I think a lot of people will remember the Digital Economy Act getting as lot of press in the U.K. back around the time of the general election. It's been relatively unheard of since, which just goes to show how easily a voting public can be distracted (oh, look, there's some kind of wedding going on. Shiny).
Read More...Oh, look! A post containing pictures of things I've done. Shame it isn't anything more exciting than running around in a computer game. One of these days, I plan to get a life.
In the mean time here's some spans from Minecraft, the best thing to happen to people with mild OCD and lots of free time in...a good long while. For a game which started off as a project for someone learning how to design games, it's surprisingly good fun. Also, for a game written in Java, it's surprisingly responsive. Though, this may just be an artefact of the fact that everything is a cube. Probably easy for the VM to handle. And, to be honest, Java VMs are bloody good these days.
Read More...Like many of my posts, this follows on a from a discussion at Imperial College London. It's a great place to have random conversations about random (preferably science-, technology- and medicine-related) things: the sheer concentration of people thinking about things is amazing, and sometimes disturbing.
Read More...Well, here's a little thing which finally clicked in my mind a few weeks ago: lots of websites, for one reason or another, have some kind of bar which is affixed to the bottom of the page. Look, for example, at facebook - they've got the little char bar which sticks to the bottom of the page. Back in the days when heathen coders still walked the Earth1, it was done using interesting positioning scripts and a lot of black magic. Then people began to discover the wonderful world of the other CSS positioning modes (relative, absolute, and fixed). However, there were still a lot of problems: absolute doesn't scroll with the page, so it's right out. Fixed does scroll, but getting it to stick to the bottom was always a challenge - you generally had to set the offset from the top of the page, requiring you to work out the window height, and subtract the height of the bar, remembering that each browser used slightly different values (based on whether the renderer used the padding-box, margin-box, or border-box to handle these sorts of things).
Read More...Disclaimer: The copyright to Snorlax as a concept is probably owned by someone. If anyone asks, this is satire or some such, and is meant as harmless fun. The code presented here uses my own name, in fact. I don't think anyone's copyrighted my name. Might be a good idea. I look forward to the cease and desist letters.
Read More...Ah...finally, something to post which isn't abstract and boring. I've actually done some work which can1 be muttered about here. And due to that the fact a lurgy has me pretty much bed bound, and my laptop will barely run Civ 5, and I suddenly have time to update my blog. This has been waiting to be written about for over a month but, hey, I've been busy.
Read More...This one is for all the freelance coders out there who happen to stumble across this post; not that I expect many, but you never know.
The project, currently named in my head "MusicMerge" (I suck at naming things) is to do with music library management. One of the big problems I have co-ordinating a large music collection between the members of the household is correctly identifiying and removing duplicates so, I've been thnking about how this task can be automated. What follows is a rough specification of 'MusicMerge' and the various features required to make it usable:
Read More...Information in this post is reproduced, with permission, from Anthony Byrant's Blog (link), which is well worth a read especially given his current project is the construction of a tokeniser/parser/compiler(?) for a generified language.
Read More...Warning: Another badly formed essay. Again, may be revised.
I'm am really interesting in getting other people's opinions for both the essays here, and any other met0aphysical topics people would like to discuss. Leave a comment, or drop an email
The question of metaphysical freedom has plagued philosophy since the development of consistent theories of a causally-closed physical reality. If, for every each physical event there is a direct physical cause, then the system is casually closed. Furthermore, a system where the effect that a generated by a specific set of conditions is always the same is a deterministic system. The current scientific model is both deterministic and casually closed and, therefore, should be completely definable for all time given only the initial conditions and the causal rules.
Read More...Cross post from the Official Google Blog (which is always worth a read when they're not touting the success of Google Apps): Light summer reading: entertaining legal opinions
Enjoy!