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Tag Archives: programming

Send me a screenshot

Friday, October 7, 2011

This week at work has taught me an important lesson about making (and asking for) effective bug reports: screenshot screenshot screenshot. Bug reports are tricky because of two enormous gaps between the user making the report and the developer reading it. Formally speaking you might call these “information asymmetry” and “lack of a shared vocabulary”. [...]

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IF experiment in collaborative dialogue design

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Emily Short is trying something very exciting in interactive fiction design: she’s written a conversation system that lets you write in new dialogue. It’s supposed to ask you how that dialogue should fit into what’s already there, then generate some Inform 7 code. You send her the code and she incorporates it in a new [...]

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Geek insomnia

Friday, March 23, 2007

Ok, so having a laptop sometimes isn’t a bonus. Obviously if I go to bed too late, I don’t get enough sleep. But also if I go to bed too early, I end up staring at the ceiling for hours and … don’t get enough sleep. So the trick is to hit bed early, but [...]

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Inform 7: still cool

Monday, May 8, 2006

On rec.arts.int-fiction today, Brian Slesinsky posted the following snippet: In a hole in the ground lives a hobbit. A nasty, dirty, wet hole contains ends of worms and an oozy smell. A dry, bare, sandy hole contains nothing to sit down on or eat. The hole in the ground is a hobbit hole. “That means [...]

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Inform 7: Oh wow…

Monday, May 1, 2006

Inform 7, the long-awaited ground-up rewrite of the interactive fiction authoring language, is out in beta release, and it’s… extraordinary. First the bad news: they’ve tied it inextricably into an IDE currently only available for Windows and OSX. On the other hand, that IDE looks pretty damn fantastic — packed chock-full of IF-specific goodies like [...]

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Emacs beginner tips

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

(All feedback about this gratefully received, beginners or pros. Leave a comment.) Emacs (and its cousin XEmacs) are enormously powerful text editors. Not so great for writing letters to your grandma, but fantastic for editing programming languages or LaTeX. Problem is, they’re so powerful that it’s easy to get lost when you’re starting. Someone shows [...]

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algorithmic art

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Some of these are really quite lovely. And most (all?) of the source code is available! It’s Jared Tarbell, with Complexification.net.

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cloning woes

Monday, April 25, 2005

The implementation of Object.clone() prevents guaranteed type-safe (both compile- and runtime) code from compiling. The following class will not compile: public class SafeCloner { public Object cloneOrNull(Cloneable in) { try { return in.clone(); } catch(CloneNotSupportedException) { return null; } } } (Yes I know that strictly speaking this isn’t type-safe. That’s what this article is [...]

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