Disqus - Latest Comments for blinks

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:03:23 -0000

I think we did. :) The QS developer works here now, and this is his project, IIRC.

Re: Shaman (alpha): Request for Playtesting and Feedback

blinks — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:40:56 -0000

Being the crazy developer person I am, I'm keeping all the materials for this game in a Git repository: http://github.com/blinks/shaman -> that link will always have the most current version of the rules.

Re: Cauldron

blinks — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:34:00 -0000

Turns out that AppEngine has some limitations that make writing and ranking full-text search less than useful. I'll be rewriting in Django -- this site is on Pylons.

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:13:40 -0000

Hmm. Not that I know of -- crazy to hear of another clan of Blinkinsops, though.

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 21:24:07 -0000

I don't think there's any weather information there, but if you were pulling the RSS feed, you could use it to create a mashup map of traffic incidents, and that, by itself, is very cool.

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 10:13:10 -0000

Awesome. Sounds like he'll be joining the ranks of the Pythonistas relatively soon.

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:10:54 -0000

I think that if he's interested in admin tasks and dynamic web pages, you might have him start with something like Django, TurboGears, or Pylons -- get something up and running right away. This will, of course, need him to have a goal in mind for the pages he wants to write. Make sure that his goal isn't too complicated. Something simple (that ideally has him pulling information off the server box -- perhaps a remote process list?) that requires very little would be best.

That's my thought: find a simple web app, work with him to implement it with a framework. (Perhaps even App Engine -- sign-ups are free now.) The important part here is to teach good project management principles; unit testing, source control, automation, etc. Build things from the bottom-up, learning as you go.

Does that sound like it would be good?

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 17:01:32 -0000

I think that time-to-cool (how long does it take to get something interesting running?) is definitely the most important metric for learning a language. Figure out what he's interested in, and figure out the "hello world" of that class of applications. It's a shame that writing games has so much more overhead now than it did when we were in school, or that'd continue to be the best way to do things.

Perhaps it's not so bad, but Pygame and Pyglet take way too much work, imho.

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:42:33 -0000

Eric, if you could expand on this a bit, that'd be good. Do you mean an actual series of languages, or perhaps subsets of an existing language, or series of programming problems?

As to the series of languages, what about SICP?

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:40:59 -0000

(see http://adam.blinkinblogs.net/post/57791370/supp...)

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:29:46 -0000

The other nice thing about knowing the difference is being able to tailor your grammar to the type of parser generator you're using.

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:05:27 -0000

It does. It's pretty easy to reason about them when you remember that the top-down parsers need to break productions apart, while bottom-up parsers need to put them together.

When several productions have the same left-most symbol, a top-down parser doesn't know how to break that production apart without quite a bit of look-ahead, so it has trouble. With left-recursion, it's much harder to determine when to group symbols into a production, so bottom-up parsers have more trouble.

Recursion:
* list := epsilon | list element (left recursion)
* list := epsilon | element list (right recursion)

In the first, bottom-up parsers can never be sure when to collapse into a list without look-ahead, because it depends on whether the next token is an element or not. In the second, it can collapse for each element and be fine, because list can always end up being epsilon. This is how I think of it, anyway; I could be way off.

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:43:13 -0000

How's studying going for the GRE?

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:45:45 -0000

Sweet. Warning, though: I'd be an activist judge, all about the jury nullification. :)

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 11:47:07 -0000

Speaking of ideology: have you voted yet? Got to get absentee ballots postmarked by Tuesday, and all that.

Re: Abstract Source Control

blinks — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 10:35:37 -0000

The other thing to think about here is how distributed source control systems like Git and Mercurial work -- every time someone clones a repository, they're branching off of it. Every separate repository is a branch, and every push or pull (in Mercurial terms, at least) is a merge. Would that be an acceptable "psc branch" command? (I like the name!)

Re: Abstract Source Control

blinks — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 00:30:45 -0000

Why should they be distinct operations? You should be able to examine the history of any file/branch/etc. and find out the path it took to get where it was, including where it branched off/was copied from, etc.

Re: Abstract Source Control

blinks — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:47:01 -0000

On this note, I think that a RISC API for source control might only have four lower-level operations (CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE). A commit would be a set of CREATE/UPDATE/DELETE operations and metadata that can be atomically applied to an existing node in the repository. The repository could be modeled as a tree, growing in the direction of time, each node with unique coordinates (the space/time/metadata deal). I think that Git is somewhat modeled like this, even with the ability to move nodes of the tree around; separate them, reattach them, etc.

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:59:18 -0000

Try again; turned on view access for non-members. :)

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 13:57:28 -0000

Speaking of programming (when are we not?), can you see http://trac-hg.assembla.com/spark-language/ ? What do you think?

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:31:07 -0000

Gosh, thought I fixed that. Give me a sec...

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:48:04 -0000

That's awesome. I'd love to see a third party actually become viable in the US, and keeping the two major parties under the law is a necessary part of that.

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:47:00 -0000

It's interesting to examine motives: all of my family on my dad's side is military, you know. :)

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:48:25 -0000

Ah, but the "hopiness and changiness" *has* died down: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

While the "shock factor" of someone who has never held federal office might have provided a bit of a boost to the McCain campaign, I'm not sure if (a) it's enough to carry the election, let alone (b) be what the country needs.

I'm not an Obama supporter because he's an outsider, but because of his leadership abilities -- have you seen the Biography episode on him? He has done quite a bit with his life, and brought together quite a few people. We talked once about the president needing to be someone who'd make the decisions you'd make, only smarter, and I think that Obama is that kind of guy.

Re: The Last Starfighter

blinks — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:43:33 -0000

Bwa ha ha! Hadn't heard about it. Crazy Texas.