Yesterday marked the release of my first video game. Rollout is an Android port of the project I started during the YSU game jam in April. Releasing the game on Android was an exercise in bringing an idea to completion and learning Unity. Big thanks to the Youngstown Game Developers group and all the wonderful artists that provided assets free of charge (see the credits screen for more info).

Overall, I am pretty happy with …

The Unified Style Guide (aka USG) is a side project I've been slowly piecing together over the past few years. It started mainly as an effort to document my personal preferences for structuring files and folders. A special file reserved in the style guide is the directory information file which simply provides a plain text description of the directory contents. When necessary, I have been using these files to describe the naming convention of the …

The Unified Style Guide (USG) is a project that I have been slowly piecing together to better organize files and directories. The premise of the project (and all style guide projects) is to provide a straightforward guide that is well thought-out and takes the guesswork out of most use cases. I will anguish over all the trivial, mundane details so you don't have too!

The two utilities that support the USG are Doctrine and Archiver …

Been working on some updates to QuickWin recently. QuickWin was ultimately developed to scratch a productivity itch that had been bugging me for a while. There are some similar projects available such as GoToWindow and AltTabAHK but nothing quite hit the feature set I wanted. Overall, I am happy with how functional QuickWin has proven to be; it has quickly integrated into my workflow over the past few months of usage.

New Feature Examples

The …

Some system related picks this week.

Podcasts:

• System Smarts - New podcast focusing on all aspects of systems.

Software:

• Graphviz - Diagramming and visualization tool that uses a text-based markup. Works well for documenting system design.
• Mscgen - Message diagramming tool that uses a text-based markup. Great for documenting any system that has intercommunicating components.

Made a quick video to demonstrate some of the features of gArchiver:

I use gArchiver frequently and it has proven invaluable. The ability to quickly add metadata to a zip file is handy. Here are a couple of typical use cases:

• Keeping track of where files came from. When I need to keep a local copy of a received file, its useful to make a quick note of who sent it.
• Grouping files together as …

Sometimes normal leading comments just aren't enough, instead a visual method of grouping blocks of code together is needed. The following pattern seems to work very well:

<comment-symbol>{-- <group-text> --
<code-here>
<comment-symbol>----}

Here is an example in C:

/*{-- Some grouped variables. --*/
/* Maintains foo-y stuff. */
int foo = 1;
/* Maintains bar-y stuff. */
int bar = 2;
/*----}*/

Here is an example in Python:

#{-- Some cool code here. --
foo = 1
bar = 2
#----}

Multi-line example in JavaScript:

//{-- Big long explanation of a …

For a while now, I have had the mindset that any high-level operation related to a software project should be captured as an OS-native script kept either in the repo's root directory or an appropriate subdirectory. For example, the following scripts are located in the root directory of my blog repo:

• _Build_HTML.bat
• _Cleanup.bat
• _Deploy_SSH.bat
• _Run_Test_Server.bat

A few things worth noting about the filenames alone:

• The scripts are Windows-native batch files since …