So midterms are finished, and life goes on. As much as I’d love this post to be tech-oriented, showcasing some brilliant new software that I’ve written in my spare time, the truth is, I haven’t had enough spare time lately in which to write any software of value.
The small exception to that claim is this app, a neat little VB and XML oriented program that allows you to read an iTunes playlist file (as exported to XML), and auto-copy all of the songs in that playlist to any folder you wish, preserving the artist/album/song file structure.
I wrote the program to fill my brand new blackberry with a selection of excellent songs, because the built in Roxio media manager is great for pictures, but slow as sin when it comes to larger media files. After writing it, I realized that it could also be a useful piracy tool; but then again, a hammer could be a positively fantastic homicide tool in the wrong hands too. Of all the libraries I’ve ever written, my .NET XML parser has spawned off more crappy little programs, making it possibly the most useful bit of code I’ve created.
Other than that, my coding has lately been limited to some cool graphics stuff in with OpenGL and C++. So far we’ve constructed a classic spinning cube implementation, complete with a custom view pipeline that implements transformations, dynamic shading, and back face culling in software. The next topic that we’re studying is texturing, and eventually, ray tracing and shaders.
While none of my assignments for this course have been interesting enough to warrant posting, I’ll definetly up my final project for the course, which at this point, is probably going to be a 3D terrain generator, similar to that of Sim City 4 fame.
