Business as Usual I was hoping returning to the ol' blog would maybe get my creative juices flowing. And it has; it's an outlet, even if nobody reads it. Guess I gotta hork it out to more people.

The big evolution today: C programming is hard. Why am I using C if Perl is so great? Well, there's a slight problem with Perl: all variables are represented as floating-point numbers. This causes serious problems for embedded devices, as they tend to lack floating-point processors. My beloved Zaurus is no exception.

Coming from Perl into C is a huge eye-opener: Perl does lots of stuff. C does almost nothing, instead opting to give you an almost direct interface to the hardware. It's really useful, but on the other hand, it's a lot easier to screw up because it isn't going to hug you and congratulate you for trying your best if you use an improperly initialized pointer.

Basically, what I need to do is toy around with text-based programs for a while, until I get the hang of manipulating data. I want to plunge into SDL soooo bad, but my first foray into it was not very promising (yay segfaults). So what we're going to see is yet another text-based RPG. However, I -do- plan to get it to the level of Thy Dungeonman. That'd be sweet.

(While we're sorta on the topic of embedded systems: Does the Zaurus really count? It runs a mainstream Linux kernel. It can run regular applications without modification. For all intents and purposes, it functions as though it were a desktop machine from 1996. Just smaller.)  ¶ 12:02 AM