Load/Save

Posted on May 15, 2009 by MXH

When I implemented my web-based port of Taipan!, I added one minor feature: I let the user save (and load) a game to (or from) a single savegame ‘slot’. It can take a few hours to work your score up to the highest levels, so this seemed like a nice convenience feature. Today, I’d like to talk a little about the implementation of this feature.

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Learn to Program

Posted on May 14, 2009 by MXH

One of the best introductory programming books I’ve ever seen is entitled “The IBM PC from the Inside Out“. This is an assembly language oriented guide to the programming and operation of the 8086-based IBM PC. It suffers from being out of print, and from being targeted at a 25 year old machine, but neither drawback is as significant as you might think.

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Sunk Costs

Posted on May 13, 2009 by MXH

Seth’s got a pretty good post up on the importance of ignoring sunk costs. He makes a couple of mistakes, however, that are worth clearing up.

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Firefox Cookies

Posted on May 12, 2009 by MXH

Several weeks ago I updgraded to Firefox 3.  It worked fine, except for one strange behaviour:  It deleted all cookies every time it was shut down.  (I realize that this is sometimes the desired behaviour, but I didn’t like it, and had configured FF not to do it – but the cookies were deleted anyway.)  I found this thread, which suggested deleting the cookies.sqlite file.  (I presume it can get corrupted.)  I removed the file, and cookies started working properly. FYI, on my machine, the file in question was located here:

C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%RANDOM%.default\cookies.sqlite

(where %RANDOM% stands for an apparently random 8-character alphanumeric string; there was only one subdir in the Profiles directory, however, so it was easy to guess which one to change.)

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JavaScript Cookies

Posted on May 11, 2009 by MXH

It’s pretty simple to manipulate cookies in JS, but there are a few gotchas. Browser incompatibilities naturally crop up, although somewhat differently than you might expect; some browsers are more permissive of the Wrong Thing than others, so you might blot your copybook and not notice until you hit cross-browser testing.

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Working Actors

Posted on May 10, 2009 by MXH

I was watching “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” the other day (okay movie, desperately needs about 40m of cuts) and thought I recognized one of the actors by his voice. After a little searching, I found him on IMDB: Keenan Wynn is the man, and the role I knew him from was that of Col. “Bat” Guano in “Dr. Strangelove”.

The thing that struck me was how much work he did. He has 271 credits in IMDB as an actor (by way of comparison, his better-known co-star from “Dr. Strangelove”, James Earl Jones, has 171). He has 14 credits in the last two years of his life alone. The guy was a professional.

There’s no grand point to this; just a moment of respect for those guys who go steadily about their craft in show biz, without becoming celebrities.

By the way: William Shatner? 195 entries.

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New Taipan! Port

Posted on May 8, 2009 by MXH

I enjoyed Jay Link’s JS version of Taipan! so much that I just had to play a complete version. So, I took his C/ncurses version and ported it to JavaScript. The port is available here. (Warning: It’s feature-complete in terms of gameplay, but some graphics effects are missing. Also, it hasn’t been tested extensively, although I’ve got it running in versions of Safari, FF, and IE.) Aside from producing a diverting game, this exercise taught me something interesting.

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Recommended: Keith Hennessey

Posted on May 7, 2009 by MXH

Keith Hennessey has got a new economics blog up. Whether or not you agree with his politics (he’s an ex-Bush WH guy) he’s worth reading for the clear way he lays out the issues surrounding questions of economic policy, with particular emphasis on the political realities of economic policy making. His post on last Thursday’s Chrysler bankruptcy announcement, for instance, is hard on the Obama folks, but sensitive to the “no good options” realities they face.

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Middleman

Posted on May 6, 2009 by MXH

Consider this line from the movie “Layer Cake”:

The art of good business is being a good middleman…putting people together. It’s all about honor and respect.

It’s an interesting idea. (Quick review of the movie: Stylish, but not particularly good. Did wonders for Daniel Craig’s career, has got a really fun soundtrack, and features a very cute Sienna Miller.)

The same ground is covered somewhat more seriously in this post. Either way, I think it’s an excellent point. In strictly utilitarian terms, the number of people you’ll meet who will be directly useful to you, or to whom you’ll be directly useful, is a small fraction of the total number of pairs of people you know who would like to meet one another.

To put it another way: The overall value of your social network increases as the square of the number of nodes. The immediate value of your social network to you increases linearly in the number of nodes. You can create a lot more value by focusing on the former, as opposed to the latter.

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Continuations

Posted on May 5, 2009 by MXH

I’ve been working with continuations for the past few days. I haven’t had occasion to use them before, and must confess to finding them a little spooky. As a first impression I’d say that I like them, but find that, as with threads, buggy code that involves continuations can give rise to some truly bewildering behaviour.

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