Every once in a while, I find myself needing to quickly run linux or one of its derivatives. Here are some resources I’ve gathered that allow quick setup of a disposable linux server: 1. VirtualBox Runs on your own machine as a VM. Internet connectivity. You’ll need to download an ISO and install it. You…

A few days ago, Ben Orlin of mathwithbaddrawings.com posted Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe, which described a nested game of Tic-Tac-Toe – In lieu of describing the game again, I’ll direct you to his post if you haven’t already read it. The problem with UTTT is thus: the Orlin Gambit is too strong, and Ben admits it in his later…

Code for this is at https://github.com/ertyseidel/collisions Motivation In a multiplayer game, it is useful to be able to do collision detection on the server, to ensure that your players aren’t cheating or moving incorrectly. When we take latency into account, and the other myriad problems that can come about when we deal with packets, this problem…

Especially for Hacker School students, but really for anyone: If you’re looking for a way to discretely measure your progress through Hacker School, check out the following resources: Programmer Competency Matrix This one especially is a good way to measure yourself. Programmer Competency Matrix rebooted, which is the same thing but extended. Signs you’re a…

Joe and I just spent an hour or so debugging my Node.js application, a simple multiplayer tag game. The problem was that while a player was moving, they disappeared from every other player’s view. Not the greatest for playability. So we dove in to the code, and figured out that on each loop, the x…

For users of Blaggregator: If you use wordpress for your blog, you can get a custom feed of only posts which match a tag by constructing the following URL: http://example.com/?tag=tagname&feed=rss2 So for example, I’m going to tag all of the posts that I want on Blaggregator with “blaggregator” and then give Blaggregator the feed url…