Ryan, Kristine, Bianca and I went to a restaurant on Lake Travis called Cafe Bleu. I took a few pictures, but I really just like one of them:
On March 20th - 25th, Ryan and I had some of our college friends visit us to check out Austin. Aurash was the first to arrive, and while waiting for the rest of the crew to land, we decided to walk around Zilker park. We ended up walking all the way to the Texas State Capitol.
Here are some pictures I took along the way.
There is a card game called “Set“, that I enjoy playing a lot. I was surprised when I couldn’t find a computer version of the game. I can usually find a computer game for any puzzle or card game even if they’re not too popular, but I guess this game is not popular amongst coders at all.
Back in 2005, I implemented a two-player version of the game using Java. I uploaded the game to my website, but I had to take it down shortly because my web hosting company doesn’t allow daemons and game servers to be running on their servers. With my recent MacBook purchase, I found that I never use my old Athlon 3200 system, and I don’t have space for it near my desk. I reinstalled linux, and decided to make a web-server out of it. Since I have total control over this server, I can bring my Set game back online. Unless I get thousands of people to play it, my home connection should be plenty fast enough for such a simple game.
I’m thinking about rewriting this game for the iPhone. It’s a simple enough game that by the time Apple allows home-brew applications to be running on the iPhone (around June 2008), I can have it coded and tested.
On my way home from work today, the sun was about to go down, and I decided to stop by Zilker park since my camera was in the truck. This time, I attempted to take pictures of town lake and downtown before the sun went down. This is my favorite image from today:/images/_G102397.jpg)
Click here to see more photos from tonight.
On Thursday, apple released their iPhone SDK (software development kit). I’ve been waiting for this day ever since I purchased my iPhone. Of course, in order to be able to develop iPhone applications, one must own an intel based Macintosh computer. I only developed on Windows and Linux so far, and I knew the day apple came out with this SDK, I would go out and get an apple computer. I had a hard time deciding which apple computer product to purchase, and I considered everything from the Mac Mini to the Mac Pro. However, I decided that I wanted something powerful yet portable, so I bought the newly updated 15″ MacBook Pro. Amazingly, this laptop outperforms both of my desktops, even though my newest desktop is only a year old with similar specs. The biggest difference is that this MacBook’s CPU has 6Mb of cache as opposed to 2Mb. The benchmark was based on my Path Tracer application that I wrote last year in C. I uploaded the code to my MacBook Pro, and it compiled and ran without me having to make any changes to it.
Learning how to develop iPhone applications is likely to eat into my photography time. I never did any development for the Mac OS X platform either, so programming in Objective-C will be completely new to me as well.
