Personal Blogs

For the last couple of days I've been working on my solitaire thing, lying in bed and trying not to think about going back to work.

The solitaire thing: looks awful, the code is gnarly in too many places, there isn't much (any) error handling, the test-harness is patchy, the documentation is scant and the TODO list is huge. But the major components [bar one] are all now in place.

There are issues, but these are issues that shouldn't cascade—I can work on them without worrying that I will break-the-build. The main plumbing has been done, all I need to think about now is what the sinks, taps, bidets etc. will look like/do.

Well not quite.

The main reason that I started building the thing in the first place was that I was interested in the game itself. In studying it mathematically and studying AI. I'm still a while off doing that yet.

That's the big [bar one] that I don't have in place—the analysis module. [Although I'm not sure that it is going to be a module!] It's all very well being to open/save games, write the code for a new board/move/player and just have this happen, what I really need to do is...

There's a wee bit of me that just wants to forge ahead. I've built-in a few things into the model to help, and the model is set up so that it should be easy to build-in many more of such things. This would be a wrong thing to do.

So what I'm going to do is to fix the things that are flaky, every day when I'm tired of doing that I'll get out a pencil and paper and see if me not thinking about the main problems has been a help.

What's been done so far isn't too bad, but then after studying computing for three years now, it shouldn't be.

I'm in new territory [computer-wise], time to make ensure that I've built the foundations right, even if I'm thinking about the roof while I doing that.