8/28/09 [PF #76] - And so she finally shows up!

[Gabi]

At last we get to see Keaton!

And Joshua's bad luck streak is still going on.

By the way, it's still Friday in Argentina.

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

Is that a guy with a lightsaber in the first panel?

[Sprocketsdance]

Keaton.. and a lightsaber?? How cool! 

... and yes.. poor poor Joshua..  I wonder if his android body is strong enough to break the bonds? 

[Tapewolf]

Keaton.. and a lightsaber?? How cool! 

The first panel is taken pretty much whole from Deus Ex.

... and yes.. poor poor Joshua..  I wonder if his android body is strong enough to break the bonds? 

Depends whether they set him back to full strength or just to a more Being-like strength.  Also, if the chair was designed to hold a Demon, it won't make much difference.
Finally, if it's all just a misunderstanding, Joshua isn't likely to get his job back by smashing the chair and running away.

As a general note, don't forget that Walk in the Woods is updated too.  It might have been better if I'd staggered them, actually...

[Garsemor]

That guy is a wacko, but he's actually not far of from the truth. I'm starting to think that he and Kristofer (Jakob) arn't going to get along.

[Tapewolf]

That guy is a wacko, but he's actually not far of from the truth. I'm starting to think that he and Kristofer (Jakob) arn't going to get along.

It may not be quite clear, and hell, it's been most of a year ago - but Ashford believes that Kris is one of Cross's underlings:
http://www.project-future.org/strip.php?strip=34

EDIT:
FWIW, I was hoping we'd reach this page a month ago, but life just isn't that waaayyy...

EDIT EDIT:
Some random trivia from the development of this strip:

23:00:49 tapewolf: I hope that leaves me enough time.  I'm a little worried about that building now 
23:00:57 RenSGaulen: Heh.
23:01:03 tapewolf: Graassss
23:01:19 tapewolf: I'll probably either do random noise or steal Amber's grass.
23:01:34 tapewolf: I seem to steal everything else from her 
23:01:41 RenSGaulen: *snrk*
23:02:16 RenSGaulen: "Get off my lawn.. HEY, WHERE'S MY DAMN LAWN?!"
23:02:20 tapewolf: Hehehe

...which led to this:

Stealing Amber's Grass

...though in the end I never actually did use Amber's grass design.

[Jack McSlay]

An ED-209 on the top of the building and a dog to chase dudes with lightsabers. that's an strange security scheme

[Ren Gaulen]

An ED-209 on the top of the building and a dog to chase dudes with lightsabers. that's an strange security scheme

Hey, it was never said that anything at the UNATCO Starfire makes sense!

[Tapewolf]

Not many Deus Ex players, hmm?  These screenshots may help:

http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k216/tapewolf/games/Shot0000.jpg
http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k216/tapewolf/games/Shot0023.jpg

[Gabi]

So where did the dog come from?

[Tapewolf]

So where did the dog come from?

Another Deus Ex reference.  I don't believe how much discussion we're getting from a throwaway gag  


http://it-he.org/deus4/leftbhnd.jpg

...I even made the dog too red and kind of shiny.

[Sprocketsdance]

Awww.. wow.. cute doggles   Man.. do I feel lame for not playing this game XD

Oh yeah.. and poor Keats.. seems like this happens a lot..

[Tapewolf]

Awww.. wow.. cute doggles  Man.. do I feel lame for not playing this game XD

It is widely regarded as a classic.  The sequel (Invisible War) - not so much.

As for the dobermans (I think this is probably one of the things that led me towards creating Dorcan) - they aren't particularly friendly in this game, being attack/guard dogs.
I recommend Ren's suggestion of using gas grenades - that makes them run away, at least.  The tranq gun doesn't work and kills them which I only realised about halfway through the game.

EDIT: Deus Ex does appear to be on Steam if that's any help to you.  I doubt you'll get the newspaper that was in the boxed version, though  

[Buhamet]

Someone's been playing Deus Ex too much

I love that game, and you've done a really good job remaking the UNATCO Base at the start (did you ever find the hidden area below the computer room floor?) Along with the Robots.

Comic wise, it's awesome as usual, although where the idea of "Undead liche" came from along with the "oh no, not this again" does sorta raise questions about the sanity of the commander

I personally wonder if Oswalds got the strength to break out the chair, seeing how he's a robot himself now

Oh, FYI, it's not a lightsaber. In Deus Ex you get a sorta Beam Sword when you get in Hong Kong

[hapless]

Must... Resist... Installing... Deus Ex... Again... Oh, well, who am I trying to kid...
Keaton actually looks like a professional in business dress - if I didn't know that she has quite emotional approach in many situations I'd think of her as of Furrae's Tovera.

//h
PS. Josh->Faces["WTH?"].count++;
PPS. Was supposed to be Pike, but I have no idea why did I put the dot-operator in there.
But actually, it might be a valid C. Josh being a pointer to a struct with an array (of structs containing a count member) named Faces, which gets indexed by a string literal (which's turned by the compiler into an address to a place in the read-only data section) which makes the CPU increment an unknown and somewhat random location of the program's memory. I guess most compilers probably wouldn't  let you to use a (const char*)-type pointer as an array offset without a cast, but...
P^3S: Hashmaps, not arrays. Indexed by just about any value, including strings, using [] operator in quite a few languages.

[Tapewolf]

PS. Josh->Faces["WTH?"].count++;

That's some pretty weird array syntax there.  But yeah, there's only one time he does anything like the D-face here.  We concentrated on making him look angry instead.

EDIT:

But actually, it might be a valid C. Josh being a pointer to a struct with an array (of structs containing a count member) named Faces, which gets indexed by a string literal (which's turned by the compiler into an address to a place in the read-only data section)

...and here I was thinking you had some language that automatically let to do some kind of string lookup hashing as an array index.  Hmm, maybe you could overload [] or something....

EDIT EDIT:
This is what Keaton had to say about the strip:

Keaton 17:43 "Oh no, conspiracy theories. Why the **** did I take this job again? 8|
       If he starts with the Bush did 9/11 sh** then I'm slitting his throat and leaving."

[Fibre]

PS. Josh->Faces["WTH?"].count++;

That's some pretty weird array syntax there.  But yeah, there's only one time he does anything like the D-face here.  We concentrated on making him look angry instead.

EDIT:

But actually, it might be a valid C. Josh being a pointer to a struct with an array (of structs containing a count member) named Faces, which gets indexed by a string literal (which's turned by the compiler into an address to a place in the read-only data section)

...and here I was thinking you had some language that automatically let to do some kind of string lookup hashing as an array index.  Hmm, maybe you could overload [] or something....

Well, it's certainly valid C++, and that's basically what would happen there with:
struct Face {int count;};
struct {std::map<std::string, Face> Faces;} *Josh;

I'm pretty sure it's never valid C though. The only case where Faces["WTH?"] would be valid is when Faces is an integer type, and then the expression would be a char const l-value, so .count couldn't be valid.

[Tapewolf]

I'm pretty sure it's never valid C though. The only case where Faces["WTH?"] would be valid is when Faces is an integer type, and then the expression would be a char const l-value, so .count couldn't be valid.

Remind me to discuss const-correctness with you one of these days.

[hapless]

Oh, well...
test.c:3: error: array subscript is not an integer
A cast from (const char*) to (int) fixes the thing, just as supposed.
struct Face { int count; };
struct Character { struct Face Faces[200]; } *Josh;
void execute() { Josh->Faces[(int)"WTH?"].count++; }

As a bonus, this example code doesn't initialize the *Josh pointer, so the incremented memory location is even more random. *cough*SEGV*cough*.

//h - Once again, "What have I done... "

[Tapewolf]

//h - Once again, "What have I done... "

Scared off all the other readers, most likely 

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Nothing unusual there...

[Sprocketsdance]

I find it rather intriguing... looks fun ^^

[Tapewolf]

I find it rather intriguing... looks fun ^^

It's turned into a discussion of C++ programming by the looks.  Fibre seems to have got the drop on me because although I do this for a living, I don't usually use the template operator, except when programming the Nokia S60, which is, frankly, a nasty piece of work.

In summary, this is the sort of language that Windows, Firefox, and most computer software you use on a day-to-day basis are written in.

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_%28programming_language%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B

[Sprocketsdance]

Is it bad that this stuff is making me drool? >.>   I think I might want to take a few classes..... I'm sure my bro has a few books laying around but I doubt anything for beginers..

[hapless]

You might want to use something more newbie-friendly than C/C++ to start with... current introductory courses seem to use either Java or C# (C-Sharp).
I wouldn't recommend to start learning with Pascal/Delphi or (Visual) Basic. It will cause much grief (not only for you) after a while.

//h - On the other hand, who am I to tell you what to do?

PS. I hope this addendum won't get overlooked...
I' m pretty sure there's an unofficial list of "do" and more importantly "don't read" books... you wouldn't believe how many bad programming books are available on the market. From my limited experience I can only say that O'Reilly books are usually OK, as do some of the Apress's. Anybody else willing to speak on this subject?

[Sprocketsdance]

You might want to use something more newbie-friendly than C/C++ to start with... current introductory courses seem to use either Java or C# (C-Sharp).
I wouldn't recommend to start learning with Pascal/Delphi or (Visual) Basic. It will cause much grief (not only for you) after a while.

//h - On the other hand, who am I to tell you what to do?

Thank you for the advice! I'll consider it when shopping for books =) I'm slowly making my way through nursing school at the moment so... who knows ^^

[Tapewolf]

You might want to use something more newbie-friendly than C/C++ to start with... current introductory courses seem to use either Java or C# (C-Sharp).
I wouldn't recommend to start learning with Pascal/Delphi or (Visual) Basic. It will cause much grief (not only for you) after a while.

That was one of the suggestions I was considering, picking something easier to begin with.  I originally started out on BASIC on the ZX Spectrum, switched to C/C++ around 1992.  I got into it because I was interested in the idea of programming games.
What I usually do when learning a new language is set myself a goal, and work from tutorials or 'learn C++ in 30 days' type books to achieve it.  That may or may not be the best way, but it's what I've tended to do.
I worked out a lot of it for myself, learned some extremely useful things in college (2-year thing between school and university in the UK), at University it was a case of of diminishing returns, but that's probably just me.

I've been meaning to look at programming the Android phone just as an experiment, but at the moment I haven't really been able to think of something to write, which means I don't really have a goal to seek.

But yes, I think it's a very good thing that people are interested in learning about it.

PS. I hope this addendum won't get overlooked...
I' m pretty sure there's an unofficial list of "do" and more importantly "don't read" books... you wouldn't believe how many bad programming books are available on the market. From my limited experience I can only say that O'Reilly books are usually OK, as do some of the Apress's. Anybody else willing to speak on this subject?

Yes, O'Reilly is usually pretty good.  But I can only really recommend first-hand things which teach you how to program C++ in DOS, circa 1992  

I am wondering whether to hive this thread off to the Outer Fortress or something.

**EDIT**

On the topic of the actual comic, our Evil Plan for smoothing out the updates has borne fruit this week and unless I get hit by a bus or something, we'll be updating on schedule tomorrow.

[hapless]

What I usually do when learning a new language is set myself a goal, and work from tutorials or 'learn C++ in 30 days' type books to achieve it.  That may or may not be the best way, but it's what I've tended to do.

Hehe, similar thing here. Actually, I've learned basics of C by mapping the sourcecode of program I was trying to modify onto my turbo pascal knowledge... with mixed results.

But yes, I think it's a very good thing that people are interested in learning about it.

The more the merrier, as they say.

I am wondering whether to hive this thread off to the Outer Fortress or something.

IIRC threads can be split? The first half of this one was actually on topic...

//h
RE: EDIT:

On the topic of the actual comic, our Evil Plan for smoothing out the updates has borne fruit this week and unless I get hit by a bus or something, we'll be updating on schedule tomorrow.

w00t!

[Tapewolf]

IIRC threads can be split? The first half of this one was actually on topic...

Yes, that's what I meant.  I should have been clearer.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Meh. The topic moved. I'm not complaining.

... although I've also wanted to learn C/C++ for a while, now, as well... Goes nicely with the bash, perl, php stuff...