Books Read in 2022

Commitments. Decay. Plans.

Blog: What I learned, forgot and learned again about Java Preferences

I'm not an expert in Java, but I have been using and teaching it for a really long time. One thing I've always struggled with is the right way to manage settings and preferences, especially stacking different levels of settings (defaults, setup time and run time). The various systems I worked on in grad school were massively over complicated (to the extent where I think in my masters’ system, configuration was probably a third of the whole system).

For the Game Tracker I set out to keep things really simple, and ideally to do things "the right way". Given that I don't actually work in software development with anyone other than myself, figuring out "the right way" can be a bit of a struggle sometimes. Still I'm trying to start modelling my own technology learning after Julia Even's approach and learn and focus on what I have learned.

For handling settings, I've used Java's Properties quite a bit (they made up a big portion of my PhD system, which was *much* more streamlined than my masters). Having an API to handle getting simple values in and out of a file is really useful. Preferences are an extra layer on top of that, where you hand over keeping track of the storage to the JVM.

While I'm still a little grouchy about Preferences not being transparent to the user or the programmer. They do feel like "the right way" to keep track of settings. I was especially confused when I cam back to the Game Tracker after a long break and so had to relearn a lot about Preferences. Hopefully this will be a good overview and collection of the good resources I found.

Overview

As I mentioned, preferences let you hand off worrying about where your information gets stored. All you have to do is tell Java that you would like this class’s preferences and then either read or store a value. When you end your program, Java will store everything and the next time you run your program your preferences will be there.

You can recompile or even completely delete and replace your program and your preferences will still be there. If you’ve ever deleted and then reinstalled a program and been surprised that it remembered everything from before, that’s preferences in action. (And that bit where stuff just gets magically remembered is why I’m sometimes uncomfortable with the idea of preferences, sometimes you just want a program to go away, but we’ll talk about that later.)

When we’re talking about preferences, we’re talking about the small pieces of information you need to make your program run. For example, with the game tracker the list of games is too big to go in preferences, but keeping the file name where I'm keeping the list of games makes sense. There’s not a strict limit, but keeping too much data in your preferences isn’t a great idea. Additionally, everything is handled as a string by Java so you want to avoid storing anything complex, like an object, and should keep in mind that you’ll have to handle moving numeric data back and forth.

Using Java Preferences

You access Java preferences through a java.util.prefs.Preferences object. We’ll talk about how you *get* a Preferences object shortly, but once you have an object you can treat it as a dictionary. You have a put(String key, String value) method where you can store a value under a key and a get(String key) method which gives you the last value you stored under key.

If you have other types of data, you have to handle them separately. The good news is that you don’t have to do any parsing, there are putBoolean(), putDouble(), putInt() methods and getBoolean(), getDouble(), getInt() methods (and actually there’s a pair of methods for every primitive Java type).

You get a Preferences object by asking the Preferences system for it. Similar to the way you ask System for System.out, there are static methods on the Preferences class for getting your Preferences object. Unlike System.out where there’s only one object to get back, there’s actually many possible objects.

Each package in your program gets its own preferences, so when you ask Preferences for your object, you need to give it your class so it knows which package’s preferences to give back. The static method Preferences.systemNodeForPackage(Class theClass), takes a class object and so you can statically give it a class like CLI.class. *

That there are actually two kinds of preferences. System Preferences (which is what you get if you use the method above) and User Preferences. System preferences are shared by every user on a computer, but the user preferences are unique for each user. Generally user preferences are the right place to store things unless you have a strong reason why everyone needs to share. To get the user preferences, you’ll use the static method Preferences.userNodeForPackage().

From there you’re pretty good to go. The first time someone runs your program you can store their preferences and there after you can access and update them as necessary. I’m not sure it’s the “right way” but I think you should also offer your users a chance to see what’s stored in preferences and a way to remove them (the Preference class has methods to do both). I still need to implement this in the Game Tracker, but I think transparency is good to keep in mind.

My GameTracker Example

The last time I worked on the Game Tracker I reorganized a lot of the components. At this point ** I’m really only keeping two preferences for Game Tracker; the name of the persistence manager and the  file name of the file which has the game and play session data.

The persistence manager is managed in the CLI class. As the CLI class is starting it figures out which PersistenceManager it needs and then calls a factory to return an instance of that manager.  For every preference, I keep a constant string in the class to keep the key value, and I’ll often also keep a default value as well.

When the CLI starts, it processes the command line arguments (a story for another day) and checks if the option for the persistence manager has been set. If the value has been set, the CLI saves the value in the preferences. Then the CLI consults the preferences for the name of the persistence manager (with the default). This means that the value that’s loaded is either the new value that was just passed in, the preference that was set before or the default value if it’s never been set.

    private static final String PERSISTENCE_MANAGER_PREF = "gametracker.persistence_manager";
    private static final String PERSISTENCE_MANAGER_DEFAULT = "CSV";

if (cl.hasOption("datamanager")) {
  Preferences.userNodeForPackage(CLI.class).
    put(PERSISTENCE_MANAGER_PREF, cl.getOptionValue("datamanager"));
}

persistenceManager = PersistenceManagerFactory.getManager(
  Preferences.userNodeForPackage(CLI.class).get(
    PERSISTENCE_MANAGER_PREF, PERSISTENCE_MANAGER_DEFAULT), args);

Within the CSVPersistenceManager, the only preference kept is the data file name. Like the name of the persistence manager in the CLI, I keep the name of the preference and the default value as constants, although here the preference name actually sits in the super class FilePersistenceManager.

In FilePersistenceManager:

protected static final String DATA_FILE_PERF = "gametracker.datafile";

In CSVPersistenceManager:

private static final String DATA_FILE_DEFAULT = "gametracker.csv";

Persistence managers are passed the arguments off the command line, so as in the CLI, the super class checks the arguments if there’s a value for the datafile and that is taken and loaded into the preferences.

if (cl.hasOption("datafile")){
  Preferences.userNodeForPackage(
    FilePersistenceManager.class).put(
      DATA_FILE_PERF, cl.getOptionValue("datafile"));
}

The CSVPersistenceManager then checks the preferences to find the filename for the data file.

datafile = new File(
  Preferences.userNodeForPackage(FilePersistenceManager.class).get(
    DATA_FILE_PERF, DATA_FILE_DEFAULT));

The data file can be changed from the setFile method in FilePersistenceManager.

public void setFile(String fileName) {
  Preferences.userNodeForPackage(
    FilePersistenceManagerMenu.class).put(DATA_FILE_PERF, fileName);
      datafile = new File(fileName);
}

I’m not getting a ton of use out of preferences right now. I was doing more before I started streamlining, but right at the moment those are the only two things I need to keep track of. Again, I’m not sure I’m “doing it right,” but this setup seems to work for me. 

The Magic Inside

As I said, the great thing about preferences is that the JVM and the operating system really take care of it for you. So if you’re happy to trust the “magic system” to keep stuff up and running, then you’re good to go. On the other hand if you’re trying to figure out what the hell is going on, then let’s talk about it.

I ended up researching this because when I came back to the GameTracker after a long break, I had no idea what was going on or why the software (which I wrote) knew where the files were without me telling it (also sometimes I’m bad at taking notes - but I did have an issue on the topic for myself). This was especially a problem because I was looking for a local configuration file, which just wasn’t there.

I set out to figure out what was going on. Thankfully a number of people have written pretty good explanations of the preferences system. I decided that I could add a little bit by bringing those articles together and the best way to learn anything is always to teach it (or in this case blog about it).

So with that being said, there are two things to talk about if we want to open up the magic inside.

How are the preferences organized?

At the JVM level, all preferences are kept in trees. There’s the system tree and a tree for each user. (So as a programmer you have access to two trees, the system and the current user). 

Each node in the tree represents a package. The root of the tree is the empty package and it’s named “/”.  Then every package below the root is its own node. If we take my GameTracker as an example, the CLI.java main class is in package ca.kendon.gametracker.cli. That means that the root node has a child node, “ca/”, which has a child node “kendon/”, which has a child node “gametracker/”, which has a child node “cli/”.

A tree diagram of the CLI class's preference.

Since we have multiple packages with preferences (.cli and .core)  both of those packages's preferences would be held under their common parent.  so "gametracker/" would be the parent to both both "cli/" and "core/"

A tree diagram showing the common ancestors for both the "cli/" and "core/" packages.

Notice that the names of the preference node have those slashes at the end. If you ask for the full name of the node the CLI preferences are in it will be "/ca/kendon/gametracker/cli”. If that seems like a file name... well that might be important later (in some contexts).

Where are the preferences stored?

The JVM has its nice abstraction of preferences in trees, but that doesn’t help when your question is “where is that value *actually* stored?” Now we actually have to take a look under the JVM and see what the operating system is up to. Preferences exist in all operating systems, not just for Java but for any software that needs to remember things. Of course, since all operating systems have their own ideas about where stuff is, there’s a different answer for every operating system. For a quick overview we’ll look at Windows, MacOS and Linux.

Victor Kropp has a really good post on the details.

Windows 10

As windows is wont to do with all of its configuration information, things are stored in the registry. 

User preferences are found at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\JavaSoft\Prefs

System preferences are found HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Prefs

Remember that you can look at the registry using the Registry Editor (regedit) utility, which is installed by default in Windows.

MacOS

On MacOS, preferences are stored in the Library. Since we have two types of preferences, system and user, MacOS actually has two types of libraries (system and user) for preferences.

System preferences are found in /Library/Preferences/ in a file called com.apple.java.util.prefs.plist

Each user’s preferences are found in their home directory in ~/Library/Preferences/ in a file *also* called com.apple.java.util.prefs.plist

plists are Apple’s favourite way to store things in a way that slightly frustrates everyone … well it frustrates me certainly. They’re XML files (often compressed) which can be a pain to actually look at. On the command line you can run the command:

defaults read ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.java.util.prefs.plist

Which will show you the preferences for your own user.  For example mine includes:

        "gametracker/" =         {
            "cli/" =             {
                "gametracker.persistence_manager" = "CSV";
            };
            "core/" =             {

                "data_file" = "data/games.data";
            };
        };

If this seems a little overbuilt it's the weird collision of Apple's plists and xml files which always end up having some weird structures.

Linux

On Linux, preferences for each node are stored in its own file (in case you’d wondered why the Java name for preferences looked so much like a file name).

System Preferences are stored starting in the directory /etc/.java/.systemPrefs/

User preferences are stored in each user’s home directory under ~/.java/.systemPrefs/

Under those directories, the JVM builds a directory structure that matches the preference nodes, with the leaf nodes being files. In my Game Tracker Example, that means that the "gametracker.persistence_manager" = "CSV" preference is stored in the file ~/.java/.systemPrefs/ca/kendon/gametracker/cli. 

This makes a lot of sense to my *nix-centric brain and I think explains a lot about the structure they chose when setting up preferences in *nix environments.

Conclusion

I'm always wary of systems that aren't transparent to the user, but preferences provide a good way to keep track of the details about a program without making a mess or requiring a lot of overhead. I still have a lot to learn, already, I'm wondering about some of the things I'm doing to update the preferences from the program. Hopefully this overview provides a place to get started and answers a few of the questions the preferences seem to draw. 

Footnotes

* I *think* you can use the this identifier to get the class dynamically, but I'm not sure whether or not that's a bad idea. (Thus far I've found I've made mistakes using the literal class - copy and paste errors - so using this may be smarter.)

** This is a snapshot of the GameTracker from early November 2021.

Books Read in 2022

Responsibility. Compartmentalization.

Books Read in 2022

Life. Responsibility. War.

2021 in Games

I've now spend 5 years keeping track of the video games I've played and I've found it lets me play more and play more intentionally. Plus it's nice to be able to write a post like this where I can look back over what I played, what I enjoyed and how the year went.

Yes, it was mostly Battle Brothers

Time Spent

I played 49 games for 600 hours in 2021. That's much less time than I've spent on games for the last few years. I guess that makes sense working full time and (slowly) starting to build up my creative career. My PC also broke a little and I think that cut down on some of what I played, and it also forced me to be more intentional with what I play. I also dedicated a lot of my playing time this year to trying out games from the cellar that I hadn't played for one reason or another.

The curve on how long I played games is pretty sharp. I played 150 hours of Battle Brothers and would have played more if the PC hadn't started to fall apart. I feel like I spend a lot of time here writing about I like tactics games but I'm not good at them. Battle Brother's hasn't really changed that for me, but it has been really fun to play.

Everything else topped out at around 50 hours, so overall my top 10 games by time played where:

1. Battle Brothers - 150 hours
2. Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn - 59 hours
3. Chrono Cross - 47 hours
4. Trials of Mana (Remake) - 41 hours
5. Mario Golf: Super Rush - 40 hours
6. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity - 37 hours
7. Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance - 36 hours
8. Trials of Mana (Collection of Mana) - 32 hours
9. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - 24 hours
10. Secret of Mana (Collection of Mana) - 22 hours

After that everything flattens out into pretty small chunks.

I really wanted to *finish* a lot of games this year, and I did, but I think I really want to *experience* a lot of games for 2022 and also focus on having as much fun when I'm playing video games as possible.

I love a good end screen.

Finished Games

I haven't kept track of the games I've finished before, but having spent more time in and around ProtonJon's community I thought it would be interesting to see what I've finished. As I said, I already thing my goal of 2022 isn't to finish as much as it is to play, but it's still interesting to see what I played to the end.

I'm counting finished as reaching the credits at the end of the story, although for practically all of these games there's a lot more to play at that point. More or less in the order I finished them, I played:

• Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity
• Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury
• Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
• Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
• Trials of Mana (Remake)
• Trials of Mana (Collection of Mana)
• Celeste
• Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
• Super Mario Odyssey
• Secret of Mana (Collection of Mana)
• Chrono Cross

The only game I really completed was Bowser's Fury. It was really well designed to make it easy to pick up and play for a few minutes and get a few stars. For the others it was mostly nice to see the end of the story.

If you want a game full of cat's Cat World certainly is. Still not sure why they write it Bowser's Fury.

Favourite Games

Every game

I think the games I liked the most were (listed alphabetically):

• Battle Brothers
• Hades
• Super Mario Odyssey
• XCOM: Chimera Squad

When you do a thing right, Battle Brothers feels pretty good.

Things About Games in 2021

As I said in my Games of 2021 post, everything I played was good, but I don't think 2021 really hit the heights of 2020. I spent a lot of time trying to get really deep with a lot of the games I played and I'm not sure it was really worth while. I'm glad I played the games I did this year, but looking back on what where my favourites out of what I played, the list is weird. I only played a few minutes of Hades and Chimera Squad and not that many hours of Odyssey.

Battle Brothers is great and if I can manage the multi-headed hydra of fixing my PC (or more accurately, figuring out *how* I want to fix my PC) I'll be back to it. I think it's a great game where commitment, to characters and attempts, is really well balanced with interesting outcomes. I *like* Dwarf Fortress, but it always feels like it takes too much commitment for the "things went really sideways" fun to kick in. With Battle Brothers I've screwed something up in an interesting way after a few hours, or if things get boring, it's easy to jump out and start again.

I also like that I get a little better every time I play. I keep an eye on the Battle Brothers Reddit and sometimes I feel like I'm not getting enough from the game, or playing it right, but I'm having fun and that's really all that matters.

I'm trying to "Do" more in 2022 and I think that's going to apply to games as well. I've said it a few times, but I'd like to play more games and play more types of games. 2021 was a little bit stayed and I think I forgot to have as much fun as I can.

I recently read a tweet about how you shouldn't consider games you want to play but haven't a "pile of shame" so much as the video game equivalent of a wine cellar, where you're waiting to find the right moment and mood to open something up and I like the reframing. I think I can add that games don't go off after your start them, so there's no worry about putting stuff down and picking them up again later and you may as well have as many open games in your cellar so you can find everything you enjoy.

Games of December 2021

December was a bit weird, but I feel like trying to expect anything from a month during the pandemic is kinda useless. I ended up mostly focused on Chrono Cross, which was find, but next year I really want to play more and more kinds of games.

My top five games (by play time) for December were:

1. Chrono Cross - Chrono Cross is fine. I decided to play along with the Axe of the Blood God game club and found I enjoyed the minute to minute play, but was pretty underwhelmed by the story telling and most of the mechanics. As a sequel to one of my favourite games, Chrono Trigger, it feels deeply up its own ass in story telling. Chrono Trigger is able to get by, by not spending a lot of time integrating the plot or the time travel, Chrono Cross spends so much talking about time travel that I was just hoping to find a portal to the end of the game.
   
   
   
   The combat system is also underwhelming, partly because they tried to make it so complicated. At the end of the day most of the really fancy things they implemented didn't really work. I think if they'd leaned into the puzzle colour grid and made that a much more intentional system, rather than frustrated by the random AI. I think if they'd mixed this with Final Fantasy X's combat system, it would have worked a lot better.
   I love how colourful Chrono Cross is and I love the island aesthetic. It would have been nice to really get to enjoy the world a little bit more with less of the story sitting on top. A lot of the time it feels like they made a game and only later tried to tie it to Chrono Trigger, and I'd love to play that version that's a little more laid back and embracing the weirdness.
   


2. Secret of Mana (Collection of Mana) - Had a little bit of Secret of Mana left, so started the month by finishing that up. I ended up running out of steam fighting the final boss and ended up with 1 MP left, so had to sit there and wait for the game to knock me out. I ended up doing my old fashioned magic grinding to end the game off. Stupid as it seems standing in an inn and casting magic on myself for a few hours is still kinda fun.
   
   
   
   


3. Super Mario Odyssey - Really didn't pick this up much, but played some Balloon World and really enjoyed it. Odyssey just has a great feeling for movement.
   
   
   
   


4. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - Went back into this a bit, but mostly I'm planning to spend more time in 2022 learning the game and getting good at it.
   
   
   
   


5. Celeste - Played a few minutes just to get the feeling.
   
   
   
   

Here's my total play time chart for December:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:

Blog Post: Books Read in 2021

Kindness. Bravery. Summer. Growth. Community.

Blog Post: New Year's Resolutions 2022

I usually start off by being a little reticent to make resolutions since I want to pay attention to my habits and decisions each day.  However, I'm finding maybe just by the nature of a break in December that this is the easiest time to breath and reset. 

I realized all my old year end pictures break after a while. So I made my own.

As I said in my reflections on last year's resolutions, I've been struggling a bit and and feel like some of my habits aren't leaving me the way I'd like to be.

So here's what I want to remember and think about during 2022:

1. Move - I've discovered that while I was never super fit, I've become profoundly weak this last year. So it's time to move again and get back to a place where I feel comfortable moving and being in my body.
2. Read more non-fiction - I'm really happy with how much I read in 2021 and I'd like to keep that up. The one place I struggled a bit was making the time to sit down with non-fiction and read intentionally. So in 2022, I want to prioritize that reading.
3. Do - I've been keeping a journal consistently since the beginning of the pandemic and one of the regular themes there is "Do".  Last year I had a resolution to "Do More" but this year my goal is just to "Do".
4. Learn more about food - in the last little bit I've been thinking a lot about how to find the best food, grow the best food, enjoy food more and cook better.

Blog Post: Games of 2021

It's the future and some how I'm still sitting here playing Nintendo games. I only played 4 games which were released this year, and three of them were by Nintendo. 2021 has been a bit of a weird year in terms of what I wanted to play, and I really haven't felt that compelled by most of the other games released in 2021.

Everything I played this year was "good," they're all solid games you might enjoy, but none of them have really impacted me that much.

The Good

New Pokémon Snap

I don't have a huge nostalgia for the original Pokémon Snap. I enjoyed the new one, it's certainly pretty. I *may* have not figured how how to play it to advance properly, so it felt a little flat to me. Overall, I did enjoy the safari model of travelling through environments and seeing "genuine" Pokémon interactions.

Mini Motorway

I liked Mini Metro, where you have to plan out routes for a metro system and try to keep up with demand as long as you can. Mini Motorways is a nice follow up, it's prettier and the way you eventually fail feels a lot more manageable. It really runs up against the part of me that loves city building and so after a little bit of playing I'm kinda frustrated that some idiot built their house right *there*.

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury

I only touched the 3D World remake. It's still pretty good, but it really doesn't compare to Super Mario Odyssey. Bowser's Fury was good, it has a real lightness of movement and interesting level design. I also like the idea of Nintendo turning out light weight, smaller games more regularly, so if I could play a new Bowser's Fury sized game every year I'd be delighted. Otherwise Mario games are pretty good if you like Mario Games and Bowser's Fury is a good Mario Game. 

Mario Golf: Super Rush

I think I've said it a ton, but Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour on the Gamecube is one of my favourite games. I spent a lot of time playing it dreaming of how awesome it would be if it was built out to be a fuller, flashier game. Super Rush is *not* the game I dreamed of,  but it is pretty good. It's a well built golf game with fun courses. If that sounds like your jam then you'll probably like it. It has a single player "RPG" mode which I found to be underwhelming and the online modes are okay.

I appreciate the DLC support they've given the game. The big drawback to the game is they introduced a their speed golf mechanic where you sprint after your ball to hit it again as fast as possible. Even when you're not playing that mode, it still dominates the design in a way that's not bad, but a little awkward.

Administrativa: Feedburner Feed Broken

 Just a quick note that Feedburner seems to have stopped working with the blog, so I've turned it off. Possibly "for now" or possibly "for ever". You will need to readjust your RSS reader (assuming you have such a device).

You can find the feed for all posts at the bottom of every page, or through this link.

Blog Post: Books Read in 2021

Anxiety. Whales. Joy.

Blog Post: Looking Back at 2021's New Year Resolutions

I'm not sure how to think about 2021. I started a new position as a Learning Technology Specialist and that's forced me to think about my identity as an academic and a creator. The pandemic has also gone on and on and while that's profoundly wearing, it has also offered me a lot to be thankful for. My life is good and getting better, but it's not the easiest time.

Naively, I wrote some resolutions last year and I have a tradition of checking in on them the following year, so I guess it's time to do that:

1. Relax - Uh... fuck. The entirety of the year didn't lead towards relaxing. I certainly struggled both with the pandemic and personally to really get to a place I felt good. I think I'm starting to build some resilience in my mind now, but it's been a journey to get here.
2. Go on More Adventures - Uh... double fuck. Truth be told I did choose not to adventure as much as I could have, but still this year was not conducive to seeing new things.
3. Read More - Ok, something positive! I read a lot more and I read more broadly (certainly a lot more mystery). After several years of trying to read more I finally feel like I've shifted the reading bar in my head.
4. Write More - I didn't do nearly as much of this as I wanted to, but I did write more than I have in the past. I think I've found a direction and a way I want to go forward with my rather eclectic creative work, so I'm happy. I'm also more focused on the blog than I have been in a long time and that's making me feel good. The future feels bright.
5. Do More - I certainly found my way towards getting things done by small steps. As I said, I've found a way forward, in just prioritizing what I want to have done. I think I can still do better here at finding ways to do things, but *generally* I'm happy.

I'll be honest, 2021 kicked me in the ass in a lot of ways. I feel disconnected from myself in the past and I find it a bit hard to keep a thread constant through my life for more than a few months. There are touch-points of happiness and I think, if nothing else coming out of the darkness I felt a few months ago, I'm much readier to take an active role in my life going forward.

The best light in what's been my 2020 view.

Blog Post: Books Read in 2021

Men. Together.

Blog: Games of November 2021

I don't think I've had a month before, where I haven't played five games. I was pretty busy this month, and my PC is borked, so I guess I got to be focused for November. I'm looking forward to playing a bit more over December. I'm just about finished Secret of Mana and I'm trying to decide what to play next. I've been thinking about playing Legend of Mana, but also Final Fantasy 9 and 12, and maybe Eastward, and the Skyward Sword remake. The Axe of the Blood God is also doing a pantheon/game club playthrough of Chrono Cross, which I was thinking of playing sometime soon as well. So I have no idea what I'm going to do next, but at least I have options.

My top five games (by play time) for November were:

1. Secret of Mana (Collection of Mana) - I think I've played Secret of Mana more than any other game. It's certainly one of the two games I first fell in love with as a kid (along with Illusion of Gaia). I played a bit when the Collection of Mana first came out, but decided when I finished Trials of Mana that it would be interesting to go back to where I started and play again. It's been fun, sometimes frusterating (I've tried to do a more-or-less low level run), and a little weird. There are several things I'd forgotten and a few I don't think I'd ever seen before.
   
   
   
   


2. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - Continuing to try to "git good". I had a fair bit of fun, although honestly playing ALTTP makes me want to play Illusion of Gaia more often than not. They have very similar game play and IoG is beautiful (and I love it). I started to do a second play through to keep building towards "gitting good" but trailed off as the month got busy.
   
   
   
   


3. Trials of Mana (Collection of Mana) - Playing the original after the remake has been interesting. I've tried and bounced off this game quite a few times in the past. I'm thinking I'll write a combined "things" post about both the original and the remake - and Secret of Mana as well. Overall, I'm glad I played it certainly has a lot of interesting elements. I'm not sure how I would have felt if I played it back when it was originally released, and it does have some flaws by modern game standards, but it's really pretty and fairly fun.
   
   
   
   


4. Super Mario Odyssey - I barely play this, but I finished the "main game" and started on the post game bit and the flow and joy in running around this game has been great.
   
   
   
   


Here's my total play time chart for November:






And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:

Blog: Books Read in 2021

Loyalty. Meaning. Edge. Relations.

Project 18: Game Tracker Update - 2021

 So it's been a long while since I've sat down and worked on the Game Tracker and it's also been a long while since I've written anything other than vague intentions for working on the project. Fortunately my new focus on creative work has push me back to it.

I was actually pushed by a post I'm writing for the blog that I'll share pretty soon. I've wanted to do a good explanation of Java's Preferences. I managed to thoroughly confuse myself with them and so thought I'd follow the Julia Evan's approach of writing about what confused me. I'd left my project in a thorough mess back in March - the equivalent of the truck sitting in the old bard with the engine out and wires and tubes laid out all over the place - and so in order to show how I was using preferences, I thought it might be a good idea to put the bits back together.

When I abandoned the project, I was in the midst of trying to convert the save system (persistence) to use JSON. That was part of a grander idea to connect to some kind of web interface - Google Sheets and Firebase are the two I've been eying. I ended up struggling to get Java and JSON to play nicely together and after a little bit of cobbling, I discovered that Joda-Time -  which I've used for managing time in Java for *years* - was also making everything complicated. 

I gave up and decided that since I mostly wanted the system up and running so I could finish the blog post - which I've been working on for months. I set up a project - well... took over the one from March - called 2021 refresh and tried to get a minimal set of the Game Tracker up and running. That was more or less fun, I built a CSV version of the data manager and then did all the cleanup I had to do to get up and running.

Game Tracker - Pretty much the same after all these years.

I also realized that I've been keeping the GitHub repository for the project private. I think that's partly based on not feeling like the project was ready for people to see and partly fear about showing off my own programming work. Given what I've been thinking about with creative work and how I want to use my time going forward, hiding isn't going to help me, so I opened the repository to the public and put and MIT Licence on it - not that I think it will be terribly useful for anyone. I found Choose a Licence, which was helpful for comparing licences.

 

I also got to write a readme, which at the end of the day turned out to help me feel better about the whole project and make sure that anyone who stumbles across it will know what on earth is happening. Nothing about the whole project feels at all glossy or cool - like I would like it to - but it's happening and I've moved it a little bit forward. I found Make a README which was a really good resource.

I like that I can return to the idea of small tasks for the project now. For example, for reasons that are beyond me - maybe as a demo for students - I set the game systems to be a Java Enum. This is a terrible idea since for some reason new video game systems have been released in the last few years and I've even purchased some of them. It'll be nice to be able to jump in and work on that for a little bit and then be done.

I also have a lot of other things I'd like to do. I'd like to expand the interfaces to include a desktop GUI, something for my phone and something for the web. I also still want to set up remote data management for the system. I'll get to those at some point, but again my new approaching to getting things done means they'll hopefully trickle out over time.

Blog Post: Books in 2021

Greed. Interesting.

November 2021 Project Update

I recently watched Cathy Hey interview Jeff Walker about building a creative career. While I'm not planning to leave my day job any time soon, I've been sitting on a lot of creative projects without making much progress and this really inspired me to get moving on a lot of these things.

I decided as a starting point I wanted to dedicate a little bit of time each week to working on projects. I set an initial goal of 5 hours a week and I really haven't nailed it yet, but I've actually started to get a little bit of stuff done. 

As apparently has become my wont I set up a spreadsheet to track my time, and so now my life outside of work is filled with colourful bar charts. 

My focus for now has been on reviving some actual posts in the blog. Inspired by Julia Evans (@b0rk), I wanted to start including more about the things I know and the things I'm learning. The first of those is using Java's Preferences. I'm using preferences in the Game Tracker so thought I'd use it as an example and then I realized that a) it's a horrible mess and b) it's not available to the public. Now I'm updating that and my next post will be about that.

So, generally, you can expect to see a few more posts outside of me tracking books and games here. I've made some progress on Chrono Trigger Sprites and I have a backlog to post there. Plus you can also expect more posts about technology, learning and teaching. I'm not committing to any set rates, but "more".

I feel pretty happy approaching my projects this way, so I really appreciate that video. I think I've started on a good productivity groove right now and I'll take it.

I've been sketching more too!

Blog: Books Read in 2021

Gambit. Life.

Blog: Books Read in 2021

Bodies. Recovery.