World of Warcraft Guild Creation Guide

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2755917/world_of_warcraft_guild_creation_guide.html?cat=19

Gorillaz have Stylo

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2759937/gorillaz_have_stylo.html?cat=33

Snow storm of 2010… The aftermath

The snow storm has come and gone but it’s devastation continues to linger. Amongst the piles of plowed snow you will find shattered remains. To see them, you would think they cry out as one hundred thousand voices, “Why have you forsaken us?” These, my friends, are the cries of the shopping carts. While the shopping centers around the region closed and shoppers and store workers were travelling home, they were left to weather the elements of the largest snow storm in decades. To many they were just the forgotten shopping carts left outside. To them it was… The holocaust. Here I have attempted to capture the horror and suffering imposed to the innocents. Each photo will reveal a similar but different story. They are all unique yet they are bound together by the same unfathomable terrible fate. You can see the evidence of being violently shoved into each other, or into concrete and steel structures, by the large snow plows. The twisted and broken frames seem to emanate a sense of dejection. No one I asked seemed to be bothered by any of this. It is an atrocity! It is my duty as a blogger to reveal this untold anguish to the world. The only thing that we can do is remember them... to honor them; for they are the true heroes of 2010. In life they carried our groceries... In death they carry our hearts.

Kwantum Cat

Timers

Ok well I decided to take this in a little different direction. I am going to start putting small bits of code up here and piece them together into different things. That way you can learn and I can experiment. So if you are as excited as I am about programming then whip out your compiler and lets get started.
The first thing I will go over is how to create a simple timer which you can use to trigger things. What things? Anything you want really. In my example it will put a line out to the console after a certain amount of milliseconds.
By the way, 1000 milliseconds is equal to 1 second. So 10000 milliseconds would be equal to 10 seconds. It seems complicated but lets take a look.
One thing you should also consider is that time is relative when dealing with different operating systems. A tick is the smallest resolution of time that the CPU your dealing with can process. (I generally think of a tick as 1 millisecond) In my example I am using a long variable named sc_timer. It will capture the current time by using getticks(); function. To get the timer to trigger, you subtract sc_timer from getticks(). The result is how much time has passed since you last updated the sc_timer variable. Pretty dang cool. You can use an if statement to compare if the elapsed time is greater than a certain amount of milliseconds. In my example I used 10000 milliseconds (10 seconds).

I created a console application in Code::Blocks and modified it... main.cpp:

#include <iostream>
#include "sc_getticks.h"
using namespace std;
long sc_timer;
int main()
{
sc_timer=getticks();
while(1)
{
if( (getticks() - sc_timer) > 10000)
{
sc_timer=getticks();
cout << sc_timer << "\n";
}
}
return 0;
}

Next I created a new file and called it sc_getticks.cpp

#ifdef _WIN32
#include <windows.h>
#endif
#include "sc_getticks.h"
long getticks(void)
{
#ifdef _WIN32
return GetTickCount();
#else
long curtime; struct timeval tp; struct timezone tzp; static long secbase;
gettimeofday(&tp,&tzp); if(!secbase) { secbase = tp.tv_sec; return tp.tv_usec/1000; }
curtime = (tp.tv_sec - secbase)*1000 + tp.tv_usec/1000; return curtime;
#endif
}

You can see that I put in some preprocesser directives. Don't worry about that for now. All you want to concentrate on is that this function will return the current tick count. (Note: if you are just using Windows systems you can replace getticks(); function and file and just use GetTickCount(); )

One more file... (its a small one) sc_getticks.h

extern "C" long getticks(void);

Now when you compile all this together you should get a console application that spits out the current tick count once every 10 seconds.

There you have it, a relatively painless timer. What you do with it is up to you. I will build on this example so stay tuned!

Download files for this project