David Acevedo's Blog

I'm not much for Horror Novels and while I've read lots of Stephen King I've more or less avoided all his scary books. I never saw the point of it. I had however read one of his horror novellas: The Mist which I completely enjoyed.  When I was in Japan, nursing a broken collarbone that kept me indoors for months, I entertained myself playing with the Play Station. I had a couple of games two of which proved to be amazing ones. One was Castlevania: Symphony of the Night , which had a lot of nostalgia Gothic flavor and the other one was Silent Hill . Playing Silent Hill was an altogether new experience for me. This game did it right, it felt like you were playing a horror novel or a good horror movie. Before actually reading the Mist, I had heard a radio play done in 3-D audio which was utterly fantastic (and better than the decent movie Frank Darabont did a few years back). Silent Hill felt like you were there. Surrounded by the mists, that rolled off the sea in the littl...

The other day I saw an ad for a game called Hacker:Evolution . I downloaded the demo and the game is a simulation game with you being a hacker. You have a terminal and a map of the computers and I though as I was going through the demo that this would be a great game if it incorporated basic programming into it. Like instead of just typing "bounce" to bounce your hack through some else's computer you actually had to define what bounce did á la Ruby. def bounce(ip_address) pipe(self.ip_address, ip_address) end Or some such thing. I though that would be cool. How cool would it be if it took place in the mid 80's and was done through modems? It could even have real exploits for the old systems! It's a neat idea and a cool way of learning programming, I think.

As I've written before I'm learning Ruby, a programming language. I use two computers one Mac (the laptop) and one PC (the desktop) and I'd been looking for a good text editor to do my programs. If you've never programmed before, a program is merely a text file that has been written in a language the computer can translate to machine language. The language the program is written on is called a programming language and there are many with different strengths and weaknesses among them: C, C++, C#, Ruby, Python and Java. To write programs two tools are typically used a text editor and an IDE or integrated development environment. For Ruby an IDE is bit of an over shot, so I was looking for a text editor. The best text editor from everybody I've talked to is Textmate (or BBedit though they're both very similar). Only problem is that it's $60 and only available for Mac (there is a port of Textmate to Windows called E-Text and that one is $40). So I looked fo...