The Code Kitchen

Ludum Dare 14

The idea of competing to write a complete game in a very short time has always appealed to me for some reason. I think mostly because it means I'll actually be forced to finish a game. So I'll be entering Ludum Dare 14, it starts around 9PM tonight and ends 48 hours later. Ruby isn't my favorite language for game development but it can't be beat for rapid prototyping, so that's what I'm using.

I'll be liveblogging as the contest is in progress, if you're bored this weekend you can check my posts here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/author/codekitchen/

I'll also be doing a short presentation on the experience and on prototyping video games in Ruby at this month's Salt Lake City URUG meeting.

office faq

This FAQ refers to my home office in Salt Lake City. These are real questions that people have asked on IRC or other forums. According to an informal IRC poll, interest in my home office exploded after this post started floating around the innertubes.

First, here's an overview of the room:

On with the FAQ:

How big is the office?

120 sq ft. But don't worry, I don't hog all that cavernous space to myself! I share it with my wife and 2 others.

I bought this card table in college. I switched to a real desk for a while but it was too big and got in the way, so I sold it and went back to the card table.

How do you work with such a tiny screen?

I spend all day in a text editor. 80 columns should be good enough for anybody.

Three pennies. I have no idea where these came from.

Genuine Ikea furniture.

Wood floor + wheely chair?

It's just as awesome as it sounds. And the wood floor covers the entire upstairs of the house. Who says you gotta stand up to grab a snack from the kitchen?

What an ominous-looking door. Where could it lead?

That is not for man to know.

Some of the native flora and fauna. She bites.

Is that Macvim? Haven't you tried Textmate?

Yes, that's Macvim. Yes, I tried Textmate back when it was first released, in fact I used it for 8 months and even presented a Textmate tricks and tips session at a local user group. Vim drew me back in the end, just like it always does.

By the way, if Apple would get off their butts and release a quality tablet mac w/keyboard, I could finally get rid of that yellow legal pad.

Whoa, is that a 2001 Hyundai Accent parked outside? I've always wanted one of those!!!

Well this is your lucky day, because that car is for sale! Act now, it won't last long.

My inbox, and my outbox. For maximum convenience, the inbox is situated so that it can be dropped en masse directly into the outbox.

Is the shredder really necessary?

Oh yes.

Recently I was forced to start sharing my office due to the economic crisis.

And that is that

In all seriousness, I'm glad that Mitch Haile has an office that he loves and is so uniquely his. Don't take any of this as a slight against you Mitch, it's simply another perspective. I just can't understand why on earth anybody would want to surround themselves with so much stuff!

I'm working on 3-5 different projects on any given day, and my dual-monitor setup has never once felt too small. I haven't bought an actual physical programming book in years, and I've sold or donated almost all of the ones I did own. One of my projects is a distributed software system that runs across entire data centers, but I prefer to leave the server farm where it belongs -- in another city, not in my closet.

Often I'm not even working in this office. Salt Lake City has no shortage of wonderful coffee shops, libraries, parks and other destinations with everything I need to be productive: a seat, a table, a power outlet and an Internet connection. During the Summer you'll rarely even find me indoors -- I typically work out on my back porch, glass of iced tea by my side. Maybe I'll post a follow-up tour when Spring warms things up a bit more.

I'd love to hear from others, and see their home office setups. Drop me a line with comments and/or criticism, and I'll post a follow-up.

Fumito Ueda interview

There's a great interview with Fumito Ueda, creator of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, over at 1UP. I love some of the insight into the design of the game. These are two of the most inspiring video games of all time, if you haven't played through both at least a few times you really should do yourself the favor. A Playstation 2 can be had for next to nothing these days.

I wrote this bit of code while working on a D project this morning: void trace(R ...)(char[] a, lazy R r) { if (tracing_enabled) do_trace(a, r); } trace("Playing {} on {} ({})", _sound, _channel, _device); That, friends, is a variadic lazy function template conditionally at run-time calling a type-safe variadic function, only evaluating its arguments if the call is made.

I wrote this bit of code while working on a D project this morning:

void trace(R ...)(char[] a, lazy R r) {
     if (tracing_enabled)
         do_trace(a, r);
}

trace("Playing {} on {} ({})", _sound, _channel, _device);

That, friends, is a variadic lazy function template conditionally at run-time calling a type-safe variadic function, only evaluating its arguments if the call is made.

You are banned from this site due to an unknown user-agent

DESTROY OF HONOR

There's something that's been bugging me for a while: how did I ever enjoy the Red Hot Chili Peppers?

Redmine Invoicing Plugin

I've made my Redmine Invoicing plugin public on projects.codekitchen.net. It's a simple but flexible system for creating invoices out of logged hours and other line items, all right inside your Redmine projects. I just started the project Tuesday night, so consider it a very early beta release, but it's in a usable state now and I am now using it for my clients instead of my old system.

Any feedback/bug reports would be great.

sad: Aspiring chef dies after eating super-hot chilli

Simple git-daemon launchd script

Here is a simple launchd script to run git-daemon under launchd on Leopard. Edit the XML to tweak any options, it's self-explanatory.

You'll need to change at least the UserName and --base-path options to match your configuration. Don't forget to touch git-daemon-export-ok in each repository you want to export. See git-daemon(1) for more info.

> sudo mv cz.or.git.git-daemon.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/
> sudo chown root:wheel /Library/LaunchDaemons/cz.or.git.git-daemon.plist
> sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/cz.or.git.git-daemon.plist

Make sure you're in the know.

fish in the river

the view from on top of bald mountian

Banksy visits New Orleans

Is your local hardware store owner on the no-fly list?

In the process of remodeling our basement, we found part a March 1959 issue of the Deseret News and Telegraph stuffed up in the ceiling. I could go on and on about some of the fascinating parallels with content you'd find in any major newspaper of 2008 -- some things really never change. But this hilarious post-McCarthy-era comic took the cake for me:

The late '50s also appears to be one of those periods when everybody wanted good mileage from their vehicles -- most every car ad prominently displayed a MPG rating. Did you know that the 1958 Renault 4-door sedan got 40 MPG?

delicate arch in arches national park, utah

wildflower in foreground, mountains and clouds in background

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 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.