Posts under ‘geek’

Cuil (pronounced “cool”) debuted today, a new search engine brought to you by a few former Google employees. It’s pretty slick, presenting the user’s search results in a columnar, newspaper fashion, configurable to either 2 or 3 columns wide. It’s a nice, simple format. I really like it.
Unfortunately, it appears the engine itself might still [...]

I ran across scanned copies of the Commodore 64 User’s Guide and Programmer’s Reference Guide, in handy PDF format. Not surprising, really, that someone took the time to scan them in.
I sometimes wish I still had my 64.
Oh, and be sure to download Firefox 3. Very nice.

This nice article brought back memories of old-school copy protection, such as “enter last word of second to last sentence on page 72 of game manual” or intentional bad sectors on commercial 5.25 inch floppies in an attempt to thwart copying on the 1541.

I’m about 50% complete with the Java implementation of Leafpile but have decided to put development on the back-burner while I focus on learning to write Mac applications. In fact, why not simply port what I have now over to a Cocoa application. Mac is back in service again, and I’ve really been itching to [...]

Spotted in the wild. And yes, this version of Spam isn’t good for you either.

The Spam slot machine!

Progress has been glacial, but as of today, about 25% of the opcodes are coded and tested. I completed a “simple” console UI using Swing and the Java 2D API because I was at a point where I needed some kind of user interface to do any kind of useful testing. I don’t work much [...]

I added a page listing my all-time recommended list of programming books, guides, and references. It’s called Good Reads, and you’ll find a link on the right.

I setup a new project at SourceForge called Leafpile. The plan is to do a Java implementation of the Z-machine virtual machine used for running interactive fiction story files, (think: Infocom). There’s a very concise standard out there for how to do this, called the Z-Machine Standards Document.

Lots of Post-It notes and scribbles already.
There are [...]

I was cleaning up an old hard drive yesterday and ran across a pile of Infocom data files from their popular text adventures. They probably came from an old compilation I picked up years ago called The Lost Treasures of Infocom. I absolutely loved playing these games on my Commodore 64.
Infocom’s games ran on a [...]

If you’re doing any kind of Ajax development, I’d highly recommend getting the Firebug plug-in for Firefox. It’s been a godsend for debugging Ajax apps.

What killed them? Google, Ajax, broadband, and OS X, in Paul Graham’s eyes at least.
And, I totally agree with him. Looking at his list, I’m already quite entrenched with 3 of the 4 items, and if it weren’t for my PC at the office, I’d have dumped Microsoft long ago, since everything I do now [...]

Being quite familiar with Kathy Sierra through the Head First series of books Head First Java and Head First Design Patterns, it was a bit shocking to read that she’s been the subject of death threats and violence against her on her blog.
Or maybe not. Blogs, it appears, have now become the new Usenet, where [...]

Playing around today with Genalyze and parsing some recent spam that fell into my trap reminded me of the great articles on spam-filtering and analysis by Paul Graham. I was surprised I didn’t have a link to his website here. Remedied. Graham’s site should be required reading, not just for his articles on spam, but [...]

Much to my surprise, I’ve actually found some time in my hectic schedule over the past few weeks to play around with C#. My first impression is that I’m pretty impressed with Microsoft’s effort. C# is quite similar to Java, I’ve found I’ve been able to pick up the core language in no time at [...]