I’m getting to grips with Java and just did a quick Google search to find out how to get a Unix timestamp. Please, bear witness to what happens when you go too far back when explaining something.

“Time is a physical property. For Physicists it is a dimension tightly coupled with space (spacetime). Time as a physical property (or dimension) passes uniformly.”

Yeah, I just need that timestamp example…

“We simply can’t define how fast time passes - we live inside of it. Just like a piece of driftwood in a river is unable to change its speed relative to the current we can not change our speed within time.”

I had to scroll to back up to ensure that, yes, this page really is entitled “Date and time in Java”. I feel like Brian Cox is explaining Java to me.

You know what’s very quick and simple to install? Not this:

I can have MySQL running in about 10 minutes from a standing start. SQL Server 2008 Express Edition, on the other hand, can’t even open it’s manager without having a “this might take a few minutes” box pop up. And I’ve been bumping heads with the installer for two hours now (how can I just install the manager without installing everything? Joke’s on you, it’s impossible). It’s all installed, finally, but the components aren’t talking to each other.

GRUMPY.

I may be the last software developer in the world to realise that you can pronounce ‘===’ as ‘threequals’.

But what about ‘==’?

Over the long weekend, I decided to have a stab at programming an Xbox 360. Don’t judge me, this is what I do with spare time.

I’ve never thought I’m particularly great at programming. However much I know, there’s always more to learn. A few years ago, I passed a tipping point where the new stuff began to get easier to take in, and I began to feel like there wasn’t anything that I couldn’t eventually figure out.

I’ve been doing web development during those last few years, and it has pushed out all the other things I used to play with. I used to make 3d games - well, 3d games engines that did nice stuff, but weren’t actually games. If I knew how to make compelling games, I’d probably have turned them into games. But since it was kind of a dead-end hobby, I spent less time on it.

Enter the Xbox 360, with it’s XNA development environment. It’s a huge step up from the environment I used for 3d stuff before, which was the humble but versatile Blitz3D. I’m getting that feeling of being a beginner all over again.

I forgot how bad I was at maths, and forgot how much of it was needed for 3d programming. In the past four days, I’ve shovelled all sorts of knowledge into my brain. I knew what Matrices were, but not how they pertained to 3d graphics. Well, now I do. Quaternions. Ever heard of those? Me neither. Until now. Changing the colour of something now takes about 10 lines, where it used to take just one in Blitz3D. I don’t position objects in 3d space anymore, I apply translation and rotation matrices to them.

It’s scary stuff, so why persevere? A few reasons:

1) If I want to keep programming in 3D, the already aged Blitz3D simple won’t be around forever. XNA is, for now, current, and regularly updated.

2) I don’t want it to beat me. If I can figure this out, then I’ll have a foot in the door.

3) C# is a really nice language. Blitz3D was great, you could do anything in it, but it’s like programming with boxing gloves on sometimes.

4) If I ever finish something (which I can guarantee I won’t), Microsoft allow developers to upload their game onto an area of the Xbox Dashboard, under “Indie Games” for the entire world to see and downlaod for their Xbox. I’ve always wanted to write something for a games console, so XNA offers quite a nice carrot in this respect. It also offers a giant stick labelled with things I don’t understand, and beats me with it.

Finally, I’m actually making progress. In just a few hours, I had something moving around and controlled by an Xbox360 gamepad. Considering I’d never programmed anything in C# before, or used the XNA framework, that’s kind of a testament to just how good a development environment it is, and that’s seriously encouraging.