C++ is one of the most used languages, especially in the gaming industry. As I like to code lot in various languages, I had to try out the C++.

My coding experience in the past have been some coolbasic,random scripting languages and lots of php and mysql. So when I started coding c++, I had good knowledge of coding in general.

First “hello world” apps I build on Linux system using g++/vim. Setting up development environment and commonly used libraries on Linux was easy because of the apt-get.

Because I like playing games, I want to build my own games, so next step after the “hello world” is to get ball on the screen and move it. I build the app using sdl. This was the part where I really started to get bugs.

When I finally got the moving ball on screen working, I tried to port to windows… Working with c++, windows and custom libraries is pain on windows. I have to manually install every damn piece of libraries I want… I can’t apt-get anything…

It took couple of weeks of lazy coding to get the windows port working. After that I build small asteroids kind of game/toy, but porting that back to Linux made more problems because some variables had different values on different platforms…

Screenshot from my c++ project

So my opinion on c++ so far:

Pros

• Fast
• Multiplatform support
• Good skill to have
• Almost all modern games are build using c++

Cons

• Custom libraries are sometimes damn hard to install
• Managing variables and strings is so freaking hard… (I love php now even more)
• Freaking hard to learn some weird stuff

C++ is great language and I will try to learn more, but first I will try finish one php project…

I have written about Amazon EC2 some time ago. I liked the EC2, but now I found new competitor that is better than EC2. Rackspace cloud is easier to use and has great support.

Prizing
Both Amazon and Rackspace offers virtually unlimited computing power/file storage for low cost pay-as-you-go prizing.

It looks like Rackspace offers cheaper servers. Rackspace also has small 256m server for 0.015$ and that is my most used server, because I usually don’t need big server.

Managing servers
Here is the point where the real difference becomes. Amazon has some kind of weird command line tools for managing the servers, firefox addon and a online  management console. The management console isn’t the best system, but it works. The main problem is that connecting to the server with ssh is damn difficult. It took 1hour for me first time to get the connection to the server…

Rackspace offers simple solution to connecting to the servers. They email the random server password for you. Then to can connect with normal ssh client to standart ports. No unnecessary key stuff etc. Rackspace also offers ajax console.

Support
I haven’t tried amazons support, because I haven’t a) needed help b) found where to get help

Rackspaces live support is awesome! There is always somebody to answer my questions.

In my opinion…

…Rackspacecloud is much better.

So, you are coding your project and you realize that you haven’t done any backups! What is the easiest and fastest way to do backup (I don’t know about speed and difficult of this method, but it works and I like this.)

Dump your databases! (if you have any)

Mysqldump --databases dbname > dump.SQL

Then move to parent directory

cd ..

And do a tar archive

tar cvvf project.tar project/

And voilà! Local backup is ready, let’s move it to safe place in your ftp server…

ftp ftp.example.com

Use ls and cd to find right folder on your server, then move local file with:

put project.tar

Whee! Now you have backups safely on your server! It is possible to write a cron script that backups and uploads your project every hour.

One of the best horror/puzzle games ever is on sale at steam. You can buy 3 awesome games just for 5e! Not bad price at all

I have played demos and techdemos of penumbra long time ago, but I didn’t bought the full version. But now I got full version of every game on penumbra for very nice price.

But one of the best things that I can say about penumbra.

• Runs on every modern computer and also on older ones.
• Nice graphics
• Awesome physics engine. (Many puzzles are based on physics)
• Lots of nice puzzles
• Interesting story
• Runs on Linux/Mac/windows (But the steam version wont run on linux natively But it looks like it is possible to run this with wine.)
• Creepy game

At this price, I recommend to buy it now, as its on sale only for this weekend.

Kubuntu was my first distro that I really liked. It was almost cutting-edge, based on Debian, fast and stable. And it had the Kde 3. The best desktop environment ever. But now, Kde 4 has been released and kubuntu is moving to use kde 4. Now it is time to me to change distro.

Old kubuntu 8.04 is starting to get old and I have found some unstability (meaning random crashes and freezing for 2 sec once  on a month(So, it is still much more stable than windows)). I don’t want to move to latest Kubuntu, because it has the Kde 4, I don’t want to  continue using of older version of Kubuntu, because it is old.

I have tried to use Kde 4 for couple of times. I have found it unfinished and weird. Kde 4 is trying to be more newbie friendly, and thats not a good thing. Example dolphin. Konqueror is much better and it has much more features. Dolphin is something that could be on gnome, not in kde.

In kde 3 I can change almost every setting, I can modify my desktop to be just like I want. Kde 3 is desktop environment for power users. Kde 4 is something for regular users. Kde 4 is too simple for me!

So moving to ubuntu isn’t a option, because, well, it uses gnome. I have decided to move to the Debian, because it is stable. I think I install something like wmii or xfce to it. Yes, I could get xubuntu, but I think debian is more stable and xubuntu is based on Debian, so there is no big difference.