April 20, 2010

Koopa 1up

Finally some progress to report: an update of the Koopa Cobol Parser project. The main feature of the new release can be seen below: calculation of coverage.

The horizontal axis iterates over the 513 files in the test suite. The vertical axis shows you how much of that file Koopa actually parses (or, put differently, doesn't ignore). As you can now see, coverage is not bad at all. Consider me a happy developer.

I extended the batch parsing application with the ability to export its results to CSV, which you can then import into the favourite spreadsheet of your choice. So you can run this against any code you have lying around and get a nice visual in a reasonable amount of time.

Other feature: Koopa can now also correctly handle SKIP1, SKIP2, SKIP3 and EJECT statements. These are basically directives for printing the source code; they don't actually contribute to the semantics of the program. Makes you wonder how much Cobol code got physically printed over all these years...

As usual, the executable jar has been updated, so feel free to take Koopa for a spin.

April 17, 2010

Progress ?

Not much to report. I've been working on the front-end for the new Skribler, but I haven't gotten to anything presentable yet. I've been sidetracked a little, trying to see if I could get JQuery to work, but it's not generating the factbase as it should. I have also been playing a little with dtrace on the mac, but I need some good documentation or a reference manual to get the traces that I want.
As usual there are a lot of crazy ideas floating around in my head, and I have a hard time ignoring them and sticking to the plan. Ah well...

April 05, 2010

I got Beta, Baby!

Starcraft 2 Beta, that is. How to get it yourself: set up your beta profile at battle.net, and be prepared to wait. In my case, I got in after about ten days.

I'm playing on a mac, as you might have guessed, but the client is still Windows only (Mac client is in the making). So thank God for Bootcamp!

Download and installation was easy. Only problem I got was that the map server was down on my first day. When it is down you can't download the maps, and so you can't play unless you already got them before. Why can't they include the basic maps in the install ? It was around 1.7GB already; a few more MB wouldn't have mattered much.

Anyway, the game itself is great! I got my ass kicked three times in a row —all on Novice level as well— but it was fun. I finally managed to win one game with a combination of Stalkers and Coloxen, with a few Immortals thrown in for fun. (Yes, I prefer Protoss.)

Also, if you like playing with a pen tablet instead of a mouse (as I do), you'll be fine. With the old Starcraft this was a bit of a pain, but in SC2 it wasn't a problem at all.

The replay feature is also very nice. It showed me that I was actually quite a bit slower in my build than my opponents. Timing is very important in this game.

Definitely will be playing more.