The Quixotic Engineer

December is a busy time of year. Busy cramming for the exams next week? Caught up in the holiday rush? Either way, you’re probably online looking for an excuse to procrastinate for another hour or so. Here’s some recommended reading to help you do just that.

First up is an article over at CGSociety about the visual design of Team Fortress 2. I’ve geeked out more than once about how much I love this particular aspect of the game, but reading this article has given me a new found respect for the team of animators at Valve. Among the piles of great concept art (including an early build of the Heavy with a mullet), the article explores how well-designed characters and maps can enhance the gameplay experience. Consider the following excerpt:

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…and that concludes a very busy four day programming marathon. The final project for my Databases class involved creating a database and web interface for a hospital. We were a five person group, and I was responsible for designing the interface for the doctors, nurses and residents. Elaine wrote the interface for Administrators and Directors, Sven and Fadhl were in charge of the MySQL database and Alex used Dreamweaver to make a great looking site.

All in all this was a great learning experience. Fortunately for me, Elaine was quite familiar with PHP/Javascript and sent me over lots of code that I could use as a template for my own work. I was already familiar with Perl and Html, so PHP wasn’t especially foreign. I managed to write ~18 interactive pages that allowed doctors to view their patient list, add/modify/delete patients, view their schedules and paystubs, etc.

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This winter I took a course called System Software. In it, we learned a neat programming language called Perl. Perl was handy for that class because it happens to be very good at parsing text, and we used it to write a simple compiler. Being the pragmatic kind of person that I am, I immediately began to think of ways to use this new found skill, and the opportunity arose in a rather roundabout way.

You see, I have what I’d describe as a fairly large collection of music (roughly 18.6 days worth according to iTunes). This sometimes causes problems when I’m out shopping for CDs and I can’t quite recall which ones I already own. iTunes is able to export a list of your music as an XML document, but you end up with a large unwieldy file with roughly 15 lines per song.

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