A River of Words

Ballistic Wars is like a better version of that ancient classic “Marbles” – very addictive.

The process of bringing a comic book to the big screen has a mixed past – Batman and Batman Returns were decent, the rest were horrid. Batman Begins was almost unwatchable, while The Dark Knight was actually pretty well done. Superman has been hit and miss throughout its history. The X-Men movies got progressively worse with each installment, while both recent versions of The Hulk were pretty good – even if I don’t know why they felt the need to recast.

However, with my son’s recent fascination with Spiderman, I’ve been reintroduced to the sheer fun of the first two movies. Yes, the third was complete crap, but I can’t think of a better spiritual translation of “comic book to film” than the last hour of Spiderman 2. Alfred Molina made a great “Dr. Octopus”, and their battle on the Elevated Train is perhaps one of the best action sequences ever filmed.

I can do simple math! This was supposed to automatically publish Monday morning for this week’s “Monday Break”, but I set the publish date to 2009-10-20 instead of 2008-10-20…oops!

Anywhere, here’s the awesomely addictive physics simulator Fantastic Contraption

I’ve been incredibly under-the-weather the past few days, and just haven’t the energy tonight to put together something interesting, so instead I’m going to punt on this post and give you Philip K. Dick’s How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later – which contains one of my favorite PKD quotes ever:

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

A bit late today, but here it is. There are some neat things in the Google Reader API that have been exposed as REST-like services. Here are some examples (they will require you to be logged in to Google Reader in order to work):

Read Entry in Google Reader Window
Followed a Link in the Entry Body
Followed a Link in the Entry Header
Keep Unread
Read, Marked Unread (I refer to these as my “re-read” posts – I read them, and then decided they needed more thought)
Starred

And some documentation on the API itself.

After spending almost 9 hours trying to get past the first “world” in Braid , I got frustrated and looked online for a Walkthrough – I found the Official Walkthrough and figured that would be the best way to go – until I got to the second page and saw this:

If you are having problems solving a puzzle, don’t give up!

Some of the puzzles will be hard. But when you manage to solve those hard puzzles, you will feel very good about it. The game will feel very rewarding. Don’t rob yourself of that feeling by reading a walkthrough!

Please do not use a walkthrough.

9 hours is more than I care to spend on just about ANYTHING, let alone a single level of a video game. Good thing I played the demo instead of buying the game – I would have been even more displeased than I am! I feel as though the developer has said “If you need a walkthrough, you’re too stupid to play my game, and I’d rather make fun of you than invite you in as a customer.” And when I finally did locate a walkthrough which explained how to get past the part that had me stuck, the only person that I felt had cheated me was Jonathan Blow – the solution to the first puzzle makes no sense at all! It must take some sort of idiot savant of video games to figure out something like that. I feel pretty confident that, had I spent thousands of hours playing this game, I would never been able to solve this first puzzle. Again, the only upside here is that they put this puzzle right into the first few minutes of the game so that I could determine just from the “free trial” that this was not a game I would enjoy playing.

Of course, this got me thinking about the culture of “anti-spoilerism” that “artists” seem to live in, and in my mind it seems connected to the socialist view of “spreading the wealth” that Obama is espousing. In both cases, you have two opposing camps: those who believe that their own strengths and weaknesses should determine their behaviour, and those who believe that all of us should be held to some arbitrary list of strengths and weaknesses. I don’t get that “very good” feeling from “figuring out a puzzle” – I get a good feeling from experiencing a new story, and your puzzles just get in my way. I’m tired of people trying to dictate to me how I should enjoy something, and even more horrifying is the concept of someone else defining what my hard-earned dollars are used for.

To this end, I’m thinking perhaps it’s time to get something like YouTube for people who want to watch a game from beginning to end – there’s clearly a market for spoilers and walkthroughs, and I’m betting a good segment of that market really just wants the story; so why not have someone like MG play through the game, recording his session, and then make it available for a small fee (say, $0.50 via some form of micropayments/credit bank)? I even have a killer idea for the domain name!

And what about you? Why do you think spoilers should, or should not, be allowed? Would you ever pay a small fee to see an entire game played through without having to do all the annoying playing yourself? I’d especially like to hear from those people who have a strong opinion against allowing spoilers for those who seek them. Why do you object to people choosing their own method of experience?

This Mozilla bug has to be simultaneously one of the funnier and sadder things I’ve seen on the internet recently.

“This privacy flaw [in Firefox] has caused my fiancé and I to break-up after having dated for 5 years,” the woman says. “The privacy flaw is this: when he went to log-in under his dating sites (jdate.com, swinglifestyle.com, adultfriendfinder.com, etc.), Mozilla promptly asks whether or not he’d like Firefox to save the passwords for him. He chose never, obviously…[later] I went into the Password Manager to change the saved password option from Never to Always and that’s when I saw all these other sites that had been selected as “Never Save Password.” Of course, those were sites I had never visited or could ever dream of visiting.”

Funny because she chose to reveal all of this incredibly personal information in a public bug reporting tool, and because of the ensuing conversations. Sad because she’s upset that “[Firefox caused them] to break-up after having dated for 5 years,” instead of being grateful that Firefox prevented her from entering into what clearly was a relationship destined for a horrible, horrible future.

Drag this Make Page Editable link to your “Bookmarks Toolbar” in recent versions of Firefox, and click on it to enable the built-in “Page Composer”, allowing you to edit any page you want!

Had a 1 hour meeting today run 2 hours over – and result in a lot of extra work for me – but it could potentially result in a massive change to my career path, so I don’t feel bad.

As a Code Kata, I’ve been working my way through the Project Euler stuff.

Here’s the problem.

Here’s my solution:

	
# A generator to derive the Fibonacci sequence

def fib():
    x, y = 0, 1
    yield x
    yield y
    while 1:
        x, y = y, x+y
        yield y

	
if name == ‘main‘:
    idx = 0
    sum = 0
    gen = fib()

    while idx <= 4000000:
        idx = gen.next()
        if (g % 2 == 0): h = h+g
    print h

Note: You want to be careful how you use infinite generators like the ‘fib()’ I created above.

One guy on the forums noted:

Now, replacing an odd number with O and an even with E, we get: O, O, E, O, O, E, O, O, E, O, O, E, O, O, E…And so each third number is even. We don’t need to calculate the odd numbers. Starting from an two odd terms x, y, the series is: x, y, x + y, x + 2y, 2x + 3y, 3x + 5y

Like Randall Munroe, I’m a big fan of “casual gaming”. So I’m going to post a new “casual Flash game” every Monday in the section “Monday Break”. This week, I bring you the masterpiece Gemcraft. It took me about a month to work my way through with all the levels having highlighted frames. Enjoy!

Google recently submitted to the W3C a paper suggesting a very interesting, multi-request compression scheme, which boils down to:

In this proposal, a dictionary is a file downloaded by the user agent from the server that contains strings which are likely to appear in subsequent HTTP responses. In the case described above, if the header, footer, JavaScript and CSS are stored in a dictionary possessed by both user agent and server, the server can substitute these elements with references to the dictionary, and the user agent can reconstruct the original page from these references. By substituting dictionary references for repeated elements in HTTP responses, the payload size can be reduced.

While not wholly new, this is a very good idea, one that I’ve been waiting for smarter minds than myself to codify for some time.

Continuing on with yesterday’s theme of revision control, I decided to post a little bit about how I’m using VCS these days. I’ve moved to using git as a front-end for SVN, using a workflow that follows along the paths laid out here and here. Eventually, I’ll probably look into using partial clones as outlined here.

Since I recently moved to using “svn:externals”: in my main repo, I spent some time this morning looking for information on how to get git-svn to pull these external trees, and here are a few resources I found:

Life and Hacking: svn:externals for noobs!
SVN’s svn:externals to GIT’s Submodule for Rails Plugins
Phly, boy, phly: svn:externals

None of these have actually solved the problem for me yet (I think I may be fighting against the fact that I’m using debian’s packaged git instead of the newest upstream), so I have begun looking into alternatives. This article suggested I look into braid and/or piston, as well as pointing to svnmerge.py, which can assist with automatic branch management. I’ll be trying a few of these out over the coming weeks and will post my findings here.

The following is an excerpt from the 3rd Edition of the O’Reilly and Associates classic Learning GNU Emacs, regarding Emacs’ “vc-mode”, which I’ve been using more often of late:

12.5. VC Command Summary

To give you the flavor of the other things VC can do for you, Table 12-1 provides a summary of VC commands. Each one will be explained in detail, but you can probably guess some of their actions from the command names.

Table 12-1. VC commands

Keystrokes	Command name	Action
C-x v v	vc-next-action	Go to the next logical version control state.
C-x v =	vc-diff	Generate a version difference report.
C-x v u	vc-revert-buffer	Throw away changes since the last checked-in revision.
C-x v ~	vc-version-other-window	Retrieve a given revision in another window.
C-x v l	vc-print-log	Display a file’s change comments and history.
C-x v i	vc-register	Register a file for version control.
C-x v h	vc-insert-headers	Insert version control headers in a file.
C-x v r	vc-retrieve-snapshot	Check out a named project snapshot.
C-x v s	vc-create-snapshot	Create a named project snapshot.
C-x v c	vc-cancel-version	Throw away a saved revision.
C-x v a	vc-update-change-log	Update a GNU-style ChangeLog file.

From this article regarding the Mono 2.0 release, I bring you the following quotes from Miguel de Icaza:

“Thanks to statistical data from MoMA, we’re able to prioritize what people are actually using,” De Icaza said. “What is important about this is there are some API’s that we’ve definitely postponed. For example, [Windows Presentation Foundation] is not something that we’re working on right now.”

WPF is part of Microsoft .NET 3.0 specifications. At one time, it was best known by its code name, “Avalon.” WPF is included in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 and provides a graphical subsystem for developers. De Icaza claimed that WPF is not yet widely used by developers at this point.

“The IT developer cycles are not in lockstep with vendor release dates,” he added. “There are definitely the early adopters and they’ll be using the latest APIs and those users won’t be served by Mono. But anyone else on the tech adoption curve should be fine with Mono.”

Am I the only one that thinks this guy can’t open his mouth without sticking his foot in it? I doubt the bulk of the Mono developers really want to broadcast the message “We don’t care about early adopters” as the “party line”.