Walking on…

I want to briefly mention that my wife Hilary, made a New Year’s resolution (2015) to walk 1000 miles over the year. She enjoys getting out and about in the country and towns and last year walked a bit with her WRAF colleagues on a charity walk in Suffolk. This inspired her to accept this challenge and she has made a blog called 1000 miles with friends and a facebook page as well.

Hilary then invited me to walk with her and on most weekends this year we have done a walk somewhere in Suffolk. Last weekend Hilary planned to take me walking along a disused railway line near Lavenham I think, but we had other things to do and needed a quick and easier walk, so we actually settled on doing a very local walk at Nowton park Bury St Edmunds.

This was only about 3 miles long but was the first time we had walked around the perimeter of the park completely and it was a very pleasant Sunday morning walk. In the afternoon it clouded over and rained so at least we walked at the right time!

Chess

Since my last post I have eased back on playing and studying chess, as I have been revising C programming and coding with a view to making my own C chess engine. This is a long term dream of mine to make my own chess engine, but I need to get good at the basics of C programming to really get this complex C chess engine created. It will only be a basic C chess engine but that is complex enough for me at the moment.

Over the weekend I completed a C course I had enrolled in months ago..learntoprogram.tv C programming for beginners by Mark Lassoff. This is really to prepare for iOS programming and has a bias toward C programming on the Mac but I was able to adapt it to my Win8 PC. I enjoyed doing it and now will keep practicing C coding and tinkering with my developing C chess engine.

I sometimes cannot see the wood for the trees when learning C. For example I was printing out a board array and I kept getting a waring from the compiler..”expecting a matching int”. I just couldn’t think what the problem was as I had a mental block, so I asked for help on StackOverflow and found I had not matched the printf specifiers to the arguments! See SO SO C printf array int matching format

So simple and such a silly error to make! Hopefully though I will never do that again…

I actually have a chess coaching session tonight with my chess coach so now I need to get back to playing chess!

WebDev

One reason I finished the C course with Learntoprogram.tv was I was on a webinar with them last week discussing web apps with HTML5, JavaScript and PhoneGap. This is very interesting and I will be developing my PhoneGap skills. Have you tried it?

The end of this post…

That is all from me for this post. I have lots to do on programming and general activities and blog posting! All good fun…take care till next time! 🙂