Saturday, January 7, 2012
French is a beautiful language, so of course it makes sense that some right-wing crazies would fight like heck to keep English from ruining it. That's exactly the intent behind Toubon Law - which mandates that any commercial publications written (or containing text) in another language also come with a visible French translation.
This usually just means you have to properly internationalise software and that Open Source licenses are completely null and void as they are only written in English... but it becomes much more fun when you realise that advertising - despite containing no literal meaning whatsoever - also counts as "text". Meaningless catch phrases, and shallow one-liners are not exempt! Read on for more »
Friday, December 30, 2011
First things first: I promise to try to limit the Notch related posts in the future and I apologize to the legions of l337 coders for the continued coverage.
Right, now, on to todays topic: "Colour like you're Notch" (Awright, punning on my own blog post titles!). While watching the livestream of Notch coding Minicraft, I was intrigued by his dynamic sprite colorising. After a little reverse engineering and experimentation I realised it was dang simple, and we could apply something similar to HTML5 games.
Read on for more »
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
The problem with the real world is it's not enough like Minecraft. The fix is simple: pipe haunting and beautiful C418 tracks at various random times throughout the day, in a Minecraft-y fashion. To keep you on your toes, add in some rare-but-scary cave sounds. And that's exactly what my Grindcraft python script is for.
If you're a fan of the game (a fan is someone who has played it) then you'll know that the music in Minecraft is "special". The game proceeds largely in silence... you'll be deep in the process of constructing a summer house out of glass, or building a railroad to your lava pit when it starts... ever-so-slowly drifting in, and filling your body with smiles. Then it washes away without you even noticing.
I decided I needed this for my daily grind, so I whipped up a dodgy python script that plays random ogg files out of the Minecraft resources directory. But first I needed to figure out which songs Minecraft plays, and at what times.
Read on for more »
Monday, November 14, 2011
The Play! framework went and made Java development more fun than Ruby development (*ducks*) - and then Martin Odersky went and made Java more fun than Java (*considers ducking, but doesn't*), and then the Play framework went and mashed those fun things together and now there is the Play! 2.0 framework.
Play 2.0 gives a big hug to Scala (the core is all Scala now - though there are still Java APIs for everything if you haven't convinced your bosses to switch yet). One small-yet-nice feature of the new version is built-in CoffeeScript and Less CSS support. Here's how you use it...
Read on for more »
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Since having a chat about what I learned from watchin' Notch, I've received buckets of emails 'n' tweets asking for links to the videos... After an epic google search of 5 minutes I've collected them all and aggregated them in this one happy place.
Notch coded Prelude of the Chambered for the Lundum Dare #21 game competition over 48 hours of August 19th-22nd 2011. I think most of it is here - and I've started annotating some of the good bits. Started. I'll fill out this post as I go...
It's well worth a study if you've got a couple of days to spare!
Read on for more »
How crap is the mouse, right? Yeah, I know! So I made a greasemonkey script to do my websurfin' using my 
As I move into my twilight years (mid 30s) I start to have flashbacks surrounding various aspects of my youth. This very morn', for example, I was whisked back to an endless summer evening circa the mid 80s... The scene is composed of; a large christmas tree, me, my grandmother, and our TV. Connected to the TV is my first ever computer: a