r-wos.org

So I looked at ownCloud this week. The install was pretty much hassle-free, as you would expect from a PHP application. And the web frontend is pretty nice (though extremely slow, at least on my AMD Sempron server). There’s a photo gallery, and direct media streaming, and zip downloads, and generally a lot of good…

Racket Appreciation Day was today, for me. I tried writing a small script that reads from Github’s API and displays a list of “@mentions” in Guile. (Why Guile? Well, the short version of the story is that I’d like to run this program on my [Ben NanoNote](http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Ben_NanoNote) since I have that machine lying around for…

Playing with node.js currently, and I don’t grok it. I’m passable (not “good”, just passable) in JavaScript but I don’t get why anyone would ever want to program in the style node.js dictates. It’s async, yeah. Only async. And async without language-level promises, or channels, or a select. Or multi-processing. Or anything really. They basically…

Here’s a small raycaster in CoffeeScript. I wrote that just to see how it would look. (There’s also a small rant at the end, if that’s what you’re looking for.) Result (click through from your RSS reader if you can’t see a canvas): Not bad, certainly more succinct than JavaScript, but …well – maybe I’ve…

Just some short notes about CoffeeScript, after maybe 5 hours of playing with it. This is mostly about the syntax – but then again, CoffeeScript is mostly about the syntax. I like it, overall, it’s definitely a step up from JavaScript. Though it is a bit of a “works 90% of the time” design: it…

Another entry without any ranting – what is this blog coming to? In order to not entirely slip into the realms of factual boringness this one is only useful for people who use wmii as their window manager: The wmii status bar doesn’t interpret ANSI escape codes for colors, but one can set the colors…

(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…