With all the brouhaha over the new Kindle 2, many are speculating on
the future of Amazon’s eBook reader. Yet few people know the secret
history of the Kindle. This history must be revaled before people
understand the TRUE reasons why the Kindle will fail.
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On February 26th, 2009, this was a fantasy
I’ve been working on a reboot of Free Sky, codenamed “Shiny”, and
things are coming along nicely. I’ve learned a lot about program
structure in the last two years, and I’m finally beginning to
understand the MVC (Model-View-Controller) way of making an app with a
graphical interface. A lot of problems that seemed unapproachable two
years ago now open themselves to solutions. Instead of writing reams
of boilerplate code, my new controllers and views are slim and easy to
understand. And I am finally beginning to understand and apply the
most important design principle of all: You Ain’t Gonna Need It
(a.k.a. YAGNI).
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On February 20th, 2009, this was trivial
I recently mentioned that I had a nifty little dice library and parser sitting around, waiting to get cleaned up and released as open source. Well, thanks to the common cold, I spent a good portion of today sitting around the house.
When I wasn’t sleeping, I was learning how to package a python library for release on PyPI, the Python Package Index, and setting up a Google Code project. Without further ado, behold: Dyce.
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On December 9th, 2008, this was trivial
With my object system prototype, I wanted to explore the possibilities
of tagging. An article in AI Game Programming Wisdom 2 (”A
Flexible Tagging System for AI Resource Selection”, by Paul
Tozor) spurred my imagination: the article poses the scenario of
a first-person sneaker. The player sneaks up on two guards and
overhears them complaining about the cold. The straightforward way to
program this scenario is to assign each guard instance a list of sound
files to play through, either randomly or in sequence. However, any
time you want to add another sound file to the possibilities, you have
to edit that guard’s list, and the lists of any other guards which
need that sound file. Mr. Tozor proposes another way.
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On December 8th, 2008, this was trivial
One of the first problems I tackled in my prototype was persistence,
because I foresaw the difficulties of object serialisation, and I
feared them. Because I’ve chosen Python as my language of first
resort, serialisation isn’t as big of an issue as it would be, say, in
C++: it’s built in to the language as the pickle
module. The mechanics of serializing individual objects isn’t
the problem, but capturing the state of a large, complicated system
with lots of little objects running around very well could be. I
needed a strategy.
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On December 7th, 2008, this was geeky