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"If school programming languages that serve children best end up looking quite a bit different from conventional programming languages, maybe it’s actually the conventions that need changing." Several good points from Alex, and some good points about breaking away from equating "computational" with "procedural".
11
January
2012
January
2012
Links
Tagged as:
code, computation, education, programming.
31
December
2011
December
2011
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"I could argue back and forth forever, but what I really want to do as a developer, is to work on games in tiny, tiny teams. It means less compromise when it comes to design. It means more freedom when it comes to implementation."
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"Shim is a node.js-based browser-compatibility tool that lets you synchronize several devices/browsers and surf the same pages simultaneously on all of them." Wow.
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An Impressive list of notable examples of programmatic journalism from Dan Sinker; something I must return to.
04
December
2011
December
2011
code
Tagged as:
code, drivetime, music, musichackday, spotify.
Drivetime Spotify App
Music Hack Day London this weekend. Tom, Blaine and I ended up making a thing which didn’t demo perfectly, called Drivetime.
It solves a common problem: how do I listen to the same classic pop and rock anthems on a Friday afternoon as people in other studios? The answer is with the Drivetime app.
Drivetime is a Spotify app. You drag a playlist into it to start broadcasting – you set your station name with a simple text field. Then, anyone loading the app can click on your name and hear what you’re playing. Not just the current track – it’ll start the track for others at exactly the point you’re currently at, and it’ll advance through the playlist when a track finishes. At any point, you can stop listening, and choose another song to listen to.
That’s it, really: a simple broadcast/listen system, all built into Spotify as a native application.
The front-end is just HTML/CSS/Javascript, which is how Spotify apps are built; the communication with the client is via socket.io, on top of node.js on the server. Tom and Blaine wrote the back-end; I wrote a bunch of the front-end, which Blaine promptly made much better, and did all the hot pink neon. We all played a lot of Tina Turner in the hacking rooms, and we went home to bed betimes on the Saturday night.
All the code’s in github. The Spotify app only runs (at the moment) if you’re a Spotify developer. We might see if we can get it a bit further and release itspot, so people can listen to one another’s classic rock selections.
It was a fun hack, even if my explanation of it was incoherent, and part of a great weekend – so many superb hacks, large and small, on display.
03
October
2011
October
2011
Links
Tagged as:
code, commits, git, programming.
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"Takes a snapshot with your Mac's built-in iSight webcam every time you git commit code, and archives a lolcat style image with it." YES.
23
January
2011
January
2011
posts
Tagged as:
bengriffiths, code, data, historyhackday, stories, ww2.
The Story of a Lost Bomber
It was History Hack Day this weekend. My friend Ben Griffiths scraped the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s register to try to contextualise the death of his great-uncle in World War II.
Before you read on, please do read his story. It’s worth your time.
Ben’s hack is intelligent and, as ever, he explains it with precision and grace. But really, it wasn’t the hack I wanted to draw to your attention; it was the story he tells.
Like many hacks at such events, it begins with a data, scraped or ingested, and Ben’s plotted it over time, marking the categories his great-uncle is represented by.
But data over time isn’t a story; it’s just data over time. A graph; or, if you like, a plot. What makes it a story? A storyteller; someone to intervene, to show you what lies between the points, what hangs off that skeleton. Someone to write narrative – or, in Ben’s case, to relate history, both world and personal.
I’m left, after all this, thinking of just how young these bomber boys were. Looking at this data has been a much more moving exercise than I was expecting.
I found it very affecting, too, but not just because I was looking at the data: I was looking at it through the lens that Ben offered me in the story he told. When you consider it’s the story of one tragic loss amid 12,395 others, you pause, reflect, and try to perhaps comprehend that.
In the end, I couldn’t, entirely, but I tried – and because somebody told me just one story, about one individual, his plane, and his colleagues, I perhaps came closer to an understanding than I otherwise might have. And, because of that, I’m very grateful Ben shared that single story. I’d call that a very worthwhile hack.
13
January
2011
January
2011
Links
Tagged as:
arduino, code, interrupt, nikon, photography, scheduling, timers.
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Library to send appropriate pulses to an IR LED to trigger Nikon cameras
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"TimedAction is a library for the Arduino. It is created to help hide the mechanics of how to implement Protothreading and general millis() timing. It is sutied for those actions that needs to happen approximately every x milliseconds." Aha.
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"This library is a collection of routines for configuring the 16 bit hardware timer called Timer1 on the ATmega168/328." (Timers look hard).
20
April
2010
April
2010
Links
Tagged as:
addmetabox, code, development, Eyjafjallajökull, fiction, literacy, mastery, microfiction, plugin, programming, stories, volcano, wordpress.
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Post-Eyjafjallajökull microfiction.
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"Primarily, spaghetti code is a literary failing. Through my observations of the developers responsible for these wrecks — they often turned out to be poor prose writers and some were very arrogant about their coding abilities. I believe the core skill that these cowboys lack is that of editing – an instinctive drive towards pruning and tweaking that all good writers know is one of the most important components of literary creation." Some good stuff in here, especially around technical literacy (and, by extension, literate programming).
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Quick tutorial in add_meta_box – the way to add custom fields to WordPress forms.
19
April
2010
April
2010
Links
Tagged as:
code, custom-post-type, development, wordpress, wordpress3.
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More clever stuff with dedicated post types in WP3; notably, adding custom fields to custom post-type forms.
19
March
2010
March
2010
Links
Tagged as:
blimey, code, formatting, games, keynote, marketing, ohdear, physics, presentation, quantummechanics, science, socialmedia, splintercell, textmate, ubisoft.
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"If there is a bigger Splinter Cell fan than myself, I haven't yet met them; but in their zeal to promote the newest iteration, Ubisoft has caused Sam Fisher to tweet. And I don't mean they've made him chirp, which would be preferable. They've given him a Twitter account where he tweets in a supremely earnest way about how tormented his shit is.<br />
<br />
*No.*" Oh dear. -
"A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving." Oh boy. That's quite a thing (and: quite a sentence!)
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"I've been using Copy with Style command, which I took from this blog post. It copies text selection as RTF so when the code is pasted into Keynote, it looks exactly the same as it looked in TextMate, including font style, size and colors. Code can be then modified in Keynote, while the style is preserved." Useful!
27
February
2010
February
2010
Links
Tagged as:
acting, blog, chrisremo, code, design, directing, gamasutra, gameplay, games, heavyrain, interaction, interactivedrama, markup, michaelabbott, narrative, panopticon, patrickredding, perspective, ruby, sass, security, sinatra, tv.
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"…let's not kid ourselves. If you sell a game that's a first-person shooter, then no matter how many RPG elements you shoe-horn into the game, the shadow that hangs over every character interaction that you have, no matter who they are, is the question in the player's mind of "What happens if I shoot this person?" And that's our own fault! We've sold the player that; we've made a contract with the player that says it's okay to kill people. Why would we then chastise them for exploring that?" Patrick Redding is brilliant. This interview, with Chris Remo on Gamasutra, is great – Remo asks some smart questions, and Redding gives some really smart answers.
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"The game insists that I focus, even for mundane activities like carrying groceries, on carefully following directions delivered to me visually on-screen. The simple act of carrying groceries is subsumed by the mechanical procedure of executing a series of prompts _for no apparent reason_. This, for me, is the primary disconnect in Heavy Rain. My mechanical game-directed actions don't amplify or add meaning to the in-game behaviors they execute. They don't pull me in; they keep me out. " Hmn. I've been thinking about something similar recently. Time to fire up the blogpostmatron…
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Lovely, lovely article explaining just how the PeepCode Blog works. The blog itself features unique layouts for every post. There's no CMS, no database, but what's going on under the hood is at least as clever – and the flexibility makes the beautiful and clear pages much easier to build.
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"…for reasons that baffle me, my TV can only receive the four terrestrial channels, plus a grainy feed from the building’s security cameras. Easy choice."
Links & notes for this month
- "...let's not kid ourselves. If you sell a game that's a first-person shooter, then no matter how many RPG elements you shoe-horn into the game, the shadow that hangs over every character interaction that you have, no matter who they are, is the question in the player's mind of "What happens if I shoot this person?" And that's our own fault! We've sold the player that; we've made a contract with the player that says it's okay to kill people. Why would we then chastise them for exploring that?" Patrick Redding is brilliant. This interview, with Chris Remo on Gamasutra, is great - Remo asks some smart questions, and Redding gives some really smart answers.
- "The game insists that I focus, even for mundane activities like carrying groceries, on carefully following directions delivered to me visually on-screen. The simple act of carrying groceries is subsumed by the mechanical procedure of executing a series of prompts _for no apparent reason_. This, for me, is the primary disconnect in Heavy Rain. My mechanical game-directed actions don't amplify or add meaning to the in-game behaviors they execute. They don't pull me in; they keep me out. " Hmn. I've been thinking about something similar recently. Time to fire up the blogpostmatron...
- Lovely, lovely article explaining just how the PeepCode Blog works. The blog itself features unique layouts for every post. There's no CMS, no database, but what's going on under the hood is at least as clever - and the flexibility makes the beautiful and clear pages much easier to build.
- "...for reasons that baffle me, my TV can only receive the four terrestrial channels, plus a grainy feed from the building’s security cameras. Easy choice."
- Strictly speaking, "The Best of *American* Journalism", but there's lots on here I'd like to read sometime.
- "You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."
- "You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."
- "The demo of Dante's Inferno provided absolutely the stupidest gaming experience I think I have had since possibly Ultimate Combat Mission on the Spectrum +2. I don't think God of War can meaningfully compete, because... well, because it isn't based on one of the most famous works of literature produced in the last thousand years. Dorothy L Sayers translated it, for God's sake. Kratos never really had to get past anything more culturally embedded than Clash of the Titans." Dan has been playing Dante's Inferno, and the end result is this lovely post, about classics, and living stories, and Just Plain Stupid Games. It's very good. "...there's nothing to stop an incredibly silly game being a very enjoyable game, but there's something about the abandon with which Inferno is being used art direction for a slash-em-up that is killing the joy of it a bit for me"
- "This is the S2H replay; an activity monitor/pedometer thing that does a similar job to the fitbit. Except it feels way more like the future than the fitbit because it's cheap, fashiony and simple. And you they'll actually deliver one outside the US." I like "fashiony" as both an adjective and a watchword. The S2H sounds pretty nifty, too, and Russell's write-up is great...
- "Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts." Huge, two-part article (presumably from Saturday's Review) with a great deal of advice - some sensible, some common sense, some insightful, some entertaining - on writing. And: much of it applies to other creative disciplines, too.
- "Schell took this game-life integration to the extreme, describing a world chock-full of sensors, where you could earn experience points from a toothpaste company for brushing your teeth, or points from health insurance companies for walking to work instead of driving. Companies and even the government would have a vested financial interest in engaging consumers and citizens through game-like elements. It would be a world fraught with "crass commercialism," Schell said, but it would also be a world of opportunity for game designers." Hmmmmn.
- "I'm imagining that Curling is project management: sweeping in front of the stone to both clear a path and influence the direction, but without touching it; a good curling strategy is to both knock the competition out of the way and get closer to the target, sometimes with different stones; ...plus you can drink and smoke while you play"
- "Magick is all about naming and control. So is journalism, and software engineering—related disciplines." yes yes yes a thousand times yes (the most wonderful sentence in James' write-up of a non-conference I didn't attend).
- "Quantic Dream's latest may not only be the best game you've ever played – it could even become one of your favourite films." I cannot think of a more depressing sentence.
- "I hugely prefer Windows ME to anything else. The problem is that it’s difficult to run on most of the hardware I have and no other Windows edition cuts it for me. So, I’m down to using a Mac..."
- "ASBOrometer is a mobile application that measures levels of anti-social behaviour at your current location (within England and Wales) and gives you access to key local ASB statistics... This app was created by Jeff Gilfelt and made possible by the data.gov.uk initiative, which is opening up UK government data for public reuse." What sensationalist rot; no number of pretty visualisations make this kind of fearmongering acceptable. It's nice that the data is open; it's a shame this is the best thing people can think to do with it. Whether you like it or not, this information is very, very loaded.
- "“Notput” is an interactive music table with tangible notes, that combines all three senses of hearing, sight and touch to make learning the classical notation of music for children and pupils more easy and interesting."
- "I had been studying this style of letters on similar buildings in Washington, D.C., and something about them always felt a little dull. But in the Claremount letters I found life in the charming way the awkward proportions and loose spacing came together. So I set about designing a Claremount typeface." Nice article on designing a typeface, and, I must admit, it's rather good-looking (especially for something named after me).
- EMSL dissect a classic Tomy wind-up semi-electronic game - in this case, a version of Pong. Amazing what you could do with mechanics (even if that included "making the singleplayer game entirely unfair").
- "Ibuki, Makoto and Dudley from the Street Fighter 3 series have all been confirmed as new characters in Super Street Fighter 4 by Famitsu magazine." And now it's a confirmed day one purchase for me. (Seriously, Makoto and Dudley were my two mains in SF3. This is going to be brilliant. Seichusen Godanzuki!)
- "How good is that?" It is super-good, that's how good.