Boing Boing directed me to this:
Category: Geekery
Squeak
In response yesterday’s post about game development for new/young programmers, Dave Briccetti suggested checking out Scratch and Etoys. So today during my lunch break I did.
I think I like these, and particularly Etoys, even more than Alice. With Alice, you need to use a model that someone else provides (unless you happen to have a 3D rendering program that’ll import into the system, which is unlikely given our target audience of young people). But with Etoys at least, you can draw your own sprites. Essentially you start with a blank canvas. You use a fairly typical ‘paint’ program to draw something and Etoys turns that into a sprite with a bunch of event handles.
What’s even cooler (albeit a bit scarier — adults will want to supervise this of course) is that you can share your workspace with other users and type or chat with them. Collaborative visual programming. I like it!
Scratch is neat because of its YouTube-like front end for sharing things you make. I haven’t dug into the building process for it yet.
Interestingly, both of these projects are built on Squeak, which is an implementation of Smalltalk. Squeak is being used to build everything from these game-building projects to web development.
This is what I love about the web. Someone leaves a comment with a couple of links and suddenly you’re in the midst of a whole new world to explore. Thanks Dave!
[EDIT] Actually I just visited Dave’s blog and he has covered this terrain well before I did (he is a part-time teacher). Check out his post on Teaching Scratch and Alice, and his blog in general, for more on this topic.
Techie Funk
I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. Normally, my relaxation time is spent playing games or reading. Mostly playing games, and even more specifically, playing MMOs. But lately nothing is scratching the itch for me. I spend all day at work bored and wanting to go home. Then I get home and I’m bored and trying to find something to do that interests me.
I finally took the time to sit down and navel-gaze about this. First of all, why am I bored at work? Well that’s pretty clear: I have no challenges. I was hired for a position I’m quite over-qualified for, and rather than use my skills, my manager (who really has no technical savvy) has me doing busy-work. On the bright side, the pay is rotten.
And I think this revelation leads me to why I’m bored at home, too. My brain is starving and playing games, which used to be my recharge activity, is just starving it more.
So I’ve decided its time to let my geek flag fly again. I was thinking maybe instead of playing a game, I’d take a shot at creating a game. But what language to use? I write PHP at work these days, and I’m tempted to build some kind of web game, but maybe I need a change.
And then I happened upon this post at Raph Koster’s site: Raph’s Website » A letter to a 12-year-old It’s a fun read, but as kind of an offhand part of the post, Raph asks his audience: BTW, if you had to recommend a programming language to today’s 12-year-olds, what would it be?
Now I’m a good deal older than that, but often enough I can act like a 12-year old, so I was interested to see what people suggested. One of the things suggested was Alice, developed as a system to visually teach programming to kids. It’s pretty neat! Basically it uses methods that are tokenized into draggable widgets, and you ‘stack’ these up to give orders to a 3D avatar. From some of the examples it looks like you can do a lot more, with collision detection for gaming and so forth. I haven’t dug that far into it. To me it was more a curiosity than a tool I’d use (I think!) but it was well worth a look to anyone with a taste for geeky stuff.
Another option mentioned was PyGame which is some kind of game development toolkit based on Python. I’ve never taken the time to learn Python and have always been interested, so I might give that a look. Some kind of open source UO emulator called RunUO was mentioned as well, but I’m not sure if that requires a UO client or what. Another item to dig into I guess.
Lots to dig into, and I’m still not sure that a web-based PHP game isn’t what I want to do. I have a rough idea of the kind of game I want to make: a turn-based dungeon crawler of some kind.
Anyone have suggestions as to other ‘get up and running quickly’ game creation tools out there?
Another internet relationship horror story
These pop up every so often, and we’ve all heard them before, to the point it’s become something of a cliche: that hot blooded young thing you fell for online turns out to be an 50-something overweight person of the same sex as you that still lives in his/her mom’s basement.
Still, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded, and honestly the stories are always fascinating in a train-wreck sort of way, so here you go, from LA Weekly:
The Life and Death of Jesse James: An internet love mystery
Robotic restaurant or mass delusion?
So, one of the latest internet viral video phenoms is of some restaurant in Germany where “the staff has been replaced by robots.” I keep seeing this same YouTube clip pop up over and over. Well I’ll post it here, and you tell me what you see:
OK, I’ll grant you that you order by touch screen rather than talking to a waiter, but that isn’t exactly new (nor is it preferred, at least by me). And then the food runners put your meal on a little cart and slide it down a ramp to your table. At which point you and the rest of your part open up the carriers and peer at each others’ food and decide who gets what. Unusual, sure. But how the heck are people seeing this as, to quote Gizmodo “a new restaurant […] staffed entirely by robots.” (It isn’t just Gizmodo, the story is everywhere from Sci-Fi.Com to BotJunkie.)
By the way, if you want to follow the story back to its original source (which I always recommend…we bloggers are such parasites, feeding off of each other and hard-working writers):
World’s First Automated Restaurant Opens In Germany
Physics bedazzlement
Two Slits Are Better Than One is a fascinating article about the double-slit experiment, and how light can behave like a wave and a particle at the same time, how observing an experiment can change the results, and all kinds of other quantum physics magicalness.
I don’t claim to understand it all, but it just sends my mind spinning off into crazy directions when I read stuff like this.
Image resizing wizardry
Check out this rather amazing video, which should really grab the attention of anyone who resizes or crops image in their day-to-day routine.
For more information, see Dr. Ariel Shamir’s homepage.
Feld Thoughts – The Montana Future
Brad Feld at Feld Thoughts – The Montana Future has up an interesting post on what he (and presumably others? I’ve never heard the term before) calls “The Montana Future”: the idea that we can live anywhere and still do our jobs, thanks to the internet.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone, but 99% of the work I do, I can do from my home office, which could be anywhere. Most of my work is for people and places near by, but that’s mostly due to networking and habit. I guess in a way I backed into this “Montana Future” without really realizing I was doing it. Mr. Feld’s post served as a great reminder of how fortunate I am to have this opportunity.
Let’s go phishing!
For the few of you who may not know, ‘phishing’ is a process that unscrupulous folks use to try to trick you out of your personal information. Most often, it arrives in the form on an email that appears to be from your bank, or Paypal, or some other online service. The email will ask you to click a link and update your account information. The trick is that you’re not really going to end up on the real site, but rather on a look alike, and the criminals will be collecting all the information you ‘update.’
That’s the quick and dirty on phishing, anyway…
So how good are you at detecting a phishing attempt? Take this quiz and find out!
Me? I got 8 out of 10, but kinda sorta should’ve gotten 9 out of 10. One of them was so obvious that I thought it was a trick question, and given that it was a quiz and not my real data at stake, I didn’t research it. Yeah, I know… excuses, excuses… 🙂
“There’s a star with a tail in the tail of the whale”
The star Mira is a red giant in the constellation Cetus (the Whale). Astronomers turned the Galaxy Evolution Explorer orbiting telescope on it, and found this giant ‘tail’ (the Galaxy Evolution Explorer sees ultraviolet light). The tail is 13 light-years long!
Comet-like star streaks through Milky Way
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