Coding #
Not much progress recently, but that’s due for a change. For one, I need to figure out why this is happening:
Learning #
Finishing up Unit #1 (the second unit, of course) of PMGAI. The final project for the unit was interesting, but I didn’t enjoy it that much after spending hours fighting with the dev environment (apparently “Run as administrator” is vitally important even when it shouldn’t be). Two failings here:
- On my side, I should have remembered my personal rule for courses/tutorials that demand a very specific dev environment: Just spin up a VM. Chances are good that either something on your main dev machine will be incompatibile with their stuff, or their stuff will mess up something on your main dev machine.
- On their side, as tempting as it is to just tell students “Do x, y, z” without explaining anything, that doesn’t help much when they run into problems. At the very least, prepare an “explanation and troubleshooting” section. Why are we installing these modules? Why using one method for some and another for others? How do I know for sure that these steps have succeeded?
I’ll jump into Unit #2 once my annoyance fades, and hopefully revisit my poor HAL9000 Python code later as well.
Playing #
Still on a second playthrough of “The Talos Principle” to see more of it. It’s amazing how quickly I’ve forgotten some of these puzzles.
Nostalgia #
Delving into old school fantasy RPGs, I’m often reminded of the 1978 Ralpha Bakshi animated film version of The Lord of the Rings. So I dug out the DVD recently and watched it. The animation, the pacing, the effects are all so dated; while I still have a lot of fondness for it, I can’t exactly recommend it to anyone.
