Kuroko Project

In the wake of the Intel-OLPC fallout, the chief designer of the OLPC technologies asked Groklaw about ideas for an open hardware project. Even better, it made me aware that OLPC itself is still an ongoing process, rather than being cut-n-dried.

To me, this tickles my inner-struggling-hardware-geek in a really good way. Not just in Jepson’s commercial efforts in the “making components public and affordable” part, but also in her advocation of the “we’ve got no vendor secrets, here’s the exact part-list, schematics, and source-code” method of development.
Of course, making it open isn’t a guarantee of success(OGP, OpenMoko), but it’s a nice perceptual move away from the Wintel alliance’s long standing policies of “we know what’s best for you, and there are no user serviceable parts inside”.

(Yes, my reading list for the past two months has included Stross’ Halting State and Vinge’s Rainbow’s End)

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_why had a neat post on Io today, showing off a cool introspection+meta trick that I wasn’t aware of. And since it’s _why, the Io mailing list has shown another flurry of activity, which I’m hoping will snowball into another group of fresh users, to eventually reach that goal of “1.0″..

Interestingly enough, Io was the language I learned right after Ruby, for much the same reason: trying to get a good grip on concurrency in simulation environments, after too much exposure to UnrealScript.
 (And along those lines, Thunder and Lightning still stands as the only major game project using Io as a scripting language).

So, Zed spewed. Since I guess I’m now a Rails “professional”, I guess I’m supposed to have some sort of up-in-arms opinion.

I really couldn’t care less.

Once you pick up that Zed writes in a deliberately provocative manner, reminiscent of the SA Forums, the rant’s main points boil down to his personal experiences with consulting, and elements of the Rails community being too uptight.

The only thing I found really entertaining about the affair(outside of the Rubinius praise) are the responses popping up on mailing lists looking to move away from Mongrel, because they just can’t trust software written by a person who posted “something like that”. If your sentiments are similar, I hope you’re not using OpenBSD(Theo), ReiserFS(Reiser), or anything GNU-related(Stallman)

In my professional life I’ve had to use a lot of software I considered brain-damaged(custom Java object-frameworks, antiquated news databases, PHP), but the dislike almost always stemmed from experience with the software itself, not the person/teams behind it.

“Use Fink until it pisses you off, then switch to DarwinPorts. That’s what everyone else seems to do.” : from jwz’s blog.

“Indeed”, he said, as he executed “sudo rm -rf /sw” on his developer machine at work.
(That’s not to say MacPorts is a utopia free from stupid issues though, it just seems to guarantee more consistency).

One of the things I’ve noticed is that most OSX hints for setting up anything in *nix-land tell you to add path statements just to ~/.bash_profile, usually assuming that you’re working on your own machine. But if you’re ssh’ing to another OSX(or -nix based) and set up the path in the same way, this will probably cause vlad(and capistrano, I guess) to fail with “command not found”, since they use a non-interactive shell to run commands. There are simple fixes: enable PermitUserEnvironment in your /etc/sshd_conf file. Which works, but 1: it’s a potential security hole(paranoia, a game we all can play!), and 2: it’s overkill, because having your path in ~/.bashrc is the proper way to do it, as pointed out here.

I had bullet points for a Visual Studio rant after wrapping up the C# side-project that has consumed my summer, but this guy already said much of what I wanted to say.
About all I can add to it is a harumph at Microsoft documentation: yes, MSDN is obviously a force to be reckoned with(if you can pay the entry fee), but it’s tedious to play the back-n-forth game of “look up the actual API via IntelliSense, and look up actual examples in MSDN’s clunky public web interface / hope that a google search for the control will return more than a ‘getting-started tutorial’ that covers what MSDN already did”.

Contrast that with How To Learn Cocoa, Cocoa Dev Central, and Apple’s own Cocoa Reference Library. All free, fairly well written, and more than enough to get you started with basic Cocoa apps.

Meanwhile, discovering exactly how to fire events from buttons in .NET took up most of a week’s evenings.

And lo, the Visual Studio build tool did proclaim to the masses, “Interop.Photoshop8.dll” and “Interop.Photoshop9.dll” both declare “ps.Application”. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, for another clever approach had failed.

(seriously, if anyone knows how to get multiple interop DLLs for a single interface to play together in VS.net, or alternatively, why an older interop DLL would not be able to invoke a newer version of the same interface in COM, please please please let me know)

Edit(2:09AM): hurr, if you build the object library manually with a different namespace, you can use both. Of course, now this opens up multiple namespaces for a single set of actions, but that does reduce it to a design issue rather than a “bang the rocks together” issue..

After moving to Eastern Washington, Qwest thought it would be fun to break my Internet connection not once but twice; the latest involving a corporate thought process similar to: “Oh, you’ve had an external ISP for the past four years and moved twice, but you really didn’t want us to switch you over to MSN this time?”. le sigh.

Work is going great. I’ve spent the past two weeks hacking away on custom WordPress sites, which is good and bad. Good is boning up on my apache admin knowledge and regular-expression mastery. Bad is that it’s PHP, and trying to color outside of the lines on WP results in lots of headaches with mod_rewrite, and designers who thought it was totally cool to hack in custom css/js compressors.

Additionally, I’ve been formally introduced to distributed source-control by a longtime friend. I’m now itching to try out Mercurial on some personal projects, to evaluate it for possible use at work. I have to admit that most of my exposure came from slashdot fallout about git, which put me off of the concept for quite awhile, but realizing that you don’t need to setup a personal server just to try it has gotten me excited.

Finally, E is a new text editor for Win32, which promises “the power of TextMate on WIndows”. This had me all hot and bothered to try it, until the actual setup time came:
The setup needs to be run as Administrator. OK, fine, installing for all users, great. What? Update Cygwin? OK! Great, it’s intelligent enough to..wait, you’re installing to the user-specific directory? Even though I already have a cygwin installation on this machine? And after it finishes for the administrator user, it needs to do it again for my personal account?
That being said, it does have some promise. I’ll report back later on it.

One of the ideas that hasn’t left my head in the past few months is the concept of a generic Super Robot Wars engine. That is, a tactical RPG coating with a beautifully-animated chewy center. Much of SRW’s appeal to me(outside of big smashy robots) are the attack animations, which are 2D cel- and vector-animation at its finest. And there’s no lack of fans wanting to get in on the action with Photoshop, or even building it.

Contemplating how to do the attack animations naturally leads me to Flash, but trying to layer something on top of GameSWF screams of nothing but pain. I got to thinking about SVG today, long billed a more standardized way of animating. A few research papers later it turns out that along with SMIL, SVG Tiny 1.2 is reported as being great for this kind of work. There’s even a handy Java library for it.

But then comes the frustration: barely any usable native tools. Beatware Mobile Designer looked great, but apparently it’s been bought out by a generic “solutions” company. Ikivo Animator has potential, but no OSX port of their latest version. Synfig has an OSX port, but it’s just been withdrawn due to packaging problems. Inkscape has animation on their “indefinite TODO list” (although to be fair, they’ve got a good deal of discussion about it). And Moho and Plastic Animation Paper just don’t export to SVG(nor do a lot of other packages, really). Vexing.

One thing I’ve been playing with in the past week has been the Slick library, a smallish library for easier game development and 2D rendering(via LWJGL) in Java. One of the things I’ve been getting back up to speed on is Java Web Start, which Slick has some tools to help with.

Unfortunately, re-learning how to do collision-detection took most of my night, so for right now, a screenshot is all you get for now..