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UPDATE: Added structure and a few more ideas... Intro Have you ever seen someone include a giant open source library in a project, just to access some small part of its functionality? It's very important to have someone else write, debug, and maintain a large part of your code, but when you do this over and over, it can add quite a lot of bloat to an app for comparatively little gain in functionality. This is a huge problem, as I see it, but maybe there is a solution? What about allowing people to integrate only small subsets of modules into their code. I'm calling this idea "code google," for lack of a better term, although it's a LOT more than just search. It involves search, analysis, IDE integration, and social networking, so that library developers can track what parts of their code are actually being used. It's far from trivial to implement, but I think it could be very useful Before our company started, a friend and I wrote a fair-sized ga...

I already blabbed this in a bunch of emails to people, but just in case... Scott Dunphy of New Style interviewed me about Death of the Vele, here . This was the first time I've been interviewed for anything; I was surprised I sounded coherent -- I thought it might come out a lot less cohesive than it did when I listened to it.

I have changed TPS many times in the past year and a half, but the core idea is still to be a collaborative story telling RPG that feels like a traditional RPG. The latest version of it is called Death of the Vele and the (lame) website is here It has a link to the latest rules. Wow, taking a look at the old rules, I see that I have streamlined the mechanics a LOT since last year. They are simpler, lighter weight, and more intuitive. There are also tools to promote more integrated and structured stories (spotlights, hitting aspects, etc.). Death of the Vele also adds a back story (which you can remove if you don't like, of course). I'm hoping to publish Death of the Vele within the next 12 months. In the mean time, the rules are out there for free, so anyone who wants to can use them. Here is the feature list from the latest copy of the rules: Collaborative, but feels like a traditional RPG Your characters are yours Supports campaign-length stories Game play ...

I made a slide presentation introducing Lambda Calculus and some functional concepts (lazy evaluation, how to represent data, etc.). It also talks about a Lambda Calculator I wrote, which does LC in three ways: compiles into JavaScript interprets through substitution (alpha, beta, and eta) and shows the steps compiles into virtual machine code (and can execute it) The VM still fails on some complex cases, but when I have that working, I want to make it generate native code, using LLVM. I open sourced all this, under the ZLIB license. Oh, I also started on a Lambda Calculus version of space invaders , which is in there, too :) LC is a really nice language. I wasn't able to find a modern, untyped, lazy language. It seems like functional languages have all gone the way of static typing, but I'm hoping it doesn't have to end that way. Looking at what Anders Møller and co. are doing with TAJS at Aarhus University and BRICS gives me hope that some day, the computer will te...

I got Plan9 from User Space and started messing with it in the hopes of getting a nice toolbench going with Acme. Since I wrote Ober , I've been interested in this idea. Now, I'll probably rewrite it in Go. I'm wondering if I can just use named pipes to mimic what Acme does with its 9p interface. Anyway, I wrote a simplified version of the Calc tool I wrote for Ober and I put it, here . The calc tool searches an Acme window for variables and their values and some code at the bottom. Then, it executes the code, sending the variables and values to its stdin. The code is expected to output new values for some of the variables. Calc parses the output and replaces the new values into the window. I'm also including two wrappers that make it easy to write calc scripts in rc or Go, so you can say something like this: Bob's age=30, he is yearsleft=0 years away from retirement (calc). #!/usr/bin/env calcgo yearsleft = 55 - age If you middle-click "calc" in t...

I've been searching for the "Philosopher's Stone" of role playing for years -- a role playing system that combines traditional role playing with the collaborative story telling of Universalis. I think the Blood Red Sands system might allow this. By replacing the coins of Universalis with dice, BRS introduces relative differences between traits, an element of risk into contesting for narrative control, and a competitive framework for play. I think this difference can allow it to support traditional role playing better than Universalis. That's how the document for the new game I'm working on starts. I found Ralph Mazza's Blood Red Sands about 5 weeks ago, when I checked out the Ramshead Publishing site, to see if there was anything new going on. Wow, was there ever! Blood Red Sands is a highly stylized, competitive role playing/story telling game about heroes and their ordeals as they strive to confront the evil, despotic Witch King in a blasted land c...

Approach I started working on my file sharing approach. Sharing will not involve deltas or packs, just chunks, by Git id. The idea is to share Git commits, with all of their associated tree and blob objects. They'll be shared using a manifest for each commit that exhaustively lists all of the chunks in that commit. A manifest will be a binary XML document (using fastinfoset , same as Xus uses for its protocol), since that's a pretty efficient binary serialization format (using BER encoding for numbers in a lot of places and whatnot) and then using another XML doc to list chunks for the manifest: A commit manifest contains the serialized commit data, the commit id, and a list of tree object ids/crcs and blob ids with blob chunk ids/crcs A commit manifest chunk list contains a list of chunks for the commit manifest file, since a commit manifest file could get large I'll probably use an extra branch to store the chunks that a peer currently has for that branch. When it ge...