Chris Mills – Game dev with more than just games on my mind.

Reading List

Published January 22, 2017

My current reading list. The Dictators Handbook is pretty darn good so far. Lessons learned: bayonet my commander and ensure I have control of the treasury to assist with loyalty. Not sure how I’m going to apply this to my job, but we’ll see.

Thank you ACLU

Published January 15, 2017

The ACLU does such amazing work and I’m so glad they’re taking on this fight. If you care about what they do be sure to support them.

AGDQ

Published January 15, 2017

Best part of my week has been watching Awesome Games Done Quick. The culmination was the final run of Undertale. While hugging the goat, they hit $2.2 million. Such as an amazing event and for a really great cause; humbling to see the gaming community come out and give so much. During the last run by TGH gave a shoutout to one of his friends who couldn’t make it to the event. It was revealed during an announcement that the could not make it as he was being screened for possible tumors. Seems thanks to early detection (yay cancer prevention!) Kaizen is doing…

Walkability as Technology

Published January 14, 2017

https://janejacobsjapan.com/2016/11/27/walkability-as-technology/ Walkability is a huge factor for me when looking for places to live. Very happy with Eugene and where my workplace is located with respect to it.

Pointers in Swift 3

Published September 26, 2016

Let’s reverse a null-terminated string in Swift. First, the code.

let reverse = "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"

let encoding = String.Encoding.utf8
let ptrCapacity: Int = reverse.lengthOfBytes(using: encoding) / MemoryLayout<CChar>.size
var ptr = UnsafeMutablePointer<CChar>.allocate(capacity: ptrCapacity)
ptr.initialize(from: reverse.utf8CString)

var index = 0
var np : UnsafeMutablePointer<CChar> = ptr.advanced(by: 0)
while (np.pointee != 0) {
    index = index + 1
    np = ptr.advanced(by: index)
}

index = index - 1
while index >= (ptrCapacity/2) {
    let revIdx = ptrCapacity-index-1
    let tmp = ptr[index]
    ptr[index] = ptr[revIdx]
    ptr[revIdx] = tmp
    index = index - 1
}
print("")
print("Reversed using pointers")
var s = String.init(cString: ptr)
print("\(reverse)")
print("\(s)")

ptr.deinitialize(count: ptrCapacity)
ptr.deallocate(capacity: ptrCapacity)

let reverse = "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"

let encoding = String.Encoding.utf8

let ptrCapacity: Int = reverse.lengthOfBytes(using: encoding) / MemoryLayout<CChar>.size

var ptr = UnsafeMutablePointer<CChar>.allocate(capacity: ptrCapacity)

ptr.initialize(from: reverse.utf8CString)

var index = 0

var np : UnsafeMutablePointer<CChar> = ptr.advanced(by: 0)

while (np.pointee != 0) {

index = index + 1

np = ptr.advanced(by: index)

}

index = index - 1

while index >= (ptrCapacity/2) {

let revIdx = ptrCapacity-index-1

let tmp = ptr[index]

ptr[index] = ptr[revIdx]

ptr[revIdx] = tmp

index = index - 1

}

print("")

print("Reversed using pointers")

var s = String.init(cString: ptr)

print("\(reverse)")

print("\(s)")

ptr.deinitialize(count: ptrCapacity)

ptr.deallocate(capacity: ptrCapacity)

This example is a bit contrived, if you wanted to reverse a string in Swift it would be much easier to use the String(reverse.characters.reversed()) method. First thing, when working with pointers in Swift, is to allocated memory for them. Here I’m using ptrCapacity to allocate space for the array of CChar that will represent the string we are going to reverse. ptrCapacity in this case will be the same size of reverse.characters.count, however I wanted to have a reminder there of MemoryLayout. MemoryLayout helps describe the memory layout of…

Custom Operators with Generics in Swift

Published September 19, 2016

This weekend I decided to sit back a play with Swift. About two weeks ago I took some time off from work and while relaxing I started watching Swift Talk. Swift Talk is a weekly video series by Chris Eidhof and Florian Kugler who during the show do a bit a pair programming and refactoring. Rather than go over a solution, they walk you through the thought process, live coding as they discuss the topic of the week. Even if you are not interested in Swift, as a coder I strongly suggest watching some of the free episodes to get…

XCode Provisioning Woes

Published April 11, 2016

Lately I’ve been pretty busy with work that I haven’t had much time to write my own code. Having made some time, I decided this weekend would be a perfect time to update my Math Ref app. As an added bonus, I was going to setup my new iPad Pro for development. This was the start to losing almost an entire day to provisioning profiles and what I found out was an Xcode 7.3 bug. The problem started when I connected my new iPad to test a bug from a user about restoring purchases. When I went to run the…

Back to Meditation

Published January 13, 2016

For most my life I have had an on-again, off-again relationship with meditation. It began sometime around middle school I think, I was fascinated by Japanese and Chinese cultures and in kung-fu movies, someone was always meditating. Even Vader dug meditation from time to time. As you can imagine though, a young kid trying to sit calmly and relax is not really a thing that will last. There was something about it though that kept me coming back. Off and one over the years I continue to find myself wanting that space, wanting to have my brain let go of…

Minor Issues Integrating CocoaPods

Published January 11, 2016

Recently updated my Math Ref project to use CocoaPods for all my frameworks after some frustration with Fabric and Xcode. Ran into a few issues that I wanted to document. Issues with “CocoaPods did not set the base configuration of your project because…” Solution : Don’t tinker, reset. Issues with “library not found for -lPods” Solution : pod install, or from the same place, delete the libPods.a file. Issues with SourceTree and Xcode linking Solution : SourceTree ignoring typechanges

First two weeks of dandelion

Published May 18, 2015

First two weeks of dandelion

I originally wrote this post on 2 May, but forgot to post it.

Well, the app has been out for two weeks now and it’s time for the reflection post. Since the app is free and I didn’t really intend for it to have any monetization scheme I decided on no analytics in it. The only data I have is from Apple (not their new fancy analytics thing) is the old iTunes Connect one. So, after two weeks, let’s look at some data.

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