Blitz Basic on telly - watch it now - woof, woof

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HYWs1cNy3k

Starring:

Blitz Basic;
"Maneesh Sethi";
A Game Programming for Teens book;
and some old bloke.
Guest starring Blitz3D and the Castle demo

Running time: 8:28
Language: English

Warning - this movie contains a lot of footage of Blitz Basic.

They even say Blitz Basic is faster than C++

Oooh.

Coming from Maneesh "Is this my arse or my elbow, I forget?" Sethi, I'm not entirely surprised to learn that they say things like this.

Very interesting. Didn't they say that it takes less time to program a game in BlitzBaisc not that it's faster than C/C++?

Well, he says compared to C++ it is a lot faster - yes he seems to be referring to the speed to write a game - although, it wasn't totally clear (due to excitement) in my initial listen.

He says that it's faster to program in Blitz than C++ ;)

Shame the games being shown were a bit naff.

I heard alot of bad reviews about that book :/

I can't watch this with a serious face when he has that hat on.....

Honestly.... for TV, take off the hat....

Oh, and pong has a bug, lovely (beta test before TV)

lol, in all seriousness, good for him! :-)

Hat? I think we are suffering from ethnical ignorence...

But really, I saw that book. I was programming before 16! How come I didn't get any tv credit?

Wait, wasn't there a thread on this a long time ago?!

Nice anyway to watch it again.

Yah I remember watching this like 2 years ago...

HAT!

It's a Sikh turban, you ethnical ignoramus.

Pretty impressive stuff to author a successful programming book at age 14.
Pretty darn impressive growing a full beard too!

HAT!!!!

I'm not ethnically ignorant if I call his Hat a HAT! Should I call him ethnicaly ignorant if he calls my Nike's "shoes"?
I dont care really.

HAT!!!!!

Beautiful :P

Agreed, you guys shouldn't bash him. He wrote a successful book at the same time most people his age would be perhaps thinking of working summer jobs at minimum wage.
That is a rare thing and it is really an achievement.

Although, I did notice he doesn't indent his code...

Edit:
And yes, I am certain it is a Sikh turban.

lol..in one word "gay!" - then again publishing a book at
that age is quite an achievement...have to say though, id
be slightly concerned about the content.. his verbal
communication skills dont seem too great..hope this isnt
reflected in the text..

anyhoO..ill shutup.. ;) :p

I wouldn't put much faith in a book written by a guy who can't even make a Pong game without screwing it up on national TV.

lmao

Calling a Turban a hat? Its a scalf wrapped round his head, thats already bad enough without you pretending its a HAT

yea, it's a bit like a 'priceless' ad :P

Blitz3d: $99
Turban: $39.95
Advertising a BASIC programming book on TV while your PONG example has a bug: $priceless!

yeah that's bad ! - but the host handled it well,
'lets find the bug !' haha ...

LMAO



Wrapping cloth around my hands... GLOVES! Wrapping cloth around my neck..... SCARF!! Wrapping cloth around you head..... HAT!!!

Not that it matters really, but since you all continue to poke at me as though calling it a hat means ignorance, then by all means I shall continue to call it a HAT!!!!!

May I take this opportunity to refer you to Mr Sethi's other, lesser known tome - Hat Making For Teens:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hat-Making-Teens-Maneesh-Sethi/dp/7592000681/sr=8-2/qid=1158574402/ref=sr_1_2/026-8174136-5235647?ie=UTF8&s=gateway

That is pretty ignorant Dark Half. Although to be fair, you seem to be ignorant of the meaning of ignorant.

GfK wrote:


When he releases "Beard Growing for Teens" - for teens, mind you, not just for teen boys - then I'll be impressed.

LMAO! HAT!!!!!



Definition:


sorry John, the true ignorant people are the ones calling a culteral difference ignorance!

Just because I call a turban a hat doesn't mean I am ignorant. Nor does it mean that you calling sweeties (or whatever you call it) and me calling it candy means either of us is ignorant. Telly vs TV, flat vs apartment, and so on. That doesn't suggest ignorance, however as I stated before, since you're all going to call me ignorant for a culteral difference, then I will continue to call it a HAT just out of fun.

@GFK, your link is a 404, or is that part of the joke?

Thing is Dark, you wrap the scarf round either you head or a hat. Look turban up. This means it cannot be a hat. Under any definition. In churches you used to be asked to cover your head with a hat or scarf.

Your arguing about apples here, honestly your not getting the point! The lack caring doesn't mean I am ignorant, I know fully well what a turban is just as I know what a scarf is! The fact that I CHOOSE to call a turban a hat isn't ignorance.

The fact that you choose to call candy sweets doesn't bother me (but perhaps calling soccer football is a bit annoying really as I can never be sure which is on topic). Being brought up with catagorizing turban under the hat clasification is merely a culteral thing. I am not speaking culteral as in the whole US, just this part of Wisconsin. That doesn't mean it's wrong, well except with the Gestapos here I guess...

But go ahead, keep arguing the fact that calling a turban a hat is ignorant. Or perhaps argue that spelling Turban as Terban is ignorant, or perhaps that one shouldn't eat a certain food whilst wearing a turban is ignorant, I dont really care, I will still call it a hat which doesn't make me ignorant!

:-) HAT!!!

calling soccer - football?! wtf!, its called football you heathen :p
- soccer indeEd...

well..Dark Half, I dont know how much you travel around this small world, but I travel a lot..and I would suggest you, do not call their sikh turban HAT if you ever visit India, trust me..:)) reason is simple..you will leave India without your head not just hat :))

I dont think your calling it a Hat is ignorance and at no point said so, I think its illogical and deeply deeply worrying.
It cannot be a hat this has been shown to you. Yet you insist on clinging to you right to call it a Hat.

This level of compulsive mania, or need to defend your stance so vermently, even though you now know it to be a turban, is worrying, and possible a sign of some childhood trama involveing some headwear possible a scarf.

Also I would say that possibly there was a lack of free will involved. This line in particular "The fact that I CHOOSE" which has been caps and bold seems to show also that in some way you were coerced into what ever situation you are repressing.

A possible clue would be in your use of "candy sweets", both our cultures know what each means, yet your use without a commer implies an underlining subthought of "candy candy candy" which although not obviously can be shown to be linked to Haloween.

So One haloween when you wanted to go as a character from alice in wonder land you were made to trick or treat as an old lady in a Nightdress with a scarf, or as little red riding hoods Grandma, and all the other little kids would say "Look at Dark in that night dress and a scraf". And all night you gritted your teeth and said back. "Its a HAT"

LOL :))

Man that guy looks 30.
Heh a BUG that's classic.
Serously how can somebody mess pong up...?

Cause your trying to argue tomato tomato here. I really dont care, honestly I dont!!! I said hat at first because it almost appears to be a small hat (poor video quality), but then someone had to go and blatently use the word ignorant, so at this point I dont really care.



I knew it was a turban before you Gestapos (and I will re-use that word) told me. Childhood trama, hardly, just going to hold my futile stance because you geniuses can't get the clue that I really dont care, so I might as well waste your time.



What? Wouldn't the word choose, or choice, just spue free will? My choosing to call it a hat as your choosing to prosecute me for it to the bitter end, isn't that free will?

I stopped reading your post after that point, sorry if there was some sort of important material or relevance. Please re-iterate if there was. Perhaps I will re-read it at a later time.



Yeah, sorry, I don't do alot of traveling. That still doesn't mean I am ignorant. Nor does that mean that my calling his turban a hat should make me a criminal (especially on a forum, on the internet none-the-less). I don't sit here and point out all your spelling mistakes in your posts, nor do I watch closely at your refferences, slang or not, and point out your ignorance...

Point is, I really dont care, and the more of an argument you guys make this, the more I will stand by my calling it a hat. It's the internet, arguing is pointless as I have learned in the past. So is correcting others, ignorant or not. I am laughing, really really hard inside at each attempt to correct me you guys make. Cause you just dont get it (and I have said this repeatidly), I dont care! Hat, Turban, Shirt, Dashiki, I REALLY DONT CARE!!!! :-)

get it yet?

Perhaps I should have called it a Cap!


Dorag (used quite often for scarfs worn around your head, mostly by bikers in the US) would have def gotten all your panties in a knot right?

( http://www.tearcatcher.com/rag.html <-- Dorag for those who are ignorant about Dorags )

No, cos thats it is (A really long dorag). Its not that you called it a hat thats the problem. Its that you became really really defencive, and dint laugh at my joke

lol..how pointless can these threads get :p ;)

In my gender that would be a tie... But I agree that making fun of someones brain bandage is silly!

OK Seriously, does what a person wear on his head affect how well he doews something??? When I joined (bought) B3D there was a chap here called pantsonhead... his little picture had underwear on his head.

I sometimes put my wifes underwear on my head after it comes out of the dryer... while I fold the other clothes... it is warm and I am slightly bald.

Hey Dark Half..I didnt try to correct you on any way..I just trying to send you nice friendly suggestion, becouse when you use to call that sikh turban HAT, its with time routine, so, there is nothing wrong with that if you like to call it like that..but if you someday go and visit India and then name their turban HAT, not becouse you wanna hurt them, but becouse you use to call it like that, well..they dont care same as you dont care here..they'll just cut your nice head and thats it :)..oh yes..dont hit their cows and rats..you can stuck badly in prison for that (if not killed in maintime) :))

What an idiot.

As well as ignorant it's astonishingly disrespectful.

This, on the other hand made me smile:

why would someone delete 15 posts of good natured fun and go back to JohnPickford's pointless drivel as the final word in the thread?

Why was my post deleted? It was neither disrespectful nor off the topic.

Maybe we crossed some line.

But I cannot see why not delete a lot further back.

But maybe its a problem with the site, because a perfectly reasonable thread seems to have been deleted from the Bmax threads

oh well

how come that thread got deleted along with a few other reasonable topics

Okay, I skipped about 15 posts here to write this so sorry if it's way off topic, which it probably is.

Do you call a bike helmet a bike hat, or a bike helmet?
The same applies to turbans.

Different rules apply with hats and bike helmets.
In places where you can get a fine for not wearing a bike helmet, you don't wear a hat on a bike; you wear a helmet on a bike.
When your culture has you wearing a turban all day, you wear a turban all day.


Of course half this 'debate' really isn't your fault, since thinking the turban to be a hat because of YouTube's awful video quality is quite understandable :)


Edit:
Looks like I dodged some phantom post incineration.
Lucky!

Actually I found my son's bike hat laying on the kitchen table just the other day and remember telling him aloud to put his hat in his room where it belongs...

Dark Half is a Mad Hatter :-)

Actually it was odd that he mentioned the helmet, cause that really did happen. I called it a hat as well by mistake (I had just woke up, venturing out into the kitchen I was getting angered at the mess my kids had left in the living room, I couldn't think of the word helmet for the life of me, and I really told him to put his hat in his room, my son promptly corrected me that it was a helmet).

Ah, i see, so you're used to this! :D

[edit]

I'm going to call you Dark Helmet from now on... :P

How many assholes we have around here?
*SIR YES SIR*

Grest film. Theyre making a SB2 you know!

"ah, I can't breathe in this thing!"

go straight to.... LUDICROUS SPEED!

The moderator seemed to be on crack...

It's a horrible book, my obnormal friend is trying to learn to program with it, I read some of the code and it's so crude and horrible, you can tell it was written by a 16 year old.

So, um, Who is he on these here forums?

Wow, you guys aren't all that nice. I was 16 when I showed up on TV, I was 14 when I wrote the book? Where were you all at 14?

On a related note---no, it is not a hat. It is the precursor to a turban (Called a Judah or a Putka), that Sikhs wear before getting a turban.

Look, the bug in pong wasn't even a big bug, it just knocked the ball offscreen. Yeah, it shouldn't have happened, but it made for some fun TV.

On a related note, I am studying at Stanford now, and my book is a bestseller in several countries (translated in several languages). My book has sold several thousand countries all over the world. I get emails from people in Japan, in Poland (where it was #7 in the country), and of course the US (where it was a top-20 bestseller at Amazon and B&N). If you guys want to bash the book....well, read it first. Hell, read the reviews at Amazon.com. People seem to like it.

-Maneesh Sethi
maneesh@...

BTW, Zenith: What code was horrible and crude? I'd like to fix it. Can you tell me how to improve?

Oops - I posted this in good faith.

There he is :)

Maneesh, I cant tell, but i think that pong sourcecode looked huge :) (Or was the code on screen for the alien/mario thing?)

Personally, I say congrats, though I agree the source is messy :P But then, you see my source from a few years ago, yuck!!! :)

When I was 14, hmm, i'd programmed the BBC to speak? but thats about it :P

[edit]

I have a question:

If Maneesh was to have posted about his Blitz On Tv experience, we would have congratulated him, but! since we found it, we ripped the crap out of a video instead.

What gives?

I think some are being a bit unkind - yes the book has a daft title and the games in it are hardly inspiring but the whole point of the book is to teach beginners the basics of programming . You can't really do that with clever compact code.

I think what may irk some people is the fact that if you write a book on a subject it is expected that you are pretty much an expert in the field you are writing about - something I doubt in this case given that the author has never actually produced and published a game himself - that I am aware of anyway.

However the achievement of actually writing a book , getting it published and doing so well at such an early age is very commendable.

Hi Maneesh,

I havent read your book, and only joined this thread to "Dark Elf" bash, and luckerly when it became "H&K" bash all those posts were deleted.

Anyway a couple of questions.
"It is the precursor to a turban (Called a Judah or a Putka), that Sikhs wear before getting a turban."

Are you supposed to kill someone before you get a Turban? (That might make me sound totaly prejudiced, but I dont know any Sikhs, and the only things Ive read about them was Indian Campigns/British army Victorian stuff)
Are you supposed to carry a knife at all times?

This is true, and I'm certainly one of those who was ( more than a bit ) unkind. It wasn't for the sake of being nasty, nor was it entirely serious, but it was specifically because the book confused so many beginners that I said what I said. Can't remember if you were ever a Blitzcoder/CW regular but I was, and there were so many beginners who turned up over there more confused than they were before they ever started.

Having said that, I've never watched the video, and had absolutely no idea how old Maneesh is or was. Part of me still thinks that - if you're old enough to have a book published - you're old enough to take criticism that the book wasn't helpful for a lot of people.

At the same time, it is a heck of a thing to write a book at sixteen, and god knows, I'm grateful that I don't have a copy of the book I wrote at nineteen because I bet it's not a patch on Maneesh's ( it wasn't a computer book, so the comparison would be difficult, but even so, you get my point )

So yeah, if I'd known his age, I'm sure I would have been a little less tactless in my comments. Sorry, Maneesh.

the book is good for total newbies, it helped me for awhile

the games are not impressive but they do explain the concepts to newbies

better then when i tried to explain it to my friend, what is so frakin hard about variables?!!!!

That's been rumored for years... However, the following is currently in production for G4, to be aired in 2007:

Spaceballs, The Animated Series.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/21/television.brooks.reut/index.html

(Now, the movie was great, but I doubt they can make a cartoon out of it that's interesting for more than half an episode)

Yeah, hard to believe how far Blitz has come from other forms of the Basic language. I remember that I was coding Basic in the old 80s format way back when, where you had GOTOs and GOSUBs, and If variable Then ## (insert line # here). Man, those were the days when I picked up Basic, back when I had the lousy, clowny TI-99/4A (man, why didn't I have a choice for a Commodore 64, or an Apple IIe, oh, maybe that was because I WASN'T EVEN IN KINDERGARTEN BACK THEN! (Sorry, that was a burst of complaint)). Anyway, with my first REAL PC, picking up QBasic/QuickBASIC, I was still working with line numbers, but that quickly faded away (QBasic WAS backwards compatible to GW-BASIC, if I'm not mistaken, that probably explains the line #s). However, it wasn't until about 10, maybe 12 years ago when I first worked with Visual Basic, and that was an awesome, yet somewhat challenging version of the Basic language. However, Visual C++ got me into doing other languages, but decided to go back to Visual Basic, then Liberty Basic, now here with Blitz 3D, BlitzMax, and SOME DB Pro (yeah, I know). However, now I'm thinking of working around the .NET structure, and coming back to the MSDN community.

However, thanks to Maneesh's book, I have done some screen savers in Blitz, but my heart and soul still goes out to Microsoft's languages. Of course, that doesn't rule me out from using Blitz altogether, I'll still use it a lot. Seems like I'm just multitalented out of nowhere. At least his book got me into more diverse programming than just Microsoft for a while. MS is more for business app development anyway, but I still try some decent software development with VS 6.0 and 2005.

Shit!!!! is he going to kill me for calling it a hat?

Honestly though maneesh, I give you a congrats for getting on TV. But I will give you crap for the pong bug, that is priceless.

You still wearing your hat to this day?

Yo Maneesh! we are but mere peasants and not worthy of breathing the same air as you.

You should be justifiably proud of your achievement. At that age, I was a clueless little snot, and now look at me... people stand in awe of the intellectual colossus I've grown into ;)

Kudos to you Maneesh, I wish I had done a similar thing when I was 14! Alas, that was back in ZX Speccy days... :S

i am go to teach my cousin and friend using your book Maneesh, real good for them since they can't think in terms of data if their lifes depended on it

my cousin is the kind of person that thinks a data file alone will kill his computer, yes i know he is stupid

Link: actually not stupid. The way PCs work now it is possible for what appears to be a data file to actually trash your computer. I have seen .txt files that were really .exe files in disguise. You double-click to open in Notepad and actually execute a virus.
There are even .mp3's that when opened with WMP, would open up a web page and download a virus from it. I don't have it anymore, but I did once have an mp3 that would download and open a .txt file on your computer just to prove that it could be done.

Of course, a good anti-virus program installed on your computer should help avoid either problem. :)

I just watched the video, and some of the comments by the guy conducting the interview are just priceless.
Example:
I'm not knocking Meneesh's programming skills here, just the dumb comments.

Stupid question, but wouldnt the OS just try and open Notepad?

It would... although there's also some email viruses that were named like something.txt<200spaces>.exe, with an icon that looks like the notepad icon...
The email client will truncate the file name, so all you see is something.txt with a notepad icon, appearing harmless.

And of course there also have been bugs in the windows image viewer libraries (both in the GDI library, and another one which I don't recall the name of)... Any app that depended on the OS to render the image would invoke these, and a 'malformed' image could generate a buffer overflow and execute any code it wanted. Bit a lot of people when 'bad' images started to appear as banner ads on websites, merely viewing a site with one of those images could install spyware on your computer.

Nice book for beginners.

@Xlsior,

Arrr yep, I could see my Mum falling for that.

Heh, I can only imagine what the Linux fanboys would feel about that statement. Believe it or not, BlitzMax is far different from Maneesh's BlitzPlus/Blitz 3D code, so the Linux and Mac communities would feel left out all together. Even for Blitz 3D, there's another author, Eric Grebler, that has the 3D Game Programming for Teens, and that, IMHO, would be the better way to learn Blitz. Can't wait to see that BlitzMax book from Sloan Kelly here in the States soon (possibly through Amazon or Buy.com).

I wonder if this guy was ever a member here on the blitz forums? Anyone could easily write a book on how to make a broken pong clone. His parents 'were' proud, until his bad code embarrased his families name in front of 37 tech tv viewers!

um, Daniel.. Maneesh posted above.

hmmm...methinks someone hath not read all of this thread.

LMAO That was classic!

Yeah, who even wants to watch G4/Tech TV after some clowns ran it down from its old days?! I'm telling you, between G4 and Spike TV, cable television is hardly what it was back about 10 - 15 years ago.

Yeah, now there are a thousand boring channels instead of 50.

Well, even cable TV wasn't half as boring to watch as it it this day in age. Now they're forcing that expensive HDTV junk down our throats, and who's gonna want to spend $1000+ on a TV and $250+ cable service just to watch junk that'll only look better, but still be junk TV?

Anyhoo, as far as this Maneesh guy, he may potentially make a great game, but if he can't do any 3D or HD-style games or screensavers, then I'm gonna have to go along with Eric Grebler or Jon Harbour's books. Andre LaMothe and Jon Harbour are my true heroes, atm.

But you may need one to view the games in your sig ;)

So, did anyone get excited by the video?

When I first read that, I thought you meant Maneesh would make a good subject for a game. :D
Maneuver Maneesh through the virtual Blitz Basic lab, gathering code to successfully make a bugless pong clone and write a book about it.

Good lord I didn't write the entire book about Pong. It was the first game.

maneesh has personal power ! ;)

@maneesh - I was a little drunk and jealous by someone who actually did something with their life when I posted that comment. No hard feelings ehh? Good job with finishing that book.