chasing parked c(h)ars

I’ve been working on the polar coordinate plotter over the last few days, and I’m making some good progress. This, however, is not a circle:

I know why its happening, but haven’t yet worked out a fix. I’ll blog about it later, once it get it working properly.

Anyway, I wanted to do something different in the spare couple of hours I had yesterday, so I wrote a little tool for working with character sets. Its available over at toybox: 64charset

It has three basic functions: create a charset from a definition file, decompile a charset into a definition file, and view a charset. What this gives is the ability to edit a character set in a text editor. Its not as convenient as working in a real editor, but for quick edits and hacks you can’t beat it.

It was a hell of a lot of fun to write, and I had the whole thing working in about three hours of actual work, which I was really impressed with. Perl is just an incredible language for getting shit done fast. This fact is nothing new to me, I’ve been using Perl for as long as I’ve been using Unix, but every now again you get reminded of just how truly excellent it can be. The SDL bindings are pretty awesome too.