Me and the CS teacher I'm assisting teaching for has devised a project for me to do so he can have a bit of an easier time marking me. At first I was a little apprehensive, but I think this is pretty doable:
I am to write a applet+servlet that will allow students to log in from school/home under their network logins and submit assignments and files to their respective directories. This system will be used for the entire school.
"Hm", I thought. "This only seems a little bit daunting". I pondered a bit more and drew out some diagrams/UML-esque images and realized that this might be pretty simple. In a nutshell, the user would enter their login info and connect to the servlet. The servlet (this all in Java by the way) would verify the login data with Novell (somehow; I'm clueless on this part), and send confirmation back to the client. Then the client would open an FTP session with the server and send the assignment to the proper directory based on their student login and the course it's for.
The main difficulties I foresee will be learning Swing, figuring out digital signing (for the applet), and somehow interfacing with Novell to verify logins. The rest should be pie. ;)
Advice on this very welcome; the above is by no means in stone. Those more experienced than myself on the matter please offer your wisdom!
Skirmish Online
...is in a lapse of inactivity. Don't worry, it's not like it's dead or on hiatus or anything. Just a lot going on right now. It'll get there. :)
Here's the v0.04 Roadmap for those who are interested in the progress on the pending release.
Star of Shadows
...may get a rewrite. I'm really unhappy with the current structure, which was more or less a product of ugly Cowboy coding. It gets more hackish with every coding session, and that's just no good. I'm going to be structuring the rewrite's development on the Agile cycle, which is outlined in Eliwood's (a trusted friend and excellent developer) recent gamedev article, "How to Make Your Games Succeed". I'll work on this more than v0.04 of Skirmish is out the door.
Waterloo Computer Science Contest
Saving the best for last, or maybe the last for best*, is the contest I'll be participating in tomorrow. The University of Waterloo (a big-shot University up here in Canada, for CS/CE :P) holds a Computer Science contest that has two phases. In the first phase each highschool writes the initial contest. Those who do well enough go to the University itself and write the latter part. I'm told that free pizza is involved in this portion. I don't even know what the prize is for the winner(s), but fame and fortune is likely to ensue.
I was reading over some questions from previous contests, and it doesn't look too difficult.
Wish me luck!
