tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29229867980190347912011-07-07T22:04:32.589-06:00Anything and everything related to computer programming and web design. Finding a good place to start with this sort of thing can be a challenge, or at least that was my experience. That's why I created this blog!Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.comBlogger221100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-5921697470840939932009-12-23T19:57:00.003-07:002009-12-23T20:00:41.526-07:00

To anyone who might be following this blog:Since the time that I started this blog over a year and a half ago I have had the opportunity to start my own web design business. It only makes sense at this point that this blog gets merged with the website for my business. This blog has therefore been migrated to its new home at http://www.nosecreekweb.ca/blog/. Enjoy!

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-10319545234003783042009-11-19T16:34:00.004-07:002009-11-19T16:41:23.981-07:00

Do you want to program games in 3D? There is no better (and easier!) program than Unity. The problem until now has been the $100 price tag. That has changed now, however, as the indie version of Unity is now free! There is still a more expensive "Pro" version, but the indie version is a great tool in its own right. You can read the press release here, or just go download Unity!

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-13497049818995831742009-10-15T21:54:00.002-06:002009-10-15T21:58:25.206-06:00

Every month a website called the Experimental Gameplay Project issues a challenge to create a game based on a theme in seven days or less. This month's theme is "numbers" and I decided that I would submit an entry. Here is some more information about the game as I posted on the Experimental Gameplay website:Okay, I have an entry. As much as anything this was an opportunity to learn how to do

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-21086808381739020202009-09-02T10:20:00.012-06:002009-09-02T10:59:01.023-06:00

For a website I am working on I wanted to have some nice looking round edges. The gimp has a built in way to make round edges when selecting a rectangle. Simply check the "Rounded Corners" option and you're set. I did this and then used the Edit -> Stroke Selection action to draw my edges. The problem was that I only wanted a 1px border and, even with antialising on, it looked rather ugly.

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-84508943630838997122009-06-07T15:35:00.003-06:002009-06-07T15:56:32.388-06:00

Only a couple of blog posts ago I was talking about the curse of IE6. I think I should officially declare it the worst browser ever made. Its a HUGE pain for a web developer. The WC3, however, tells us that 15% of web surfers still use it. Ugh. On the plus side you should also realize that if you ever need to change something on your site specifically for IE6 (you probably will), than you

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-90589652266925383462009-06-06T14:55:00.002-06:002009-06-06T15:05:26.772-06:00

Everyone seems to be making a big deal out of the Project Natal announcement by Microsoft at E3. Sure its cool, but I think Sony's new motion controller for PS3 is even cooler. Check it out!

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-60635695861183418912009-06-01T15:36:00.003-06:002009-06-01T15:56:46.819-06:00

There is no question in my mind that Firefox is a vastly superior web browser to Internet Explorer. That may sound like a conceited fan-boy statement, but it really isn't. I'm not saying Firefox is the best (I'm waiting for a Linux version of Google Chrome). Its just that, as a web developer, I can't stand the way IE continually ignores internet standards when displaying web pages. My pages

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-55812180555405426942009-05-19T09:42:00.003-06:002009-05-19T10:00:53.032-06:00

I've been tinkering around with LÖVE some more and I'm impressed by how easy it is to get a simple 2D game running. My problem now is that I don't know what game to make. As a kid I was always coming up with ideas for the latest and greatest game. Now that I can actually make them, I can't seem to recall any of these ideas. I think I'm going to make some sort of game where you manage planets

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-71619075316160816282009-04-27T19:07:00.004-06:002009-04-27T19:21:16.136-06:00

The newest version of Ubuntu, 9.04 or Jaunty Jackalope, was released last Friday. Since I was still running 8.04 I decided it was time to update my system. Not a ton of new features in Jaunty, but I'm looking forward to the better support for multiple monitors and I've recently started noticing that some developers are no longer making their software for Hardy. I didn't want to do clean

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-11014589285996836772009-04-23T16:08:00.005-06:002009-04-23T16:20:32.865-06:00

I finished my last exam for the year yesterday and so today I was ready to get programming again. I had thought I would probably play around with pyglet for a while, but as I was exploring the various options I ran into something called LÖVE. From the LÖVE website: What is LÖVE? LÖVE is a 2D game engine in which games can be made by using Lua scripts. Actually,

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-43561588314264750652009-03-02T14:19:00.002-07:002009-03-02T14:24:58.638-07:00

One of the sites that I am editing right now is very heavily based on fonts. I need to have the right fonts in the right places or my client wont be happy. But I find fonts to be such a pain. Which fonts are 'web safe'? What happens if a user doesn't have the right font installed? As I was coding the site I ran across a great article entitled "The Myth Of ‘Web-Safe’ Fonts". It's worth a

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-82549283963680253572009-02-17T15:22:00.001-07:002009-02-17T15:24:40.985-07:00

Interested in promoting your blog? Submit it to condron.us which is a site that scrolls through a list of recently updated blogs. I just added my site to see what kind of traffic it will actually bring.

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-12438428708655972502008-12-12T16:40:00.003-07:002008-12-12T17:13:20.430-07:00

I'm done school for the semester, so hopefully that means I'll have some more time to work on programming and the like. Yesterday I was trying to get my Ubuntu laptop to connect to my Mac OS X desktop. Accessing a networked OS X computer as a windows share is pretty easy under Ubuntu. But you can only see a few files. When networking OS X to OS X you can access pretty much the whole computer.

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-66566501729022909632008-10-17T15:57:00.003-06:002008-10-17T16:05:48.269-06:00

I just wanted to mention two interesting python libraries I have recently discovered:1. PygletThis seems to be replacing pygame as the best choice for making games in python. It uses OpenGL instead of SDL, which means faster games!2. PymunkA port of the Chipmunk 2d physics engine to python. A recent PyWeek contest was based on the use of Chipmunk in python games.I haven't yet tried either of

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-2250995165568903112008-10-02T20:54:00.000-06:002008-10-02T20:56:12.669-06:00

Download Restricted FormatsBy default Ubuntu does not come equipped with the ability to playback the most popular audio/video codecs. This means that you won't be able to listen to your mp3's or play your DVDs. Fortunately this can be solved fairly easily by downloading the Restricted Formats package:1. Go to Applications->Add/Remove...2. Change the 'Show' option to 'All available applications

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-66032751040679830312008-09-15T20:47:00.004-06:002008-09-17T18:57:53.226-06:00

For years I have been a strong advocate of Apple and it's Macintosh operating system. The biggest reason for this is that I flat out hate Windows (and Microsoft in general). OS X seemed like the only viable alternative, and I found it to be far superior. Of course, I also knew that there was also this little, relatively unknown, OS know as Linux; but I never bothered to actually try it.This

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-53036649923216416442008-09-15T20:36:00.003-06:002008-09-15T20:46:49.609-06:00

My favourite game development community, http://www.idevgames.com/, is going to be running a contest. In the past they ran a competition known as uDevGames which was probably the biggest contest in the OS X development community. It's been a few years since it has run, but it's looking to make a strong return in the near future! Check out this thread for more info.

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-25507018079051326542008-07-17T20:52:00.000-06:002008-07-17T20:52:00.522-06:00

If you're looking to make 3D games on a Mac there is no better tool than Unity. It's easy to use, with a great GUI and all the scripting done in the familiar javascript. You can use it to build games for OS X and Windows. There are also plans to make Wii and iPhone builds possible. It costs $200 to buy the indie licence, but even if you can't afford that it is worth checking out the free 30-

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-48107560785839608252008-06-07T18:01:00.000-06:002008-06-07T18:01:02.604-06:00

At some point you will run into the limits of web technologies and GameMaker and you will need to learn another language. Python is an excellent next step. Pygame is a module for python that will allow you to easily import and use sprites in your games. Check it out at http://www.pygame.org/. Once you've downloaded and installed Python and Pygame I recommend that you get started by looking at

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-50884565697481796382008-05-20T18:33:00.006-06:002008-05-21T16:44:07.192-06:00

A friend told me that IE 8 is supposed to be fully compliant with CSS. I went to test a website on Browsershots the other day and discovered that it didn't work in IE 7 or 8. So much for compliance. The problem I have is that the height of my main div is set to 100% but it only goes part way down the page and then ends while its content continues. Its a bit difficult to explain so hopefully

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-23386813771689994082008-04-26T15:51:00.000-06:002008-04-26T15:52:00.294-06:00

In my last post I suggested that web design is the ideal way to get your feet wet in the ocean of computer programming. Some of you have been there and done that. Others just want to dive right into the world of game making. One of my favourite game creation tools is Game Maker. I love it because it is fairly simple to use if you are new to this type of thing. It has a drag and drop

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2922986798019034791.post-76001765882682333732008-04-24T20:12:00.004-06:002008-04-24T20:31:54.676-06:00

Getting started with computer programming can be a challenge. Where is the best place to start? Designing websites is an easy way to see quick results for your efforts. The most basic way to get started with web design is to use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web editor. Dreamweaver is the champion of this type of software. For the amateur who is just beginning the open source NVU

Dustinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14136267529165108168noreply@blogger.com0