Uni Blog Week 06 Last updated: 16 minutes ago Intro Happy ...

2026-10-17T03:00:12Z

Uni Blog Week 06

Last updated: 16 minutes ago
Intro
Happy Canadian Thanksgiving! No classes on Monday, meaning half my course load is gone this week.
Project Management (Monday Morning)
Lecture
No Lecture. Canadian Thanksgiving day.
Assignments
We finally got the whole group together. We all agreed with the idea to build a parkade. We have submitted the idea to the professor and are currently waiting on a response.
We got approval to do the parkade idea, and I got nominated to do the website. So today I setup a VM, DNS routing, nginx routing, and started doing mocks of the website. Going to use the University's web theming (so I don't have to think as much) for consistency. If you want to check that out, it can be found at CIS385 Website but its only going to be up for as long as it is required.
Converted the wireframing over to html and css today. So now we have something actually showing at that website. But now I am waiting for the rest of the group to do the research and feed me data.
Omg, I hate working with groups. The group members seem nice enough, but the one person is trying to share a folder using a personal Onedrive instead of the school Onedrive, so naturally I cant get access to it because Microslop is the absolute worst at gating off sections of itself. The groupie should have used her University account Onedrive to make and share a folder. I don't want to correct her because the other group members can get into the folder. So obviously I am the asshole.
Operating Systems (Monday Afternoon)
Lecture
No Lecture. Canadian Thanksgiving day.
Assignments
The professor has assigned a new assignment. This one is all about CPU scheduling algorithms. First Come First Serve, Short Job First, Multi Queue, Round Robin, Priority. This was a test of brain power. He had us doing average wait times and average throughput of 4 processes over the different algorithms using Gantt charts. It was actually a good time.
Data Communications (Tuesday Afternoon)
Lecture
Did two quizzes right at the beginning of the session. Going over code words and bitwise XORing. I'm going to need to cover this on my own later because this is not making sense right now. This professor is not good at teaching. I wound up doing the wireframing for the project management project while he lectured. That was nice and productive.
Assignments
Has assigned a new assignment out of the textbook. More good times. Questions are from chapter 3.
Project
Finally approved my request to use eBPF as my project material. I am looking forward to it. I believe that I can use this to learn more about C programming, Operating Systems, and Networking. I don't know if I will start working on this this week though. Got a lot of other things in the air at the moment and 4 midterms coming up fast.
Extreme Programming (Thursday Afternoon)
Lecture
This is supposed to be a midterm review lecture.
Assignments
A small lab today, doing the same thing as the entire semester so far. Mapreduce a set of "web server logs" this time though she put in some data errors that we had to identify and handle. She also asked us to make different mappers from the same data. So that was neat and its nice to finally see a bit of variation on this course. Next week is midterm for this course and it sounds like it will be super easy, basically study the assignments.
Personal Stuff
This week I have been playing Final Fantasy 3 & 10. I have been reading Carmilla, and Between the Two Fires.
I have been programming a platforming game in C and raylib. It's been interesting to see how that evolves, I put no forward planning into this one. I made a movement bug where you can only see your character when you move, but I think I am going to make it a core gameplay feature and use it as a defense mechanism.
I have been planning programming projects for an RPG called Midnight March, as well as a process monitoring app called Vassago Core. Midnight March is going to be sort of a mix of Bloodbourne and lovecraftian mental torture where three hunters have to take an item to a church to save the world. It'll be a small game, only a few hours at best, and it will have horizontal progression instead of levelling and stats. Meanwhile Vassago Core is going to be a system daemon with a gui that constantly runs on Linux system to monitor system processes and resources but where this differs from all the rest is that it will store historical data for diagnostics and it will always be running as system daemon.
Also, just before posting this I got an email to troubleshoot a lagging webserver. So far I have pruned the database and reduced the incoming data from the Python API. Which has helped. But there is a weird 50s lag spike on server processing every 20 seconds. I am still trying to diagnose that though. There are two wordpress sites on this one server and only one of the two sites is exhibiting the issue. Kind of weird.
Conclusion
I spent so much of this week programming and studying for midterms and just trying to stay on top of all the projects that I have on the go right now. I added a section to the blog for personal things that I have been working on each week because there is a lot, and once uni is done maybe I'll continue on with personal updates and / or work updates. Who knows. See you next week!
References
Ubuntu Server for the project website VM
GoDaddy For custom dns routing for the project VM routing
Tailscale For some easier networking and ssh'ing into new VM
If you want me to elaborate on anything, please message me on Discord, Mastodon, X, or email me. I’ll be happy to go into more detail one-on-one or to create more posts.

https://blog.alderautomation.ca/uni-blog-week-06/

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Pong in Retrospect Last updated: 4 days, 5 hours ago Code: Pong ...

2026-10-16T02:43:28Z

Pong in Retrospect

Last updated: 4 days, 5 hours ago
Code: Pong on Github
Playable: Pong on Itch.io
Intro & Intentions
I recently made a Pong game in C with Raylib. Recently, as in, I just published it a few hours prior to starting to write this post. I guess one could say that this is my post mortem review of that experience.
I decided to make this game to better learn and understand C and game design. I intended to complete it but I never intended to release it or make a big deal out of it. For instance the code is a mess and needs to be refactored, and programming paradigms were not followed well; this was just a learning project. After having finished it though, it does feel like a big deal and I am going to make a thing out of it.
Tooling decisions
First I had to figure out what programming language I was going to use for this project. I had originally been planning to do this in C++ and SFML because that has been my go to programming language and renderer lately. However, I am taking a university course this semester where they are teaching C, so I decided I should be doing this in C to get the extra practice.
Next, I had to figure out what renderer to use. In my research, what I found was that I could still use SFML with C but a project called Raylib was much better and easier. I have been struggling with the complexity of SFML, not that its overly hard, but there is enough friction that it's been bothersome.
I got Raylib installed and I have to say that while it does lack nice tutorials it was a hell of a lot easier to install and configure compared to SFML. On Fedora, installing Raylib is as simple as:
sudo dnf install raylibdevel
And in the C program:
#include <raylib.h>
Other tooling was fairly straight forward; Neovim editor, Git, Gitea, signboard, terminal, Firefox, Enscripton, and Itch.io.
NOTE ON AI: I don't know if I have said this before or not:
I do NOT use ai to write code. All my coding is done by hand.
I do use AI to get information faster than search engines.
I also use AI to do the things that I can not do, such as art assets, music assets, sound effects, etc.
Programming
C doesn't have classes or any form of object oriented programming. I have only ever done OOP or scripting, so stepping into C with no classes was really weird at first. My ball and my paddles became data structs which held all my data. They each went into their own .c and .h files. Those files also got functions that related to them. Such as the ball files got the function for checking if the ball hit the walls or paddles. In hind sight, I feel like I still wound up setting this up as OOP. I need to do a lot of research on composition and much more practice.
One thing I noticed is that I could move functions around really easily. While refactoring the code for public display, I made a game logic file and moved a few functions from the paddle and ball files into that game logic file. The only thing I had to change in the main file was just to include the new header for the game logic file. Everything else continued to work as normal. If I had been using OOP, I would have had to change so much more code anywhere that those functions were being called.
Release and User Feedback
This was such a cool part of this project. I love seeing people using my products and offering feedback on how to improve it. I had several feature requests; add a pause, add a time elapsed, add a wall bounce sound, and make the AI easier to name a few. And I have added these features to the game. I had originally overlooked the pause and the timer but I had intentionally made the choice to not put in the wall bounce sound as I thought that it would become too much noise for the User, but I think I am more sensitive to noises than other people are.
Going Forward
Next things that I am working on:
Going to refactor this app and get it on my public github (This is done now: Pong GitHub)
Going to clean up and expand on my github (I really need to start thinking about employment presentation). I don't use my Github for everyday usage, I use a privately hosted Gitea instance. My Github
I have started programming a voxel based game in C and Raylib. I have some cubes drawn so far and a working camera.
I have also started on a Mario style platformer as well.
If you want me to elaborate on anything, please message me on Discord, Mastodon, X, or email me. I’ll be happy to go into more detail one-on-one or to create more posts.

https://blog.alderautomation.ca/pong-in-retrospect/

Nostr notes by alderautomation (Unofficial)

Uni Blog Week 06 Last updated: 16 minutes ago Intro Happy ...

Pong in Retrospect Last updated: 4 days, 5 hours ago Code: Pong ...