Recently in glitch
Infocom-related mishaps
dept. of side projects
Corduroy is a Python library for using CouchDB with Tornado.
book cover doodle
i have no idea why i made this…
scale error
coordinate transforms will always be a trial and error affair i'm afraid
the rules of the game
13 months and 11k lines of code later, i’ve finished up the choose your own adventure project. all told i ended up cataloging a dozen books from the early-to-mid 80s, looking for patterns in their construction and in the paths made by different readers through them.
these short, simple books had a surprisingly complicated structure with their interlocking pages & choices. as a kid the idea of writing one and keeping all those pages straight boggled my mind. what was lost on me at the time was that even a list of hundreds of page numbers can be comprehensible if it’s redrawn as a diagram. these days i feel like i approach everything that way.
so here is my look back at an obsession from my past, using graphical obsessions of the present to guide the way.
Bookmarks
my favorite piece of cs slang (well, foo and (big|little).endian may actually win there, but still...)
fascinating stuff w/ teletype overprint graphics (composed by hand) and a crazy revelation about manray's origin as a bbs hang out. plus the intro text to leather goddesses of phobos is a classic.
the end sequence of doctor strangelove in miniature
flash 10-based SID player. the fft is a nice touch. it's crazy to see how linear the waveforms it generates are
nice seeming replacement for my old p5/clojure setup
the mac toolbox dev days were a different time. and as much as i would never want to go back to worrying about what my stack and heap look like in their memory partition, i miss the ethos...
distills out the top 2 principal components of the jrpg, level grinding and melodrama. yet the third (anime haircuts) is totally missing somehow...
courtship = rhythm and synchrony
how can a forum post at macrumors really be the best documentation out there for this? i mean seriously apple...
a cocoa wrapper for core audio objects. finally something that lets you use audiounits without all the insane c++ boilerplate
an amazingly vast survey of the internals and what it was like to program these things in assembly. the various tricks at the end to multiplex sprites and divide the screen into subregions are humbling.
even if as3 isn't the most elegant language in the world, it seems to encourage a kind of api-clarity among library writers that more than makes up for it.
pretend for a moment that the whole world isn't viewing your site on a fiber connection
the decorator decorator. takes so much of the syntactical ick out of what's otherwise one of the nicer recent additions to python.
alan kay being right but also yelling at the bazaar to get off his lawn — “You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were.”
the american cockroach can run 1.5m/s, and does this by running on its hind legs. thank you internet...
some really beautifully made typefaces. it's crazy to see things that look simultaneously emigre and usable.
Found
definitely the best thing i was exposed to in the d+m dept.