James Tharpe

James Games: War!

James — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 02:02:30 +0000

Now that I have a deck of cards built, it’s time to write a game. The first game I’ll write will be war, because it’s the simplest game I know. Here are the rules: A standard deck is divided evenly between two players. Each player draws their top card to play. The player with the [...]

Proper Prompting with System.Console

James — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:50:48 +0000

Today as I was designing the object model for War (see: James Games), I decided to write a small console application to help with some testing. Early in the process, I had to deal with the typical task of getting user-input. Typical code for getting input looks something like this: static void Main(string[] args) { [...]

Building a Deck of Cards

James — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:54:06 +0000

In my last article, I defined a deck of cards as “a complete set of cards,” but it’s really not that simple. Though most games require one card of each face & suit combination (as in a standard 52-card deck), not all of them do. Some games, such as Mille, require multiple decks whereas other games, such as Spanish 21, [...]

James Games

James — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:32:19 +0000

I’ve decided that in 2012 I’d like to do some technical blogging. I’ve been writing software since I was in high school and I fully expect coding to be a lifelong hobby and an occasional profession. This series of blog posts, and the software I’ll be developing along the way, will serve as a framework [...]

The moral side of murder

James — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 00:40:11 +0000

The video below features Michael Sandel of Harvard University teaching a course on Justice. In the first part of this video, we are presented with four moral dilemmas: First Moral Dilemma: You are the driver of a trolley car. You are the driver of a trolley car traveling 60mph towards a group of five workers [...]

Birth

James — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:22:11 +0000

Today is Father’s Day and it’s about time I wrote about Ada’s birth. Ada was born on December 16th at 12:00PM exactly. She was delivered via scheduled c-section, which was the safest option for us because the baby was in a breech position. We went to the hospital early that morning. Kimberly was whisked off [...]

Why Kids do Drugs

James — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 14:55:24 +0000

When I was in elementary school, during the �Just Say No� days, I remember hearing about drugs and being utterly confounded by the message. If drugs are so bad, I thought, why the heck (I didn�t say hell - it was a bad word) did so many people risk their lives just to get high? Something didn�t make sense.

Ada in the Cloud

James — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 12:37:20 +0000

...if I'm going to ask "what does it all mean" then I might as well go all out. Every so often, I like to entertain various visions of the future. Lately I've been drawn to the concept of sentient computing and the potential eventuality of being able to "upload" one's consciousness into a computer.

Doing whatever a spider can

James — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 03:59:13 +0000

Today I played Spider-Man at Parties on Air for a kids 4th birthday party, just because I could. I had a great time. I got a little worried when I walked in and heard one of the kids say “I don’t think that’s Spider-Man, I think that’s a real man.” But she seemed quite convinced [...]

The Great Train Robbery

James — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 20:40:41 +0000

I recently read The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton. This books is a witty and somewhat accurate account of The Great Gold Robbery of 1855 in which �12,000 worth of gold bars were stolen from a moving train. The book details the motivation, planning, and difficulties of the robbery as well as the eventual [...]