Assembly Blog

I was attracted to the “small” displays above the areena entrance since the party started. When Hieronymus announced the “Assembly 05 Coding Challenge” I took that challenge and pulled out my favorite movies from the blinkenlights project. As I’m a software developer but have no clue or experience about demo programming, I just went using my favorite programming language: Python. Actually I only needed to get the PyGame library which allows me to control SDL, OpenGL and other stuff. But most of that isn’t needed anyway. In about 90 lines of (pretty sketchy) code I wrote a parser and player for the blinkenlight movies that corresponds to the specifications of those LCDs. See http://amy.gocept.com/~ctheune/blinkenassembly.rar for the source code and some example movies. You’ll need Python and PyGame installed on your machine (Linux, Windows, MacOS, you name it).

I’m proud to say that we in the infodesk have managed well the first party day. Nothing major issues has come up. I had luckily a program installed which I could use to make some info posters around the Areena when there was something needed. I’ve made almost ten new posters already :)

About GameDev compo, there were quite few original ideas in there. The chicken with big guns was the best. I was quite amazed by the fact somebody made a pinball game on the compo, but then again the ball was either a (wo?)man or a cow. So it actually had some humor factor also. I’ll give my vote for the chicken! Do give yours also @ PTN!

Here’s my first pic from Assembly Infodesk!

Woke up early this morning (8.30). Had a creeping feeling ot heartburn because of rather greasy late night snack around 0.30 last night. Went outside facing the sun for the first time in after a long, long while. God, that felt good! I munched my breakfast breadroll in no hurry and enjoyed the warm caressing of the sun. After a rather cold sleep that came as a pleasant surprise, even if I had to sacrifice my nightvision needed inside Areena.

I have now stayed up 49 hours and had nine hours of sleep somewhere in-between. 9/49 is quite a horrible ratio to keep, almost a half of the actual need. Unfortunately I’m just not such a sound sleeping guy. Immediatly if there’s some discomfort I wake up and quite probably aren’t capable to fall asleep again, even if the source of discomfort is removed.

To do: couple of more ads for the Interactive and two other inserts. We spent two hours last night shooting some obscure rather obscure stuff at the request from our reporter. I hope he has A Vision concerning the material waiting on the DV-tape to be logged, captured and edited.

But first a cup of coffee!

Indeed a very early morning it is still. The sun has just come up and the view is quite spectacular. It’s a pity I don’t have my digicam with me so I could share with you the wonderful vista. Inside, the Arena is still on slow motion, not much is happening and it is actually pretty quiet, I can hear my music playing loud and clear from my stereos.

This 12-hour shift that began at 21:00 yesterday is already getting to me. Still 2h45min to go… *YAWN* The bright side is that I won’t have any more shifts during the rest of Assembly 2005. Nothing much has happened, a bit of client machine tweaking and some password trouble were all that required my attention during these past 9 hours. Got to visit the sauna, which was very nice :)

People seem rather tired at this point and who can blame them. When kickbiking through the Arena corridors, I came upon many “zombies”. Take it from someone who’s been there, it’s not worth trying to stay awake the whole time, sleep is very important!-)

Riddler / Systems Crew