Walter Higgins

We need Bookshops

2013-04-25T16:59:00Z

2013/04/25 16:59

And he offered this comparison of the two ways of buying books. “Physical bookshops sell you a book that you didn’t know you wanted until you walked in. Online it’s a narrowing experience – when you walk into a shop, it’s a widening experience.”
-- Do We Philosophically, Emotionally Need Bookstores? | Publishing Perspectives

Categories

Books, Bookshops

Breaking Mad Thrones

2013-04-12T16:16:00Z

2013/04/12 16:16

Mix and match the characters from TV Shows Game of Thrones, The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad. This stuff writes itself...

Episode 1

Walter White dumps Jesse and forms an uneasy alliance with Tyrion Lannister to expand his Meth Empire into Westeros.

Episode 2

The Lannisters hire Don Draper to do a brand make-over. With only crude Quill and Parchment to work with, Don walks out on the client as only he can.

Episode 3

Peggy Olson swoops in to save the day and bonds with Cersei Lannister while discussing new Lannister Sigils. Omar Little (The Wire) is appointed King's Hand and begins plotting to overthrow King's Landing from within.

Episode 4

Tywin Lannister and Roger Sterling enjoy a brief philosophical interlude, trading quips about the ups and downs of being a patriarch (This scene may involve sexposition). Jesse Pinkman seeks out Omar Little with an interesting proposition.

Episode 5

Walter becomes increasingly impatient with Tyrion's laissez-faire attitude. Both have misgivings about the partnership. Roger Sterling's tongue-in-cheek advances toward Brienne of Tarth are rebuffed.

Episode 6

Omar goes on the run after pistol-whipping Prince Joffrey. Jesse unwittingly becomes a pawn in Master-of-Coin Petyr Baelish's quest for power.

... and so on.

Categories

Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Television

Reader

2013-03-14T13:56:00Z

2013/03/14 13:56

It's hard to argue with this statement...

The truth is this: Google destroyed the RSS feed reader ecosystem with a subsidized product, stifling its competitors and killing innovation. It then neglected Google Reader itself for years, after it had effectively become the only player. Today it does further damage by buggering up the already beleaguered links between publishers and readers. It would have been better for the Internet if Reader had never been at all.
-- cortesi - Google, destroyer of ecosystems

I reluctantly moved to Reader only when it was apparent that BlogLines was well and truly over. My history of RSS Readers is...

AmphetaDesk
BlogLines
Google Reader

... I'm wondering - what next? If I was to be true to the spirit of web self-sufficiency I should self-host. My first thought on hearing that Google Reader was shutting down was "How hard could it be to write your own RSS aggregrator?". Madness - I know - but ...

We’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.

It may suck in the interim before great alternatives mature and become widely supported, but in the long run, trust me: this is excellent news.
-- Google Reader shutting down July 1 – Marco.org

Categories

Google

ScriptCraft Update

2013-03-09T17:11:00Z

2013/03/09 17:11

I've been steadily plugging away at ScriptCraft these past few weeks. Fixing bugs, adding new functions, improving the documentation. I've just uploaded a new version which you can go grab at ScriptCraftJS.org. What I'm most proud of in this release is that AutoCompletion (Tab Completion) has gone from it-kinda-works to it-actually-works. AutoCompletion is one of those IDE features most Java programmers can't live without. Getting it to work for a live javascript environment is fun. To see it in action try the following....

Fire up your CraftBukkit/Minecraft Server and connect to it from a minecraft client.
At the in-game prompt type /js arr then press the TAB key.
The command will change to /js arrows
Now at the caret position type . (that's a full stop) and press the TAB key again.
The command will change to /js arrows.explosive()
You can cycle through all of the possible arrows methods by repeatedly pressing TAB.

... Pretty cool. No? (Side-note: If you're curious about what all of these arrows methods actually do, just execute one of them and equip yourself with a Bow and shoot an arrow to find out). Auto-completion is just one of those features that makes exploratory programming that much easier. For ScriptCraft, the Auto-Complete feature became a must-have when my two kids began arguing over what the arrows functions were called. AutoComplete isn't just for professional Java programmers equipped with powerful IDEs. Eager young minds, keen to learn programming should have as much help as possible from the computer.

Categories

ScriptCraft, Programming

Pearls

2013-02-21T16:08:00Z

2013/02/21 16:08

"Pretty girls do not need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family. But girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult," reads an excerpt from an article titled, Leftover Women Do Not Deserve Our Sympathy, posted on the website of the All-China Federation of Women in March 2011.

It continues: "These girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is, they don't realise that as women age, they are worth less and less. So by the time they get their MA or PhD, they are already old - like yellowed pearls."

Ouch.
-- BBC News - China's 'leftover women', unmarried at 27

Categories

China

Bipolar

2013-02-21T15:39:00Z

2013/02/21 15:39

Now in contrast, the C/C++ approach is quite different. It's so damn hard to do anything with tweezers and glue that anything significant you do will be a real achievement. You want to document it. Also you're liable to need help in any C project of significant size; so you're liable to be social and work with others. You need to, just to get somewhere.

And all that, from the point of view of an employer, is attractive. Ten people who communicate, document things properly and work together are preferable to one BBM hacking Lisp who can only be replaced by another BBM (if you can find one) in the not unlikely event that he will, at some time, go down without being rebootable.
-- The Bipolar Lisp Programmer

Categories

Lisp, Programming

Desensitize

2013-02-21T08:29:00Z

2013/02/21 08:29

What we need to remember is that people are often learning things from within the model of different video games that may in fact be preparing them for work in the 21st century. This includes becoming desensitized. Desensitization is not only a broad term, but also one which gets a bad rap in our society. But the truth of the matter is that many occupations require a level of desensitivity, which allows us to effectively perform a task in the face of difficult feelings evoked by it.
-- Joan Ganz Cooney Center - Improving Our Aim: A Psychotherapist’s Take On Video Games & Violence

Categories

Gaming

ScriptCraftJS.org - A new website for all things ScriptCraft.

2013-02-12T21:13:00Z

2013/02/12 21:13

ScriptCraft now has its very own website. ScriptCraft.org nor ScriptCraft.net weren't available so I went with ScriptCraftJS.org. The name 'ScriptCraft' needs some disambiguation - it turns out there's an existing plugin for World of WarCraft with the same name. Whatever.

Maybe I'm getting old or just rusty but the process of setting up a new site seemed trickier. I haven't been able to bed down Apache on my new laptop yet and setting up and configuring Apache on Ubuntu is harder than I remember. Another sure sign I'm getting older, I began writing the index.html page in plain old HTML but quickly grew cranky having to write all of those opening and closing tags. Nowadays, writing for the web in anything other than Markdown seems pointless.

Anyway - I may put some ads on that website yet. It's important that there's a portal for all things ScriptCraft related.

Categories

ScriptCraft

Just enough Java to load JavaScript

2013-02-08T17:26:00Z

2013/02/08 17:26

This is just enough Java to load and run Javascript...

import javax.script.*;
public class jscript
{
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
    {
        ScriptEngineManager factory = new ScriptEngineManager();
        ScriptEngine engine = factory.getEngineByName("JavaScript");
        java.io.File file = new java.io.File(args[0]);
        engine.put("engine",engine);
        engine.put("args",args);
        engine.eval(new java.io.FileReader(file));
    }
}

... JavaScript to Java: "That'll do Java - I'll take it from here."

Categories

Java, JavaScript

Follow-up

2013-02-08T16:47:00Z

2013/02/08 16:47

What’s notable is that he also invested the follow-up effort to ensure the software was engineered well-enough to work on other computers and on multiple operating systems, could be understood and maintained by others, was adequately documented, licensed to be useful, and so on. All those apparently secondary activities typically take orders of magnitude more time than the original coding at the heart of a successful program.
-- Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Super-Productive Programmer

I have a lot of things on my to-do list for ScriptCraft. Top of that list is documenting the existing API. It's a lot of fun using ScriptCraft myself but I really need to document it better - both the API and the Young Person's Programming Guide.

Categories

Programming