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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Thursday 11 March 2004 (Day View)

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11.03.2004 – Thursday 11 March – Timers that don’t

• Another normal day at uni, and an eight o’clock start. I stayed at uni for ages, spending time in the labs with Marcus and then again later, trying to get my timer code working – which I couldn’t.

• Kieran turned up for our prac, and a bit later Matt turned up as well. Matt managed to write a mostly working line algorithm using just a red pen and a piece of paper, and in less than half an hour – impressive I thought. I wasn’t particularly worried about writing my own though, and was leaving it to the end because I knew, if all else failed, I could just write a literal representation of one of Bresenham’s line drawing formulas – which was, in fact, the recommended way of doing it. I’d already written about eight when I was messing around, some sort of worked but in strange ways – and some would have made nice screensavers, but now that I know how to do it and it works, that’s even better. I was actually in the lab trying to find out how to get a timer working, as nothing I did seemed to work. It ends up what I had was perfectly right, but I had to invalidate some part of the window before it would repaint, irregardless of whether and how I called repaint – something of a stupid way of doing it I think, and probably not something I’d have worked out by myself any time soon.

Comment by Matt – Saturday 13 March 2004, 10:12 PM

  "Later in the day, I spent a bit of time in the labs in ITEE, when Matt came, and wrote me a line drawing algorithm. If it wasnt for him, I never would have got it done, and had to hand in code that I stole off the internet - Just like the rest of the people in my class. Good thing that Matt came down, then, isnt it."

Comment by Ned – Sunday 14 March 2004, 5:31 PM

  You will find I have updated my journal entry above to include my life-changing meeting with the great and usually wrong Matt. We hope this fills you with much joy.