Because I don't feel like doing them anymore. If you want to know, just ask me. Or subscribe to the newsletter...

The thing's almost done. When you have a document called "CWG_Status.odt", it of course means you're using the OpenDocument format, but also means that you are reminding yourself of what you still have to add. And when that file goes from 10.4 KB to 8.3 KB, it means your almost done! So, I poke a little fun at ODF for its size... so what? The price is just right ($0.00). It's fast enough for me. Anyways. Right now I have 9 lines of stuff that still needs to be added. One will be addressed after the initial version goes live. I know, it can't be considered "Finished" until it's actually "Finished" but, name one piece of software where the creator had no more ideas for new stuff to add after it was "finished". It's the great thing about my job, I just work and work and work, and my boss will ask "Are you finished?!" and I'll reply "Software is never finished..." And it's like eternal job security with no ship date.

That's funny though, because you can finish a work of art. Like, a song, or a painting, or a photograph. With art, though, it's like, you reach a point where you consider it done, and then you take stuff away. Especially in sculpting. They haul in a huge chunk of marble for Michaelangelo and he says "I'm done! I just have to cut some marble away now."

At some point in the last 3 years, I've learned to see computer science as more art than science, though. A program can be beautiful. It can be elegant. You can show it to other people and they may or may not (usually not) see the beauty in it. It's a messy process. I'm not talking about the user interface either. I'm talking about the code. The design. The implementation. The very little code that does a lot. The abstraction. The sweet, sweet pleasure of everything running correctly.

So the game is almost done. It's looking beautiful... not in the sense of how you probably think of beauty, but in the sense described above. The code is beautiful. The interface is not beautiful, at all. Well, it kinda looks like this site, only less gray, and more non-colorish. Here's my motto:

Function, then beauty

It makes life easier. Get it to work, then make it aesthetically appealing. That's down the road though, since this isn't like a 3D game or something. It's a web game. With an incredibly lazy creator.

There's more logic in this game than anything I've programmed in the last 3 years. Well, I guess that's an exaggerated statement. There's certainly a lot of logic in dumb and it's web counterpart. I guess I can say, there's more logic in this application than any other application I've ever done. Meaning, something specific, like this website, or other websites I've done, even in work. Underlying systems aren't applications, they're tools to help make application development easier, and that includes dumb and dumb web. And the security system, and my menu system which still holds its own. So this adds a level of complexity that I wouldn't normally find in an application, but not one that I'm not capable of handling. Basically, here's what goes on with my other applications...

select data from the database
show it

or

show a form
input data to the database

With dumb and JSF, there was literally no work do be done here. I can't say what's going on now, only because it's too complex and it would give away my great ideas.

I look forward to releasing this game on the web for the 4 people in the world that will enjoy it. Should be within the next week or so. w00t!