Tag: blaggregator
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The Artist and the Scientist
I posit that there are two distinct ways in which people become fascinated by programming. One way is via high-level languages, web development tools, and visual languages. This “way” in is for people who are more interested in the act of creating with code than coding itself. I call these people the “artist-programmers”: people who…
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SSD vs RAID0 for Gaming: SCIENCE!
A while ago, I bought an SSD (128GB Crucial M4) off Amazon, with the idea of putting it in my gaming rig as a “game cache”. My plan was to install my most played games on it, while the rest of my games sat on my current setup – Two 1TB Seagate Barracudas in RAID0.…
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One Letter at a Time
The other day, I saw the following brain-teaser posted on Reddit: along with the claim that “Startling” is the only 9 letter word where you can remove one letter at a time and still have a word. Let’s see if that’s true using IPython and a long list of words from http://www.mieliestronk.com/wordlist.html [ed. note in 2018…
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The Broadcast Problem
In which I ramble on for a while before concluding nothing. You’ve been warned. Snapchat and Facebook Snapchat is quickly becoming my go-to communication tool for sharing moments with close friends. There’s a certain intimacy to it: just you and your chosen few recipients get to see the picture for a short while. It’s a way…
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Povio: On its way to cool
An open letter to the developers of Povio including some hopefully constructive and totally unsolicited feedback about the user experience. 1. Povio is cool I heard about Povio through Hacker News and immediately installed it. It’s new. It’s humble. It solves the problem of people sharing useless stuff about themselves. I can ping the people I’m…
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Terminal_’s Rules of Game Development: A retrospective
Terminal_ is a game that Evan Conway , Max Feldkamp, Mike Gold, Julian Delfino, and myself worked on during the winter of 2012-2013. I’ve since left the project, but I believe that Evan and Max are carrying it forward despite having day jobs. That winter, I had the role of Product Manager, and came up with the…
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What are Javascript, AJAX, jQuery, AngularJS, and Node.js?
This post is addressed toward people who have little to no experience with JavaScript, Node.js, or their associated libraries, but are interested in learning what they are and aren’t. Another student at Hacker School asked me to explain the difference between Javascript, AJAX, jQuery, AngularJS, and Node.js. Let’s start with the basics: JavaScript JavaScript is…
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Free Linux Servers
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…
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A Fix for Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe?
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…
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LACE: Latency-Aware Collision Engine in Javascript
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…