Fang: I don't get to do any creative writing in my core extension class.  The next thing I have to write is about immigration.

Me: What do you have to write?

Fang: An essay from the point of view of an immigrant coming to Ellis Island.  And we have to do a bibliography.

Me: Did your teacher specify a year?

Fang: No.

Me: Well, if you choose a poor person coming over in the early 1900s, the conditions on the ships were terrible.  People huddled on the floor in family groups, not always enough beds or any beds for a transatlantic voyage, there were vermin, poor sanitation, little food ... you could tell some really gruesome stories.

At this point, Fang, who adds, quite correctly that the late 1800s also qualifies, is grinning like a jack-o-lantern.  Gruesome is his bag, baby.

Hey guys, no robitussin for me tonight. So I managed to shake loose some time to work on OPW's link-sharing features. The jump from the hack I had before to handling this... closer to properly... was a big one, but there's definite progress.

Here are some examples:

This strip has nonexistent semantic markup, which is geek-speak for "it's hard to embed it right," so I'm pleased with how they turn out now when you just paste a link to that day's comic page. I had to edit the title a little, and supplied my own description; it automatically picked the right image (the largest one, by area). You can also tap on the image to cycle through alternatives, if any decent ones were present.

Girl Genius looks good too. There was a problem with overlap— oops, I fixed it.

XKCD: 100A.

This one has an automatic summary, because they supply a proper og:description element. The best available image is pretty crap, though; reminds me that I need to add an option to remove the image entirely.

I also found a few links just now that don't work at the moment. Probably I need to specify a user agent string and then they will cooperate perhaps.

This is an iterative improvement; more are planned. Please do open issues via the bug button.

Thanks!

Lots to love on this list.  Good food for thought.

I loved Morgan the Unicorn so much I wanted to name a future daughter after her. I'm trying to remember how young I would have been to be into these.

Yup it's cold in Chicago today. I hate the cold just as much (if not more) than most people I know. But ya know what? I woke up under a pile of blankets in my heated home. Took a hot shower, and then put on clean clothes that were warm and dry. With a full stomach, I chose which coat to wear and opened up a box full of mittens, gloves, and scarves to layer on. I know that no matter what happens today, I will have food to eat and safe, warm spaces to dwell. Counting my blessings today and wishing that this was the norm for everyone. ‪#‎HandHWeek‬ ‪#‎NHHAW‬

I'm reading Wolf Hall right now.  It's the first book of three in Hilary Mantel's trilogy about Thomas Cromwell.

It feels pretty much like standard historical fiction so far.  Because the back story is so complicated (dear me, but the 15th and 16th-century English royal family trees are confusing), she has lot of different tricks to give it to us: characters just recalling it as (boring) internal monologue, dialogue, legend.  It's well written, but feels anachronistic in parts.  You know, historical fiction.  In high school, to avoid 11th-grade English, I took a course called "History through Literature", which was basically a course made up of historical fiction (we did read some Shakespeare), and sure, at various times over the course of my life, I've read quite a bit of it, though my preferred English period is around 350 years earlier.

And sure, Thomas Cromwell is pretty cool to learn about.

But I can't help but think it's a little much that both this book and its successor won the Man Booker Prize. 

And yet.

There's gender afoot.  Basically, I'm saying that I don't think that historical fiction, as a genre, is really literature.  (That's probably true. I probably don't.)  But of course, it's a genre mostly written by women, while "literature" is more often written by men. 

And yet I think it's good genre fiction.  And yet, I like musical theatre, not opera, and I think that "Show Boat" is as important as any opera.

There was a post here, but I lost it switching things around and being a general dingus. *salutes*

Houser: My question is, how do I get you to nap?

Beeble: Your question is tigers.

Houser: My question is not tigers. Maybe that's your question.

Beeble: Nooo. My question is leopards.

This is another post about Blindside, the text-only realtime RPG I'm working on. At the moment, I'm both looking at tools and options for building game maps, and implementing tools for the game's AI.

The game is intended to be large and complex enough that I am creating it in two pieces: "engine" and "content". Let me explain, if you're unfamiliar with these ideas. The engine is software, and it does all the housekeeping like keeping track of your location, stats, inventory and health, and also figuring out what you can see, who you can attack, where you can move, and so on. The content is the all the stuff the engine needs in order to tell a story. So there's maps, descriptions, dialogue, lists of NPCs and so on.

In a sense, the engine is like a video game console. It doesn't do anything until you add some content in the form of a game. And then it comes alive. (Oldbies will be familiar with game engines like SCUMM, used for the Lucas Games graphic adventures; and the Z-machine, used by Infocom for their text adventures.)

The great thing about splitting apart the engine from the content is that if you design the engine right, you won't have to change it once it's finished. You just start the engine up and point it at the content. And you can then spend the rest of your development time working on content, and even keep making more content even while the game is running.

Because I want the monsters and NPCs in the game to have very different responses to the player, have some decent agency, and to actually be difficult to beat in a fair fight, the AI system needs to be both powerful and flexible. And when you want to teach a computer to do things both powerfully and flexibly, inevitably you'll want to create a language to do that. And, traditionally, when a game engine has a language built into it, it's called a "scripting" language, because you're creating a script for the characters, locations and items in the game. 

So Blindside will have a scripting language of its very own.  But wait, I can hear the wailing of the nerds -- there are scripting languages out there already! Why invent a new one? You could be creating content or making your engine better, why waste time on making a new language too? There are often justifications for making a new language, especially when the use for that language is very specialized.

One problem with many modern computer languages is that they are so generic -- so applicable to any problem -- that while they can do almost anything, you have to be extremely verbose and specific about exactly what you want done. You might like to think of generic languages as a big pile of 2x4 lumber and a huge pail of nails. You can build almost anything from a doghouse to a four story apartment building with these components, but it's going to take a long time and you have to be very careful and precise. A custom language, gives you the equivalent of panels for a prefabricated house. While you can only build certain kinds of rectangular houses of certain sizes with these panels, they go together very quickly and they work very well.

In computer science more broadly these kinds of specialized languages for making "prefab" houses are Domain Specific Languages, or DSLs, in that they're languages specifically made for a particular domain/use.

The goals for the AI language are that it should be very easy to understand (so one can review it at a glance), very easy to write (so I can teach it to others), be both terse and obvious, and still be flexible enough to allow lots of different tactics. 

The language is still in flux but I thought I'd show you a bit of what it will look like. This little bit of code might be attached to an NPC that is part of a team of fighters, or maybe even a friend or companion to the player. 

See if you can figure out what this does just by reading it.

  first ally poisoned having health<25% order by health
    definitely cast remove poison order by speed
    possibly use remove poison having quantity>3

It should be pretty clear: If there are any allies who are poisoned and dangerously low on health, pick the one who has the least health and cast the fastest spell available to cure their poison and then end the turn, but if no such spell is available or we can't cast it, then if we have at least four items in our inventory that can cure poison then we might use one, but we'll also check for other things to do.

This is some pretty complex behaviour expressed in a fairly concise fashion.

And this code actually works, at least to a degree. What is happening right now is that the above three lines are converted by a compiler into about twenty lines of Javascript that do exactly what is described. (I'm not going to show it that because it's huge and ugly).

The cool thing about a compiling the AI code right into the same language that the engine is written in is that the AI code runs just as quickly as the engine itself. This is kind of unusual for DSLs and scripting languages in general -- usually they're interpreted step by step by the main engine program, or by a helper program called a library. 

But making this a compiler is great news for Blindside -- it means the AI can be quite complex and still not bog down the system even if there's a few thousand creatures roaming around with their own little agendas. It also means my job creating the engine is somewhat harder, but that's a good trade-off. As a programmer, my job is to make computers useful and helpful.

And if by putting a little more effort into my work makes the work of others much easier, then that is what I like to call design leverage. If I spend an extra hour, or week, or month, in making something better so that all of the dozens or thousands or millions of people who use it can get an extra second, or minute, or hour of time back or make their use of my project more enjoyable, or at least suck less, then that is time very well bargained.

And now we're at risk of veering into my whole philosophy of engineering so I think I'll wrap this up now. Thanks for reading, if you made it this far, and thanks for trying, if you didn't.

I attended Barcamp Philly today.

"What the heck is a barcamp?" you cry. A barcamp is an unconference.

"What's an unconference?" you ask. An unconference is a DIY conference. People who want to speak show up bright and early, write their name and the title of their talk on an index card, and slap it up on a grid of times and conference rooms. The board fills up, aaaand... that's the conference! Attend whatever talks strike your fancy.

"Why's it called barcamp?" you inquire. Because O'Reilly Associates, the people who publish those technical books with the animals on the covers, sponsors an annual conference you're not invited to called foocamp. And programmers like variables named "foo" and "bar." (Plus: "Friends Of O'Reilly.") Thus the joke.

"Why foo and bar?" you persist. The generic term "foo" dates to the 1930s and was popularized by a Smokey Stover cartoon, according to Internet RFC 3092, "Etymology of Foo." It was likely derived from the Chinese character "Fu." During World War II, GIs popularized the phrase FUBAR (F****d Up Beyond All Recognition). Thus after the war it was natural to think of "bar" as what comes after "foo."

"What talks did you attend?" I went to "You Are Not the User" by Shawn Berven, who covered a table with diabetes test gear and then explained what it takes to design products that are right for actual people... people who are not you.

I went to "Come On... It's in the Requirements" by Sloan Miller and Abby Fretz, who discussed the concept of the HIPPPO... the HIghest Paid, most imPortant Person in the room... who is guaranteed to be ill-informed and have strong feelings about everything.

I went to "Urban Exploration," by phillystomp, who showed us what she found when she snuck into abandoned Philadelphia public schools.

I missed an awesome talk by an eight year old girl about how to use iMovie because I was giving a talk of my own.

I went to "Web 0.9," where Greg McGee told us about headspinny new toys like WebGL and WebRTC.

And I wrapped up my day with "Geek Theater," an improv experiment by Lauren Galanter and friends. This turned into a panel discussion between an eight-year-old boy, an angry Philly cyclist, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Hilarity ensued.

"Hey wait up! Did you say you spoke today?" Why yes, I did. My talk was entitled "javascript games, a HOWTO: thanks, Obama!"

"Why 'thanks, Obama?'" Because my friend turned 40. My friend sells health insurance, and his career got going as Obamacare was gearing up. I happen to think Obamacare has helped millions of people. It's also been an administrative clusterf***, no question. That created opportunities for people like my friend. So for his birthday, I whipped up a video game in which he must intercept as many potential customers as possible without running into any Tea Partiers. Because that makes Obama sad, you see.

This morning, I realized the game was just a talk waiting to happen, so I made a few changes to respect his privacy and "Willy Loman Sells Obamacare" was born.

"Why JavaScript?" It's the language of the web browser. And lately, the webserver too, but that's off topic. Everything can browse the web at this point, and it's a very easy language to code in, so if you want to whip up a game in a hurry that's your ticket.

"So you spent 45 minutes explaining a simple video game?" Well yeah, because details matter. But it was also a trojan horse for my favorite geeky rant, "this" considered harmful, in which I tell JavaScript programmers to stop stuntin' and frontin' and doin' things that are hard and save their best energies for the actual problem they are trying to solve.

"So how was it?" Oh, it was a blast, straight up. I've attended barcamps before, but it's been a while since I spoke at one, and I'd forgotten how good they can be. I attended JSFest in San Francisco this year— which required I get on airplanes— and honestly I got just as much out of barcamp today in many ways. I just love the vibe. I like the technical stuff, but I think I like the nontechnical stuff even more. You should absolutely attend the next barcamp in your area.