The Code Kitchen

delicate arch in arches nationa...

wildflower in foreground, mount...

Phun finally has an OS X port!&...

Phun finally has an OS X port! Playing with this game brings back memories of the first time I threw away the Lego instructions and decided to build what I wanted to build.

Neo4j, a database storage engin...

Neo4j, a database storage engine that operates on nodes and "relationships" (edges). Designed for fast traversals of the network.

Greek Iced Coffee (Frappe)

Apparently this has become something of a national drink in Greece over the last 50 years. I was skeptical about using instant coffee, but it works really well in this recipe. You wouldn't get the same kind of foam on top with normal coffee grounds. It's a great summer alternative to iced latte if you don't have an espresso machine. My next experiment will be to pick up some irish creme or vanilla flavoring and try adding that.

Read on for the recipe.

cool shyguy wall decoration

Cool looking spider sitting on...

In The Beginning There Was: Pon...

Requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and Apple Safari. Yeah.

Download Source

Hard-coding the velocities and limiting the animation rate to 30 frames per second has not worked all that well (not surprising, locking the logic rate to the rendering frame rate is always asking for trouble). You can see how the speed of the ball and paddles isn't consistent. So fixed rate logic is out. Delta-based animation is in for the next project.

Kenta Cho's Mu-cade for OS X

An awesome snake-like shooter, now for Mac OS X 10.4.

Mu-cade for OS X.

The Physics Centipede Invasion.
Smashup waggly shmup, 'Mu-cade'.

(download)

patch file if anybody wants to build it themselves.

Update: I tried the game on a PowerPC Mac, and while it loads and runs just fine, it's not playable. There's probably some endian issues in the game's internal data structures. If I get some time I'll look into it, but for now this release is Intel-only. :'(

Mozy Deathmatch II

We're putting on another coding deathmatch this month, April 14th. We've got $20,000 in prizes to give away this time and all it takes is a few hours on a Saturday to participate, so if you live in Utah give it a shot!

Further #to_proc Abuse

Everybody loves to abuse #to_proc. The Symbol#to_proc extension has even been baked in to Ruby 1.9.

Why not continue the duck typing abuse? Let's build a cheap ActiveRecord knock-off for Enumerable:

my_peeps.find_all(&{:last_name => "Palmer"})  appointments.find_all(&{:description => /billable/i, :time => (start_time..end_time)})  my_socks.any?(&{:status => 'washed'})

The implementation is simple.

class Hash; def to_proc   proc { |obj| self.inject(true) { |m,(k,v)| m && v === obj.send(k) } } end; end

Of course, I wouldn't try to argue that it's as useful as Symbol#to_proc. Fun to play with, though. I'm using it in a RubyOSA script that I'm building for Colleen. For completeness, this version performs a little better if the hash has many terms and a lot of records will be filtered out:

class Hash; def to_proc     proc { |obj| self.inject(nil) { |_,(k,v)| v === obj.send(k) || (break false) } } end; end