r-wos.org

(This is a postmortem for the 26th [Ludum Dare game programming competition](http://www.ludumdare.com). The theme was “minimalism” and I wrote [an HTML5 game called “**::.::::::.**”](http://r-wos.org/hacks/ld26/).) First things first: the ratings are in: My entry was placed 60th overall (out of 1610) which is just fantastic! The other rating categories: This time around I focused on making…

This is just another one of these “I have to write it down somewhere or I’ll forget it” things. Changing the implementation of dynamically linked library functions via LD_PRELOAD isn’t hard at all – but what wasn’t completely obvious to me is how to write implementations that use the original version of the function. As…

A lot of the Ludum Dare games are written in Java. Much to my surprise, I did have a JRE installed on my machine. So most of the games worked out of the box, but sometimes the JRE died with a peculiar error: Let’s try and understand this error, shall we? Can you image that…

The 26th Ludum Dare game programming competition was this weekend. The theme was “minimalism”. I wrote a game called “::.::::::.”. It can be played over here (use Chrome if you can). I don’t have a post-mortem handy (this time around, I’ll wait with that until the ratings are in) but the timelapse has just finished…

I like reading source code but it’s hard to find suggestions for programs that make a good read. There are some lists floating around the web, but it’s always the same four or five projects – sqlite, xmonad, and so on. And it seemed to me that most people blurting out “sqlite” didn’t really read…

Things I’ve learned today in my little Cray-1 adventure: The Cray-1 seems to use a Data General Eclipse as its control computer. The Eclipse’s OS is called RDOS – and that’s also the system the assembler is running on. (RDOS has the PROG/A/B switch syntax described in the assembler manual, and also uses the .SV…

(part 1) Nothing ground-breaking to report, yet – but I’m having a lot of fun so I thought I might as well blog about it. Today (well, actually yesterday, it’s 3:30am…) I’ve read the Cray Assembly Language manual I linked last time. It not only describes the architecture and instructions of the Cray-1 but also…

You might have heard about the guy who made a fantastic small FPGA Cray-1. He also found two old backup disks, one of which contains the last known copy of the Cray Operating System. I’ve just started playing around with the disk images – it’s quite exciting! The non-COS disk seems to contain some kind…

Just some links I stumbled upon recently: The first one’s an interview with Ken Arnold, and also the best discussion about program design and OOP I’ve ever read. It’s actually the only discussion of OOP I know of that doesn’t revolve around solutions for self-inflicted problems. I couldn’t find a page with the whole text,…

I’ve been playing with typography a bit lately. It’s a surprisingly addictive way to waste time. I’ve read Robert Bringhurst’s “The Elements of Typographic Style” and I rather liked it. The problem is, of course, once I’ve read it I couldn’t stop thinking about typography. I know that I do a lot of things very…