A little light spam

I actually had comments on a few of my posts. Except it turned out that they where both spam. One was an advert for cheep pharmaceuticals and the other an aside about the 2012 nonsense, that even the Mayans don't actually believe in. Oh well, here's hoping for more relevent comments in the future.

NW RPG Update

I think I have my RPG rules where I want them. All I need now is a new name. I'd iike to keep the Initials though, if I can come up with something useful. One nice feature Is that character generation can be quick. I Sat down (admit idly with a basic concept in mind) and had the character sheet filled in, in well under 10 minutes. I made a Miu (A Cat boy) who as Cat people are want to be has rouge based skills, and is reasonably handy with a Dagger.

So I have this, and some screens and some Adventure ideas. I'm getting my Boys to decorate their own Screens and character sheets. All I have to do is set up stats for the actual monsters (I have basic templates) and I'll we'll have a short dungeon Crawl on the weekend. Then somthing a little longer latter on.

My Homebrew RPG

Someone has informed me that I was beaten to the punch with the Never World name. Well there goes a long held idea that has had its day I guess. I actually have cover art that I made a good 20 years ago for my Never Worlds (yes I had an S on it back then) rulebook. I didn't have any idea of what would go into it, just the Idea that I would write an RPG called Never Worlds one day.

Other than that I spent soem time coming up with a moderatly different setting and a set of customised races for my game. Only to have my Sons (aged 5 and 7) declare that they wanted to be a Dwarf and an Elf (or a Dragonian) respectively. So there goes my desire for an original setting.

At the moment I'm wrestling with getting a magic system that I'm happy with, and really haven't had much traction on the idea so far. I'm still wavering on how customizable spells should be, and casters will need to pay for using magic. I originally wrote customizable spells which do not have set duration or number of effects but now I'm thinking that this should be changed to a more riged set of effects so that spells have a fixed cost.
And maybe a generic rule about maintaining spells once they are cast.

Never World RPG 2nd instalment

Minor tweaking has continued so to speak. Mostly I've been trying to simplify things, make skills work more consistently with each other and remove as many modifieres and rolls as possible. At the same time i don't want to loose variability too much. In the process I found more inspiration here and there. Including some even better ideas about how wounds should work. These let me get rid of the large, and very clunky table of Damage classes, and the need to roll damage as a seperate activity.

Now I'm down to a system where the Attacker will make one roll, and the defender might make one roll, if they are wounded.

I'm still increasingly happy with the rules and have even managed to get a character sheet together which is simpler on the one hand and gets the important numbers down on the other. And all this while making space for a portrait as well. All together a good feeling.

Now I just have to work on some of the other areas that have special dozens of special modifers like reaction rolls, hiding and sneaking etx. The goal is to ahve a set of tables that easily fit on half an A4 page, while still being readable.

PS: This post seems to be getting a lot of spam comments in Japanese, so I've been forced to disable further comments on it.

Creating An RPG

My latest pet project has been creating my own set of RPG rules. It has been an interesting to say the least. And an interesting one as I have morphed the rules through phases of expantion and contraction. The contractions mostly triggered when I realized my Character sheet was getting too complicated, and had too many modifiers and derived values.

At it peak I simply had too many special skills that could mofify rolls made with other skills and the sheet had something like eight special purpose bonuses. I've now paired that back down to two. So you have bonuses for being very Strong and for being Very Dexterous. And if you use magic your main magic skill works that way as well.

At some point I decided to change the damage system from hit points to a wound based system (which isn't so obviously numeric). Still a few simulated battles have shown me that it is workable and a basic (not combat optimized) starting character has a good chance of beating two goblins in a straight out fight.

I've ended up with an essentially 2 Stat system Mind and Body as the main way of getting things done. Now all I have to do is some play testing and a lot of wording refinements. With so much flux I still have sections that refer to attributes and modifiers that no longer exist. Or give bonuses that are not relevant anymore. Or are simply not explained properly because I know what I mean.

So my plan of action is:

1. Clean it up
2. Develop a setting
   
3. Develop a starting adventure
4. Self publish
5. ...
   
6. immense Profit
7. Buy whats left of White Wolf, Games Workshop & Wizards of The Coast, after my RPG's success has driven them to near bankruptcy, mu ha ha ha.
   

Nothing could be simpler really (well except for point 5 there, that might require some reality manipulation).

On the technical side I've used Monkey Pirate Tiddly Wiki. as my content creation engine. And it has been a very nice way to work, and rearrange and cross reference. I started with an ordinary TiddlyWiki but then I liked what MPTW added in terms of extra buttons and such. And it only took a little hacking of styles and macros to get a look and feel I was happy with.

Avatar is over hyped

I saw Avatar this weekend and it was an extreme letdown. Well lets start with the good point. The 3D CGI was gorgeous to look at. And Cameron really captured what I have always imagined that an enchanted forest should look like. And yes this was an enchanted forest, just because the Elves where blue 12 feet tall and had tails didn't change this fact.

But once you get past the visual glamor you find a story filled with cardboard characters and plot holes you could fly a shuttle through.

Firstly we have the bad guys: A corporate twerp and a trigger happy Duke Nukem lookalike who have somehow been put in charge of the companies most important mining operation. Its quite evident that neither is actually suitable for the jobs they are doing, and honestly I couldn't imagine them actually having such jobs. The Twerp especially seems completely dominated by his subordinates, there is no way he would have been able to get to that position in such a short order.

The good Guys are euqally cardboard non entities. Even our hero (I can't even remember Jake Sulley seems aqkward and wooden pretty well all of the time. Especially towards the end of the movie he uttered some of the most jarring dialog I have ever heard.

Then we have the Pilot (what ever her name was) who rescues the good guys from captivity. The problem is she has no real motivation to do so. here is a difference between refusing to fire on civilians and active rebellion (and willingness to fire on your former coworkers). She had been there for much longer then the hero and was one of the Marines. When she flew on the Navin side she knew she would be shooting at (and killing) people she had bantered with in the mess hall. More over she was pretty well condemning herself to permanent exile on Pandora. No matter which side one the only thing she could have hoped for if she returned to earth was a long jail sentence as a traiter, or on murder charges.

Then we have the Navin who are steryotipical nobel savages. Theoretically great hunters and warriors who can't seem to get a thing right until lead by a Human Marine.


Why is it that the Navin aren't ready and waiting when the Humans come to destroy hometree ? They didn't even have their flyers ready, even though they had an hours warning. Surly they would have gotten their children and other non combatants out before a known attack force arrived. And be ready and waiting to drop fliers down on the helicopters. This is making their leaders look stupid.

Why is it that their arrows are useless for the first half of the movie. The first Planet side scene a truck drives in with arrows sticking out of its wheel, and they barely penetrated (didn't even flatten the tire), then during the attack on Home Tree the arrows just bonce of the heleicopters. In the final battle however, when our hero is leading the Navin, suddenly their arrows can pierce through the Helicopter windscreens. Either they can or they can't And if they can they should have taken out a good number of the helicopters in the first battle.

In any case the Humans had been their long enough for The Navin to know about metal and that their arrows can not pierce it (Would any sensible hunter waste ammunition, that had to be made by hand, firing at something he knows he cannot hurt. The humans seem to be quite capable of not wasting ammunition (even The Head of The Science team gets the idea).

Why is it that no one rides the armored herbivores (the ones that have gun poof Armour on their heads (WTF)) They look to me like the ultimate in heavy cavalry and if the Navin's link can tame the fiercest predator on their planet surly a herbivore would be tamable as well. What kind of idiot does a cavalry charge against machine guns? These are supposed to be hunters. Can't the find secure positions to stage an ambush, at least it would give them time to fire a few rounds of arrows before getting hit. Even a few pit traps would have helped.

All in all the thing is that If the Navin are as in tune with their world as they are supposed to be, and their weapons are as capable. then they should have been able to wipe the floor with the human security forces without some ex human leading them. And if there not then his leadership would have been useless unless he could find better weapons somewhere, either stolen form humans or I don't know, the artifacts of an ancient Navin Civilization which the people had abandoned.

The whole every creature (and even some of the plants) have exposed links for establishing direct neural connections thing was rather hard to accept too. It really deserved some kind of justification. THere was no hint that it was engineered and at the same time I can't see how it could have provided such an evolutionary advantage that every animal would have one.

Then we have the Energy Vortex. Which is believed to be a very high energy electromagnetic field. Others have noted that such a field should have been quite devastating to humans (if not the local wildlife). However the fact that is selectively knocked out Sensors without affecting anything else is bizzar. Honestly It the flux is so strong that sensors don't work then why do the communicators continue to work? Heck even the computer systems should be affected (uneless they have special shielding). And what about the Avatars, which are also run by remote control but seem to have no restrictions on range (and are also unaffected by the flux).

All in all I loved the visuals but hated the story, and at almost 3 hours a the middle third was frankly boring to sit through. Recently there have been stories of Avatar being the highest grossing movie ever. This true in raw number however when corrected for inflation it comes in at 21st place (when I wrote this, though it is moving up). The actual record is still held by Gone with the Wind.

Post Christian Morality

Quit a while back Australia introduced a citizenship test. At the time the local paper ran a quiz which claimed to contain questions from the actual test. One of the questions was about the guiding principle of Australian law, with answer options including 'Christian' and 'secular' and the obvious red herring of 'Sharia Law'.

The correct answer, was 'Christian'. My partner however, who is catholic wanted to answer secularism. Which got me to thinking that in despite what we might like to claim she is right. I have very much grown up with post Christian values. And indeed ones which are in places opposed to most religious teachings. To me the key concept is the idea of personal freedom. If it harms none, do as you will.

The fact that this also happens to be a key statement of Wicca is coincidence. However it flies in the face of judo christian tradition. Modern progressive churches do (I belive) accept some idea of free will to do. but they do not seem to attach any special moral meaning to it, other than a negative one where your free will gives you the right to damn yourself, or you can surrunder it and follow the church teachings and be saved. This is not however universal as soem Protestant denominations still teach the Calvinist idea that God has decided who is and who is not among the saved, and there is nothing you can do to change his mind.

When I look at the ten commandments, Ignoring the various controversies about what is and isn't aprt of this set, I find that only three of them are enshrined in Australian law. We hare prohibited for Stealing, murdering and bearing false witness. But then again these are things that have been discovered by most successful societies around the world, though granted not all of them.

As to the others. the first Thou shalt have no other god before me, is unconstitutional in Australia. Likewise for the making of idols. As we have freedom of religion. In other words the writers of the Australian constitution, following in the footsteps of the American founding fathers, said that the bible is wrong on that point. That to restrict the free practice of other religeions is morally wrong. So wrong in fact that the fact should be noted in the document of final arbitration.

Adultry, taking the lords name in vain, and being rude to your parents may be considered bad form as it where but are not considered illegal. The last one about honouring your mother and father requires some careful thought in considering what a strict reading actually implies. to me it suggests following their orders qithout question, but what if said orders are themselves illegal. Is a child that is being abused dishonouring their parents if they report the abuse? Morally I'd have to say no, taking the commandment literally I'm not certain of the answer.

Then we come to the idea of working on the Sabbath, and coveting of goods. Both of these seem to be part and parcel of capitalism. A good chunk of our economic activity is based on coveting and encouraging others to covet. On the whole we seem to have settled that coveting, while bad in excess, is necessary in moderation. Without it international trade would all but grid to a halt. Ditto for research and development, which is based on wanting to know and wanting to create.

So overall are we a Christian society then? One third of the ten commandments cannot be enforced because to do so would be against either the constitution or the established conventions of our society. The breaking of another third are either encouraged, tolerated or seen as a personal matters. This leaves only 1/3 which remain codified in law, and these are so common to the human race that they can hardly be called Christian values. So all in all I think that the idea that we are still a nation built on Christian ideals is demonstrably false.

Then there are the many other points which we have made moral judgements on, but which the ten commandments are silent on. Chief among these is slavery. the then commandment eplicitly prohibits you from coveting your neighbours slaves (some transaltions say servant). This implied that your neighbour, and you, might actually own slaves. Similarly no mention is made of universal suffrage, racial or gender equality. Worst still the bible is consistently sexist, implicitly racist (certainly in the old testament), and has historically been used to justify the divine right of certain individuals over others. And yet our values say that these three things are important. Again we appear to be post Christian rather then Christian in our prevailing world view.

Climate Change and Scale

One thing that always annoys me about the climate change argument is that proponents of human driven climate change tend to focuse on the last few hundred years or at most thousand of years. This stikes me as odd considering that there has been life on earth for hundreds of millions of years.

This is why I find the graph on this page very interesting.Firstly for most of the history of life on earth the atmosperic carbon level has been well over 1000 parts per million, and we are talking about levels between 400 -500 as dangerous irreversible climate change. The other thing that the graph seems to show is that the earths stable average temperature iis about 22 degrees.

SO on a geologival tiemscale the current averages of 16 degrees is markedly below average, it is then little wonder that the world is trying to get warmer. There is strong evidence that higher carbon levels lead cause photosynthesis and plant growth to accelerate.

Granted that our evolutionary history has occured during an ice age (while there are icecaps we are essentially in an ice age). So all in all while I support moves to reduce human pollution of the environment I remain strongly skeptical of the Climate change claims and associated agenda. Especially as this position is increasingly becoming a doctrine held by its proponent with religious zeel, this includes deliberate steps to sideline or suppress any and all contrary options.

The Death of Science

The following article "Climategate: Science Is Dying" caught my eye recently. I hate to break it to Mr Henninger but the fact that scientists are human and that academia is rife with internal politics has been an open secret for many many years. At least for anyone involved in science or academia in any case. Seriously anyone who has gone to University and paid even a little bit of attention should be aware of this.

The whole topic was covered back in the Sixties by THomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In a nutshell new ideas tend to get taken up by young scientists just getting started. To a large extent the peer review process favors older established theories, especially in highly specialized publications where reviewers are likely to have a conflict of interest against publishing things that will invalidate their own past works. So what you tend to get is generational change. The old theory only dies when most of its proponents have retired.

These days we as a society have far outgrown the romantic notion of Science as the great savior that can do no wrong. That is why research has to be screened through ethics committees. In Psychology many of the pivotal experiments conducted in the first half of the 20th century frequently involved inflicting potentially serious mental trauma on unsuspecting volunteers such as the Milgram study.

But then again Kuhn didn't really reach that wide of a general audience. So maybe Climategate will have an impact on the perception of science in the general community. Far from being a bad thing it will help the general public to see science for the man made institution that it is. And in my opinion this is a good thing as accepting anything blindly and absolutly is demonstrably a bad thing.

Sports Funding

So the Australian Federal government got back its report on sports funding. In a nutshell it says stop spending big bugs on a handful of professional athletes and put the money where it will have an impact on the general health of the population. Personally I could not agree more.

There are 22 Million people in Australia. I don't see any reason why we should be more capable at sport then Americans of whom there are 300 million. so It stands to reason that they will produce ten times as many world class athletes as we will. It should be noted that we also have no chance of outspending the country that is still the worlds largest economy.

The Dummy spit by the head of our Olympic Committee was to be expected. But then again I have little respect for an organization which globally almost sees its self as above the law. Heck they have managed to pressure government to make special laws for them at several Olympic games recently. Then again the AOC position seems to be based on the tricle down economics. That seeing Australians win gold will make Obese kids want to get out and play sport. No it dosn't work, instead they'll send a hero TXT. WHile waithing for their high sugar high fat food items to be put into a brown paper bag (produced by a proud sponsor of the Australian Olympic team naturally).

The Sydney Morning Herald has a number of articles exploring both sides of this issue, though none of them allow you to leave comments. Personally, as a tax payer I agree with the report. I'd rather see my tax dollars go into local sporting facilities then into the chase for Olympic gold.

Why Go is a good thing

I've seen quite a few posts and comments on blogs along the lines of go is just a crap version of X I can't understand why google is wasting time on it, instead of (just using | improving) X. There are several answers to this.

Firstly Go is probably different from X and does not have the same stated goals as X. Especialy where X turns out to be a high level programming language that has a very large runtime, or runs in a VM or is interpreted.

Secondly Diversity is good. Think of Go as just another mutation of C, which has some new and useful features. Having written a few tiny programs I can see two so far. The first is that even though we are statically typed it is amazing how rarely a type actually appears outside of a method signature. The implicit typing that occurs when you set variables to initial values gets things correct an awful lot of the time. And the big one is concurrency. Everyone knows that programming concurrent software is hard. As the trend these days seems to be to multi core CPU's it is also becoming a very important area. Big thing is that Every program I have written so far has included gorouteens. they are a great way to generate data (if any place you would be inclined to use a generator in Python you'll be creating a go routine.

It occurs to be that a list comprehension style syntax for defining generators would by handy here. But thats just sugar as it where and I can definitely live without it, much as I have been able to live without anonymous functions in python.

I think that Go is a worth while addition to the programming language ecosystem. And this is true weather it survives or becomes extinct.

Generics or Bust

I have to add my voice to the choir calling for generics to be added to Go. As others have noted Go contains no fewer than four parametrized types: arrays, slices, maps and channels. Such types are so mandatory that it seems impossible to build a programming language without them.

And it is an annoying asymmetry that I as a programmer can't define an equally parametrized linked list or binary tree type. I expect that these will come eventually. My hope is that it will be sooner rather than later though.

The Go Language

So there is a new language in town. Having gone through all of the docs I have to say it looks interesting. The need to destinguish between new and make is a little messy, the language FAQ agnoledge this however.

I like the type system, with the implicitly implemented interfaces. It does look like Go programs will involve quite frequent casting. Ditto for the built in concurrency primitives, and I expect that most programs will make quite frequent use of them. Where in Pthon I might use a generator I could well see myself using a goroutine in Go, and getting my generated items from a channel.

A lot of effort has been made to make the language terse, which is a nice feature for a low level language to have. And yes making switch statements default to breaking at the end of each case unless told otherwise. Thank you finally a language that reflects how switch is actually used!

Personally i don't see why they didn't just call the looping construct loop, rather then for. seeing as it is a general purpose looping construct that can be invoked in several ways that look nothing like a traditional for loop. Still this is a minor thing.

What does look certain is that Go programs aren't going to look much like C or java, once enough people learn how to use the language natively. The basic constructs are just different.

Now that I've gotten this far its time to try some actual programming in Go. To this end I've retrieved the list of 99 Lisp problems and I'll see how I go in solving them using Go. Step one will be to build a linked list typo work with. It will be interesting to see how much mindshare Go can capture. And when we can expect a Windows version, lets face it lack of Windows support is glaring omission at present, even if I don't use Windows I still recognise its importance in the marketplace. (Now there's a scary thought Go.net ... its only a matter of time i suspect.)

Lost in a Sea of Ideas

The following is a repost as the original got spammed with junk comments and Blogger dosn't have an easy way to remove large numbers of comments in one hit without dropping the entire post.

I have found myself lost in a sea of new concepts lately. Firstly I read Andrew Poltkin's presentation on Rule based systems in Interactive Fiction. I have to say it was discouraging in terms of the RPG I was writing. Short point being that This is harder then you think it is.

Then I came across the following article (PDF). Which is an interesting read. And raises a point that I missed the last time I saw it. Namely stop treating JavaScript as it it was a class based language with awkward syntax.

The thing is that It is a prototype based language with two kinds of links, and a couple of missing functions. The big problem with learning to write JavaScript properly is that most tutorials make this mistake, And their is a lot of truly awful JavaScript code samples out their.

I don't really have any new insights on prototype based inheritance (yet), so if your interested have a look at Douglas Crockford's JavaScript site. I won't pretend that I get everything Douglas is getting at but I'm convinced that he understands it and that this is a good place to start hacking.

So where does this leave my project?

Up in the air a little. As I'm determined to do it right as it where. And need to teach myself how to operate effectively in a prototype based language. I'm pretty well sold that a rule based approach might be the best thing I can do. I encountered this when I tried to add conditional logic to my RPG, My conditional tests required inimate knowledge of how the engine stores its data, which seemed way to coupled. What I seemed to need was a simpler data organisation. I can't think of anything simpler then a flat database of facts, and that sounds pretty rule based. So Murphy's law is in full swing and I'm going back to the drawing board. Just as soon as I've learnt some new tricks

To misquote a classic

A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How that code used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those servers dance
And, clients, they'd be happy for a while.

But XML made me shiver
With every page I'd deliver.
Bad news in the log-file;
I couldn't take one more crash.

Obama Snubs the Dalai Lama

I read this morning that President Obama has avoided meeting the Dalai Lama. I can't help thinking that he has done the correct thing here. Like many Westerns I have for a long time tacitly supported the notion that China invaded and is a hostile occupying power in Tibet.

However this may have been very much a case of I don't like Communism as a form of government and therefore the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The thing to ask is what the office of the Dalai Lama actually represented. The answer is that the office represents a brutal feudal theocracy.

As this article details up until the communist takeover Tibet was a feudal society which still practiced serfdom and mutilation as criminal punishment. Now the Chinese propaganda machine clearly has an agenda in perpetuating this view of history. I have no doubt that the do everything they can to exaggerate it. However I'm also certain that this position does have a factual base and should not be swept under the rug for convince. After all the west has an established history in supporting Dictatorships as a means of slowing the spread of communism.

Now here lies an interesting conundrum. If you accept the official of Tibetan Buddhism then the current Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of his predecessors, which would make him directly responsible for all of the actions of the regime through the ages. If this is true then no matter how benign and peaceful an individual he appears to be he does not deserve any support form modern democracies.

I just found this related story. Personally The position of the independce spokesperson sounds rather stupid to me. It was only the ruling class in Tibet, which was not elected, that lost its ability to determine Tibet's future. I doubt that without an extrnal push the regime would have changed significantly.

A Bill of Rights for Australia

A while ago former Priminister John Howard wrote a very persuasive article about why Australia should not have a Bill of Rights. I have to say that after reading it I was convinced. He presented what seemed to be an excellent argument for how a Bill of Rights would reduce democracy.

He argued that a Bill of Rights would shift power from the Legislature to the Judiciary. While he is right about that I find that I don't agree with his conclusion. And it all has to do with the concept of the two freedoms. A concept I first encountered in the dystopian novel 'The Handmaids Tale' by Margaret Atwood.

The two freedoms are freedom to and freedom from. And the thing is that they frequently clash. In the so called war on Terror we all have lost some of our freedom to, in the name of freedom from. Mostly this has happened in the guise of special anti terror laws that reduce some individual rights in order to protect society from harm.

More recently in Australia there has been the Internet censorship debate and the argument that to protect society from pedophilia we will have to restrict every ones Internet access. But we promise not to misuse this new censorship tool for any other purpose. Senator Conroy has argued vehemently that anyone who opposes him is supporting paedophilia and hence is morally corrupt. Not Senator I'm not supporting paedophilia I'm supporting my right to access information that the government of the day does not like. Promises that the blacklist will be limited to refused classification, with no public oversight, rings hollow to me. And are something you cannot promise in perpetuity. Instead I am certain that once the tool is there the government will come under immense pressure from lobbyists to use it against all sorts of information that some vocal minority find objectionable.

Would freedom of information enshrined in a bill of rights prevent this? Maybe maybe not. John Howard wants to argue that its not a choice that should be left to judges. The thing is that the worst the high court could do is agree with the government that such a filter was not against the bill of rights. What they couldn't do is mandate one, that power would remain with the Legislature.

What I have realised is that a Bill of right protects freedom to. But cares nothing about freedom from. In effect it says that some freedoms
are so important to maintaining democracy that we are willing to sacrifice freedom from, to protect them. A Bill of rights gives the judiciary the power to say no this law can't stand as it would reduce the freedom to do X which is protected by the Bill of rights. Now the Judiciary can already do this for anything that is covered by the constitution, so this isn't really a new power.

It seems to me to be a very good division of powers. Let the Judiciary protect freedom to and the Legislature protect freedom from. Because
when it comes down to it a free and open society cannot exist without freedom to.

So a bill of rights does, as Mr Howard claims, extend the power of the judiciary, but it does not give them new powers. The extension is very tightly focused and will in the end serve to strengthen democracy, just in case we ever make the mistake of electing a wannabe dictator into the highest office in the land.

Social Networking

I read recently that use of facebook by teenagers has declined for the first time ever. Some time earlier I also read accounts of what happens when the first facebook high wears off and you start realising. Oh so anything I put on Facebook will be seen by my boss, and my parents and my mother in law and ... what have I created. Fortunately for me I don't believe that any one of the above individuals in my life actually have a Facebook profile.

My Partner, has expressed similer annoyance with Facebook, where she has several groups of frends from different periods of her life. Very often something she wants to post is particularly relevant to one group and not the others. However having one networking sites all will see it, leaving some to scratch their heads and wonder what she is going on about.

Recently I have joined site dedicated to a particular subject of interest. What I found inside was an entire social networking site (blog included). I've been thinking about this for a while and I think it makes sense. The Facebook Idea of one network site to rule them all is a bad one. Why, because we all have segments to our lives. Places where we don't want to expose to everyone we know for one reason or another.

Interestingly this is one place where I don't even want interoperability. And their are certainly things I have posted in special interest sites that I don't want on my Facebook Page at the present moment.

But why not just use the entire internet as your social networking site? well that comes down to the problem of finding other people with similar interests. Take this blog. Its on a general blogging site, and all things considered I don't know that anyone actually reads it. Often I feel its I get more of an audience by posting my thoughts to Facebook, then to recording them here. Ditto for special interest sites where my posts are guaranteed to be on topic and delivered to an audience who will be interested in some of what I have to say on the matter at hand.

So it is natural that their will be an array of special interest social networking sites. Each with a target demographic of sorts, and many fostering particular special interests, whatever they may be.

An RPG in JavaScript

I've spent my train time for the last two weeks working on an wrting an JavaScript RPG (Thats Role Playing Game) system. The end result is intended to be a cross between the system used by Kingdom of Loathing and a traditional text adventure.

So far I've been boged down with a lot of low level mechanics, and ensuring that all my objects can round trip between JavaScript and XML. E4X makes this far less painful then it would otherwise be. The plan is to have a JavaScript game engine that executes XML based adventure files. Why XML? because JavaScript can allready parse it and it will be less cryptic then JSON. I'm musing that an adventure creator would also be nice, and would give me an excuse to play with XUL.

E4X means that at the moment my engine will only run in Firefox. But then this is a hobby project and I have better things to do then deal with the Pandora's Box of cross browser issues. Especially as Firefox 3 already implements so many goodies from HTML5 and ECMAScript 5th Edition.

Though I can't wait for the next beta of Firefox 3.5 and the @font-face CSS property. That and border images Should really come in handy when I get around to putting an interface page together.

JSEXT

I've been playing with a javascript library, which works as both a command line, and server-side execution Environment. Its called JSEXT and is a rather interesting beast. plus you can call your server side functions from script that executes in the browser, and JSEXT will generate the boilerplate needed for the AJAX call automatically.

For one thing it provides an incredible amount of auto loading magic, which sees it find not only functions in other javascript files but also in C header files. Any C library will effectively be usable form javascript. That got me thinking Cairo is a C library

Getting the helloworld example from the Cairo FAQ going was reletivly simple. But JSEXT provides something better, an OO wrapper for the Cairo library. Granted I did have to check the source out from SVN and compile it to get them, and then sort out a couple of minor bugs in the wrapper.

Anyway the following code is a slight modification of the basic example. This script is intended to be accessed from a web browser as title.jsx?"Insert your text here" and yes it works perfectly fine if you set the src attribute of an img tag.

function(str){
    this.responseHeaders.contentType = "image/png";

    var surf = new JSEXT1.Cairo.Surface.image("ARGB32", 800, 80);
    var cr = surf.context();

    with(cr){
        selectFontFace("serif", "normal", "bold");
        fontSize = 32;
        source = [0, 0, 1];
        moveTo(10, 50);
        showText(str);
    }
    surf.writeToPNG(stdout);

}

Yes this is a file containing one anonymous function. This is one of the more curious features of JSEXT. You can give it a directory tree and it will walk it and build a set of Javascript objects based on what it finds. This does requie one method per file, which is somewhat unusual. But seems to work alright in practice. It is also uses lazy loading so only the methods you actually use get loaded into the runtime.