Robot Goblin

Quick and Simple UML Diagrams with yUML

Joe — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 19:25:32 +0000

Finding a decent UML modelling tool is pretty difficult, and they’re often quite heavyweight programs with a whole bunch of features. Sometimes you just want to quickly make a little UML diagram to explain a concept, or quickly create an image of a simple diagram you have on paper, and installing a huge piece of …

Calculating the Number of Divisors

Joe — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 01:29:29 +0000

Introduction Calculating the number of divisors for a number is a fairly simple task in programming, it can be achieved with the following simple code: const int number = 50; // The number for which to count the divisors of int count = 1; for ( int i = 1; i <= number / …

Generating a Maze

Joe — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 18:43:03 +0000

When I was coming up with ideas for my Christmas game this year, I ended up thinking of one that would work best with procedurally generated (i.e. generated using a particular algorithm, but using randomly generated numbers etc. for content). This post shows some of my ideas and techniques for creating such a system, and …

Fedora Summer of Open Hardware – Prize Arrived

Joe — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 14:18:29 +0000

For those who don’t know what the Fedora Summer of Open Hardware is, it was a massive give-away of open hardware, by the Fedora Project, to contributors of the project. Each person who entered had the choice of which type of hardware to try and win: a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino board, or an OLPC …

TurretDefence Early Preview (0.0.1)

Joe — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 14:33:42 +0000

I’m currently working on a project (working title: TurretDefence) in which the player must protect a lone turret from being destroyed, and defeat all the incoming enemies. The tricky part is, however, there are no in-game controls. The player must edit the AI of the turret, using a script file that the game loads at …

PurpleEngine Released!

Joe — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 22:28:05 +0000

While at university I used an engine created to help beginners learn game programming, that was designed to be able to make 3D games very easily with little knowledge of how things are working. It was a great engine, but as I have bit of a passion for 2D games, I decided to attempt to …

Managing Multiple SSH Keys

Joe — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 22:18:31 +0000

SSH keys are a very efficient way to make secure connections over the internet, for a large variety of things. Many things use SSH keys regularly, for example using Git on GitHub requires you to register a key to use when accessing repositories. Most of the time, however, their help guides only explain how to …

RealCrypt on Fedora 17

Joe — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 19:50:59 +0000

I’ve already written about using RealCrypt on Linux, however this explains things a little more thoroughly and should allow you to set up RealCrypt on Fedora 17. If you’ve read the previous post, you should be able to get RealCrypt installed and ready to use on your computer, except you may find that you receive a message saying that you don’t have the necessary permissions to view the mounted volume.

Converting Videos for iPod Using FFmpeg

Joe — Sat, 26 May 2012 01:15:31 +0000

The iPod is an awesome little media player that a lot of people use to play music, but many others also use it to play videos. Unfortunately, though, it is fairly fussy about which video formats it accepts. Here’s how to convert videos to allow them to be played on an iPod (and presumably iPad …

Patching Up with Git

Joe — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:49:51 +0000

Often when you work on other people’s code, or work with code in groups, it’s not a good idea to commit to the main repository. If not for any other reason, just so you don’t piss off the person who’s running the project. That definitely doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t work on their code, though. …