posts

Words, Games and Comics

So, I kinda think I might have made a new “car game” kinda thing, yaknow, like you play on long journeys with your siblings. I also re-read an old post on xkcd’s blag about LimerickDB (and OH WOW) which I had previously been surprised at a lack of when one of my school associates mentioned that she was writing them. The last thing I did today was watch the end of Futurama, quite fun. Now I am just waiting for a git-repo of joe@saidar (my white eeePC) home folder to be pushed to my joest@whitefall account for storage so I can “star afresh” as I cant be bothered “uninstalling” a compiled version of xmonad. In fact I don’t know what I am going to do with that stuff…

Game

Right, to this hither-too unnamed game:

Rules are simple:

• Start with a word.
• Each player has to think of a word that starts with the last letter of the previous word.
• (optional) Once a letter has been used, it cant be used again.
• The first one unable to finish looses….

or..as I like Openness and sharing, take it and improve upon it, I played a game or two with my set’s of rules against myself, was fun. I lost though :(

Happening Stuff

what I been doin:

Reading

I started reading Wheel of Time again at christmas, just so I had an excuse to join Dragonmount the biggest WoT fansite. I finished them a few weeks ago (maybe last month…) and went on to Tad Williams’s Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. which is a series of 4 on a sheltered boy turning into the hero against a mystical race’s evil prince-that-slayed-his-dad and his great great great grandmother. Its really good. I read the first and second quite fast but then had to wait for about a week (untill today) for the last two to arive from amazon. So while I was waiting (not very patiently) I had to occupy myself:

TED talks

I watched a good few of this years TED lectures that were released, including:

• Bill Gates letting out some mosquitoes on the audience
• Jose Abreu’s Venesuelan youth orchestra and their proformance
• and Jill Tarter’s SETI talk

Coding

• A UML class definitions to XML and (hopefully soon) XML 2 UML script
  This takes a class definition inputted in uml format (in the code slightly different) and outputs a class diagram like this (the second bit). I am working on maybe making it draw automatic links/relations and stuff.
• I wipped up a realy simple (and realy slow) RSS feed for the SC4D LEX which just itterates through the 5 newest uploads and regex’s certain informations from them. It is so slow because it itterates through a number above the highest ID and discounts 404’s as I cant directly get the ID of the latest.
• I am going to revisit the comics script and make it a lot better. I dont know how though, so I could do with some suggestions
• I am trying my had at making the pathfinding bits for OpenSity (forum and wiki)
  I kinda have the path based bits worked out (a set of Path objects, a Route object is a chain of Path objects drawn from the master set. each path goes between two Nodes), and am trying to figure out a good way of pathfinding over an area (for the pedestrians for example).

and thats about it… *goes to watch new TED vid. Might expand my coding into another blog post

I am going to attempt doing this more…

Letting you know that I am starting on a ClassyCMS, can be found on the wiki (here)

Also that TED is great and so are the comics I read (comics@abacathoo)

The new ban thread is getting going too :)

some websites

TED is one of the jewels in my bookmarks, the videos on that site are mostly amazing.  Along that line I have a game I wish to share with you… yeah I know :P but anyway, its called Tangerine Pannic and its just a flash game that you dodge bouncing tangerines by moving your characrter left and right. The combination of music and the little quotes the character produces are just fantastic. Another few sites I love to check out are Zero Punctuation and XKCD, the first being a game reviewer of the highest order, he combines satire and fast paced stickdrawing to produce some of the funniest things I have seen. XKCD is the staple “geeks webcomic” and I suggest checking it out from the very first comic. (other comics I read can be found here).

I also love Linux and the whole ethos that surounds it. Running Arch linux on my main pc and my two eeepc’s has made me realise how terrible windows can be. Two technologies I have come to love recently are SSH and IRC. IRC is one of the first (and imo still one of the best) IM systems (like MSN which it far outstrips), I use the IRSSI client, and have it screened on my friends server so I never leave XD.