Shadowrun Genesis save format notes (2012/12/19)
Because it’s an awesome game, that’s why.
[read more...]Instant Review: Laser Pegs (2012/12/03)
Laser Pegs are a toy consisting of clear plastic blocks containing LEDs and wiring, with the convenient trait that the blocks happen to be roughly physically compatible with Lego parts. They don’t exactly say “Lego”, but they indicate compatibility with “other construction kits”. They mean Legos.
[read more...]Personal opinion: Python's "usability" and "readability" are marketing hype (2012/12/02)
People love to pitch Python as a language to learn in. I am pretty sure this is because everything you hear about Python is about how easy and intuitive it is, and how people love to pitch it as a good choice for learning.
[read more...]Polls and predictions (2012/10/30)
The election season is fascinating for math geeks, because it’s full of numbers, and numbers about numbers, and numbers about numbers about numbers.
[read more...]Standing room only... (2012/10/24)
I’ve seen one too many news stories about how it’s bad for us to sit all the time. I now have a standing desk. It’s a little wobbly, so I’ll have to add some supports to it, which means a hardware store trip. Planning to add four corner supports to it. Initial feedback, yes my feet hurt, but I feel otherwise quite a lot better. I’ve always liked to pace when thinking, and this gets me some of the benefits of pacing without the difficulty reaching the keyboard.
[read more...]Forced password resets: you're doing it wrong (2012/09/23)
For the most part, I really like Dropbox, but it seems to me that their recent decision to roll out forced password changes is… poorly implemented.
[read more...]A reminder: Overtime is nearly always stupid. (2012/08/12)
In a discussion about a video game, and why the developers should have been working on code rather than taking a break to do some social/promotional stuff, someone wrote:
[read more...]The Secret World: Way, way, better than some reviewers think (2012/08/10)
Inexplicably, TSW reviews sort of poorly. Wait, that’s not inexplicable; it’s totally explicable, it’s just sad. Many of them aren’t even reviews of the retail; they’re from mid-to-late beta. Others are just plain wrong on basic claims about mechanics. But mostly, I think, reviewers tried to play it as though it were a modern-setting WoW, and got disappointed when it wasn’t.
[read more...]Are you sure? (2012/07/17)
One of the recurring themes in user interface design is confirming actions which might be destructive. You tell the computer to do something, and it says “are you sure?”
[read more...]Says it all, really. (2012/07/13)
Build ran forever. Went and looked, and discovered that a program called ecj1 had taken up well over 3 hours of CPU time. I announced that it was probably Java-related based on that alone.