Stu's Rusty Bucket

Friday, March 23, 2007

Late New Years Resolution 2007

Ive decided my very late New Years resolution will be to not cut or trim my goatee for the rest of the year. Maybe I’ll grow a beard this year.

Gaming pundits

Apparently I’m not as interested in online game as the pundits seem to think I should be. I’m all for the free online gaming experience, ie: diablo was ok.. But I’m certainly not going to be paying monthly fees for something I will use twice a month.

GameTap looks awesome, and I really want to play some of those classic games, and its even worth booting into windows to play it but, again, Im not going to pay monthly subscription fees for something I want to use twice a month.

Game Publishers used to be happy you purchased the game for 60$-100$, but now they want you to pay that AND the monthly fee, and buy the online extras (Psst Kid, want the new costume? secret level? pay here)..

You have to pay programmers, artists, musicians etc… I survived on the drek pumped out on the C64 and loved it (yeah there was real trash but there was the unquantifiable awesomeness as well), but yet cant really get excited about any of the high-gloss drek pumped out now. 

Maybe that’s why I own a GP2X so I can write my own RPG drek with 16 colour graphics and play the Vice C64 emulator.

I owned a dreamcast for all of a week (played+beat soul calibur then sold it), have never owned any other console. Wont be buying a PS3 or xbox360 or Wii.

What’s wrong with me that I dont like gaming and consoles and online play! Im supposed to have given my left nut to own a Wii/Xbox/PlayStation…

Maybe I am the forgotten niche gamer, I never really made it out of the early-mid 90’s…

Why would I want to care about online persistent worlds making online fleeting 5 minute friends and meeting people who’s sole intent is to kill you and spoil any game play your trying to invoke.

Jaded crotchety old geezer that I am…

Thursday, March 15, 2007

This years garden takes shape

One of our friends came with his roto-tiller the other night and tilled us up a nice patch in the backyard for a new garden. I think we are going to have problems keeping it moist, as we are on the top of a hill and all the water drains off.

Seed Savers Exchange also sent my potatoes out, I have 5lbs of Russet Nugget on their way. I don’t have a clue how much/many 5lbs of potatoes are, it could be 3 potatoes or 1 whole bag. I also don’t know if they have been cut into slips or are whole potatoes.  If they are not cut, I’ll have to cut them into eye segments and let them harden off and then directly sow them

I’ve got some seed trays to go and I need to seed them up tonight with bell peppers, tomatoes. This weekend if its not bad weather, I’ll direct sow some October beans, green beans, peas. (October beans are a dry bush been, rather than a pole bean. I have not grown dry bush beans before so I don’t quite know how much space to give them...)

Besides sowing, this weekend I need to get some wooden stakes and some chicken wire to fence the garden off.  I don’t want to take any chances with nefarious ground hogs, rabbits and deer eating my produce.

Lets just hope the ground hogs don’t try and dig under it :(

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Learning Erlang

So like a lot of people I’m reading Joe Armstrong’s new beta book on Erlang.

- Still getting my head around variables that lockdown once assigned. I have to keep telling myself that with tail recursion, its not really leaving the function and recursing like I am used to with C, so the variable is still ‘live’ between calls. Mostly because I am unsure how X <= Pivot applies to strings and tuples. Strings just being lists of integers themselves should be ok, but tuples I don’t know about. I guess you would write a custom comparison function and map it in

- The quicksort example made me go “ooooh!” in understanding. As an exercise I want to try to make it work with a list of strings or a list of tuples and see how much more complex it gets

He also breaks into an example uses =:= without first explaining it.

I’m also don’t particularly like the

X /= Y X is not equal to Y
X =:= Y X is identical to Y
X =/= Y X is not equal to Y

I’m guessing the last is a typo and =/= is not identical as opposed to not equal.

I dont quite get the ‘identical’ parsings or what they might be used for.  So far I’ve not found any explanation (it is a rough beta, so hopefully wil appear later). I also dislike the not-equal-to signage, I’m too ensconsed in thinking it needs to be != or <>.

I also think I am too used to say the ruby shell and what it lets you do. The Erlang shell seems overly simplistic. You cant build code snippets as you go. eg

cost(oranges)-> 5.

will give an error you have to create an external module in a file and compile it. Which is fine but I feel defeats half the purpose of an interactive shell :(

I’m feeling Erlang a lot more than when I looked at Lisp. I dont think in s-expressions and reverse polish notation, to me that’s great to make easy parsing by interpreter but I dont think like that.

I’m dreaming of a multiplayer roguelike server in Erlang. Maybe once I am happy with my current roguelike I’ll think of doing a basic concept for a multiplayer roguelike. I’m not sure how Id map the data structures of the maps into Erlang, or what its C api interface is like for writing a module to generate the maps in C and passing them off to the server....

May be once I’ve gone through this book and chewed its concepts over I’ll have a better idea of data structures / data representation in erlang.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Working and Biking

The screws are slowly turning at work, none of which are my fault, but things upstairs change and those downstairs have to deal with it, so I ended up going in to work on my Saturday and working until the afternoon. bleah.

The big winner was on the way home I went mtn biking. yay. The i-drive was pretty admirable, but I am ripping off the stock disc brakes pronto. They have no stopping power what so ever and I am only 140lbs! Dangerous shit they are plus they are dialed for Americans (meaning the rear brake and front brake are reversed on the handlebars....) I’m going to load it up with my Hope M4’s and front/rear levers will be placed on the CORRECT sides hehe

Need to work on the gearing as well, but I want the cable to stretch a bit more first. Right now I can’t get into the biggest rear ring. Going from #2 to #1 causes the chain to fly off over the top cog.

Its also great to have a bike for my size, as much as I loved my Specialised rockhopper, its 19” frame was too tall for me, this little GT i-drive is just right for me, being smaller I can flick it around nicely.

The other disappointment was the fire road I picked to go explore down wasn’t very long before it dead ended (I did get to follow of a trail of spent bright red 12ga shotgun cartridges like breadcrumbs), and I had to turn around as the trees left no room for passage.

Still, it was sooo nice to be out in the sun biking!!