3 Jan 2012 fzort   » (Journeyer)

It's been a while. Oh crap, is it really 2012 already?

So what have I been up to?

I've been wasting investing a ridiculous amount of time trying to learn Japanese. It's a nutso language, especially the writing system. Seriously. And I used to think that English was weird. Being able to read, say, a sci-fi novel written in Japanese without a dictionary is looking more and more like a pipe dream. I should have gone with, say, Mandarin instead, which looks a lot more sane (and more useful these days). Anyway, along the way I wrote a couple of programs to help (?) me with my learning (??).

The first one (which I still use every day) was a flash card program to practice vocabulary and kanji. That one's not too interesting.

Then I wrote a Missile Command clone to practice kanji. Here's a YouTube video. And here's the code.

Then I wrote a typespeed clone with kanji. (YouTube video. Code.)

Then I wanted to try out Android programming and started to write a Tetris clone with kanji. (YouTube video. Code.) Yes, of course I'm not using Java. Java, as we all know, sucks. There's a tiny Java wrapper but most of the code is under the jni/ directory, and I can compile a stand-alone Linux version with SDL/OpenGL.

I started to use C++ for my personal coding, which is a lot more fun than C. Unfortunately my C++ code has yuck-inducing raw pointers all over the place (oh hi ncm).

This concludes our blogging for the year of 2012. Thank you, you've been a lovely audience.

(Actually, I have a Japanese-language blog somewhere else but I'm not telling you where it is! Muhahah!)

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