Monday, February 14, 2011
It seems that my Time To MegaHAL, or TTM, is about six weeks. I’ll explain. What generally happens is this: I start a new job, and meet a whole new bunch of people. After about six weeks, someone suddenly mentions “hey, you’re that MegaHAL guy”! It happened just today. My new boss, at a job [...]
Saturday, November 6, 2010
One of my sabbatical projects is MegaHAL.10, an entirely new version of the mildly popular chatterbot that I wrote and put online fifteen years ago. I’ve been writing it in Google’s Go programming language, and I recently started getting some exciting results. MegaHAL.10 generates sentences using a second-order Markov model. That means they tend to [...]
Yesterday I posted the following on Twitter: Why is the #golang community so much more holier-than-thou than the #ruby community? Harumph to all sanctimonious hackers. This got a concerned response from someone who works at Google as a “Go Gopher”, whatever that means. It also made me feel like a dirty troll, which wasn’t my [...]
Monday, September 20, 2010
Apart from text adventures, I love point-and-click adventure games (of the Monkey Island ilk), and the more modern Japanese interpretations of this genre (such as Hotel Dusk and Another Code). These latter games tend to be more focused on telling a story, and the interface offered to the player is subsequently stripped down (with less [...]
Monday, September 6, 2010
StackOverflow is a Q&A website for professional programmers. Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood developed the concept as a direct competitor to Expert Sex Cha… errr, Experts Exchange, and I now find that answers on StackOverflow are often in the top few results when I search Google for geeky, programmer-type stuff. They’re doing some good things; [...]
I had absolutely no sleep at all last night, which is why I spent today in a stupor, content with reading news and pottering about rather than Doing Something Challenging. This explains why I started doing some vanity searches this afternoon, digging up an old web-page of mine from the mid-1990′s. Yes, it used TABLEs [...]
2010 was to be my year of “no unfinished project”. I tried really hard to work 10 hours a week on “Postal Worker”, but slotting in two hours of development time between 9am and 1am each weeknight resulted in burnout (we have a new baby in the house, and I just couldn’t continue to burn [...]
I plan to take a bit of time off to (a) recover from the fantastic Global Game Jam that was held over the weekend and (b) check out some of the other Global Game Jam games. Big props to Simon Wittber for organising such a great event, and well done to all who took part! [...]
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I’m in the market for a small-ish computer monitor with integrated speakers and HDMI input, to sit on my desk and make it easier to do XBLA development, by having the XBOX right there, ready to go, at all times. Looks like it’ll be around $250 for a 22″ 16:9 jobbie, which is a bit [...]
A new gamejam starts on Friday. Tonight a mixer event was held in anticipation, during which hotdogs were consumed and the theme was announced: A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles. In addition, each game needs to incorporate, somehow, at least one of these three keywords: Sheep Scorched Reflection Thinking!
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