Scratchlist #1

So this is my scratchlist, which is a bunch of mental throw-up about stuff I'm working on, learning, and stuff I'm planning on learning next. Might as well write it down and keep track.


project: search engine
In the process of launching learning how to launch my basic search engine from Udacity CS101.  Need to work on receiving and handling queries via forms and familiarize with Google AppEngine's framework.  I do see a problem: I don't really know what I should use for my search corpus.  Ideally, this would be some set of pages whose links eventually terminate, but I can't have my web crawler crawling an infinite # of links.  I think I will have to implement some sort of 'depth-limiter' into the crawler to establish a stopping point for link-indexing.  How?  I don't know.

project: text-based Pokemon game clone
Main objective is practicing OOP-basics in Python.  Perhaps this can also be a good app to experiment on later when I learn some socket-handling and want to make it into a multiplayer game.  That'd really be cool, but I'll have to put that one on the back-burner right now.

project: blog platform
Developing in tandem with CS253 Web Applications class from udacity.com.  This is a great project to learn database interaction with.  I mean, a blog post is essentially a string of text, stored in a table somewhere, should be easy as pie, right? WRONG.

setting up my new domain!
I took the plunge and shelled out for my own domain. Probably a bit premature, but for now at least I have my own little playground.

the Command Line
I feel like science dog when I open terminal.  Forcing myself to do accomplish as much as I know how to do with a CLI instead of gui's... the main reason for this is so many tutorial and educational resources out there basically expect such knowledge, and I don't feel comfortable just entering sudo commands without knowing what effect they'll have.

Java

This is another thing I want to learn in order to better understand what I'm learning (huh? paradox).  Lately I've come across a couple treasure troves of knowledge, all taught in java, which is a strictly-typed language unlike Python, which is dynamically-typed.

check out TheCherno's awesome gamedev tutorial series:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFYT7Lqt1h8