The ongoing conversation
Work, technology, games, books, and the things that catch my attention.
Inspired by this comment, I decided to come up with a chess variant for RoboRally. I wanted to keep the programming aspect of RoboRally and the multiple pieces & capture-the-king goal of chess intact. Programming a “side” of 16 bots would be too daunting, but a king bot and a handful of piece bots (using chess […]
Neil deGrasse Tyson was a special guest at the Nutter Center last night, and my wife and I took the kids out to see him. The teens were skeptical about the event, since it meant giving up one of this week’s iterations of their League of Legends event at Epic Loot, but they enjoyed Dr. Tyson’s […]
Philosophy is one of those areas of study that people outside the field have a hard time finding applications for. It enables the basis of logic, and so underpins all of computer programming, so computer geeks should have at least a subconscious grasp of the fundamentals of philosophy. In theory anyway. My own visceral feelings […]
An orc cook goes to the orc butcher and asks for some prime elf steaks. The butcher says “It’s not ‘prime’ these days. Elfmeat went to ‘good’, ‘plusgood’, ‘doubleplusgood’.” “Oh. Okay, gimme some plusgood elf steaks and some doubleplusgood pixie wings.” “Pixie wings are now grade A, B, or C.” “Erk. Gimme grade-A pixie wings. […]
This time of year brings together two ideas that don’t have much in common: I’ve received all of my documentation that I need to prepare my tax returns, and this week is Valentine’s Day! A few years ago, my wife and I decided to make a Valentine’s Day gift to one of our charities, and […]
You can find any number of lists of “facts” in the Internet. Weird facts, fun facts, pointless facts, interesting facts. And just like you’ve heard before, just because your read it on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s true. Here are some corrections to some “facts” I’ve seen on these lists: The quack of a duck […]
The return of my ice rules for RoboRally: There are two unofficial RoboRally boards available online that feature Ice. “The Ice Rink” includes rules for inertia. “The Cold Room” features a much nicer graphic, but the “spin chart” is not yet available (and, given the time spent coming “ASAP”, unlikely to become available, but it […]
I came across a SQL function I was not familiar with: decode. I looked it up and immediately replaced it with a CASE statement (in addition to other code cleanup). I’m afraid I don’t understand the existence of Oracle SQL’s decode() function: decode(expression, search, result [, search , result]… [, default] ) seems functionally equivalent […]
Just a quick plug here for my son’s electronic music output as “The Official Insomniac”. Go check him out on SoundCloud at https://soundcloud.com/the-official-insomniac. —jhunterj
January is no time to make resolutions. Yes, there’s the promise of a new year (unless you’re on the Chinese calendar. Or Hindu calendar. Or Jewish calendar. Or etc.), and you’re likely to be filled with optimism and ready to commit. But it’s an awfully distracting time of year too, and that optimism may lead […]