Truth Inexorable

software rant

2011-12-30T11:18:00.000-08:00

Alright, nobody is going to care about this, but I am a usability zealot, so I'm going to tell you anyway.

http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/12/30/advantages-of-everything-is-text/
I read this post about Emacs (don't get me started please) and some of the features he describes made me realize how low our standards are for usability of a command line interface.

Much in the same way that Microsoft hasn't fundamentally improved MS Paint since well, ever, it is my perception that command line interfaces haven't significantly improved since well, Unix.

I might be wrong, I am not a CLI guy. But here's what I keep looking for that I don't find:

resize the window with my mouse and have that be meaningful (change the number of columns interactively)
select, copy, paste text with common mouse and keyboard commands
autocomplete, intellisense
persistent command memory (across sessions)
directory awareness, content visibility
application awareness (ant, maven plugins that autocomplete targets, projects, etc.)
hey, tabs?
unlimited or very large buffer (like a txt file in an editor. You delete history when I tell you to, stupid computer.)
saving sessions and/or making results accessible as text files
text folding so I can hide verbose output

I work primarily in Windows, and I've been looking for a DOS prompt replacement that gives me any of this, and I've always been very underwhelmed. It's like getting excited about the next version of windows because you think MS Paint might suck less. Eternal disappointment.

I can see that a lot of what I'm asking for is what Emacs seems to provide, which is basically that your commands are editable in a sane and modern way. Does anyone actually use this feature? And, am I alone? Does the Linux CLI suck just as bad as the Windows prompt? Or am I asking for things that I can never have for some (historical, bad) reason?

Stuff like this really makes me question my own sanity, because the gaping lack of quality tears at my face every time I use these tools, but the people who use and advocate this stuff don't seem to notice it. Perhaps they know tricks I don't, but I think they've just gotten really good at MS Paint.

Also to the point of the article, the big win is not so much that everything is text. It's that somebody paid attention to how the tool is actually used, and put some effort and imagination into it.

you tell me

2011-10-19T13:02:00.000-07:00

Today I wrote my first self-motivated FlexUnit tests to test my as3 quaternion utilities. At my laptop in our rented condo in Kauai. While my wife is out snorkeling on the beach 100 yards away.

...

but the baby physics engine* is looking pretty good, I've got angular joints working now (though they don't handle torsion? I think that's a separate joint?) and stick joints look pretty good too, and I built a little inspector panel with tabs so that I can easily tweak stuff. And the math is all in 3D, which is a bit of a leap for me (much more thinking... such a pain.)

Unit testing is still a little unfamiliar to me I must admit, but I'm enjoying the added confidence it gives me about the math I'm using. Now it might be time to work on plant biology and rendering, which is after all what I sat down to do in the first place before I got distracted by all this 3d math.

Or, it might be time to head over to the beach I guess.

*Annie likes to call it a "baby-physics engine" instead of a "baby physics-engine." I like the mental image. :-)

in kauai*

2011-10-15T00:25:00.000-07:00

Some places are a letdown. They don't live up to the hype and the advertising, you get there and you think, oh, that's nice I guess. I was sorta expecting more.

Kauai is not one of those places though. Neither is the the Grand Canyon (actually grand). But yeah Hawaii in general is a little mind-blowing.

We were walking through the grounds of a hotel down the coast from where we're staying (in a condo cause it's cheaper and way better) and I got to thinking about how posh hotels terrify me.

Not as a guest. They terrify me from business perspective. It's such an amazing risk, to take, what, tens of millions of dollars and sink it into building a resort on some piece of coast near a natural wonder, with the confidence that you can earn it all back and change, in what, 5 years, 10 years, what? And all of the tens of thousands of details that go into it.

Anyway the magnitude of the business venture staggers me a little, and it makes me a little queasy to be a place like that, because it puts me in mind of the kind of people that could pull that off. I know I guess that they're just people on some level, but on another more childish level I suspect them of being well basically, cold calculating psychopaths, to be able to risk that much.

Which goes to show that I am still a small town boy, fresh off the farm, etc.. I have relatively small ambitions on that scale. Build a castle. Doesn't sound so hard.

Also I'm having a good time working on a grass growing sim in my down time. :-) I'll post the results if there are any.

*we got married!!! it was great. pictures may show up at some point.

not a great sign

2011-09-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

Is it bad that I'm excited that I might be getting sick, because I'll finally be able to get some work done?

my profession

2011-09-01T22:14:00.000-07:00

I talked to a guy on the phone today, who wants to work at my company. Smart guy. I asked him a bunch of tricky questions, and from this I surmised that he'd be likely to survive an onsite interview. That's great. That's what you want out of every phone screen.

It got me thinking about my profession. A lot of what makes me good at my job is incredibly arbitrary, like knowing what connects to what, and who worked on that. But then again a lot of it is what you might call "intrinsic." I like finding out how stuff works. I like solving hard problems. I hate admitting defeat. I enjoy finding workarounds. That sort of thing.

But there's another category of traits that is in-between. I understand when to comment my methods and when to move on. I have a feeling for what to name my classes and variables. I have a good hunch for when a breakpoint will tell me something, and when a file search will help. Sometimes I can just type out a class or three. I guess this space in the middle is what I call "software engineering." I place a value on this stuff, which is independent of the value that I place on seniority, and different from the value I place on ability.

Maybe it's simply because I realize, the older get and the more I move around, the less I can rely on ability OR seniority to govern my salary. It's in my interest to promote the value of professionalism at this point in my career.

;-)

hawthorne real estate report

2011-07-31T11:33:00.000-07:00

I saw this place while walking back from the hardware store with some lamp parts.

It's a cute little two house setup very similar to ours. Nice and private in the back. The houses look like they're in decent shape though they probably need new windows and the yard needs a ton of love.

Anyway it made me hungry. After the wedding and a couple other financial milestones are reached, I want to start working on a down payment for something like this... The business makes too much sense.

If you're looking for an investment property in Los Angeles and you aren't brave enough for Boyle Heights, you should consider Hawthorne.

sup

2011-07-31T11:26:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about the BuildGrow thing a lot lately. Isaac has some really good ideas for a generated Crystalis-style game, which I think would be super cool. So I started back in on the socket server. I got login working and I'm happy with my amf serialization layer. I don't know if I need to add compression to it as well. I might have to I guess depending on how the game ends up shaking out.

At work I've been doing a lot of advocacy lately, which is a new role for me. But as our little corner of the business is starting to look like it's in pretty good shape, I'm able to pull my head out of the code for long enough to notice that there are other departments, too. So some of this socket server stuff I'm working on at home is a way of limbering up to tackle the broader challenges at work, I guess.

Sigh. I think about work a lot but, I can't really write about it too much here, because a lot of the stuff I want to talk about it not public knowledge. That's frustrating but I love my job too much to risk it. ;-)

The other thing about this BuildGrow stuff, is that it's a great way of procrastinating. What I should be working on right now is wedding stuff. <_< That stuff is mostly under control I guess. I feel really good about the plans we do have, at least. It's the ones we don't have that are starting to be a concern. I guess we should figure out a honeymoon pretty soon here...

Also my diet is going pretty well. I have about 7 pounds to drop to reach my long-term goal, which is to be 185 at our wedding. I think I will make it. Then after the honeymoon I'll have to work on getting back down to it. Then I'll reevaluate.

There's a lot of crunchy minecrafty, dwarf-fortressy stuff on my mind these days, and a lot of wedding and adulthood stuff too, but I want to break all that out into separate posts.

inspiration and humility

2011-01-09T16:43:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about growing up, and professions, and learning, and such. I tend to do this kind of thinking internally for the most part, because I'm a pretty cautious and private person by nature, but I wanted to see if I could set some of it down here.

I want to be the kind of person who keeps learning, and keeps doing cool things, basically indefinitely. In order to live up to that image of myself, it's necessary to cast aside another image of myself, namely, that I am a competent person who does everything right the first time. I think my revelation is that inspiration and humility have to go hand in hand. In order to realize the fruits of your inspiration, you need to allow yourself to wade through the mud a bit. You need to get down there and learn, and grow.

Having a good career protects me from having to do that kind of re-evaluation very often, and I'm starting to feel like a weaker person because of it. I think that's funny.

***

So I'm writing a java socket server for a game, or loose collection of games, that I want to write, probably in AS3. It's provisionally called BuildGrow. We'll see if anything comes out of it, but I've decided that I'm not going to grade myself on the outcome of the project, but rather I'm going to enjoy the process of learning and building. I think that by focusing on that I might be able to recapture some of the fun and excitement that I used to feel about the work I do.

By the way happy new year, and cheers, and everything is going pretty great for me/us. I don't want to let the somewhat melancholy nature of this post to lead you astray; these are excellent problems to have, and I am happy to be at a point in my life where I can worry about tertiary stuff like this. ;-)

the inevitable minecraftness

2010-11-29T10:46:00.000-08:00

So I worked through Minecraft over Thanksgiving weekend. It doesn't have an ending as such, but I got to the bottom of my cave, found some diamonds and redstone, mined some obsidian, built a portal, and saw the Nether. I built the things I was interested in building. I didn't get into the whole trap business or the multiplayer. It's a really compelling little piece of art, and I'm boggled with joy at the amount of money it's made for its creator.

The whole experience got me thinking about the power of open land, and the effect that the concept has on us. American history in particular is full of the idea that land is there for the taking: just move in and set up shop. Even setting aside moral/ethical questions, that idea hasn't really been operable for over a hundred years, but I think we find it compelling anyway, because land is so inherently desirable to us. Almost like gold, or jewels.

It gets me thinking about how and where people like to live. People love water, and love to live next to water. People love to live near their food. People love to live next to other people. People love to have their own land. People love to have ownership over their space. From an evolutionary point of view, it makes a lot of sense. Games like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress hit a lot of these notes, and add just enough game to keep us hooked.

progress

2010-11-22T12:10:00.000-08:00

The diet is going pretty well. I'm fitting back into my old pants, and I'm still on a pretty good downward slope. It's still stressful though; I've had to recommit lately, and it's been painful. But the results keep me moving forward. So far I've lost 40 pounds, and I think I have about 20 more to go.

In other news, the job is going well. I'm starting to understand how this place works, and I've been able to solve some hard problems, which is always gratifying. But the double stress of job + diet has been wearing me down, and my home life has been suffering. I've basically been a zombie at home, which is kinda bad. I miss working on stuff and I've been feeling a bit hollow. Probably because I basically just play LoL all the time. Breaking the funk is hard. Maybe I should throw a party and make tacos for everyone. :-P

a new job

2010-09-07T16:20:00.000-07:00

Hay guys, I got a new job.

It's at Riot Games, they make League of Legends. LoL, as they call it, is a free-to-play team PvP DotA-style game.

Um look idunno. But they're in Culver City, which is way way closer than my old job. I've been playing the game like crazy for the past few weeks, Annie can attest, and I'm really excited about working there. Riot owns their own IP, they are their own publisher, they're profitable, and they're growing very fast. That is exciting.

I feel like there's a lot to say about changing jobs, but when it comes right down to it, I'm not sure I need to say it. It's stressful, and I'll miss the old people, and I'm nervous and excited about the new thing. So there you have it, in a nutshell. I am definitely looking forward to having an hour of my day back. More to come.

holy wars: are we in one?

2010-08-13T11:04:00.000-07:00

from: Who Is Us? | Talking Points Memo

The only way this makes sense is if you imagine we're actually involved in a sort of global half-racial holy war against Islam. From this perspective, it's sort of like some 'good' Germans trying to set up a Beer Garden in Tel Aviv in 1950 or perhaps 1944. To which folks might say, 'Look, we know you guys didn't do the Holocaust yourselves. And maybe you mean well. But it's just not right. Go somewhere else.' And most of us would probably see the logic of that sentiment.
Now, I get it. Quite a few people think this is precisely the point. (Not a lot of TPM readers. But a lot of people. Let's not kid ourselves.) We are engaged in a half-racial holy war against Islam. It's not us versus a series of interconnected terrorist networks which are relatively small but episodically quite lethal. It's us, the white Christians and our Jewish junior partner sidekicks versus the brown Muslim people. (If you're keeping score at home, let's call it the Judeo-Christians -white jerseys- vs. the Muslims -brown jerseys.) So isn't it a bit soon for these Muslims, even if these are some of the good ones, to come over here from wherever they're from in the Middle East and set up shop on Judeo-Christian territory? Particularly where the first battle of the Holy War was fought? Soon? ... heck, the Holy War is still on. As Eric Cantor said a couple days ago, C'mon!

Sometimes I wish that it were possible to have an open and honest discussion about worldviews. I think there's a lot of stuff like this that could use a few gallons of sunlight dumped all over it.

For the record, I do not believe that we should consider ourselves to be in a holy war. I find the controversy over the Mosque to be embarrassing. But considering this point of view is illuminating. It's a good reminder that other people see the world differently.

achievement unlocked:

2010-08-02T10:37:00.000-07:00

fit back into old pants. 10 pts.

progress reports

2010-07-23T15:20:00.000-07:00

I have succeeded in reducing my portion sizes at meal times. In fact, I've almost been too successful, in that I can eat almost nothing for breakfast and lunch, and really be pretty much ok with that. Which means I can eat basically whatever I want for dinner without blowing my diet. So that's cool. But of course, it's pretty much against the advice of "eat more, smaller meals, and don't starve yourself." For now I'm going with it though; I can worry about maintenance after I lose another 40 pounds. Until then, I basically want to lose the weight as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Regarding my new phone. It does feel like the future. It's not perfect yet, I wish the reader and picasa integration were a bit better. I wish there was a netflix app (I hear there will be someday). But so-far it is strikingly easy to use, and astonishingly capable. I like reading my rss and listening to audiobooks at the gym. The battery life seems sufficient, which was one of my big concerns. They've spent a lot of time and attention sanding down the rough corners of the interface. I can see how this thing wants to integrate itself into my identity. It's offering me a kind of cyborg symbiosis that I find strangely alluring.

<_<

i'm a bad, weak person

2010-07-21T14:07:00.001-07:00

I bought a Droid X.

game goals

2010-07-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

We playtested the zombie boardgame on Sunday. I think it was a lot of fun, even though we didn't get past the first room and at no time did it really feel "balanced." I learned some specific things and some general things.

Specific things:
-threat needs to scale with players.
-blundering is no fun, or at least it was happening too often.
-balancing the stats was very difficult, nerve seems mad OP, melee weapons were not compelling.
-gear is not yet well understood.
-controlling spawning via line-of-sight can be grossly unfair and forces the humans to do weird counter-intuitive things to maintain sight lines. Which also kinda breaks the story a bit. Perhaps all spawning should be "when an area is revealed" or via "exterior points" (i.e. windows, etc.)

But with all that, the core mechanic seemed fun.

General things:
The game needs a thesis. Or, it needs a story. When you sit down to play it there should be a shared expectation of where the game will go. With this game specifically, I wrote it to be a game about the heroes getting inexorably worn down by zombies. So they start strong, but by the end of the map they just barely escape with their lives. But I think the playtesters expected to start weak, and get stronger while facing increasing danger over the course of the map. So, either I need to adjust my perception, or I need to find a way to adjust the perception of the player. It might be possible to do this by calling on various genre tropes in the way the game is described. Or, perhaps my perception is simply out of step.

The game doesn't handle player death very well. We have a cool mechanic where when a stat drops to 0, you're "bitten," you get a +3 bonus on all rolls, but you can't win, and the next hit kills you. But after that there's no way for dead players to participate. If death is permanent, then the maps need to be really short. If death is temporary... then that needs to be designed in somehow. Descent has a concept of "Conquest" that deals with this problem rather neatly, but I don't know if there's a corresponding horror genre trope.

So I know what I need to focus on for the next iteration.

contractors are funny people

2010-07-15T14:19:00.000-07:00

No offense.

We got a few windows quotes. We picked one. Now I'm trying to give this guy money and he won't show up at our house. Well, no-doubt he will eventually. But I think it's funny how the relationship suddenly changed when we said we were ready to start, and the change is that suddenly he's way too busy.
:-)

coin jar dinner: cafe pierre

2010-07-14T16:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we took the coin jar in for cash. The coin jar is a nalgene bottle, so that's about $80. We had a really nice dinner at Cafe Pierre at Manhattan Beach. The coin jar *almost* covered it.

It's nice to have a fancy meal once in a while.

what do I want to think?

2010-07-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

I wonder if I could use a tool like cognitive behavioral therapy to intentionally change my attitude about failure and public risk-taking? It's usually used for more clinical purposes, such as treating PTSD, anxiety disorder, etc.. But the focus on the connection between thoughts and emotions, and our ability to change how we think, is appealing to me.

It's interesting to try to figure out, if I could change how I think, what would I change?

Programmer, program thyself.

boiling it down

2010-07-09T11:07:00.000-07:00

A few days ago we made pasta sauce from scratch in our slow-cooker. Fresh tomatoes from the garden, tons of delicious ingredients. It came out pretty tasty. But it could have been better. It was too watery, and when you took just the chunky parts, they lacked some of that intense flavor that we had been expecting. Usually when we make it on the stove that's not a problem, because the excess water boils off and the flavor sticks in the sauce, but the slow cooker has such a good seal that you don't get the same effect. Interesting, and it will be remembered.

After reading slacktivist for a while, I think I've boiled down his essential thesis to this: "self-delusion makes you stupid; intelligence means examining yourself and your beliefs. Anyone can be smarter or stupider by following the corresponding path." Which I think is an incredibly strange and powerful formulation of a thing that people have been saying for a long time, "the unexamined life is not worth living." See also: the scientific method. I'm trying to figure out if I believe it literally, or just allegorically, but he makes some interesting arguments, especially regarding empathy and bearing false witness.

It's really difficult sometimes, for me to keep an open mind in the face of my visceral emotional response. This comes up at work, and when reading the internet, playing a game, etc.. Really anytime. But I value the struggle. Regardless of (or in addition to) simply wanting to think that I'm "being smart" by considering a point of view, I'd also like to (smugly) think that when people, generally, consider other points view, the world is a little bit of a better place for all of us. In other words, when you consider another point of view, you make the world a better place.

It's like planting a (literal) tree. Most of the trees you plant may not grow above 2 inches tall, but if you plant enough, you will have facilitated many grand trees by the time you're old. And that's a pleasant thought, no?*

*damn I need to start planting some trees I guess.

file under: unrelenting smugness.

challenges and choices

2010-06-29T14:23:00.000-07:00

I recently got a silent promotion* to Senior Engineer here, which I thought was funny, until they put me in charge of the Pets strike force, and I now understand how deadly serious it is. I'm heading up the engineering effort to add pets to our MMO platform, and now all of a sudden I have to do things like "code reviews" and "assigning tasks," which is always a challenge for me, because I often have very specific ideas about how everything should be done, but delegating means letting go to some extent.

Actually the best practice I ever had in delegating was my time as work frosh for Interhovse, back in the day. I found that people really need a clear task, that suits their interests and capabilities, and in some cases a lot of support in terms of tools and advice, but given that they will take ownership and really shine. It was such a great experience, being a part of that process, that I chased it all throughout college. The dolphins, the HME, all that good stuff.

Well anyway it's tricky, making a shift now from being a programmer to being a team leader. I'll still be doing a lot of coding, but more and more of my time is probably going to be spent on other people's code, which frankly I am not thrilled about. But on the other hand it means I can tackle bigger problems, which is fantastic. I know that a lot of programmers have trouble making this transition, and I can see why. So I hope I can beat that curve.

And also I might have to buy some nicer shirts. :-/

*I know right? But in a small office, almost nobody ever uses anyone's actual job title. So to announce it would be rather conspicuous and frankly probably not that great for the morale of people who haven't been promoted so, I can see the point. Of course, it's possible that everyone else was already a senior engineer, and I just didn't know it. :-p

getting serious about it

2010-06-27T16:22:00.000-07:00

So the whole weight-loss thing. Sam keeps mentioning this Hacker's Diet thing, and on Friday I finally looked it up. It's a free online book and a set of free tools to go along with it. I found it, as promised*, extremely compelling.

The approach the book takes is that weight is a problem to be solved, just like any other problem, and it examines the problem from an engineering and management perspective. The thesis is that people who have chronic weight problems (e.g. the author, e.g. this author) have a broken appetite. Some people have bad eyesight, some have faulty appetite signals. No big deal. Except that you can't just go to the CVS and buy corrective appetite-glasses.

So the thing to do is to build a set of external tools that can do what the appetite should be doing. In building the set of tools, he brings up a few key points:

1. Your weight varies day-to-day by much more than the amount of fat you gained or lost, because of water. But, it is mathematically simple to calculate a trend line from your weight data that will give you real, solid data that you can rely on week after week. In other words, we can accurately measure the results of our actions.

2. People (or at least, people who need to lose weight) are assumed to be terrible at estimating calories. Look it up, plan it out, know what you eat. You can also control the input.

3. If you have bad eyesight, you will need glasses for the rest of your life (or until you get laser surgery.) If you have a faulty appetite, you have to apply external tools for the rest of your life**. If you do, you can keep the weight off.

And the rest is details, such as knowing that the first 48-72 hours of a diet are the most painful, such as forming a habit to weigh in, such as knowing how to counts calories, and all that other common sense (!) stuff.

I've been on a diet for about three weeks now, but over the past two days I read the book and I'm ready now to get really serious. I've been unhappy with my weight basically, forever. But I've always tried to manage it intuitively, and I've always denied, at some level that my appetite was broken. Admitting that it's broken is actually really liberating. Seeing a path to correct it is really empowering***.

I don't know if this book would work as well for non-engineers as it seems to have worked for me, but hey it's free and it's online.

*Nothing was actually promised.

**But you DO NOT have to be hungry for the rest of your life. Getting past the worst first few days has made a new man of me.

***Yes, I will have to weigh myself every morning, for the rest of my life. That now seems a small price to pay, which is interesting because I've balked at the same idea many times before. But knowing that the only thing I care about is the trend line, not the number itself, is really comforting to me. Removing the noise from the signal and shortening the feedback loop is an extremely good optimization for any control system. Weight is a control system. My natural weight control system is broken, but I can fix it with tools.

bmi

2010-06-25T14:12:00.000-07:00

Today, Wii Fit told me that I am no-longer obese. I feel simultaneously proud and insulted.

BMI. Pretty annoying.

Also, thanks to everyone who encouraged me. The hunger pain has indeed gone down somewhat, and the results feel good.

marking the moment

2010-06-17T15:23:00.000-07:00

I now think of myself as an adult. And I think I'm ok with that, really. It doesn't mean I stop having fun or anything, but there are simply a lot of subtle cues all around my life, that tell me that when it comes to classifying myself, adult is what I am.

A little rough around the edges? sure. Eccentric? hopefully. But fundamentally, no-longer a "young person."

smartphone research, and seeking advice

2010-06-15T17:49:00.000-07:00

my phone research let me show you it.

So... I want a smartphone. And thanks to a recent windfall, I can now almost justify getting one. But, I have serious, serious reservations about jumping in to the deep end of the pool in terms of monthly contracts. For reference, with my pay-as-you-go plan from Virgin Mobile, right now I spend $20-30 a month. (I make few calls, I send few text messages, and I don't do twitter.) So if I buy a smartphone that will be a pretty big cost difference.

Anyway I've been researching and waiting. I've come to the conclusion that what I really want -- a pay-as-you-go smartphone -- does not exist, and isn't going to anytime soon. So then, what are my options, and how do they stack up?

	HTC Incredible	HTC EVO	iPhone 4	Google Nexus One unlocked	Google Nexus One
Carrier:	Verizon	Sprint	AT&T	T-Mobile	T-Mobile
Up Front:	200	200	200	530	180
*Monthly:**	75	70	70	60	80
Total cost 1 year:	1100	1040	1040	1250	1139
Total cost 2 years:	2000	1880	1880	1970	2099
Total cost 3 years:	2900	2720	2720	2690	3059
WANT: 1-10	8	7	7	8	7
what?	very well reviewed	no battery life, too much like a monster truck	too Apple, but.. probably a really good phone.	no contract, but also less support = ??	too much $.

As you can tell I'm deciding between an Android phone and an iPhone, and my preference is leaning slightly towards the Android, but only slightly.

It turns out they all cost about the same. Especially since, if I'm going to be honest with myself, I can be pretty hard on my devices, and a phone I buy might not last 3, or even 2 years. So there's the replacement/repair cost to be considered as well, and that makes an unlocked phone relatively less attractive.

It's striking to compare the cost of a phone with the cost of, for example, a TV. A television lasts maybe 5-10 years. If it lasts just 5 years, and I spend $700 on it, then my cell phone is more than 6 times as expensive as my TV. (Of course, that doesn't count netflix or cable subscriptions... but it also doesn't count phone overage or apps.)

No decision has been reached. Does anyone have any words of wisdom?

*Raw research:
android phones
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/the-android-army/

Verizon - HTC Incredible
$200 + $75/mo
($39.99 plan + $29.99 data + $5 text (200 messages))

Sprint HTC EVO
$200 + $70/mo
http://shop.sprint.com/NASApp/onlinestore/en/Action/DisplayPlans

AT&T - iPhone 4
$200 + $70/mo (down to $60/mo with 200MB data limit... interesting but annoying...)
http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/packages/packages-details.jsp?q_package=sku4710254

T-Mobile - Nexus One
Unlocked
https://www.google.com/phone/choose?hl=en&gl=US&s7e=
$530 + $60/mo
http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/plans/cell-phone-plans-detail.aspx?tp=tb1&rateplan=Even-More-Plus-500-Talk-Text-Web
Nexus One Contract
$179 + $80/mo
http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/plans/cell-phone-plans-detail.aspx?tp=tb1&rateplan=Even-More-500-Talk-Text-Web&dpid=RCI500TTW

database design for revision history

2010-06-14T11:35:00.000-07:00

So, I was working on a personal project yesterday, and I came across a bullet point in my notes that looked like this:

implement item revisions

And it stopped me cold in the middle of a pretty productive session.

I originally designed my database to represent the "current" state of the system. So my central table, Item, doesn't yet have a concept of "history" or "latest revision." And I don't mind changing it, it's still a young system and very much work in progress, but the question is, what's the right way to represent an item that's been through an arbitrary number of revisions?

The constraints are:

The solution should be clean (normalized or nearly normalized)
The solution should be simple to code against
The solution should be high performance and very scalable
The solution should be applicable to other tables if/as needed

So after reading around and thinking, a couple of options pop up.

1. Rebuild it on the fly:

Never update anything, just add a new "RevisionItem" that points to the original item. When you fetch an item, also fetch its latest RevisionItem, and in most cases render that instead of the original. This will cost you performance, but it does make the revision history absolutely clear, and it means not modifying the Item table. As a side note, this method fits well into the design pattern of this particular project, where items generally have other items (comments, tasks, sponsorships) associated with them.

2. Log the old versions:

You can keep a "ItemRevisionLog" table, which stores old versions of the items, while the Item table always stores the most up-to-date. The advantage is that you don't have to change the Item table at all, and you keep it from bloating. The disadvantage is that you have two tables with the same columns-- not great design, and if you change one you have to change the other.

3. Add an isLatest flag to your data:

You can just keep every version of the Item in the Item table, and use a flag to find the current version. This runs into problems because every Item query now has to do a lot of extra work, and also you need to think very carefully about your primary key. (i.e. when other tables link to an item, they are now linking to many item revisions, not a single row.) Still, it's not unworkable. Just a little ugly.

4. Treat revisions as first-class data, and normalize them:

Make a table called ItemRevision, and put into it everything about an item that you want to be able to revise, and add a couple of columns for date, editor, and item_id. Then take those columns out of Item, and instead give it an ItemRevision reference called "latestRevision." Each revision is now available when needed, and that data is only written once. Retrieval is also a simple join by id. The downside is you have to be very explicit about what is revisable, and you have to change your data design every time you change your mind about what can be revised (e.g. right now).

***

So I'm going to cut to the chase. Number 4 is really the right answer, it seems. Anyway that's what wikipedia does, and their capacity for revision management is [unquestioned? unassailable? practically idiomatic?]. Also I found this great chart of the wikipedia schema, which, if you're into that kind of thing, is pretty cool. It's pretty clean, for all the work it does. Color me impressed.

You can see how they handle page revisions right in the middle of the graph. The Page table points to a Latest Revision, while each Revision table points to Page. A separate Text table stores the actual page text, for reasons that are not immediately clear to me, but that I will assume don't really apply to my much smaller and simpler system. In any case the chart, working in combination with a good night's sleep, has convinced me.

This has been a fun puzzle for me, and once I stop grumbling about rewriting my Item data access to go through a "revision" object, it will make me a better person.

programmable keypad update

2010-06-10T16:57:00.000-07:00

(see here)

It's the best!

I filled up all 24 keys. Only 3 with single-keystroke keys (tab, enter, delete), the rest with all kinds of wacky keyboard shortcuts.

I'm pretty happy with it. I might buy another one for home if I start uh... using my computer more.

funny thing about biology

2010-06-07T15:09:00.000-07:00

So I'm trying to eat less and exercise more and all that good stuff, but one of the funny side effects of eating smaller portions, is that it turns "the story of Nate working on some stuff" into "the story of Nate trying not to eat stuff." It's amazing how distracting hunger in particular can be for me. Part of the problem is that when I'm working hard, I'll often pacify my body with a large meal. Really not a very good habit when "working hard" means "sitting perfectly still at my desk with a pained expression on my face." But changing the habit is proving difficult and disruptive.

Sigh. :-p

where's the beef (web design)

2010-06-07T11:37:00.000-07:00

I've got some personal problems with internet technologies. The central problem is that, as a game programmer, I've never really respected web tech. The web is static and unresponsive. Most of the code is bad. Most of the languages used are (dynamically typed?) and unresponsive.

But as I keep pushing forward anyway, it seems to me that my central problem has been that I don't even understand where the work happens. Where's the beef, as it were.

A game, for example, is written in one programming language, and is tightly bound to itself, and to a single machine. It's easy, in principle, to follow the path of execution from user input, to simulation, to display. And in between there's a mass of c++ or what-have-you that makes everything go. To me, that makes sense.

But on the web, I face a daunting situation. The user sits on machine A, in browser B, makes a request to server C, which hits database D, and when the server gets the data, it renders a page, and returns it to the client. The browser then renders the page, and then the client side code takes over and manages some of the interaction going forward, talking to the server as necessary.

Just to take one example, count the number of languages, or distinct syntaxes, involved in this chain of events:

URI/URL, (HTTP)
ASP*
C#
SQL
HTML
CSS
Javascript
XML (webservices, optional)
Flash (optional, special purpose)

So, as a newcomer to the field I say, great, where do I put my application? Where does the code go? And the sad answer is, it has to go everywhere. In order to make a high performance site (the only kind I can even bear to contemplate), you need spend time with each of these technologies and syntaxes. The connections between most of the different languages are very loose. There aren't a lot of good tools for looking at more than one or three of the languages at a time. And they all matter.

So my essential personal problem with web development, is that I find it absolutely disgusting. It literally triggers my "unclean" emotional response. And then I shut my brain off and try to hold my nose as I program, and it's not very easy to work one-handed.

Well anyway I have these websites that I want to build. So, I need to get over it. I need to get over my tightly-bound, completely-integrated elitism. And so part of what I've been learning lately, is that I've been looking at the stack in the wrong way.

Now that I've figured out that nobody designs websites in html and css (they design in photoshop or illustrator), things are starting to make a lot more sense. I can redraw my big list like this:

how does it look?
1. Photoshop/Illustrator
2. HTML
3. CSS
4. ASP (optional)

what does it do?
1. SQL
2. C#
3. ASP
4. URI/URL, (HTTP)

how does it feel?
1. Javascript
2. XML (webservices, optional)
3. Flash (optional, special purpose)

So, there are three distinct jobs here. (Four, if you count the job of drawing the lines in between the categories.) Each job has good tools associated with it. Each job covers a small enough group of technologies that it's possible to work effectively. The trick, I think, is to only work on one job at a time. Put on your architect hat and draw the divisions. Put on your UI art hat and render the page. Put on yous system engineer hat and define the services. Put on your game programmer hat and write some javascript.

Do not, under any circumstances, try to design your page layout with C#. That sort of procedural art is technically possible, but it's incredibly time consuming, and the tools for it are terrible or nonexistent.

I know this isn't novel, but I feel so much better for writing it down.

*I'll use the ASP.NET C# stack because that's what I've been using for my personal projects. I strongly suspect that it's not much better or worse than anything else. I know I personally like it better than Ruby on Rails. I've never really tried PHP.

the dialog box is a lame duck

2010-06-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

file under: UI Pontification

Firefox Ditches the Dialog Box | Webmonkey�| Wired.com

Modal dialogs are confusing and frustrating. I hate the way they insistently blink at me when I try to click outside, demanding my attention before I can do what I want, forcing me to think on their rails. Outside of a few rare, special cases, modal interactions are a crutch that should be avoided wherever possible.

Non-modal boxes are... clunky. They get lost easily or they get in the way. They probably still have their uses, but as a design paradigm, they will be eclipsed.

Doing better may not be easy, but the sign of the dialog box is declining. Human interfaces are maturing, slowly, painfully.

single-purpose objects

2010-06-01T12:17:00.000-07:00

There's a fetish in western consumer culture for the single-purpose object. What I mean is, a tool, container, or item that has exactly 1 use. For example, a potato masher or a salad spinner, as opposed to a fork, or a bowl. The potato masher is utterly useless for anything except mashing, but it's a pretty good masher -- much better than a fork is. Single-purpose tools fit into a funny category because they're always perilously close to being zero-purpose knick-knacks, if their niche disappears. You'll get a lot of use out of that hammer, but maybe not so much out of that post-holer.

I think that as our society gets richer, we see more and more of these single-purpose items in our daily lives. They're not really very economically efficient unless you use them pretty often, but I know that I have an emotional weak spot for the perfect tool, the tool that makes one particular job really easy. And I'm finding, as I look around, that more often than not the right tool is out there*.

I think the same trend is true across all manufactured items, across all sectors of industry and commerce. In an abundant ecosystem, the drive towards specialization is strong. You see the same thing in rain forests, where many species specialize on eating just a few things, and you see the opposite in tough or turbid environments like cities and deserts, where a few animal species survive by being generalists. If you only have a $20 budget for your kitchen supplies, you're not going to blow it on a salad spinner. But if you already have plenty of bowls, it starts to look pretty useful.

I'm not sure if I think this kind of specialization is good or bad. I find it pretty easy to make arguments either way. Certainly I think people can take it too far, in what they choose to acquire. But I don't think I'd blame the tool for that, I'd blame the collector, if they clutter up their house or blow their budget. It's not the pipe wrench's fault that you're not a plumber.

Anyway, I like to have an awareness what tools I choose and why, and this has been on my mind a lot lately as I try to clean and organize the house, and yes, as I ponder new acquisitions. ;-)

*Funnily enough, I think this is part of the reason I get so angry about software that doesn't suit my needs; I've grown used to the idea that if I need an egg scrambler, I can order one from the home shopping channel. But when I want the perfect keyboard or IDE, I'm left in the cold. Maybe my expectations are unrealistically high? Or maybe the software industry is still young when compared to say, manufacturing, or kitchen ware...

on relativism

2010-05-17T16:54:00.000-07:00

In one sense, cultural relativism is a kind of truce. We all agree not to argue about religion and politics around the dinner table, out of a pragmatic desire to keep our family together and have a pleasant evening.

But I think if you press most people, we do believe that some habits are better than others. Some beliefs, when held by society at large, make people happier or more productive. Some bits of culture are economically more effective than other, at the very least. Science, vaccination, germ theory, etc.. But then again, whether you believe in the flying spaghetti monster or not is unlikely to make much of an economic difference, right?

To each his (or her) own. People are different, and if we accept that some people are sprinters and some are distance runners, some are poets and some are boxers, that's a form of relativism that has real positive social impact: specialization is economically fantastic. So at some point we're willing to grant our neighbors a degree of latitude in their actions and beliefs.

But on the other hand, consider motivation theory -- what motivates people? What would society look like if everyone was aware of how to get the best out of themselves, and out of others? I for one think it would be a better place. Part of the (unspoken) contract of the Enlightenment, of Science, is that as we answer more of these questions, we are driving closer and closer to a true utopia, to the capability to optimize society, to a place where everyone is happy and productive, where both the individual and the society are stable and resilient.

Fundamentalists reject this contract implicitly, and argue that their teachings, not the scientific method, hold the path to the ideal society. The vast majority of religious people aren't true fundamentalists though... the conflict between religion and science is for the most part a construct of the fundamentalists. Many religious scientists are put in a hard spot, because their science demands that they denounce fundamentalism, but their religion may flirt with it or even embrace it wholesale. How can I explain objecting to a specific, inflexible belief, while not objecting to a specific, inflexible faith? Awkward.

This is where most modern people hold up the white flag. We use cultural relativism as a social lubricant, to allow different people to interact without getting all worked up. It's a necessary (by definition) part of a multicultural society.

But I guess I think it's important to keep in the back of your mind the thought that there might be a real, meaningful difference between two beliefs. And that the belief you hold now, might not be the right one.

...relativism: pretty good, in moderation!

my web epiphany

2010-05-09T18:57:00.000-07:00

I was tearing my hair out this weekend to find a usable html/css editor. I was so disappointed with every tool I used; they were all terrible for what I wanted to do: quickly iterate design ideas for layout and content.

After talking to Annie I figured out why this is. Nobody actually uses html editors in this way, to do first-pass design. That's what photoshop is for. I've been driving backwards. Once I sat down and started sketching out my interfaces in flash (where I'm comfortable drawing boxes, etc.) I started making real progress towards my actual design goals.

When I got the thing looking pretty good in flash, it was actually pretty easy to translate it into html/css using any reasonably competent html editor. The one I'll probably stick with is the one that's included in Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express, since that's where I'm working on the nuts and bolts of the site itself.

In conclusion, every html editor sucks, but they suck less if you know exactly what you want to build before you sit down to wrangle divs.

google sidewiki

2010-05-05T13:08:00.000-07:00

Why did nobody tell me about this?

I love this meta crap.

continuing keyboard adventures

2010-05-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

My quest for keyboard nirvana continues. I've basically given up on a single keyboard that does what I want, but I just placed an order for this guy.

A fully programmable, relegendable* 24 key keypad that will sit just to the left of my keyboard. Simple, practical. Not a gaming keypad, though I looked at a couple of those too. I just think I would feel silly using one while programming. Anyway, I have big plans for this guy. I'll write about it when I get it up and running.

*Nice made up word, eh?

windows 7 first impressions*

2010-04-30T13:24:00.000-07:00

I came in this morning to a fresh windows 7 install, and I've spent the time since getting my workspace up to speed. That's more a knock on our workspace than it is on windows 7, but in the process I have some observations.

1. I don't like confirming everything twice. I'll turn off browser-open-file confirm boxes.
2. using the windows key to open programs is awesome.
3. yay search
4. using a third party zip utility to install things directly into the program files directory fails because they don't have access. The two I tried (winRar and 7Zip) did not handle it well.
5. It's pretty.
6. setting environment variables hasn't changes since what, windows 98? It still sucks hard. I know nobody ever actually does this... except anyone using java or maven. Grr.

But I can't escape the vague feeling that Microsoft have given up. It seems like their heart really isn't in it anymore, like they're just doing what the broader IT and design communities tell them to do. This is an operating designed by a company that's staring its death sentence in the face. They can feel themselves becoming IBM, and the irony is not lost on anyone. Windows 7 is a deer-in-the-headlights, avoid-all-controversy design. And it... well so far I find it vaguely depressing.

*Yes yes, nobody cares what I think.

programmer analogies

2010-04-29T17:53:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about different trends and practices in programming a lot lately, since they've been hitting me in the face at work. But instead of jumping into that I want to start off with an analogy.

What's the difference between building a truck (a big 18-wheeler), and building a racecar? They have a lot in common. They both have very powerful engines. They both meet very exacting quality standards. They're both very complicated. But there's a different mindset that goes into each one. Let me table you:

	Truck	Racecar
speed and handling	not important	vitally important
weight and aerodynamics	not important	very important
reliability target	months, years	one race
maintenance costs	must be cheap to fix	not important
fuel efficiency	very important	not important*

You see a lot of trucks on the road. Building trucks is serious business for serious people. People who build trucks can be proud of what they're doing. But you'd rather drive the racecar. (Or at least a sports car.)

So, I'd like to apply the analogy to something closer to my field of interest, namely browser-based MMOs. When you're making such a beast, you have a choice. You can look at it like a web application (see: facebook, amazon, gmail...) or you can look at it like a game (see: mario, halo, starcraft).

My contention is simple: web-apps are the trucks of programming, games are the racecars.

	Web App	Game
interface speed and handling	not very important**	vitally important
cpu efficiency and network latency	not important	very important
user accessibility, availability	99.99 or better	95? 90?***
maintenance costs	must be cheap to fix	not important
bandwidth costs	important	not important

I think you can take this analogy a lot further, to look at the people who work on cars and programs, to look at their tools and trends, etc.. Anyway it upsets me that we're building a racecar, but our engineering decisions seem to follow the current truck-building trends and best-practices. They're not appropriate to our business and they've put us in a world of hurt.

>:-(

*This is a guess. Maybe fuel efficiency is important for racecars? I don't really know.
**web page response times of 1 second are acceptable. If you press a button in a game and don't see a response within 0.5 seconds, the game has crashed.
***World of Warcraft goes down for 6 hours every week, on Tuesday morning from 5AM to 11AM. If KFPW went down for a (scheduled!) 2.4 hours every day and was fine the rest of time, that would be just fine with me. But can you imagine if gmail did the same thing?

back to basics, and it feels good

2010-04-24T13:07:00.000-07:00

I've had all week off, and most of it I spent lazing around and playing videogames. I did some housework too. But I've been avoiding working on any of my real projects, because I've felt so burned out on programming.

Yesterday and today I finally sat down to work on a little project for Tim, and I find myself really invigorated by it. Programming for myself, by myself, on a new project, is a completely different experience from working on a huge MMO codebase. I don't have to worry about the side effects of my changes because there are no other systems relying on this code. I don't have to get into anybody else's head, and I don't have to reformat code to make it readable. I don't have to remember/wonder why something was done a certain/dumb way.

I control the horizontal, I control the vertical. I go from being the "veteran," to being the "guru."* My code is much simpler and less defensive. Which means, much faster to write. All the class and variable names are perfect. It is so refreshing. I know it won't last. but it's nice.

* Funny. http://coderoom.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/5-stages-of-programmer-incompetence/ Thanks Jared.

curious

2010-04-16T10:09:00.001-07:00

Living on the West Coast, it seems like most national news happens in the morning, much of it before I even wake up.

I'm curious if there's a different feeling on the East Coast, and if so, what kind of difference does it make in your outlook?

morality in the age of leisure

2010-04-12T15:52:00.000-07:00

It's like love in the time of cholera, except completely different.

I just came off of an excellent discussion with Dave, and I want to reflect on it and flesh out my thinking.

When people are living in conditions of existential stress, (wars, famines, pre-technological societies), (my) conventional wisdom says that social pressures increase. Stressful times create intense personal bonding, and with that bonding comes strong social pressure to conform to the group.

There's a point I want to make here, that I'm struggling with...

Remember when calculators were introduced to schools? A lot of people who grew up without them said, "[That's cheating! Children will never learn how to do arithmetic by hand! They will grow up stupid!]" And well they were right about the second sentence, but wrong about the first and third. The fallacy that they fell into, is that their experience tells them that you will live most of your life without access to a calculator. But their experience is completely inapplicable to their children's lives. Kids growing up today will always, always, have access to calculators, and google, and wikipedia. For the rest of their lives, forever and ever. So, why would they need to know long division? It's a cute trick, and it's good to know what it means to divide two numbers. But you're never going to use that skill as an adult, except to teach it to your kids, who will also hate it.

So: calculators are not cheating, they are the future. Looking up facts online is not cheating. Storing all of your friends contact information into your devices so that you don't have to remember their phone number is not cheating. Using a GPS navigation system is not cheating.

Morality is having the same culture shock.

Example one is sexual promiscuity. 200 years ago, it was a big deal, because it caused all sorts of very real social problems in the form of unwanted pregnancies, orphaned and abandoned children and mothers, and disease. Today, (almost?) all of those problems can very simply and easily be avoided. The consequences of divorce are down too; divorced mothers are no longer helpless and hopeless. It still sucks of course. But it's not the moral hazard that it used to be, by a long shot.

So... that's all really great news for society, that we don't have these horrible problems anymore. But when some people's behavior starts expanding to fill the new environment, other people get really upset. "[That's immoral! People will start having sex any time they feel like it! Society will fall apart!]"

I'm going to come short of finishing the analogy I've drawn here, because I'm too uncomfortable with the topic myself. But I think it's clear where this argument is going. If resurrection were cheap and easy, murder would not be nearly so serious a crime. Nor would suicide. We would still want to find it abhorrent, but it wouldn't threaten society to the same degree. You'd have recreational suicide, ritualistic sacrifice, lethal game shows. And it wouldn't ruin society at all.

So, perhaps, the more advanced, the wealthier society gets, the more depraved it becomes, in the eyes of the older society. But also, the more liberated it becomes? Like I said, I feel pretty uncomfortable with this discussion, or at least, with having this discussion in public, outside of my own brain-space. Taboos are powerful things. But I wanted to get the point out.

usb theremin?

2010-04-09T12:45:00.000-07:00

Also what's the fastest /best/cheapest way to get a theremin interface hooked up to a modern digital synthesizer? (that uses digital samples?)

No-one makes a usb theremin? or do they? I don't know if MIDI would handle a theremin very well...

http://www.thereminworld.com/news.asp?cat=31
blech. None of those is what I want.

I'm feeling very Veruca Salt about theremins all of a sudden

GIVE IT TO ME NOW!

Yeah ok time for lunch Nate...

micro episodic game design

2010-04-09T11:13:00.000-07:00

I've been pondering whether it would be possible to produce a game in the idiom of a web comic, which is to say, three updates a week or more, with one or two authors.

At first glance it looks really, really hard. With a traditional (static) web comic it's pretty easy to put a number on how long it takes to produce each update. An hour to brainstorm the joke, an hour to sketch it out and complete the planning, and maybe a few hours to implement.

With a micro-episodic game, your players are supposed to come back every other day and play a little bit more, right? Is it possible to develop fun/deep gameplay, without driving away your audience? The average web comic audience, after all, only needs about 10 seconds to grok your latest update; value is delivered over a span of weeks, or during long binges as a new reader plows through the archives. Your game needs to stand up to both modes of play.

With a traditional game, value is delivered primarily through the novelty of the gameplay or the puzzle.
Comics tend to be character driven, and a good comic can coast for a while with no plot at all if the audience is invested in the characters. A game would need to capture that level of good-will. People need to want to come back each time to see what happens next.

Assuming you can solve that problem, you immediately hit another problem. In a comic, if a reader doesn't get or like a particular panel, they can skip it. A micro-episodic game would need to be very careful to not throw up any roadblocks for players. If players can get stuck and become frustrated, you have no audience.

In order for the game to be meaningful, there have to be choices. But in order for the micro-episodic format to function, each update has to be applicable to every player, regardless of their previous choices.

Web comics are not very bug-prone. A micro-episodic game certainly sounds very bug-prone. The game design and tech design would need to be very defensive and robust.

So. Like I said it looks really really hard.

Perhaps obviously, I'm looking at things like homestarrunner.com and mspaintadventures.com for comparison and inspiration. Those two sites are very successful at delivering many semi-interactive experiences on a regular schedule. Are there others I'm unaware of? Actually, I'm not sure I want to know. I like to jump into things like this without doing a lot of research first, because research tends to be depressing. ;-)

The game that's taking shape starts off very, very simply. It uses a character that grows as you make choices, in response to your choices, and you grow your character over the entire span of the game. The essential mechanic is navigation, you have to navigate to the next screen. Maybe the front edge of the game is always a "loading" screen which means that you're at latest. Probably you can navigate backwards and reverse (some of?) your choices to explore other options. There's a "reference" save game that anyone can use to jump into the game at the latest point. Maybe it's pulled from the community, maybe not. Or maybe that's not necessary, or maybe only at the start of chapters. We progress from blank screens to mazes to simple choices to character development, and as we go we introduce game mechanics that will stick around for the rest of the game.

Advanced ideas:
* navigation from late in the game back to early screens
* massively multiplayer
* time travel, revisiting old locations
* community driven content generation
* algorithmic/interactive content generation

Sounds fun. And still really really hard.

amf serialization between as3 and java

2010-04-08T15:00:00.000-07:00

I was cleaning out my blog and I found this old post in draft form. I don't know if anyone other than me will find it interesting, and yet I'm posting it! But I don't think the internet minds. The internet is nice like that.

~
Ok another inside baseball post for all those flash/java coders in my blog readership*. So, you say you need to pass objects back and forth between Java and AS3. You say you've tried using Xstream XML serialization, but it's just too slow? Let me tell you, you definitely want to be using AMF. It's Adobe's native object transfer format, and it is wicked fast**.

Ok so that means you want to use BlazeDS on the java side, and some kind of native deserializer*** on the client side. That sounds pretty simple! But since I know you're a vry srs software engineer, I know that you need your objects to be strongly typed and type-safe, so that you can plug them into the rest of your client and server logic. Well, to do that you need to carefully line up all of your classes on the java side and the flash side so that they are the same, and then register each AS3 class with a call to registerClassAlias. Ok still not so bad.

Next, forget about using AS3 enums. The AMF deserializer basically won't let you do it, and you'll lose the benefit of having an enum class to begin with. You can squirm and complain, but you're not getting out of this one: Java enums work fine. AS3 enums do not work. You must use primitive strings. You will lose enum type checking and compile time safety. DEAL.

Now, you're pretty close, but there are a couple more things to take note of. If you're working in vanilla actionscript 3, you don't have the mx packages linked in. That means that when BlazeDS sees a Java List, and it sends you something called an ArrayCollection, flash will barf. So you need to set the legacyCollection flag on the SerializationContext object before you serialize your java objects.

*pfft.
**about 40 times faster than our (admittedly unoptimized) as3 implementation of xstream. 40 times is a lot of times to be faster by.
***pronounced de-cereal-izer, which is also a great word. I think that's what you call someone who eats all the crumbs at the bottom of the 3 nearly-empty cereal boxes in the pantry.

from math to biology

2010-04-05T12:21:00.000-07:00

When I was learning about computer science* in college, they taught it like math. Everything was entirely comprehensible, if abstract. Terms like "Lamda Calculus" reinforce the association. The study of computer science, in academia, is essentially an abstract theoretical pursuit. The skills you learn in this setting are extremely useful for writing algorithms, and analyzing dozens of lines of code.

When you first start a project, it acts like math. You write down a few formulas to transform your data, and you pass stuff back and forth between your various functions. But as the project expands, somewhere along the way it stops acting like math. You start to bump up against the limits of what you can hold in your head, and then you blow right past those limits. And even though your math skills are still relevant for looking at any one particular small part of the puzzle, it turns out you need a different approach when you're worried about hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

The analogy that strikes me most is biology (think of cellular biology). When you're facing certain classes of bugs in systems "of a certain size," the empirical approach just makes more sense. At some point it doesn't matter what you think the system should be doing, you need to actually test it to see how it performs. As you add modules and dependencies, you're relying on a dozen or a hundred or a thousand other developers, and their bugs are now yours. This is the point at which you say something like, "lets try changing the data and see if that solves our problem."

To a computer scientist, that sounds like defeat, surrender, or worse, a lack of rigor. But in my experience at least, the math approach falls on its face after a certain level of complexity. Just as it's impossible to solve even moderately complicated general mathematical equations, programs above a certain size defy clean theoretical solutions. The biological approach however, becomes more and more effective, in comparison.

I'm not trying to give advice here, more just making an observation. Maybe we should be teaching people about the skills they need to manage software that has grown its own eco system, that has its own biology. Or maybe that's what the IT department has been doing all this time, and I only just realized it.

*Computer Science is what professors call programming. Never tell a professor that you're a programmer. You should be a software engineer at the very least.

looming personal crisis

2010-04-01T15:39:00.000-07:00

What am I going to do with all this free time? I'm so used to working crunch time that when I'm at home for more than an hour I get restless and uneasy. And now here's a three day weekend. I'm not sure I can cope.

;-)

this entire week is a strange dream

2010-03-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

Ok this is just a review of stuff I've shared elsewhere, with some additional commentary.

This is an incredibly beautiful idea about choral music, participation, and the internet. The video is kindof hokey, and the sound needs a little bit more fine tuning, especially the aspirations, but holy crap it sounds fantastic. Wow.

This bit of news about this country's major financial institutions snuck under the radar, what with health care reform and all. Perhaps we're going to do something about those too-big-to-fail firms, after all? I had almost given up on that one.

This is why you're fat? Well I find it remarkable that this study has never been done before. I have a suspicion that it's going to be very very important.

But probably not as important as this. Printing organs, or skin, or... missing limbs... Ok! Welcome to StarTrek level medicine. Not quite. But if this technology scales is capability, and if it scales in economy, it could simply remove the need to find donors for transplants. Which means vastly reducing the cost, uncertainty, and complexity of transplant operations. Which means that transplanting becomes a viable treatment for a much greater number of conditions. And while you're regrowing that organ, lets do some gene therapy on the stem cells first. Let's cure the aging diseases as we replace your failing organs one by one. Cheap. Scalable. No need to grow secret armies of organ donor clones in vats. Whole science fiction distopias avoided by one device.

On top of the stuff mentioned in the previous post... what a week. If news was like this more often, I might pay more attention.

what is that unfamiliar feeling

2010-03-22T17:59:00.000-07:00

Google stops censoring search results in China.

The US Congress passes a Health Care Reform bill.

And suddenly I feel... represented. As if major players on the world stage back my positions. I mean that feels pretty good I guess.

Now, you can argue back and forth whether it's really in the Chinese people's interest to lose Google*, and you can argue back and forth over whether the health care bill is even a net positive for the American people**. But regardless, many skeptics have been silenced in the past (2?) days. I think it's a remarkable reminder of how powerful ideas can be.

*Their arrival was good for China, and the manner of their exit will be good as well, because it makes clear that the government forced them out. Whether in the years to come, their absence outweighs the light they shone, is to be seen.

**Getting rid of denial of coverage for preexisting conditions, alone, goes a LONG way towards a more humane health care system. I am willing to hold my nose for some of the other crap in there.

jargon and lingo

2010-03-15T17:29:00.001-07:00

What is a Broker Credit?

http://micron2.typepad.com/chriscrocker/2007/01/how_does_a_mort.html

Oh, how interesting.*

*15%

remarkable happiness

2010-03-05T23:45:00.000-08:00

I wanted to write it down here, for the record as it were, that I am remarkably happy these days.

I want to embellish that statement. I've never really thought of myself as a happy person. I think temperamentally I'm on the sadder side. But when I take my internal temperature these days, it comes back much happier than I might expect. Than I'm used to.

A lot of is definitely the fault of the person I spend most of my non-working time with. ( <3 )

I think there are other factors too. I'm regaining a lot of the confidence that I possessed when I entered Caltech. Almost all of my deep doubts have vanished. I mostly know who I am, and I'm reasonably happy with that person.

I have to get back to work now (ha!) but I expect that some more deep thinking will show up in the near future.

sharpen the saw

2010-02-23T14:51:00.000-08:00

Today I got my feature done in an hour, but I spent 3 hours wrestling Spring, JBOSS, and Eclipse.

I would just like to restate some of my principles now.

* Tool performance and stability is important.
* Iteration time is important.
* A good error message can save an hour of time.

Which is to say, if you pay someone $40 an hour, you should buy them a $400 tool if it saves them 10 hours of time over it's lifetime.

another four mouths to feed

2010-02-21T23:24:00.000-08:00

Today I woke up and wanted to get an aquarium. Annie was decidedly neutral on the subject, but I had a fire in my belly, and so we headed out to Jim's Exotic Fish on PCH to see what was what.

We talked to Jim, and we told him that we were eventually interested in setting up aquaponics, but that we were basically new to fish, and wanted to start small and easy. Jim was incredibly helpful. He sold us a nice glass tank and an integrated unit that sits on top of it and does light and pump and filter, plus a heater. We sold ourselves some gravel and clay and plants and a rock. We took it all home and set it up, and filled it up with water, and put in the water conditioner. You have to do that to get the fluoridation out.

Then in the afternoon we returned for the fishes. Jim told us that he had been working 15 days in a row, because his daughter had just had a baby, so she couldn't come in to work. I sympathized. We picked up 2 pairs of 2 varieties of platies, and took 'em home, and after letting the temperature adjust and all that, we set them loose in their new home. Then we stood there and watched them for like 20 minutes.

It's a 12 gallon tank and it can hold a lot more than 4 little guys, but we wanted to start small and move up from there. Eventually we'll get to the goldfish, and then maybe koi, when and if we go for an outdoor pond system. But for now our little tank will be plenty. And I think Annie's already coming around to the idea ;-)

a long rambling post on the latest topic

2010-02-16T11:11:00.000-08:00

I think I want to write a book about software development, and why people find it so confusing. There's a lot of trendy methodologies and frameworks and languages and platforms out there, with their high priests and acolytes, promising that everything will be smooth as butter if you can just come over and see things their way. Well that's marketing for you I guess. But I think that most programmers don't have a good understanding of how really broad the programming landscape is.

I mean, one one side you have embedded systems, and then you have mobile devices, and then you have game consoles, and desktop, and then you have expert system, and then server, and then web... And they all have massively different constraints. That's what you don't get if you follow the software development trends. Most of the software development technologies out there were invented to solve very specific problems, but their evangelists are unwilling to admit it. So it's difficult to tell which buzzwords and trends fit your problem.

On the one hand this is all just basic design: list your requirements and your constraints at the beginning, and then pick solutions that fit. I guess what I object to, is that a lot of technology evangelists would really like you to skip the step where you pick solutions. As a marketer, if you can turn technology selection into a religious war, then you don't have to worry about your faithful jumping ship if their problem definition changes.

So, I'd love to see a map of the various axes of software development, along with which technologies, methodologies, etc., were designed for which region. And then I will print it out and roll it up and hit people over the head with it whenever they tell me that I should be using Ruby on Rails.

see this is what I mean

2010-02-02T11:00:00.000-08:00

Eclipse is awesome.

more griping

2010-02-01T15:43:00.000-08:00

If I were to try to keep myself to a strict schedule of a post a day, I think many more of my posts would just be complaining about software.

Every so often Eclipse seems to decide that you're being too productive. It'll crash, then refuse to launch. Generally to get it up again you have to lobotomize it first, and then rebuild your workspace. This usually takes at least an hour out of my day every time it happens. It happens about once a month, I'd say.

the world is a dangerous place: true/false

2010-01-17T13:11:00.000-08:00

A while ago I saw an online book linked from boingboing about the science and psychology of right wing authoritarianism. Right wing in this case doesn't mean politically, necessarily, but means something more like, "aligned with governmental and religious authorities."

I read the book, and I found it disturbing and yet irresistibly fascinating. I like to think that I have a natural skepticism for people who tell me that my political enemies are dangerous people. I really don't like that idea, it smells like racism and fear-mongering. So I continue to find this book hard to integrate, inasmuch as it casts a shadow on a lot of people.

However I think it also offers pretty compelling window into the psychology of some large political movements, in the United States and elsewhere. Consider whether you agree with this statement: "Once our government leaders and the authorities condemn the dangerous elements in our society, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the rot that is poisoning our country from within." A lot of people do agree with that statement.

What's presented in the book is a collection of academic research on authoritarian personalities that, as far as I can tell, seems legitimate and makes sense. It's an easy read. The author does have a political axe to grind, and he's up-front about that. (It didn't bother me because I basically agree with him politically.) It addresses topics like hypocrisy, mental compartmentalization, leader and follower personalities, and religious fundamentalism, and along the way it paints a picture of the people who love and follow public figures such as Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs, and Glenn Beck.

Like I said. This book makes me really uncomfortable because it tells me that my political enemies are dangerous, irrational people. What I'm trying to do with it is, instead of closing myself off further, to try to open myself up. If I can figure out a way to use this research to understand the emotions and beliefs that drive this certain kind of thought, then maybe I can communicate better.

Sam turned me on to a blog called slacktivist, which seems to spend most of its time ranting against right wing authoritarians, taking their arguments apart, and generally trying to get inside their heads. It's a really clever and insightful blog, but as much as I might enjoy it, slacktivist is a terrible tool for convincing your uncle that he needs to lighten up on the gays, for example. I think that by understanding the basic underpinnings of the RWA personality, we can do better.

Recognize that your uncle sees the world as a dangerous place, full of moral and physical peril. Recognize that your uncle believes that his culture, his very way of life, is under attack by coordinated, godless enemies. Recognize that he longs for a strong leader to tell him what to believe so that he can help defend his tribe. Then reconsider whether you want to get into that argument with him.

Anyway if you find any of this interesting, I think you should take a look at the book I linked at the top. I'd love to talk about it with some people.

more abstraction rants

2010-01-15T14:37:00.000-08:00

Mike was telling me about some advice for programmers, which is that premature abstraction is as bad as premature optimization. The idea is that abstracting too soon (i.e. before you know how to solve your problem) can cause problems later on when your assumptions change. Which is the same thing that you see in premature optimization. On the face of it, it sounds like simple advice, but there are some cultural reasons why it's not.

Abstraction and optimization act as opposing forces in software design. Optimization is always trying to push your algorithm closer to the metal, closer to the silicon. Optimization rejoices at side effects and arcane trickery. Abstraction is trying to push your algorithm away from the silicon. The mindset of abstraction is to make sure you never have to worry about those messy details. Abstraction rejoices at eliminating your algorithm completely by delegating it to a lower level. So abstraction allows a large group of developers to work on a vast project without slowing eachother down. Optimization on the other hand, allows code to run fast enough to be useful.

For academic applications, abstraction is more important. (If your code is slow you just come back in the morning.) So, that's why they teach you abstraction in school.* But for games, optimization is king. Generally, the optimization mind-set is not taught. You have to seek it out, you have to believe in it.

My belief, as a games programmer, is that abstraction is only permissible as long as it doesn't get in the way of necessary optimization. I currently am in the middle of a battle with a culture that seems to believe in abstraction as an inherent good, as a higher order value than optimization. I find that frustrating.

*There are lots of good reasons to teach abstraction, it's a difficult and important skill and it can color the way you think for the rest of your life. Optimization on the other hand is by nature tied to the specific technology that you're working with, it's far less generally applicable and it tends to be full of tricks, instead of full of insight.

the craigslist blues

2010-01-13T12:02:00.000-08:00

Trying to rent out a house is a bit nerve-wracking. I'll randomly get calls from people who always sound either harried, anxious, or apologetic. Then I have to set up a time for them to flake out and not show up to see the house.

Luckily we're not in the position that our financial solvency depends on getting the rent money, but boy it sure would help. So I have to worry about whether the price is too high, whether the ad is right, whether I could be doing more to get it out there. And whether the tenants will give me troubles when I finally find them. There's a lot of uncertainty about the whole thing, and I'm trying to keep a lid on it so it doesn't bubble over.

I think it's going to be well worth it when we do get someone in there, but it sure is nervous-making in the mean time.

shout outs

2010-01-08T20:46:00.000-08:00

Just a quick shout-out to all my kharaa and marines, I had a great time on Thursday night kicking it old school with my ns crew. Man that game is so good with the right group. It turns on much more than just personal skill, and when a team strategy comes together you feel so great*.

We're setting up a fortnightly game, so let me know if you want in and I'll add you to the spam list.

*Um I guess it's like sports or something. awkward turtle.

grumble grumble

2009-12-29T12:08:00.001-08:00

Some people will give you a screwdriver, and tell you to use it like a hammer. Then later they'll stumble across a real hammer, and they'll act like they invented it.

quick unrelated game idea

2009-12-25T09:32:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas everyone! Especially you Dave. Merry Oppressive Christmas.

***
I've been having the frustrating, complicated dreams that come with working late while sick, but this game idea popped out last night and I think it's cute.

Movie Plot Dominoes.

We're all directors, working on the same movie. We each specialize in a particular genre: Action, Adventure, Drama, Romance. We each have a deck of cards that references our genre, full of locations, characters, plot points, etc.. The goal is to contribute the most to the film and bring the movie mainly into your genre. Play works like dominoes - the movie's central plot develops linearly, scene by scene location by location, with offshoots for character development and subplots.

Players take turns laying down cards, but most cards must be matched, dominoes style, using a number of continuity symbols (probably less than 6, maybe just 4). Score by contributing cards to the main plot, resolving plot lines, and resolving characters. In addition to their mechanical symbols each card has flavor, version 1 rips all the cards straight from tvtropes.org.*

I'm trying to figure out if it demands any make-believe work, or "pitching" or auctioning, or if it's mechanically mostly just dominoes. I think with enough flavor on the cards it could work fine as dominoes, but that seems like a cop-out. On the other hand story telling games like happily ever after limit their audience by requiring high levels of creativity from everyone, and also it tends not to work so well for competitive play (when the correct competitive move is to claim that someone's story is bad and their turn is over).

Maybe each next scene is chosen randomly or something.

Anyway yeah that's my idea.

*Kill Dr. Lucky is an example of a game that lives on flavor. Or, hangs onto flavor by its fingernails as flavor leaps the Gap of Angry Making.

names

2009-12-14T19:13:00.000-08:00

I love the (locus? nexus? I'll settle for 'cognitive connection') between pagan true-name magic and modern computer systems.

The idea behind name magic is that if you know a thing's true name, it confers a measure of power over that thing. It's an idea similar how a voodoo doll is supposed to work, the name is a proxy for the thing, and by using the name you can control the thing*.

Computer architecture falls very easily into this metaphor. Every piece of information in a computer has an address, whether it's in memory or on a hard drive. This address can be thought of as a name. And if you have the true name of a piece of data, you can literally do whatever you want to it.

If we are all living in the matrix**, it's an easy leap to think that the developers put in a developer's console, that's intended to let players access the inner workings under certain circumstances. So if you have access to the console (magic), and if you have someone's True Name, you may be able to affect their life in any number of ways.

Actually, if you look at identity theft, it's pretty much the same story; and identity theft only gets more powerful, the more of our identity is represented remotely, by numbers and systems instead of face-to-face.

*I honestly don't know the first thing about name magic so maybe I'm grossly misrepresenting its origins or metaphysics. But anyway I enjoy the idea so much that I'm going to run with it. There are lots of examples of the importance of naming, going back hundreds or thousands of years in the cultures that I'm aware of, so I figure I can always fall back on those if I have to.
**HA!

abstraction layers that hurt

2009-11-27T21:39:00.000-08:00

Hibernate is this tool that you can use, that means that you don't have to write any SQL in order to use a database. It's like a compiler for SQL: you write your code in java, and it compiles the SQL for you automatically.

The problem with Hibernate is that you have to be an expert in data storage theory in order to use it well. So at that point you may as well write the SQL, because let me tell you Hibernate is not a very good compiler. You have to spoon feed it your data structures, and in order to get it to work cleanly you have to give up a lot of speed and efficiency in your database design.

It does have some good data portability and regularity benefits, but I'm betting we'll never take advantage of them for our game. Abstraction Layers that don't reduce complexity, don't increase performance, and don't grant extra flexibility that you will actually use, should be avoided.

a sortof for profit company

2009-11-27T20:35:00.000-08:00

Publicly held companies have a fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder profits. This can lead to all sorts of pathological activity.

Non-profit companies are prohibited from rendering an investment profit. This leads to some classes of inefficiency and drives away a lot of people who might otherwise like to participate.

I think we need a designation in between, a company that is bound to follow a well defined mission of some kind, but also wouldn't mind making some money at the same time. Not obliged to be evil, not beholden to shareholders, but not divorced from the market.

By the way, Google sees itself this way, if you believe their mission statement and their founders, and I do. Over the years I expect that Google will come to see itself as just another profit driven machine, but I think that as of now it still has some idealism left.

Craigslist is another place that seems to be operating this way, and I think their idealism may survive even longer.

It's the company everyone wants, but there's no place for it in the regulatory or investment schema. Maybe there should be?

clean design: software vs real life

2009-11-25T12:16:00.000-08:00

We all love elegant simple solutions. We appreciate good clean design and we strive towards it. But I write code all day, and then I try to apply the same principles to mechanical systems in the real world, and I find that it's just a different design space. In the real world, you cannot stuff an infinite amount of functionality into a black box. You can't keep adding abstraction layers (or pipe fittings, adapters?) Inheritance is a meaningless concept. And you have to make compromises with euclidean geometry and existing structures. You cannot just put your house in a box and move it somewhere else. Or you can but it's not a best practice.

Just something to remember I guess.

basic gardening lore

2009-11-25T12:08:00.000-08:00

Row covers, keep your plants warm and pest-free. This is the kind of basic shit that I never learned. ;-)

http://www.homegrownevolution.com/2009/11/row-covers-in-warm-climate.html

I'm thinking about setting up a greenhouse/aquaponics system, I guess that's the same principle. I can't decide where to put it around the yard, since I'd like to have the koi pond in front and the greenhouse in back. I mean I can just pipe the water back and forth and not worry about it.

solar

2009-11-23T11:56:00.000-08:00

Ok fine I just read about it at Wired, but One Block Off the Grid looks pretty interesting. They collect a bunch of people in a city who want to get solar installed, and then negotiate a sweet deal on solar installations with all that collective buying power.

Their rates for their current campaign in Los Angeles look pretty attractive: about $6 a watt before government rebates and tax credits, and about $3.15 a watt after. So a 3 kilowatt system comes out about $10,000, though you may need to be able to front 18,000, I'm not sure.

Solar increases home resale value by a lot, too, so in addition to making it back in your electric bill, you make it back when you sell the house. I don't think we really use a ton of electricity, so a 3kW system should be plenty for us. Just interesting. Though I think before we do something like this, we'd want to make other efficiency improvements like replacing our windows and blowing insulation into our walls. Then we can talk solar.

flash hack high five

2009-11-19T22:42:00.000-08:00

to this guy

for this hack (my version):

static private function construct(type:Class, args:Array):*
{
   //OK SO we can't dynamically pass an array in
   //since this is a constructor and not a Function object...
   //SO instead we're just going to hardwire it for up to N arguments
   //I am so so sorry
   //--Nate

   if(!args || args.length == 0)
   {
   return new type();
   }
   else
   {
   switch(args.length)
   {
   case 1:
   return new type(args[0]);
   case 2:
   return new type(args[0],args[1]);
   case 3:
   return new type(args[0],args[1],args[2]);
   case 4:
   return new type(args[0],args[1],args[2],args[3]);
   case 5:
   return new type(args[0],args[1],args[2],args[3],args[4]);
   default:
   throw new Error("Too many Dao Constructor Arguments: if you need more, expand the switch statement I guess. Sigh.");
   }
   }
   return null;
}

Silent partners in suffering.

dear science, please clone this

2009-11-19T11:22:00.000-08:00

Cold blooded, slow moving, tiny goats.

I think they would make excellent pets, especially for apartments, where they could laze out on the balcony all day. Their slow metabolism would mean that you wouldn't have to feed them much, but since they're mammals they might be more friendly and cuddly than most reptiles. You might have to spend a few generations domesticating them first, but it's gotta be worth a try, right?

a cornucopia of entertainment

2009-11-17T12:32:00.000-08:00

Really? Assassin's Creed 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 come out on the same day and they both get amazing reviews? I still haven't had time to plow through Torchlight yet, and I'm neglecting my WoW characters and my Rock Bands. It's so hard being a game consumer sometimes.

The sad truth is that my eyes are bigger than my stomach when it comes to games; I just don't have anywhere near the time to play these things. And that's not even counting the fourm mafia game, the play by wave zombie campaign, game night, or Descent. But I guess the good news is that I never have to be bored, ever again.

I'm literally embarrassed by this situation.

the 405

2009-11-17T10:56:00.000-08:00

They finally finished their epic construction work on the 405, in between where I live and where I work. It had been going on since 2004.

I think it finished on Friday or over the weekend. This is the only news item I could find that mentions it, which surprises me because it seems like it would be kind of a big deal. Maybe Caltrans just hasn't put out a press release yet.

My commute is so, so much better now. Here's hoping it stays like this.

my zombie rpg let me show you it

2009-11-15T10:41:00.000-08:00

Fresh Brains: Zombie Pickup RPG

Version 0.1

by Nate

Overview

The Concept: a fast paced pulp pickup zombie survival game where you can expect to play multiple PCs, because they'll probably get bitten a lot.

The world: Your standard Zombie apocalypse, a combination of Max brooks, Left 4 Dead, etc.

The System: is adapted from the Snakes on a Plane RPG, and Descent, with some differences

Character Creation

You have five stats, ranked from 1 to 9.
GUTS: How tough and strong you are. Also indicates how slowly you'll turn if bitten by a zombie.
NERVE: How quickly you react; reflexes and coordination. You'll use this to dodge zombies.
WITS: How smart you are on your feet, and how likely your traps and fortifications are to work.
CHARM: How attractive and charismatic you are. Works better on people than it does on zombies.
GEAR: How many weapons, how much food and ammo, etc have you got with you? You can spend GEAR to gain other stats at 2 for 1.

Distribute 25 points among these stats; minimum of 1, maximum of 9.

In addition, your character gets a 1 line story and 2 tropes from tvtropes.org. This page is a good place to start - find 2 tropes you like and link to them from your character sheet.

Gameplay

Each scenario involves the GM and 1 or more PCs. Link your character sheet at the start of the scenario. For each scenario, we keep track of the number of nearby zombies, (THREAT) and the time. As time passes, more zombies arrive. Zombies can be ONSTAGE or OFFSTAGE. ONSTAGE means that the zombies have line of sight to the PCs and are not impeded by fortifications. If there are zombies onstage, the game is HECTIC. Otherwise it is CALM.

The game is played with a map on a grid that can be updated by any player or the GM. The map can include FORTIFICATIONS that are found, maintained, or destroyed by the players.

During Hectic time, play proceeds in rounds. Once each PC has taken an action the next round starts. After each PC's action, all zombies move 1 square. After a player takes an action, all zombies adjacent to that PC attack that PC. A player may always pass instead of making a roll, but this still counts as taking an action as far as the zombies care.

Scenario End Conditions: If the THREAT drops to 0, the players are considered SAFE and the scenario ends. The scenario also ends if the players reach a safe location, are rescued, or if they all die.

Task Resolution

Rolling Dice
When you roll a stat, roll as many d6 as points in that stat. Every 5 or 6 you roll is a SUCCESS. (When attacking zombies, each success means one dead zombie.) Each 1 you roll is a point of NOISE. For every point of NOISE the GM may either take 1 THREAT, or may move 2 zombies ONSTAGE. If your roll more NOISE than SUCCESS, that's called a BLUNDER. When you roll a BLUNDER, the GM rolls on the Zombie Attack Table.

Being Quiet
If you don't blunder, you may spend 2 SUCCESSES to cancel 1 NOISE, as long as this doesn't turn the roll into a blunder.

Arbitrary tasks
When things are CALM, you can do whatever you want. Some actions may require action rolls; if so they can grant NOISE normally. BLUNDERS when it's CALM double the NOISE, but do not merit a roll on the zombie attack table.

When things are HECTIC, everything you want to do, other than talk, requires a roll of 1 of the 5 stats.

Killing Zombies
You can make an attack against any nearby zombies with any of your stats, as long as you can describe it in a way that justifies the use of that stat. Every Success you roll is one dead zombie, but you can't kill more zombies than you can reach with the attack.

Stunts
When you describe what you want to do, be awesome. Use the environment, use other PCs tropes, all that jazz. You get extra dice for doing so. A good description of using your basic stats gets you 1 extra die. Using the environment or another PC's trope gets you 2 dice. But each aspect can only be used once in this way per scenario per player. Assigning bonuses: PCs may assign themselves bonuses. The GM or other players will let you know if you're not being reasonable.

Using Your Tropes:
You may invoke each of your tropes once per scenario, for a bonus 3 dice. Your description must justify the use. Stunts stack with Tropes.

Examples
If I'm using a bloody axe to chop zombie head off, I attack with GUTS. If my GUTS is 5, I roll [5d6 = 56 36 36 26 16] In this case I kill 1 zombie but I also make 1 NOISE.

If instead of just attacking, I duck under the table at the last second, causing the three nearby zombies to lunge onto the table when I pop back up on the other side and casually chop their heads off as they lie prone, then I can attack with Nerve, and I get a +2 bonus for a stunt. If my Nerve is 6, then that's [6d6+2d6 = 66 66 56 46 46 36 16 16] Since I got 3 successes I kill all three zombies.

Zombie actions:
After each PC action, in order:
1. Every Zombie adjacent to that PC makes an attack by rolling on the Zombie table
2. All zombies move 1 square towards the nearest PC.

The Zombie Attack Table
1: The zombie tries to bite you. Lose 1 point of Guts as you shove it away.
2: The zombie grabs at you. Lose 1 point of Nerve as you wrench yourself away.
3: The zombie surprises you and you freak out and scream. Lose 1 point of Wits for not being able to focus.
4: The zombie claws at your face. Lose 1 point of Charm for your mussed hair and bloody nose.
5: The zombie rips at your clothing. Lose 1 point of Gear for the gadget that fell off.
6: Reroll and double all point values lost; you stumbled onto a lot of motherfucking zombies. Reroll and double every time the die comes up 6.

Once you subtract the point or points from your relevant trait, you have killed the zombie. If a trait is at 0 and you are asked to subtract points from it, the zombie kills you.

Passage of Time:
During HECTIC time, Every round takes 1 minute. During CALM time, passage of time is adjudicated by the GM depending on the actions. Depending on the scenario, THREAT increases linearly with time. (e.g. 1 THREAT per 5 minutes.)

Spending THREAT and NOISE
At any time, the GM can spend 2 THREAT to move 1 zombie ONSTAGE at an UNEXPLORED or EXTERIOR point.

When NOISE is generated, the GM may spend 1 NOISE to move up to N zombies ONSTAGE, where N is the number of players (PCs + GM), spending just 1 THREAT each to do so. (if there are 3 PCs, the GM may spend 1 NOISE to spawn in up to 4 zombies for 1 THREAT each. OR the GM can convert the NOISE into THREAT (1 to 1) instead of bringing zombies ONSTAGE.

All DOORS and FORTIFICATIONS have a THREAT cost. The GM may spend 1 THREAT per action (or N per round, or N per minute, where N is the total number of players) to destroy that fortification. FORTIFICATIONS typically hide EXTERIOR areas, which means that the GM will be able to easily move zombies ONSTAGE at this point.

Other
Maybe there are other ways for the GM to spend THREAT. Special Zombies, environmental hazards, WHO EVEN KNOWS. If the GM is spending threat, look out.

Making Noise
A PC can spend an action to lure nearby zombies. Use a stat roll, but instead of rolling, just count the total dice. The GM must move that many zombies onstage at a cost of 1 THREAT each. If the GM runs out of THREAT the PCs win.

Other things

Unexplored Areas
Might contain zombies! The GM may spawn in zombies anywhere the PCs have never seen (for interior areas), or anywhere they can't see right now, if there's an exterior area there.

Exterior Areas
Areas the PCs cannot access may contain zombies. The GM may spawn zombies there at the normal price.

Doors
The PCs can move through doors, but zombies must bash them down. An average door takes 3-5 THREAT to break down.

Fortifications
The PCs can find, repair, and destroy fortifications. Repairing a fortification requires roll, even when it's CALM. Every 2 successes repairing a fortification increases its THREAT cost by 1. Every success spent dismantling a fortification reduces its THREAT cost by 1. When it's worth 0 THREAT it's considered destroyed and the players can move through it.

Finding stuff
The PCs may increase their stats by finding GEAR lying around places. When they find a piece of GEAR players may either take the GEAR, or trade 2 points of GEAR for 1 point in another stat.

Equipment
Equipment mostly exists to give you flavor and let you use it in stunts. You can play the game without specifying your equipment, but if you specify it you can stunt with it. Your GEAR stat loosely governs what equipment you can have.

Weapons
Weapons mostly affect the flavor of the attack you can make, and it's range, and what is considered reasonable or justifiable. Your maximum weapon level depends on your GEAR stat:
0-1: simple/improvised melee (chair, shovel)
2-3: appropriate melee (axe, pitchfork, prop sword)
4-5: small handgun or superior melee
6: shotgun, samurai sword, chainsaw, rifle.
7-8: assault rifle, auto shotgun, sniper rifle
9: man whatever the heck you want.

If your GEAR level drops below the level of your current weapon, consider it either out of ammo, or wrenched from your grasp and lost, or jammed by zombie tendons, as appropriate.

Armor and clothing:
Your gear might include armor. This will help you stunt the use of GUTS instead of NERVE to move across a
HECTIC room, but has no special effect for reducing damage.

Environmental Hazards
There will be some times when the only way forward is going to be either noisy or time consuming, or both. The GM should let you know approximately how much NOISE you can expect to make for a given set piece.

my guacamole recipe

2009-11-10T22:22:00.000-08:00

My guacamole has been called many things, most of them positive, but I've resisted writing down any kind of recipe. Not because I fear imitators, but mostly because I didn't want to bother to measure all the stuff I put into it. That and also, it's going to take a long time to explain. But I've finally gotten around to it, so here you go.

(The recipe is down at the bottom because I want you to have to scroll past my pontification to get to it.)

Avocado Selection
Avocado selection is important and non-obvious. Ripe avocados are black and soft, but not mushy. Perfect guacamole avocados are not quite ripe. They are slightly firmer than avocados that you might select for eating out of the shell, or in a salad, for example. You can get away with this because the first thing you're going to do is mash them up. The reason to pick less-ripe avocados is that they have less of the oxidized brown parts. (Don't try to make guacamole with green or hard avocados: your avocados should still be soft when you slice into them.)

5 small avocados from our local mecixan market - serves 4

After you've opened your avocados, spoon them into your mashing bowl. I like to pick out the obvious brown parts and discard them, but you don't have to be too vigilant, it will generally all come out in the wash (i.e. mash). On occasion though, I will discard an entire avocado if it's too brown and mushy when I open it up.

On Spices
All spices are to taste, but the spice balance is really what makes or breaks the guac in my opinion. My greatest lesson, and the most important piece of advice I can bestow upon you, is that you need more salt than you think you do. And more garlic. A lot more garlic. The first step after opening the avocados is to salt them. You should salt the guacamole until just before it tastes like salt. Don't be afraid of overshooting; go slow and get it right. If you go too far, that's why you have tomatoes and garlic on hand. Garlic is fantastic for balancing salt: adding a lot of garlic will allow you to add more salt, and you should do so.

The other spices I use are black pepper and cayenne. The cayenne especially adds a little bit of a slow burn to your guacamole that will give it a subtly addictive quality. It should be noticeable on reflection, but you don't have to make it hot for it to have an effect. If your guests are spice-intolerant (ahem), you may omit. Do not bother with Paprika or Chili Powder, you will not taste it and it will turn your green brown.

This is what I use.

Lime Juice
Acid prevents avocados from browning too soon (it works on apples too.) Lime juice is delicious in guacamole, and I feel that it's really necessary for a truly sanctioned mix, but of course sometimes we have to make sacrifices.

For mine I only used half a lime.

Optional Ingredients
Tomatoes
Include tomatoes if you have them on hand, and especially for large party bowls. They taste good, add some festive color, and they're a lot cheaper than avocados. Select ripe, red tomatoes and dice them fine enough that they blend in. Do not add them until after you get your spice mix just about right, as too much mixing will cause them to disintegrate.

Cilantro
If I have cilantro on hand for some other part of the meal I will often include it. Chop it very fine so it doesn't interfere with your texture. It's optional.

Controversy
Some people are wrong.

Garlic or Garlic Salt?
Real garlic is too sharp and screws up your texture. Garlic powder dissolves beautifully and gives you an even texture and taste. Sometimes easier is also better.

Onions?
Don't like 'em. Their taste overpowers the avocados, and their texture gets in the way too. They're great on tacos or whatever but with guacamole they're a bull in a china shop.

Sour Cream?
It really affects the texture and color. I've had some good guacamole that was made this way but I won't do it myself... It just doesn't seem necessary since the avocados give you plenty of creamy goodness already.

Cutting the Guac
If I'm making a large batch for a party, I will use about one (small roma) tomato per (large haas) avocado. It's just cheaper. Nobody ever complains about it. It means that people who are late might actually get some.

Recipe
The reference batch was made used 5 rather small avocados for 4 people, but I wrote up the recipe for what I estimate to be an equivalent number of the large avocados that you usually find at supermarkets. If you try out the recipe let me know how it came out.

Nate's Guacamole

it will vanish

3 large avocados (or equivalent)
1 tomato
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon garlic
2 dashes of cayenne (to taste)
half a lime or 2 squirts from or a bottle of lime juice
1 bag tortilla chips (salted, non-flavored)

Open up 3 ripe-but-firm avocados and spoon them into a bowl, discarding any dark brown portions. Add salt and mash. Test salt level and add more if it doesn't taste too salty yet. Add garlic, pepper, and cayenne, and mix. Taste. Continue to tweak, mix, and taste until it is delicious and a bit salty. Dice tomato and add. Add lime juice. Mix, taste, adjust, serve with tortilla chips.

~~~
enjoy!

on self awareness

2009-11-03T13:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I spent a few minutes browsing through Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's a fantastic book and I like to review it every once in a while as a way of taking my own social temperature. This morning I was sitting in a meeting when it occurred to me that I was feeling defensive, adversarial, and stressed out. I wrote down the words "reduce stress" on my pad and spent the rest of the meeting doodling around them.

Later on I started looking up meditation techniques. Wikipedia has a good general review, and I thought that maybe I would find one of the listed secular techniques helpful. Autogenic training and a couple other things looked interesting. That reminded me of Yoga, which I have enjoyed when I've tried it, but it's difficult and I don't think I can find time to attend a class. (And also I find working out in public stressful.) I was thinking of getting a beginner's Yoga DVD, and that reminded me that there might be a Wii yoga game. Wii Fit Plus seems to be the one at the moment, although there's another yoga game coming soon. I don't know if it will be good or not. And then that reminded me that there are probably yoga courses online that might be even more appropriate, and cheaper, or free (but probably worse).

Does anyone have advice on either meditation or yoga?

Sometimes I see my life as a series of overlapping and interconnecting obsessions, kind of like the way story arcs come and go in a grand epic piece of fiction.

my thoughts on torchlight

2009-11-02T12:04:00.000-08:00

So I tried out Torchlight, mostly on the advice of Tycho and Metacritic. Here are my thoughts so far.

Diablo I was a great game--it broke a lot of ground. It was mentally light, but very addicting, and very replayable. In many ways Diablo II was a different game. It got a lot more complex, a lot longer, and a lot more involved. It has a much larger complexity profile. It also made some big improvements on the first game in terms of usability, balance, etc., but for the purposes of this review, consider that Diablo I and Diablo II are two different games.

Think of Torchlight as Diablo I, with every rough corner removed. When you launch the game you can pick up your progress within 10 seconds. Everything is streamlined. Anything that was annoying about Diablo I has been removed, and some modern tropes like WoW-style skill trees have been added.

Torchlight is a fantastic single player hack-and-slash dungeon crawl. It is 60% loot, 35% character progression, 5% story, and 0% bullshit. The graphics are simple but really well done. The gameplay feels really good. It doesn't break a lot of new ground, it just does what it does perfectly. Torchlight is the new reference Diablo I experience. And it's a great place to park your brain for a few minutes (hours) when you don't feel up to a more complex or social game.

video card fan update

2009-10-30T11:31:00.000-07:00

It turns out you can replace your video card fan. The downside is that it's fiddly, nervous-making work. I saved about a hundred dollars over replacing it. Not sure what it would have cost to get it repaired at Fry's or Best Buy, but I'm glad I didn't find out.

And what's up with RAM heat sinks on video cards? Do they actually do something, or is it just feature-itis? Well I installed them anyway, sigh.

The silence that came out of my PC case last night was music to my ears. I feel better already.

a couple of cheap single player pc games maybe

2009-10-28T15:03:00.000-07:00

I haven't played either of these but that might change.

Time Gentlemen, Please! is apparently a time travelling adventure game. Maybe in the vein of Maniac Mansion Day of the Tentacle? Idunno.
http://www.zombie-cow.com/?page_id=559
$5

Torchlight is a single player low profile streamlined Diablo clone.
http://www.torchlightgame.com/
$20

more pc blues - graphics card fan

2009-10-27T13:58:00.000-07:00

I've never had a graphics card fan break on me before, but I'm finding it really distressing. The fan makes this horrible clicking, buzzing sound that's impossible to ignore, especially when gaming. Apparently you can replace the entire cooling unit on video cards? That sounds better than replacing the video card, since it's not more than a few months old.

...Stepping back, for me it's another reminder that our sense of self extends well beyond our physical bodies. My mood and sense of well-being can be heavily influenced by the status of my car, my computer, and my bank account. I suspect that the house will join that list in short order.

I heard that cats get more attached to places than they do to people. It makes you wonder if a cat's territory is an extension of itself in the same way.

audio research

2009-10-26T12:48:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to put together another media temple in the living room, for consoles and movie watching and whatnot. Eventually we'll have to buy a TV I think, but until then my widescreen monitor will serve. But the audio solution really had me stumped. I have a pretty great setup for my PC, a pair of klipsch bookshelf speakers that I got from Ralph seven years ago, and they've spoiled me for PC speakers. (Basically, every PC speaker I've ever heard sucks in comparison to even a modest home theater setup.)

So, I'm unwilling to permanently downgrade my PC, and I'm going to have similar standards for the eventual setup in the living room. Long story short I need another set of speakers, either temporarily or permanently. I don't really want to go with a temporary solution (cheap PC speakers,) because I already have enough junk around the house. But I also don't want to break the bank. But I ALSO don't want to chase down a good home theater system on craigslist--my time is more valuable than it used to be, especially this month.

Anyway, after some research rejected logitech and I ended up ordering these M-Audio Studiophile AV 40 Powered Speakers speakers from amazon. I have high hopes that they will be a solid addition to my noisemaking capacity for years to come. Even if they don't have a place in whatever system I eventually set up in the living room, they should make great auxiliary speakers for either the garage or the bedroom.

the internet is a public good

2009-10-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

Internet access will be regulated the same way that gas, electric, water, and phone service are regulated: as a public good. Next up: cell phones, and the wireless carriers.

The FCC approved new openness rules for the broadband and mobile wireless connections to the internet, gratifying President Obama;s grassroots supporters and internet services like Google, while drawing the wrath of large telecoms such as AT&T and the wireless industry.

Back in the 1990s, I was afraid that government regulation of the internet would squash innovation and end the "wild west" era. But the down side of frontier life is that because it's lawless, you're prone to exploitation by bandits and robber barons and such. So then you have to choose whether to put up with it, petition the governor to send the sheriff around, move back east, or move even further west.

(In this extended metatphor bloggers are farmers, ecommerce merchants are general store owners, web programmers are cowboys, prospectors are .com startups. The bandits are spammers, the Indians are the old media companies (music, journalism, print)*, and the oil and railroad barons are the tech companies that move in, take over, and sell access.)

The fat cats won, the infrastructure has been build and it's very profitable. The Indians have been marginalized and their attacks have subsided, they're heading for the reservations. A flood of homesteaders and regular folk is on its way. Now, for the sake of all the families that are trying to settle in, it's time for the fed to move in and civilize the place. That means busting the trusts and taking down the big monopolies.

Civilization means equality of opportunity. That's what these rules are about. The frontiersmen are just going to have to find a new frontier.

*So yeah I feel guilty about what the US did to the Native Americans and I apologize if the metaphor is offensive, but I don't think it's inaccurate. In the story of the wild west this is how it went. The natives were outcompeted, fairly and unfairly. I think it's tragic when progress steamrolls human beings.

the kitchen is packed

2009-10-15T13:50:00.000-07:00

Last night we put all (most) of the kitchen stuff in boxes. I think most of the rest of the stuff that has to get packed is going in bags. (Also we're almost out of the 25 boxes we bought.)

But I think there's something about the kitchen gear in particular that gets you excited... This is the practical stuff, the stuff you use every day, and the next time you use it will be in your own kitchen, on your own stove.

I guess we'll be eating out until then ;-)

I keep compulsively opening up a new tab and then closing it

2009-10-13T17:15:00.000-07:00

while ( !fired )

{

//see: http://www.facultyguide.caltech.edu/acronyms.htm#Flick

flick();

}

is not a career-enhancing procedure.

;-)

tired is relative, also unemployment economics

2009-10-12T17:32:00.000-07:00

It's a funny feeling, this feeling I have now. When I'm at my desk, or at home at my computer, I'm utterly exhausted. When I'm at the new house working on stuff, I can stay on my feet for hours at a time. Well also there aren't many chairs over there right now so it's hard to sit down. But really I do feel very energized about it all.

I think the word 'tired' is a lot less informative than it should be... It doesn't communicate the subtleties of emotion that govern how we manage our time, or how we would prefer to manage it. Maybe it's an artifact of the English language. Or perhaps what I'm getting at is the same thing I've been chasing mentally for a long time, which is simply that I want to own my time, myself.

On the subject of time management. The idea of unemployment checks is interesting. What would look like if instead of paying people a percentage of their former income for a fixed amount of time, you just put them to work on some public good. Probably it would look like a human resources debacle of epic proportions, trying to find useful public sector work for a shifting population of millions... People who now complain about welfare would instead complain about the centrally planned economy taking over the private sector.

But on the other hand I always loved the idea of the CCC, the civilian conservation corps... The idea is you take a bunch of unemployed dudes and you give them something useful to do. Most of their pay is in free food, housing, and medical care, and they get a small stipend on top. It helps the unemployment problem, stimulates the economy, provides job training, and keeps said dudes off the street, all while providing some public good (infrastructure, conservation) on top.

Maybe as network technologies improve, the thousands and millions of local projects that need doing can be hooked up more efficiently to the people who are suddenly out of work but who have the skills to complete those projects. If the HR problem could be eased, then this sort of work might be a good replacement for unemployment for a lot of people. It might be especially good for young folk right out of college or whatnot. A good way to build connections in a community, to learn practical skills, all that good stuff.

oh yeah also we bought a house

2009-10-09T11:23:00.000-07:00

So we got the keys on Monday. We'll be painting this weekend and moving next weekend (If you want to help out with either let me know.)

And I started a new blog just for house stuff, where Annie and I will (maybe) be recording our adventures in experimental homeownership.

That will be the spot to watch for house pictures too.

another busted water main

2009-10-09T10:23:00.000-07:00

Our showers have been weak (too cold) for a few days now. (still at the old place, 11th St.) It's been getting so bad that I've been dreading every shower, because I have to get in and out in 5 minutes or it'll lose all warmth. This morning Annie found a new naturally occurring* hot spring in our backyard, near one of our garden planters.

WHAT.

*Warm water just coming right up out of the ground in Manhattan Beach! I didn't know we were a geothermal hot spot! I should probably call the USGS or something.**

**Or you know, a plumber.

the future soon

2009-10-02T15:13:00.000-07:00

I heard a story on NPR a few days ago (it turns out I actually read it on boing boing but for some reason I remember it as NPR audio...weird) about a boy from Malawi who read in a book about using windmills to provide energy, and who set out to build one for his family/village farm.

So, awesome, great job*. And it makes you wonder what might be in a book from the future, if you could find one, that would represent a similarly daunting, yet achievable leap. Imagine finding instructions for making petroleum out of algae, or for spinning carbon nanotubes. Or imagine reading about the network protocols and wireless power strategies that will be the foundation of the pervasive wireless internet: the outernet. If you were a determined dude or lady, you could change the world with that kind of technosauce.

But we don't have those books, so we go on scratching around, trying to figure it out on our own, without the benefit of the knowledge that "this idea changed the world." I find it staggering how much easier it is to learn something that it is to discover or invent that same thing. But when you think about humans as clever monkeys instead of rational beings, it makes more sense... Our imaginations, as amazing as they are, are only just barely good enough to lift us out of the dirt, because that's exactly how good they had to be to get us this far. (Or, if they were better, we'd surely have flying cars by now)

AND it raises the question, is there a complexity frontier beyond which we can make no progress? Where it takes so long to get up to speed that no forward progress can be made? Or will we simply continue to build more sophisticated tools and sweep the details under the rug?

...In conclusion, humans are so great.

*This sounds like both an incredibly sad and an incredibly hopeful story, doesn't it?

kung fu panda

2009-09-30T14:57:00.000-07:00

I can now announce that I am working on Kung Fu Panda World, a flash MMO based on Kung Fu Panda.

Hooray!

regarding pc hardware, I feel old

2009-09-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

So my desktop's busted. Random restarts, if I leave it powered down all day it'll run for a couple of minutes first, before it starts spam restarting.

Usually when something like this happens it's the power supply, I tend to run those into the ground pretty regularly. That did not seem to be the case this time, unfortunately. Didn't seem to be a cooling issue either. Next on the list is motherboard and cpu....

It turns out that while I wasn't looking a lot of things have changed in PC hardware. Intel has a terrible, confusing brand tangle* of processors to choose from. I bought a Core i7 920 processor and a motherboard that supports Core i7 chips. But the chip didn't fit. Core i7 is split into two socket types, LGA1156 and LGA1366. WHO KNEW. (I didn't. These concerns are completely absent from the "[how to select your awesome new intel processor]" marketing posters.) Anyway I went back and got the right motherboard.

Oh the motherboard doesn't fit into the case. I'm not sure if this is because my old Dell is just Dell, or if the case standard actually changed (AGP to ATX?) and frankly I don't really care. I bought a new case.

So I was finally all set to put it all together. Oh the ram doesn't fit either. DDR3 is not DDR2.

On we go. I mean it's not a disaster, the good thing about being an old man is that I have lots of money to throw at these things. Still, burnsauce.

...

I actually still kindof like working with PC hardware... the form factors, the interface design decisions, it all speaks to a very specific design aesthetic, a funny split between engineering and show business, between high-tech and consumer concerns.

I love that you can build a PC mostly by trying to plug things into eachother until everything is plugged in, and then turning it on. That's pretty much what I do. It's sortof similar to the old PC Adventure game ethos of "[pull every lever and pick up everything that isn't nailed down,]" and I find it amusing that those problem solving skills actually turn out to be useful in some situations. Which is to say, in environments where every possible/sensible physical interaction has been planned out ahead of time, and made to work or not work as appropriate. So that if you can plug it in, it probably works. There's a certain nostalgic beauty to the process.

*brandble?

augmented reality game ideas

2009-09-24T13:55:00.000-07:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality

So the overwhelming problem for an augmented reality game is content creation, amirite? I mean, the real world is big. Way, way bigger than any virtual world I'm aware of. To reach a national or international audience, an augmented reality game can't rely on traditional video-game content creation pipelines. You need to either crowdsource content creation, restrict yourself to a small locality, or auto-generate content somehow. Or some combination.

So here's how I think you solve it, I'll put it in the familiar frame of an MMO, because I don't have a strong theme idea yet...

Your baseline game takes some huge local dataset like Yelp or whatevs, crunches it, and turns each node into a spawn point for critters based on the node. So a Chinese restaurant creates Chinese Food creeps that wander around the vicinity. You may or may not want to make a sophisticated thematic mapping algorithm so that all your creeps aren't ethnic food? I guess it depends on the game...

So anyway one dataset/layer gives you mobs for any populated area. Make your second layer something more explicit like the geocaching dataset. May as well include all this free content in your game, right? Caches become boss monsters or quests.

Next, give your players input into the game. As they do stuff they go up levels. The average level of players in the vicinity affects the average difficulty of the area. So if a bunch of high level bozos live in a town, then the newbs need to be careful when visiting, for example. Which means that your dedicated players will create your high level content. And the developer's office naturally becomes the highest level content in the game.

From there you might as well keep layering in every dataset you can think of, crime statistics, UPA pickup games, movie times, house prices, really anything.

What's the central activity of this game? Killing creeps? Collecting shiny stuff? Damned if I know. What kinds of things do people even do outside? What kind of augmented reality game would you like to play?

tacos

2009-09-22T15:18:00.000-07:00

Tacos Mexico, on Van Nuys south of Sherman Way. It's no Salsa and Beer, so I wouldn't really take anyone else there, but they have great truck-style tacos for 1.05 each. Three or four makes a meal.

Also I tried putting butterscotch in my coffee, but it didn't work out as well as the chocolate syrup did. Lesson learned I guess.

missing music

2009-09-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

I caved in and bought The Beatles Rock Band on Saturday. We visited my parents and set it up and had a great time with all my siblings, singing and playing through the songs. There are 2 key features to the game. One is singing harmony, which was pretty fun. The other is that everyone already knows all the songs, which is fantastic.

Between that and the jam session with Mick at PAX, I've been really wanting to get back into making music. The problem is, somewhere along the way I seem to have convinced myself that I'm not dedicated enough to learn an instrument. So I'm not sure what to do about that. Maybe get myself hypnotized into thinking that I love to practice the guitar. I'm not sure if I'm susceptible to hypnosis or not. I've always suspected that I'm not, but that might just be hubris.

The solution that my imagination keeps drifting towards is for me to invent my own musical instrument/interface, that takes the drudgery and dexterity out of the equation. But that almost sounds harder (and definitely a lot more pompous) than just learning an existing instrument...

Humph.

So in conclusion, any way I slice it, my big ego seems to be getting in the way of my making music. Probably time to knock it down a few pegs, I guess. Sometimes I wish I had a work ethic instead of a dream ethic. What can you do eh? :-)

I was kinda looking forward to it

2009-09-18T14:37:00.000-07:00

My Driver's License finally came in the mail, so unfortunately I won't need witnesses to swear that I am me. Thanks everyone who offered. :-)

bonus drama - notaries and identification

2009-09-16T11:28:00.000-07:00

So, I lost my Driver's License some time ago. I went to the DMV to get a replacement. They took my picture and all that. I waited 60 days, but it never came. I called, they said the picture didn't make it into the database. I went back to the DMV. They took my picture again. Now I'm on the waiting phase again. Hopefully it arrives soon, but in the meantime, I get to learn about Notaries Public.

There's a couple of documents we need to get notarized in order to buy this house. There's a disclosure for the Loan, and then, most crucially, there's the purchase contract itself. The thing is, a notary's main job is to confirm that you are who you say you are. I currently do not possess sufficient documentation to satisfy the requirements. We were able to get away with just Anne signing this loan disclosure, but for the purchase that's definitely not gonna fly.

So I looked up the California Notary Public guidelines, to see what my options are. On page 8 it talks about identification, and the long and short of it is that I need to have 2 credible witnesses present, with their identification, who will swear that I am really me.

We're gonna do it old-school.

I actually found it really interesting reading about notaries, because they are literally responsible for the fabric of trust that our common/civil law relies on... And it's all based on the idea that either the notary knows you personally, or can establish trust through other community members. Having ID cards is basically a shortcut for that mechanism, and frankly ID cards work way better in large cities where nobody knows eachother. But I do like that we have this old trust mechanism to fall back on.

house negotitations

2009-09-15T11:51:00.000-07:00

So, let me tell you about this house. When we first saw it, it was listed at 550. We loved it-- it was two separate houses one a lot, with 2 garages. The lot is huge, 8,700 square feet, the second unit has 2 bedrooms, a great kitchen and its own yard. Both houses are in great shape. Great, this is exactly what we want, and it's out of our range.

We talked to the agent, the agent said, "she'll let it go for 460." We said, ok wow we can actually do that. We put in an offer at 460, our offer had an appraisal contingency, so that if the property appraises for less they have to drop the price to the appraisal.

Endless paperwork later, we're finally approved for the loan, and the appraisal comes back at 405. We're very excited, she has to drop the price, right? We offer 405. Well actually she has a backup offer at 435, so she counters at 435.

Now here's the thing, the bank is only going to lend us money against the appraised value of 405k, so if we want to buy the house for more than that we need to make up the difference up-front with cash. We were a bit lean in the down-payment department to begin with*, so this represents significant pain for us. We review our finances and counter 420, and it's as high as we're willing to go. We think we've lost the house to the other buyers at this point.

Radio silence for a few days, then we get a call saying she'll take it for 425, she just wants 5k more and we can seal the deal. Now, it's not the 5k in purchase price that's a problem, it's the fact that it's up-front that makes it a deal breaker. We can't give her more than 422 and feel like we're not being totally reckless. We already feel pretty reckless frankly.

More radio silence, then we get a call saying that our agent and the seller's agent have both agreed to take a 1.5k pay cut in order to make up the difference between us and the seller. The deal is on. So that's where we are right now. The seller has the football, we expect them to sign and pass it back to us any minute now.

I'm not totally sure how I feel about all this yet. I think it's gonna be good, but I don't want to hear your second-guessing until after we've finished the whole thing and moved in and made our first mortgage payment. Then we can talk about how irresponsible we are. ;-)

*For all you's out there wagging your finger right now, please remember that we will be renting out the front unit to cover more than half of our mortgage payment; some things are not as irresponsible as they look.

updated!

2009-09-13T13:31:00.000-07:00

foodonshirt.com is back up, my shirts are on sale for 16$ a piece, 3$ flat shipping. I let this go for way, way too long.

Ultimately I decided it was not worth it to rescue the old ruby on rails site, and I decided to use an off-the-shelf store (Magento). There are pros and cons to it... inventory management is really smooth, and I had to do relatively little work to get it working, but it means tweaking everything, a lot, and I still don't get quite exactly what I want. My biggest gripe is with the checkout process; it has like 3 too many steps, and some bad defaults. I'd like to try to streamline it if I get the chance, but who am I kidding? The only way this store is ever gonna see more work is if I actually sell all the shirts I already have in stock and decide to do another run.

But anyway now you can vote for which food-on-shirt related flash game I should make! You''ll see the poll if you go to one of the shirt pages, e.g. here and scroll down and check out the sidebar.

friday night at the office

2009-08-28T19:39:00.000-07:00

I probably won't be here too much longer but,

1. Nobody in my rss list makes posts on friday evenings.

2. Actually I'd like to make a graph of when news (or at least posts) are produced throughout the week.

3. Weekend! Yay!

dwarf fortress update

2009-08-27T10:25:00.000-07:00

I haven't been playing but I have been following the development blog:

I'm back to combat text, which still involves some retooling of things as the text illuminates further problems, but I'm closer to being done with the combat revision, anyway. I found a lot of things wrong with the groundhog bite today. First, a groundhog ripped a lion in half and bit off a dwarf's arms... and it was using every part of its head (eyes, nose, etc.), not just its teeth, for the biting. After I fixed that up, it was still using its teeth like little needles and piercing brains and so on. I eventually got that sorted out.

I had a dragon fight some lions, and after a little bit of dragonfire and close combat, I ended up with a dragon covered with the gramatically-in-progress "lion melted fat spatter".

I love you Tarn Adams......you go there so no-one else has to. You take it to the limit and beyond, so that no-one else is burdened by the burning lack of a fully detailed, fully simulated fantasy-mashup pocket universe. Thank you for all you do.

more signs of stress - avoidance and creativity

2009-08-25T17:15:00.000-07:00

Today I read the google wave draft protocol spec. It was amazingly concise.

2.4. Operations
Operations are mutations on wavelets. The state of a wavelet is entirely defined by a sequence of operations on that wavelet.
Clients and servers exchange operations in order to communicate modifications to a wavelet. Operations propagate through the system to all clients and servers interested in that wavelet. They each apply the operation to their own copy of the wavelet. The use of operational transformation (OT) guarantees all copies of the wavelet will eventually converge to the same state. In order for the guarantees made by OT to hold, all communication participants must use the same operational transformation and composition algorithms (i.e. all OT implementations must be functionally equivalent).

Reading specs has become a weird kind of guilty pleasure for me... or at least, I never thought I'd enjoy it, but I find that I kinda do. Maybe because it lets me be smug, if only in my own head: "oh yeah if you just read the spec you'd see how they handle that..." And since like nobody reads specs, (because theyr'e written in math,) reading and understanding a spec is a recipe for instant self-esteem!

<_<

I also applied for access to the google wave developer sandbox. Because I don't have enough to do with my spare time?

I can't resist

2009-08-21T18:33:00.001-07:00

the atheist apocalypse

http://www.viruscomix.com/page433.html

interface writer's manifesto

2009-08-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

I like what this guy has to say about interfaces... Programmers need to work harder so that users don't have to. User requests are what computers are for!

http://wilshipley.com/blog/2009/08/pimp-my-code-part-16-heuristics-and.html

There is so much work to be done, all around us.

my daily nih - virtual rpg systems

2009-08-20T14:06:00.000-07:00

nih - not invented here - a bad habit many engineers (certainly this one!) will cop to; if it was designed by someone else, it's crap and we should build our own.

I've recently been preoccupied with the idea of running a traditional rpg online. I was in one game a few months ago that was a lot of fun before it ran out of steam. We used a traditional forum setup and that worked alright, but there are some things about the way a forum is set up that make it less than optimal. Forums are good about maintaining a timeline, but bad at conveying game information efficiently. Things like maps, side conversations, character attributes, and ancillary characters are at best awkward hacks. That won't stop you from having a good time. Here is a site with a large community of play by forum games.

But to me an online rpg session is more similar to a game than a forum; I'd build it from the ground up around maps, characters, statuses, events, and attributes. Other people have approached this problem before. Here is a chart of some existing virtual battle mats that take a virtual map plus chatroom approach to online RPGs.

The thing is, most of these applications seem to have been designed for the world of 15 years ago. Most of them are downloadable clients, where the GM sets up a server on his local machine and gives his IP to his friends, who run their own native clients and connect to it. This is how online games worked in the 1990s. Nobody does this anymore in real life - games in this decade are centrally hosted. In fact I'd get rid of the native client entirely and use a web client instead. There are so many advantages to the web client! Compatibility, ease of use, accessibility from anywhere (including at work), centralization, and serialization. If your game is hosted on a web server with a database back end, you can have some confidence that you won't lose your campaign history if your GM has a power outage. Most of all, this model forces players to be online concurrently, which is often a deal breaker. There's a reason we're playing online in the firstplace, instead of meeting up at someone's house.

I also don't love the chat paradigm; it's good for letting people talk quickly, but I think there's something to be said for the more considered pace of a forum; players are encouraged to edit and embellish their posts, and the result is a higher quality, more readable and re-readable game.

I want to take the best of both approaches.

Forums are

-centrally hosted - GM needs no special software

-persistent - game data is never lost

-availabie- game can be accessed at any time from anywhere

-higher post quality - rich editors and the ability to edit posts after posting means better prose.

-multi-channel communication - secret threads for certain GM/player purposes.

The multiplayer computer game approach gives us

-maps

-built in character concepts

-object status and attributes

-fog of war

-dice rolling and other rpg tropes (initiative, turn order) built into the interface

-rich game appropriate GM controls

The system I would build would focus on creating the timeline of a story. The GM would have full access to edit anything anywhere in the timeline, and can assign out permissions to the other players to edit their own actions in the present and some subset of the past, or larger subsets as appropriate. The maps, the objects with their statuses and attributes, are all a part of the timeline. As you browse through the game log, you see how the map evolved with the actions, and you can see how the characters' attributes change over the course of the session/chapter/game.

The whole thing is stored forever in a database, and accessible from (almost) any browser. Like wikipedia, every edit is stored and is reversible. The default view of the game shows the final state of the timeline (or you can view the edits in strictly linear fashion if you want to see how it looked before someone retconned it.)

Also, sounds similar to google wave.