I’ve been thinking about various computer programing projects for years. One is a railroading game that focuses on realistic track building and realistic operations or a small (shortline) railroad. Another is an evolution simulation. There is also the mechanism simulator that I have working fairly well. The thing…

I’ve been staring at the code I wrote for the train game for a few days now. I can’t figure out my own code although I know why things are the way they are. The test program, which is really just a program to allow me to draw…

Maintaining old code is what I do at work most of the time. If there is a new feature to be added to the product, there will still be a large amount of existing code that needs to be waded through to get to the places where the…

It was an easy fix once I read a few forum posts that were slightly related. Paths to an old Windows NT 4.0 DDK were specified before the standard library paths and it caused the wrong libs to get linked in for 64 bit builds. I don’t really…

I have installed Visual Studio on two Windows 7 x64 machines. One has Visual Studio 2008 on it. The only for this post is to rant about Microsoft. I created a new console project, accepted the defaults for everything in the new project wizard, and built it. This…

I’ve been messing around with that evolution simulation code. There’s a few things in the code that I don’t yet understand but that’s common when trying to understand the inner workings of code you didn’t write. For instance, some values related to behavior rules are initialized using random…

Thanks to Andrej Karpathy, I have code that simulates evolution. He wrote code that has a population of herbivores and carnivores and they have inputs and behaviors that are complex and can evolve. The physical attributes cannot evolve and each creature is fixed with sign and hearing and…

A few days ago, I bought a used AMD Phenom 720 x3. That’s a three core processor which seems just a little odd in a world where everything comes in powers of 2. The Phenom II core is supposed to be 0% to 25% faster than the Athlon…

I rotated my monitor to the portrait orientation for a few years. It was wonderful. It’s hard to understand why anyone who edits any type of documentation, including code, would want a landscape oriented monitor. Now I have a 24″ widescreen and it’s just too dang tall when…