, just being more aware of where my spending tends to fall, and perhaps using that awareness to redirect it toward more productive endeavours. With this in mind I’ve installed GnuCash, and I’ve been playing with it the past few days. It’s a reasonably nice piece of software – while not as powerful as the tool my mother uses, Quickbooks, or other tools such as Quicken or Microsoft Money, it seems to suit my purposes quite well. Since my desktop broke I’ve been using my laptop most of the time, on which my primary OS is Ubuntu Linux, so those packages weren’t really an option anyway.
As a result of all this, I’ve found that managing ones personal finances is not unlike playing a Resource Management Game such as SimCity. This makes perfect sense, of course, since these games are designed to simulate real-world economics – nevertheless, I hadn’t quite looked at it that way before. It’s really quite rewarding manipulating my budget to accommodate different things, and trying to improve my high score offers the real-world benefit of also increasing my wealth!
The only rather annoying thing about GnuCash is its reports system. If you want to define a new report other than those templates that come with the application, you have to write a script to generate it in Scheme. This is not a trivial task; one of the sample reports weighs in at 521 lines – and Lisp-variants are supposed to be eloquent! On the bright side, the reports that come with GnuCash are really very good, but I do occasionally come across functionality that would be easy to implement were I using a spreadsheet, but which are a pain to try and wedge into GnuCash. Maybe I’ll come up with some solutions as I get more use out of the program in the coming months, but either way it’s a nice piece of software.
The other thing I spent my Christmas break doing was helping my Dad with his website. This got me back into web design, or rather, programming for websites. I was using Zen-Cart, which is written in PHP, but what I really want to learn now is Ruby. It’s cool, glamorous, and everyone’s using it, which are rubbish reasons – but hey, it’s a hobby. It does look really nice though! I particularly like its stance on typing – duck typing is an idea I’ve been growing to like more and more recently without having heard the expression, since it’s essentially what C++ offers through templates, though C++ does it with a lot less style. I’m really intrigued to see how Ruby feels to use, since it was designed with this style of programming in mind. At the same time, I would feel a lot less safe doing this sort of thing within an interpreted environment. One thing I love about templates is that they are a compile-time flexible typing mechanism.
We’ll see how it goes…
One Response to “New everything”
“I’ve found that managing ones personal finances is not unlike playing a Resource Management Game such as SimCity. This makes perfect sense, of course, since these games are designed to simulate real-world economics – nevertheless, I hadn’t quite looked at it that way before.”
I’ve seen it this way for as long as I can remember handling money, and I blame Theme Park.