Why is it that after 25 years writing software my subconscious is still unable to accept that a routine consisting of lots of lines might be very efficient where a much shorter one would be less efficient?

Y'know all those endless stupid articles and threads about girls in gaming?

The Escapist's header banners are showing Bravissimo ads this week.

I think that ends the debate.

OK, so having established that the archetypal women on my flist are in fact mrlloyd and hjalfi I think that's quite enough science for one week.

( Help Arrives )
( Types of Time Usage )
( Gas Tax Holiday )
( Everyday Shooter vs Lumines )
( Quiz Night )

Peter Moore, boss of EA Sports, had this to say on the subject of Nintendo's Wii Fit peripheral...

We're watching very closely what the Wii Fit board does. We think we have to have a role to play with that mum - the kids have gone to school, she's got 45 minutes on her own, the Wii is there, it's the first console she's ever liked because she can do things herself. And we're working on stuff, trying to work out how we can use EA Sports applications there.

By which he means "make piles of money". In the meantime, I think his insightful commentary calls for a poll...

Poll #1184519 If You Haven't Got a Willy, Get A Wii
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

I am...

I own / my husband owns...

I like...

Apparently imc is standing for the LJ advisory board.

This is very good news, since he is highly clueful and not remotely evil and in every way knows where his towel is (or did back when I was in Oxford and had more contact with him).

However, what would be even better news is if he actually succeeded in getting onto the board, so please go and vote for him here.

This won't mean anything except to ex-Tao people, but...

...GMail has just implemented bug label colouring!

And yes, it turns out it's every bit as useful as I thought it would be. Took me less than five minutes to set up and has made sorting through stuff way easier. Win!

Oops - been a while since I wrote a Cooperative Board Game Project entry.

I've been pondering the business of attacks for a while and I think I may have finally come up with a system I like. A brief description follows...

Attack/Action System - Result Counters

Physically this system is implemented using an opaque bag containing a set of small counters or tokens. For now I'm going to call the four kinds Red, Green, Blue and Yellow.

* At the start of the game the bag contains two of each colour of counter. A third counter of each colour is also required, which begins the game out of the bag.
* Various events during the game can cause counters to be added or removed from the bag. The minimum contents of the bag is two counters (so if you would remove one in that situation it stays in the bag instead). Similarly you cannot add a counter if there isn't an available one of the colour in question outside the bag.
* When using this system, a die is no longer rolled for combat. Instead, the player reaches into the bag and (without looking) withdraws two counters. The combination of colours drawn determines the result.
* To determine the result number from the colour combination, consult the character's description and/or the description of the weapon used. (So, for example, Bob the Hero might score +2 per Green or Blue and +3 per Yellow. And let's say he's wielding a baseball bat which gives +1 as standard and an additional +3 for any two matching counters. If Bob's player draws a pair of Blue counters the overall result is 8!)
* No one colour or combination is consistently favoured by the game. (So there is no sense in which Red is "bad" and Yellow is "good" as implied by the above example. Another character, Antibob the Villain, might get +3 for Red counters and nothing for Yellow.)

The thinking behind this system is that as the counter makeup of the bag varies the players will have to constantly reassess the effectiveness of different characters and equipment. Also the ability to deliberately interact with the contents of the bag will add a layer of strategy and necessitate planning ahead in the case of events which will unavoidably mess with the bag.

Suggestions for improvements, outright expressions of skepticism etc. welcomed as usual.

Why is it that Facebook doesn't let users interact with apps without granting them permission to access data?

On several occasions now I've received notifications along the lines of "SomeUser has entered data relating to you into StupidApp".

"Oh really?" I think, so I try to go and have a look and I'm immediately met with the firewall-like "Let this app access all my data and do whatever the fuck it likes with it" signup screen. But where's the option for "No thanks, just let me interact with this app using only my public data"? Not there.

(And in case anyone's wondering why I ignore all their "SomeUser has invited you to play StupidGame" requests, it's because I can't play without giving the game unlimited data access.)

As it turns out it's fine to want my program's data in canonical form, but if I actually canonise it I just end up with saintly data, which isn't quite what I need.

(In case you're wondering, I was looking up the spelling and was amused that the dictionary didn't have the meaning I intended.)

Increasingly I'm finding that the more clueful organisations I deal with are prepared to use email for things. Which is great. And on the assumption that the default formal mode for emails matches that for letters initial contact usually looks something like...

Dear Ms Lastname,

With regard to <blah blah blah>.

Yours sincerely,

<some combination of title and name>

Interestingly, in doing this I've noticed that I tend to get equally formal responses but that after a mail or two my correspondent will usually flip into a less formal email style. Which I certainly don't object to and pretty soon I'm writing in pretty much my usual manner. "Hi Firstname," at the start, "Cheers, Dom" at the end and the occasional ASCII smiley in the middle.

I've never once seen this happen with snailmail. Is there some property of hi-tech comms that promotes this kind of thing? Is formality actually a dated habit and it takes new technology to make us realise it?

All very interesting.

It's a well known thing that malicious Javascript can do bad things to your pooter.

But thinking about this issue this morning, I've decided I don't really understand why. Articles mentioning this always talk about the Javascript "executing malicious scripts". But if these scripts are also Javascript that doesn't help. And if they're not Javascript, why does Javascript itself have permission to do this without asking the user?

Of course it's possible that there are bugs in Javascript which allow this sort of thing, but then it wouldn't be strictly true to say it was a risk because known flaws get patched and most modern browsers auto-install patches.

What's really going on here?

I shall have to start being careful what I leave on my screen. Bea's reading is now good enough that she wandered into my study when I was typing this entry and said "You're writing about my dancing! Why?". Maybe I'll even have to actually password protect my WinXP login?

( Hippo Wins )
( No Business Like Showbusiness )
( Magic Online 3 )
( Stupid Dog )

You know how spammers often try to insert your name into their emails to make you think they're somehow relevant? I received a classic this morning:

Subject: naked hedgehog video!!!

I was both puzzled and amused by the spammer's imagination until I remembered something and looked at the raw email headers. Sure enough, the email had been sent to hedgehog@<my usual domain> - an ancient account that hasn't been used in many years^[1].

But I'm not clicking the link. I don't fancy hedgehogs much.

---

[1] It was the backing email address I created for a secondary account on a forum I used to frequent. Kinda the opposite of a sockpuppet - for use when I wanted to be anonymous. Interesting that a spammer has the email address. Doesn't say good things about the forum's admin.

So, Konjak has finally released the long-awaited action game Noitu Love 2 (the demo of which impressed me a few weeks ago).

The full game turns out to be a lot of fun too. Sadly not available for Mac or Linux, but if your OS is Windows flavoured it's well worth a look.

What's interesting to me is the number of people online complaining about the $20 price point. I'm struggling to come up with any rational reason for this. When Bit-blot's Aquaria was released at $30 a lot of people remarked that this was a bold move given that $20 was considered standard for indie games. So... what happened to that standard in the last six months?!

This must be an example of that behavioural economics stuff that Dan Ariely is battling Tim Harford with. Either that or people are just asshats. Wait, is that the same thing?

If you feel like spending a few minutes puzzle solving today, I recommend Qink (online Flash game). Clever, minimalist concept and very slick implementation, which is how I like my puzzles.

So, I'm now back from holiday. Actually I was back on Sunday, but I returned to such a crazy pile of things that needed doing that I had to actually do some of them before updating LJ. I know, I know, what's the world coming to.

( Do not click here if reading about events you weren't at upsets you )

So there I was, trying to give LJ's management the benefit of the doubt and they decide it would be funny to rickroll their entire userbase. Ah well, I'm used to dealing with people with a six year old's sense of humour. If they do it again it'll be no lemonade for tea. (Their tea, that is. You can still have lemonade.) My prediction is that next month they'll discover ƃuıɥʇ uʍop-ǝpısdn ʇɐɥʇ and their entire newspost will be upside down.

( Whirled Beta )
( I Can Has Utility? )
( Downloadable Content Abuse? )
( Random Thing of the Day )
( Noitu Love 2 - Devolution! )

PS. I'm off on holiday next week. Please feed the LOLcats while I'm gone?

Prior to Actionscript 3, Flash had no built-in call to programmatically generate circles. I just spotted this gem in the "recommended code" for approximating it manually using curve segments:

 static var anglePerArc:Number = Math.PI/4;
 static var controlPointRadius:Number = Math.tan(22.5 * Math.PI/180);

Evokes this marvellous mental image of some hard-working chap with a pencil and some graph paper struggling to work out where his curve control point needs to go.

When I'm writing code for an app that interacts with the user a lot I often find my early draft code contains sections like ( this )

OK, so now we need:

* A tumbler with a 22000m diameter.
* A novelty umbrella (about the same diameter).
* About 3600 billion cubic metres of fresh pineapple juice.
* 1800 billion cubic metres of rum (equal parts golden, dark and white).
* 900 billion cubic metres of apricot brandy.

Already got the ice thanks.