Space Hobo spacehobo@identi.ca

The BSD "ministat" tool is even smarter than copy/pasting a column of numbers from my terminal into a spreadsheet to see what they look like, and a good deal simpler and easier-to-use besides.

I'm glad it's in Debian, but it (or something like it) really should be in coreutils.

Everybody wants to get rid of Jackson, and there's a great movement to put a woman on the $20 http://www.womenon20s.org/candidates

Tubman's a hard act to beat, but is that older more stately photograph of her the best we can do?  What if we took the badass cover art that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_and_Diane_Dillon did in 2007, and put it on the bill?

The result is something you immediately want the moment you see it, even though you didn't know you wanted it before.

Photoshop job done by a friend of mine who is staying anonymous to avoid getting in the way of the awesome Women-on-the-Twenty movement.  But really, this thing is the best.

And I don't even use US currency much any more!

Judging from http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/7drl_2015_day_2_level_generation_and_game_concept/ I wonder if the "so few calls to the RNG" is all that unusual in modern roguelikes.  It is my understanding that most procedural generation systems in use today go with a single random input to a collection of noise functions (perlin, etc) to produce the emergent complexity. 

Part of the reason for this is that you can plug an integer into the game at the start and get a repeatable debuggable testable scenario.  Brogue even has "seed of the day" challenges where people rush to see who gets the best score for a given initial seed within a 24 hour period.

I think three calls to the RNG per level is unusually high, for 2015!

To unpack that a tiny bit for the people who don't like thoughts in 140 on proprietary platforms:

Debconf is currently very monadic (without realizing it of course), and this is the cause of most, if not all of its problems.

Lose the monads and fall back to their applicative cousins, and you lose the possibility for conditionals etc, so no need for complicated debconf config scripts with typically broken back button support.

But also, applicatives allow for declarative interface building, by composing together building blocks, in an entirely open-ended way. For example, html forms can be expressed applicatively, and I use this in the git-annex webapp (thanks to yesod-form). This should go a along way to solving the problem that debconf is limited to a few basic input types and cannot be used to make more elaborate interfaces when needed.

Pity that if I implemented it in haskell, probably in under 10k LOC, I'd probably get a 10-50 mb binary..

Amita is reading "Starting Forth". It's her first programming book. I'm a little concerned.

I spent some time this weekend thinking about Interactive Fiction, and how to implement it nearly. One thing that really struck me about IF programming is that where discussions of ordinary languages tend to be littered with code samples like "function double(x) { return x * 2; }" discussions of If tend to have examples like "when you blow the safe, if the guard is in the recording studio he can't hear the explosion; otherwise he shows up and arrests you."

I suspect this comes from most of the influential IF people being storytellers and writers first, and programmers second. It certainly makes for a fun and surreal change from most programming discussion.

Cute :) i'm assuming this is fixed in the editor, but now my glasses are held together with cat 5 cables are very strange as the laborers do in pump.io, statusnet and friendica as an abstraction layer called databank that lets us do.

Yes, how else can kiss my solar flare.

Koyaanisqatsi for editing my manuscript.

Got it, the nsa is not making this face: :-↨ everyone makes that face sometimes, several times a year, careful what you mean. I like that hosters are so awesome. The wi-fi is not between luddites and machines. Perhaps, as many are active?

How do we use https://github.com/dmarti/piehole to make both github and savannah obsolete?

Let's see how much of this curriculum is accessible to a precocious 5yo with an XO-1, and how much of it is tech-aggrandising twaddle that caught the eye of this here privileged white dude:

https://github.com/CodeClub/scratch-curriculum/tree/master/en-GB/Term 1

Is there a way to download it without having to register?

OLPC working on XO laptop telescope and microscope peripherals (hands-on) - http://ur1.ca/dx8e1

Two weeks ago, two cast-off XO-1s (the original One Laptop Per Child machines) were left on a desk at work. Since someone very close to me was about to have a fifth birthday, I snagged them and decided to set them up as a sort of extra birthday gift.

Once I saw an actual 5yo playing with this system, I was gobsmacked at how ideal they are for their intended purpose!  I am now hooked and sold completely (especially since the XO-1 didn't even have any blobs for hardware access!)

Unfortunately, they're rather old and flaky, and it seems the best thing to do is to grab a bunch of old XOs and cannibalize parts to make one nicely-running machine.  I contacted all my friends at MIT and laptop.org, but it seems that the organisation is in maintenance mode: they're making the new XO-4 Touch laptops and shipping them to deployments, but there's no way to get units or parts in small numbers to the US or UK.

There's a lot of confusion about the XO-4 Touch.  Even folks who used to work for the OLPC foundation said "Don't they sell the those in Walmart?" but it turns out that that's the "XO-Tablet" which is just an android device like any other.  I took this rather disappointing screenshot of it from a demo video.

It's quite a precipitous fall from a system that teaches 5yos how to edit pong games in situ to Yet Another Android Tablet that pretends that Neil Armstrong believes you can become an astronaut by playing Star Wars branded Angry Birds.  This is just...depressing. 

Apparently the organisation is in maintenance mode.  They make plenty of new batteries, screens, and whole cases of XO-4s, but they only ship them to the actual Deployment sites.  This means that if you're thinking of fewer than 100, they have no way of getting anything to you from the supply chain.

So if anyone has any leftover give-one-get-one laptops, tech eval units, or knows a group of folks who are going together on a bulk order for the new XO-4s, I'd love to hear about it.

http://cubieboard.org/ seems to be the raspberry pi for Freedom-Lovers!

And that's why I love GNOME's HIG. It'd say [Quit] [Cancel] or something like that instead.