KBtris

Some day, I will stop thinking of ways to ruin Tetris. But it is not this day.

A little while ago my brain finally realized that two very familiar sets of numbers match up.  Ten main keys on a computer keyboard's homerow, four main rows of ten keys each.  Ten columns in a Tetris playing field, four orientations for Tetris pieces.  And that was that.  From that moment, I had no choice.

A version of Tetris requiring most of the keyboard had to exist.  If it already did, I couldn't find it.  So now the world has one more Tetris clone.

http://kbtris.penduin.net

KBtris has a steep learning curve, which is something I would normally shy away from in a game.  But the idea is too compelling.  Traditionally, when a Tetris piece appears, even if you are a master player you still have to get your fingers or thumbs to input something like:

left-left-left-left-rotate-drop

Now, you can do the same thing with:

q

One keystroke will both rotate your piece to the desired orientation and move it to the desired column.  This of course means you need to _have_ a desired orientation and column, and then hit the correct key out of forty.  It's efficient, but you need all your fingers and your wits about you to get started.  From there, it's not completely unlike learning the piano.

I've played a lot of Tetris in my life; I consider it one of the purest gaming experiences imaginable.  My first goal now that KBtris exists is to get as good and as fast as I can at it.  I'm curious whether I'll be able to keep up with friends who are faster typists.

Beyond that, I want to see someone get really good.  Way beyond my abilities.  I want to see a KBtris Olympian and be shamed.

Maybe _then_ I'll stop thinking up ways to ruin Tetris.

How to Fix: Firefox + Wine + "Open With" List

I forget why I even have wine in the first place, but I do.
(Wine, in this context, is a piece of software that lets me run Windows programs on my Linux system.)

Every once in a while, Firefox and Thunderbird would come across a file or attachment and prompt me for what to do with it.  Infuriatingly, the default choice was sometimes wine or some terrible wine version of explorer, or something.  I scoured Firefox's about:config and anything else I could think of, but there was no mention of wine associated with file types.  Web searches were useless too.

Finally, I found this:

https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#How_do_I_clean_the_Open_With_List.3F

Relevant snippet:

rm -f ~/.local/share/mime/packages/x-wine*
rm -f ~/.local/share/applications/wine-extension*
rm -f ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/*/*/application-x-wine-extension*
rm -f ~/.local/share/mime/application/x-wine-extension*

That is what I needed.  ~/.local/share had some crap in it which many desktop applications, Mozilla's included, found and used to figure out handlers for different file types.  I can't imagine that setting anything to do with wine for such things could ever be useful for any reason ever, but if you use windows programs on purpose, you may wish to pick through those files a little bit more carefully than I did.

After nuking those, extensionless text files no longer try to open in some bastardized version of notepad.exe, oddly-formatted image files no longer try to launch some weird windows tool, and I no longer get angry at my computer for trying to run terrible programs for no reason.

My hope is that if I post this, I'll save at least one poor sap some time in their search for the same answer.

BUB on Nintendo 3DS

Well here it is, my first game "published" (in some sense anyway) via entirely-above-board means on a Nintendo console.  (Tong on Wii was great fun to do, but requires a little hacking for others to play.)

I got to draw Ork a couple dozen times.  I got to play and re-play a game-in-progress over and over.  I got to write a program in BASIC, complete with PRINTs, GOSUBs, and DATA blocks.  Every once in a while, I engage in a project that makes me feel like a kid again.  This was such a project.

For anyone and everyone who has SmileBASIC, here is the download code for BUB:

83DXN3L4

I posted that code on Nintendo's own built-in chat-about-games-you're-playing service, and it looks like some people are already having fun, including someone who recognized BUB from its Gamebuino version!

https://miiverse.nintendo.net/posts/AYMHAAACAAADVHksVo-stg

Anyway, that's my latest.  Some insomnia-hours programming and scribbling has become my favorite-so-far version of BUB.  I like to think somewhere there's somebody whose mind is set to sparking by this and other such toys.  Toys they can enjoy both as games and as a means of learning to program.  May the source be with you!

Smile!

A short while ago, the best software yet came out for the Nintendo 3DS.  It's not even a game.  It's called Smile BASIC, and it turns any 3DS into the magical kind of flexible, programmable, easily-learnable computer that is sadly otherwise absent from the modern world.

I was a child in the 80s, when Apple II and Commodore 64 computers were everywhere.  You could check out computer books and magazines from any library and type in listings of BASIC programs.  Once you got something running, you could modify or expand on it in any way you were clever enough to figure out.  The first open-source software that got me excited wasn't GNU or Linux or anything like that - it was some random maze-generating program or box-drawing routine that I copied off a printed page.

Now, that same magic, that sense of learning BASIC from examples and figuring out how to make a computer do things of your own design, is available in a $10 download, on a ubiquitous handheld computer.  And in addition to all those tricks we did on 8-bit, keyboard-enclosed, tube-TV-connected 80s technology, a slew of new BASIC commands are available which open up the 3D display, stereo speakers, wireless networking, and many megabytes of RAM to the same kinds of easy programming as PRINTing "Hello World".

If it were up to me, this or something like it would come standard on anything and everything with a CPU.  I don't care if BASIC isn't a powerhouse language, or if the hardware abstraction is limited in some ways, the point is that there needs to be a way to begin learning, on some level, how these gadgets we keep buying actually work!

A while back, I became a registered Nintendo developer.  That meant I could order dev kits, create software, and sell it through Nintendo's eShop services on Wii U and 3DS.  As a long-time Nintendo fan this was an exciting step, but as someone who values sharing ideas (and code) more than making money, it tore me up a bit to think I'd be putting out software which the next generation of me's couldn't poke around in, learn from, and make their own changes to.

Now, I don't have to.  Anybody who creates anything using Smile BASIC can publish it online, ready for anybody else to download, use, and edit just as if they'd copied it out of the back of a magazine.  Stay tuned; I'll be posting my first 3DS game very soon!

Ten Years

Ten years ago, Kim and I got married.  We didn't know then what those ten years would look like, nor do we now know much about the next ten, but we'll continue to figure it out together.  (With healthy doses of sarcastic humor and genuine love.)  We're not big on vacations or travel, but we decided to take some time off for our 10th anniversary and visit Lake Superior.  We got to do plenty of walking around Duluth, I got to sample a handful of local brews, and we got to spend a week together on own terms, according to our own whims.

 I'm thankful every day that our lives connected and joined.  We're pretty private and introverted people, but I'm happy to share a little moment like this.

Super Eclipse

Got to stare at the moon and stars with Kim last night while the moon put on a big show for us.  Last time I saw something like this, I was left to my own thoughts.  While I'm always captivated by any and all celestial dances, everything is made more enjoyable when shared with someone you love.

As it happens, we were also accompanied by a camera which was up to the task this time.  We brought some lawn chairs out to the little park area behind our apartment and watched from full moon through after the umbra had passed by before clouds started interfering.  My tripods are still in storage, so the shots I took were hand-held; 1/10th second exposures were about as long as I could get away with, but I still got some very satisfying photos, including this one.

We'd heard "blood moon" among the terms being thrown around leading up to this eclipse, and it really earned its name.

I'll have to play with some of the multiple-exposure shots I took as well.  The camera does have an HDR mode but as I mentioned, no tripod, and besides I don't actually know how to use it yet.  When we bought it, video was my first priority, and learning all the still features took a back seat so distant I still haven't gotten around to it.  :^)  I fumbled around in the dark a good while just figuring out how to get the basic shots I did.

Curiously, at maximum zoom (300mm) I was able to focus behind the moon.  I suppose that means we need to go hunting for Jupiter and Saturn sometime.

(Stars already appear very crisp in these moon shots, so I probably just misunderstand what's going on when I dial the focus past a certain point.  Regardless, gas giant hunting sounds fun!)

Shoes

My wife's been convinced for some time that I've needed new shoes.  Fine, fine, I got a replacement pair.  Same exact make and model, not sure I can even tell 'em apart.  I guess the female mind is just better tuned to pick up on these subtle details.

48-Hour Film: Enjoy the Show!

Well we did it.  Mike, Jed, myself, and a bunch of other very fun people got together the other weekend and dove in head-first to the Minneapolis 48 Hour Film Project.

That means we drew a genre out of a hat, got assigned some required elements, wrote, shot, edited, scored, and submitted a short movie in less than two days.  The nominations are set for the contest part of the event (not us!), so the embargo is lifted and we can now share our movie anywhere we please.

Take a look, enjoy the show (see what I did there?  ...'cause that's the title of ... oh forget it.) and if you like, check out a site where I detailed our production and have a bunch of related crap available for download:

http://penduin.net/48hfp/

A Proud Day

So the US Supreme Court has handed down two sane rulings in as many days?  What curious times we live in...

Congratulations to marriages and families of all kinds!  It shouldn't have taken until 2015, it shouldn't have taken a supreme court decision, it shouldn't have been such a close vote, and it certainly shouldn't have to endure the hissyfits which the ignorant will doubtlessly continue to throw.

Progress is slow and messy, but it's oh so satisfying to witness the right side of history during these victories.  I never had to fight for my right to marry, but I'll continue to fight for others.  And today... today is a good day.  Today we should all be proud.

Mr. President, P.S.

...And now we're supposed to get behind extending various provisions in the friggin' Patriot Act?!

I can only hope this is all part of some bizarro, genius strategy to get the right-wing nuts in congress to throw yet another anti-Obama tantrum, and ultimately ends in these terrible ideas dying out.  That wouldn't be the worst plan, actually, but this is a bit confusing for those of us who agreed with the Barack Obama we voted for.

Dear Mr. President, A Reply

As he does from time to time, president Obama has graced my inbox with an (entirely personal, I'm sure) email.  Often, these are asking for a show of support, standing up against the lunatic fringe known as more than half of the U.S. government.  This one required a little more thought.

Overall I think Obama has done a good job; I think history will be kinder to him than the present is.  But on this particular topic I'm not convinced I can stand with him.

"I want to set the record straight", he begins.  This is about the Trans-Pacific Partnership that's been drawing so much fire.  I figured I would put my reply here, since this blog is exactly as likely to make it across the commander-in-chief's desk as my email response.

Normally, when I have thoughts that thousands of people have, I don't bother posting them.  Why pollute the internet with opinions others have expressed at least as well?  But this time, the fact that my voice is not unique is, I think, part of the point.  So to begin with, here is the key paragraph from Obama's message:

But as long as 95 percent of our potential customers live outside our borders, we don't have the option to sit back and let others set the rules. We need to take this opportunity to level the playing field -- because when we're competing on equal ground, American workers win.

There was more, but this was as close as he came to addressing the secretive nature of the agreement, which is my primary concern about it.  (I have plenty of secondary concerns based on the leaked draft sections.)  So, here is my reply, to president Obama and to anyone who cares about my two cents:

I want to trust you're looking out for us.  But you also promised transparency, and you haven't made a convincing argument about why the details of this agreement must be kept secret.  The wikileaks draft has some very alarming provisions.  We the people don't know whether that stuff is being reigned in or made worse.

Keeping citizens out of a conversation between governments and multinational corporations on sweeping international trade deals does not feel very lowercase-d democratic (or party Democratic for that matter).  It sure doesn't sound like the level playing field you're talking about.

I'm sorry.  I stand behind many of your actions and attitudes, but secrecy and ramming legislation through raise red flags for me.  Public scrutiny is a necessary part of our republic, and I will require evidence and thorough logical arguments before I can stand with you on this big, hush-hush deal.

-Owen Swerkstrom

Another silly device, another silly game

The other day, a friend tipped me off to an in-development smartphone with a round display. Circular. I've used a computer mouse that shape before, and wasn't super-impressed, but until/unless I see one in person I won't make jokes.

But it got me thinking, what sort of game or toy might I create for something with a round display?  My first ideas were tilt-based, like those old BB-in-a-maze toys.  But for whatever reason, I was compelled to quickly throw this together:

http://turn-n-seek.penduin.net

It's really dumb.  You have a little view of the goal pattern (which you can scoot around to see more, but never much at once), and you turn the dials around to try to match it.  Get everything lined up within +/-5 degrees, and you win.  Then it resets, and picks a new random number of dials, segments, and colors.

As it turns out, it's a kinda fun little time-waster on a normal slab-shaped phone or tablet too.  (Note: Android's stock browser is terrible; use Firefox or Chrome instead.)

I have a running in-joke (so in, it's basically just with myself).  The more effort I put into a game or app, the less people will care about it.  For example, according to the stats on the Firefox app marketplace...
https://marketplace.firefox.com/search?author=penduinbits
My most popular app by far is a stupid QR scanner I wrote in an hour.
In distant second is Halloween Artist, which I did put some effort into.
Dead last is Picross, which was by far the most work of the few apps I have listed here.

So, by this logic, since it took no time to throw together, my new "turn & seek" game will soon have hundreds of thousands of people playing!  ;^)

Bub Bub Bubbin' Along

Not a lot to show yet, but here's a side-by-side glimpse into the past and future of my silly Bub game:

I'm rebuilding the game with full animation support (rather than building on the table-based code I whipped up for the prototype), so there's still a lot to do as far as gameplay.  Right now, there is only walking left and right, and no logic for slurping up bubbles, bonking into walls, or really doing anything other than seeing my scribbles begin to come alive.

If you have a decent browser (Firefox, Chrome, probably Safari, maybe newest IE) you can always try the latest checked-in version here:
http://smogheap.github.io/bub/html5/
...and of course I'll post to this blog when there's something worth posting.

The current controls highlight just how much is yet to be done:

• mouse click: test a random screen transition
• left/right key: walk

...and that is all.  :^)

More and Again

Disclaimer: I know very little about economics or sociology.  This is just a thought I felt was worth exploring.

One of the effects of living in a capitalist society and consumer culture is the notion, the drive, to acquire more and more.  What we've got is not enough, we should keep getting and getting.  It's not in the pledge of allegiance (but then, neither was monotheism until 1954) or otherwise literally expressed, but it's a kind of background radiation.  A color given to "normal".  A base molecule found everywhere in our cultural fabric.

Part of it is biological - we still have all the hunting and gathering instincts our ancestors did, and some of us certainly have hoarding tendencies which can take great mental discipline to keep in check.  But all cultures have that; that's not even exclusively human behavior.  What I'm talking about is man-made.  Not just the commercials and sales and the keeping up with the Jones', but the unspoken institution of perpetually wanting more.

As consumer goods became cheap and profitable to manufacture and distribute, this "must get more" norm grew organically.  Means of injecting this idea into as many minds as possible became a business itself.  Those who had the means to manufacture and sell invested in amplifying it, one product or subscription or investment opportunity at a time.

Here's the crux of my thought:  That message of always needing more has spread so completely that those at the top, those with the means, are also being injected with it.  With their own amplified message.  The vast wealth they've made from feeding consumer culture is not enough.  Black Friday shoppers have nothing on the wealthy anytime a million dollars can be spent acquiring more millions.

So there we have it, great income inequality and all the economic badness that goes along with it.  I've seen it grow in my lifetime, but history suggests there may be cycles at work.  The rich get richer, the poor poorer, then things go pear-shaped.  More equality leads to more opportunity and growth, then eventually we start spiraling out of control again.  If there were some good way to measure the background radiation of more-more-more, I wonder if it would rise and fall along with these cycles.

I also wonder if we can learn from the past and maybe stop swinging around so much.  And in the meantime, I hope another ever-present message gets some amplification of its own:  "There are more important things in life than money."

Go and vote. Period.

Moving back to a swing state in the months leading up to an election, even a midterm, has been interesting.  The "news" was on here the other night and after an ages-long commercial break containing literally nothing but campaign ads, the next story was about yet another campaign ad and whether it was true.  The segment after that was a few minutes of free air time for a couple of local candidates.

Between the flood of emails begging for money and the 24-hour mudslinging, I'm beginning to think that even if all the wrong people get elected, resulting in the most crooked and backwards outcome for each office in play, at least this madness will be over.  Small consolation, but palpable relief nonetheless.

I gassed on earlier about how preposterous amounts of money will be spent lying to us.  I sure wish I could say I was crying wolf. There are local politicians I like, those I consider a lesser evil, and those I dread.  But the bigger, money-soaked picture has been all dread.  Well, save for this fascinating little proposal:
https://mayday.us/

I've embraced the irony; the idea of killing ridiculous political spending by means of ridiculous political spending makes me smile (even if I'm also shaking my head).  If a politician's platform includes stamping out the absurd legal equivalency of money and speech, includes patching up known corruption vectors, includes valuing human citizens even if they aren't billionaires, then he or she has my support.

I hope you agree with that sentiment, wherever you find yourself on America's silly one-dimensional political spectrum.  But even if you don't, I hope you go and vote.  Period.

We have no right to complain about our civilization if we don't exercise our most basic civil liberty.

Bub

The short version:

Try out a prototype of "Bub" (a game I'm developing) in your browser:

http://smogheap.gitlab.io/bub/prototype.html

The long version:

Decades ago, I started scribbling alien critters, and this little guy(?) became one of my favorites.

Over a year ago, a scribble turned out like this...

...and I mused that this incarnation might need to star in a game at some point.

Months ago, I saw a crowdfunding campaign for this wild little thing.

Called Gamebuino, it's a tiny homebrew portable gaming console powered by cheap, ubiquitous, open technology all the way down.  I needed to pitch in, and I needed to write a game for it.

The screen is small, low-resolution, and black-and-white; my game had to use simple imagery.  There are very few buttons; the controls had to be simple too.  Ork is a simple shape, so I began prototyping a low-resolution game where he could walk around.

Completely-irrelevant tangent:  I say "he", but I'm pretty sure Ork and the other inhabitants of planet Snork (gimme a break, I was 8 :^) are hermaphroditic.  I'm not sure how biology works there, but no two critters look alike or have gender by Earth standards.

Anyway!  Ork needed some actions.  Traditionally he would blow bubbles, so I thought about how he might use those to get around.  Letting him blow bubbles just anywhere just got in his way since I hadn't coded any way to jump yet.  Blowing them beneath himself and climbing up, though, that was promising.

A long list of quick experiments flew by.  Different blocks, the idea of an inventory and slurping up bubbles before blowing them, bit by bit a prototype came together.  I've shared it with a few developer friends to get their feedback (and a few level ideas!) and now I think it's time to share it with anybody who will try it.  :^)

It's still a prototype.  There's no animation, there's no nice level select menu or custom controls, there's not even any music I'm willing to have on by default.  But you can experiment, play your way through the even-numbered levels and their odd-numbered evil twin versions, and once you've got the hang of it, you can build your own levels and share them by email or twitter.

Someday, I'll have a full, animated, polished version.  I also hope to publish it on Nintendo Wii U.  In the meantime, I hope you have fun with Ork in his new game, Bub.

 

Have a Gamebuino?  Grab the .HEX and play on Bub's inspirational console!
Have a computer/tablet/phone?  Play it in your web browser!
Have an interest in tinkering beyond making levels?  Poke around in its GPL3 code!

Goodbye Utah

When asked where I'm from, I've had trouble giving the expected quick answer.  For the last decade, I may have traveled from my home in Utah, but I couldn't bring myself to say I was from Utah.

I do like to say that I moved to Utah for a job at Novell, back when that was a good idea.  I suppose I missed out on their true glory days, but the projects I worked on were exciting.  Netmail was exciting enough that I followed it through various names and to a different company.  Now that company (gradually re-branding itself as "Netmail") will let me work from anywhere.

When we moved, I made a deal with my wife.  This was for my job, and if she didn't want to live here in ten years, we could move.  More than fair.

That was an apartment, a house, and three cars ago.

As it happens, a couple months shy of ten years later, it was time to get going.  Not due to a bargain struck when we moved, but because we each felt and knew it was time.  But I didn't start babbling here to talk about the move and the future - this is about our time out there and what I've learned about the place.

The Mormons

The white elephant in the room, if you'll pardon the awful mixed metaphor.

Until I moved to Utah, I couldn't have told you the difference between a Mormon and a Jehovah's Witness.  They were all just those people who knocked on your door and wanted to tell you about their God.


I know quite a lot more now, and could probably write post after post of sweeping generalizations about the religion and its members, glowing and/or scathing accounts of individuals, or just go on at length about how strange I find this or that piece of doctrine or practice.  I'm quite sure I could do that about any religion though, so I'll just hit the highlights people ask about.

• "Mormon" == "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints" member.
• A "good Mormon" tithes 10% of their income to the church.
• The church is massively wealthy and owns land all over the planet.
• Most Mormons are not polygamists.
• There are polygamist families, even in "mainstream" areas.
• Mormons are fine with modern technology. (Were you thinking of Amish?)
• Mormons are fine with science (including evolution), mostly.
• Mormons are fine with birth control, but many have tons of kids anyway.
• God changed his mind about black people in the 1970s (they're OK now).
• That episode of South Park is surprisingly accurate.

Mormons raised elsewhere find Utah Mormons to be a strange bunch too.  And "strange", I have no quarrel with.  I'm strange myself, and almost proud of it.  I tend to build opinions about churches based on how their members treat others, including non-members.  This is where things can start hitting fans.

While we were moving into our house, a neighbor started chatting with Kim and offering to help.  I emerged from hoisting a box out of the trunk, exposing my beard and my "drink beer" cap.  This neighbor interrupted herself to ask, "Are you LDS?"  We indicated that we weren't, and she turned and left.  I don't think she said another word to us while we were neighbors.  There were plenty of other times where we were snubbed or judged or ignored or just generally made to feel crappy based on not being Mormon, but this is our go-to example.

We also had neighbors who are completely wonderful.  They've treated us as peer human beings from day one, and are just generous and fun people.  They are what I would have previously called quite devout - they go to church every Sunday and attend plenty of other church functions.  Around here, though, that's not enough.  Others in this particular block of houses go to one specific church building, and our neighbors go to another.  They began doing so when one of their children had hearing trouble, since the other church does sign language.  He can hear fine now, but they like the place and still go there.  Some people here look down on these neighbors due to this.  Even more scandalously, the mother had been divorced, and their eldest is even from a previous marriage.  There are families in this neighborhood who don't want their children to play with our neighbors'.

So, in Utah the Mormons are everywhere, but there is quite a spectrum.  Judgmental and closed-minded all the way through as lovely a person as there could be.  Groupthink and tribalism are dangerous, there and anywhere.

The Drivers

I've touched on this a few times before.  I've spent time on roads all across the nation and a couple of places beyond.  I was raised in the polite-as-Canada midwest and have a very strong "get out of everybody's way" mentality.  (This is the recessive counterpart to the easily-spotted "me-first" gene.)  I have never feared for my life as often or as intensely as on Utah roads, nor have I seen such anti-social and self-destructive behavior outside of "reality" TV.

East coast driving can be nerve-wracking with its close quarters.  California freeways have wild speeders and sudden stops.  A number of places have more horn-honking than Utah.  But nowhere else have I experienced so many attempts on my life from negligence and/or aggression.

Like anyone, I find any newly-installed stoplight annoying.  But I would have absolutely welcomed one near our house.  There's a four-way stop, but schools here must not teach people how to count all the way to four.  Or two, sometimes.  Or to look both ways.  Or to look at all.

These bad driver flames are fought with kerosine.  Road signs may or may not mean something, and that something may or may not pertain to the present, local situation.  A lane might be coned off for no reason, a sign may warn of a condition that hasn't been true for a month (if ever), a "right lane ends" sign may announce the left lane being closed, or my favorite, "detour".  Just "detour".  No arrow, no distance, no road name.  Is it for a road up ahead?  Is the street I'm on now part of a detour?  Do I need to turn somewhere unusual?  Is something nearby closed?

I suppose it would be a waste to have clear, well-placed signs since these people are only going to ignore them anyway, but it feels like a chicken-and-egg problem.  Why heed a sign if so many of them lie in the first place?

The Politics

Seems like I've touched on this before too.

Presently, Utah is spending its precious few taxpayer dollars (wouldn't want to tax the giant crazy new NSA data center here) fighting gay marriage at the supreme court level.  Utah, the territory which re-defined marriage in order to become a United State.  Highest individual bankruptcy rate in the nation.  Second highest per capita water consumption.  Fastest population growth.  Insane waste and pollution.  All this in a desert.  But the most pressing issue is to stop those monogamous gays.  Yeah, it was time to get out of there.

The Culture

Given the ultra-conservative politics, one would think the culture would reflect a very individualistic attitude.  I had never come across the concept of a Homeowner's Association until we moved there.  Our house (not anymore!) is part of two HOA's - a master and a subdivision.  Doors in the block must use one specific color and type of paint.  Same goes for fences and patios.  The neighbors we like have gotten citations.  So did the neighbors we didn't like.  So have we.  And part of the appeal of that neighborhood is how little HOA involvement there is.  Most places a person can live out there have very steep HOA fees and strict rules, all in the name of keeping property values up, or looking like proper ant colonies, or something.

And God forbid you want a drink.  In Salt Lake City there are a handful of good bars, including some excellent local breweries.  Beyond that, there isn't much to speak of.  All liquor stores are state-owned, restaurants are not allowed to serve alcohol unless food is ordered, and there are all kinds of wacky drinking laws written and enforced by people who don't drink.

Somehow, in the reddest of red states, we've got this little police state full of people who claim to swear by their personal freedoms.  Maybe it just depends which freedoms.  Concealed weapon laws there are truly American - a pistol in every glove box, and two cops for anytime someone gets pulled over.  One coworker (that I know of) wore a concealed gun at work when I was at Novell.  I don't know if the company was OK with that, I sure wasn't, but the state is.  But maybe I'm just sore about gun nuts since one of them tried to burn down my neighborhood.

The Friends

I've done enough harping on Utah.  One can find stuff to gripe about anywhere.  What has made these last ten years good, and what we will miss now that we've left, are the people here who have become our family.

The guys I work with and their families have all welcomed us into their lives.  We talk, we barbecue, we play with their kids, we joke about Mormons (the Mormon coworkers moreso than the others!), and we help each other out.


I couldn't dream up a set of people I'd rather call friends.  I'll miss them the same way I've missed my midwest friends all these years. I think "family" is not a genetic measurement, but a living substance that grows and catches on us like a vine.  Whether buried or up where it's visible, it acts as roots and tangles you up.  We've gone, leaving bits of ourselves there, and carrying pieces of others with us.

The Growth

As Kim pointed out to me the other night, 10 years is not far from a third of our lives.  Plenty of time for personal development.  Though we made new friends and found supportive people, we started out a thousand miles from anybody we would normally turn to.

As I like to say, everything seems like a big deal until you do it.  Our van stopped working in the middle of nowhere.  Kim didn't have her credit card and I didn't even own one yet.  We came out of that OK.  We raised a tiny, neurotic runt of a cat with a huge personality.  We bought, worked on, lived in, hated, loved, and sold a house.  By the time our previous car committed suicide on the freeway coming home one day, it felt like a minor inconvenience.  Entire years might go wrong, and we could laugh it off.

Of course, there have been other things that actually are big deals, whether they're familiar or not.  We had to let go of our beloved runty cat.  We've moved back to the midwest with one fewer parent.  There were scary trips to the emergency room.  There are events where the only option is to grow and come out the other side changed.

As a couple, we've loved each other for what feels like forever.  We've also relied on each other.  Even on the worst days, we each knew there was one solid ally.  We can still worry about changes or situations or possibilities, but I feel like as a couple, we're indestructible.  Whatever is next, we can handle it.

The End

So, we've emerged from our time in the desert.  I'll leave the rest of the allegorical reference there as an exercise for the reader - we've got the next hours, days, years of our lives to figure out.

Hello, Minnesota

After some crazy days of packing (weeks, if you happen to be Kim), a day of movers loading most of our stuff, and two days of driving across the country with everything else (including our fish, in a mason jar, in a cupholder)...  We have arrived in Minnesota.

Getting settled, finding more permanent housing, and all that good stuff will happen, but for now we're happy to be done with the long drive, and to have the use of our rear-view mirror back.  :^)

House For Sale

Well there it is, our house is on the market.  We're packing up and we're getting out of Dodge.  For certain values of "Dodge".  "Utah", mainly.

 

Wisconsin, you've gone nuts since we left you.  You're full of roundabouts and corrupt politicians.

Minnesota, here we come!  Well, soon.  :^)


update:
...and Sold!  Well, under contact, anyway.  The midwest and its boundless bouquet of  cheeses, sausages and beers feels closer already!

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

*whistles*

I was a bit bummed about my old server dying when it happened, but it has quickly gone from sad to funny.  In preparing to take that machine (and a bunch of other old stuff) to a nearby electronics recycling event, I removed its hard disks and a few other parts.  During its autopsy, onslow reminded me about its storied history and gave me a few farewell chuckles.

• Huge case, no room at all inside it.  Crunchy SCSI cables everywhere.
• Nothing I removed had an even number of screws holding it in place.
• Of the odd number of screws I removed, none matched each other.
• The rear fan had a big chunk smashed off of its outer brace.
• The rear fan was twisty-tied to vent holes in the case.
• The CPU fan was not a CPU fan.
• The CPU fan was twisty-tied to cables that sort of ran by the CPUs.
• Three CD drives (including a caddy loader) were installed.
• Only one CD drive remained attached to the power supply.

Finally, the unused drive bay which served as onslow's name plate had damaged clips.  It was held in place by duct tape.

R.I.P. onslow

The oldest computer I still had running stopped last night after a power failure.  It was known early on as "fatbastard" and, in its final hardware configuration, "onslow".  It's the biggest computer I've had (and I've had some doozies), it's heavy, and it's packed with parts that modern computers can't use.  After running almost continuously for 14 years, it's time to say goodbye.

(Yes, I'm enough of a geek that I'm eulogizing a computer.  I'm also retiring its internal IP address.  Just give me this one.  :^)

Onslow started out as a streaming server for RealAudio, if I remember right.  A friend from UWRF's student center went on to work there and bought or inherited some hardware, and I bought or inherited that machine from him.  It was the first PC I owned which never ran Windows - by then I'd fully become a Linux guy.  It was my first multi-CPU machine.  (Back when that was worth noting.)  It had such ridiculous high-end specs in 2000 that it was still worth running now.

Onslow lived with me in two college dorm rooms, my parents' basement, two apartments in two states, and in my first house.  It was part of what made a place home.  Over the university's broadband and a series of awful DSL connections, it has served up my home shell as well as a bunch of websites.  Most of those were of no real consequence, and I'll probably restore at least a few of them on my newer webserver.  But accessing my home network remotely and being greeted by a machine other than onslow, that will take some getting used to.

When the power came on again and I was checking that all my servers and drives were coming online, a few pokes of onslow's power button told me what I knew had to be coming.  I had to echo its namesake in sarcastic disappointment...

"Oh, nice."

Eclipse

Photo by John Johnson, creative commons by-nc-sa license.

I took a walk around a nearby park last night, with my gaze mostly fixed on our old pal the moon, during its complete eclipse.  I'm very tired today and my neck is as sore as it's ever been, but I'm glad to have done it.

The last eclipse I saw was while I was in college.  There was a partial lunar eclipse with some cloud cover, and a handful of fellow students gathered to see it.  I impersonated the lecture voice of our astronomy professor and said whatever silly, vaguely-scientific-sounding crap I could think of.

This time was pretty different.  Clearer night, no company, and of course a very beautiful and somewhat rare event.  No loud English accent or laughter, just my footsteps and my own thoughts.

Everyone should spend some quality one-on-one time with the moon, whether it's putting on a big show or not.  I let it be a metaphor for pretty much everything.  It's one of life's constants, and it's also always in motion.  It's a mirror of our own little sphere, and it's also in stark, alien contrast to our familiar home.  That reddish shadow was cast by more area than I'll ever visit, and I could cover it all up with my thumb at arm's length.

I let it represent the end.  There have been some tough endings recently.  The reason I was walking alone instead of with my wife is that she's away for a friend's mother's funeral.  She was in the same hospital as my father-in-law for a while.  Both are gone now, but still connected by the people who love them.  And there was our cat.  She went through her own waxing and waning cycles, and slowly moved her sleeping spot in an arc to keep in the sunlight.  We miss her small steps and giant leaps.

I let it represent the beginning.  If my wife stays where she is for a little while, she might get to meet our new nephew.  His beginning will mark the beginning of two new parents.  Great ones, I suspect.  Beginnings are what make us explorers, what make us want to understand the things around us.  Things like the moon disappearing.  Our beginners' ignorance is valuable; it gives us somewhere to test new ideas and build new knowledge.  It's also scary, so sometimes we fill it with comforting nonsense too.

While I walked and stared, I let the moon and its eclipse represent inevitable change, immovable resolution, good, bad, fiction, fact, fear, joy, miraculous, mundane, and anything else i could think of.

I also imagined spouting nonsense in a loud English voice.

"Now we can see that the Earth is not particularly good at shadow puppets.  Never mind dog or bunny, the Earth is only able to do basic shapes like rock, paper, and scissors.  Tonight, it would seem, it has chosen rock."

Giving Thanks

This year has been ... well it's sucked.  I'm not superstitious, but I'm entirely ready for this particular "13" to be over.  Regardless, I have plenty to be thankful about, and I want to give credit where credit is due.

Thank you, smart people.

All kinds, all flavors of smart people.  Smart philosophers who ask interesting and hard questions.  Smart scientists who seek to understand the nature of the universe.  Smart engineers who combine knowledge with craft and create new tools.  Smart businesspeople who enable small pockets to afford big ideas.  Smart politicians who balance demand with reality, present with future.  Smart educators who perpetuate smartness itself.

Everything I'm thankful for leads to some obvious (and many less-obvious) smart people I should thank.

I'm thankful for my wife.  A person couldn't ask for a better partner, and I feel lucky every day.  The main smart person to thank here is her.  Thank you, Kim!  Next come the smart people who helped her become who she is - her parents, her teachers, the various professors who helped her earn her various degrees.  Thanks to all of you!  Then of course there are the smart people responsible for a type-1 diabetic being able to live a normal life.  Canadians Frederick Banting and Charles Best were the first to make use of insulin, and a lot of people before and since have helped too.  Many thanks are needed to many people I've never heard of, living and dead.

I'm thankful for my work.  Programming is both something I enjoy and something I can do well enough that people will pay me to do interesting things.  I have my own set of family and teachers to thank, as well as people like the late Dennis Ritchie.  He created the C programming language and co-authored Unix.  (To me, that's like creating oxygen and co-authoring the atmosphere).  Elsewhere in the web of Newton's shoulders-of-giants are today's Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Patrick Volkerding, back through Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace and beyond.  Thanks, all you smart geeks.  The fact that I get paid implies I have a string of smart businesspeople to thank too.

Just a couple items in, and already I'm hitting up Wikipedia to figure out whom to thank for what.  That means I should probably add Jimmy Wales.  Not that he single-handedly runs Wikipedia, let alone researched and wrote up the particular information I'm after.  Some "shoulders of giants" are actually "giant collections shoulders".  Thank you, giants, and thank you, shoulders.  That work rests on the web, which rests on the internet, which rests on TCP, which rests on machines and designs that join back in around Turing or so, giving me another bunch of smart engineers, smart mathematicians, and even smart statesmen (yes, including Al Gore) to thank.

At this rate, I'd never get through all the smart people I'm thankful for.  Whether you're a big name smart person whose deeds are clearly visible, an obscure smart person doing interesting things, or you're just smart enough to try and make the world a little better, I'm thankful for you.

Improvised Halloween Costume

Did you guess it?  I'm a sentient spacial anomaly attacking the starship Enterprise.

Halloween Artist, Revisited in Geeky Detail

A while back, I made a little toy that simulates carving pumpkins. http://penduin.blogspot.com/2011/10/halloween-artist.html
It was during that narrow window when the WebOS-running TouchPad was new and hot, and before HP decided they hated success and killed it.

Since then, web browsers have gown up a lot, and nowadays Mozilla is executing Palm's vision of a browser-based operating system even better than Palm did.  (Sorry, WebOS, I still love you, I'm just sayin'...)  In any case, I've been digging back and dusting off some of my old apps.  When you get your app running on FirefoxOS, you don't just port it to yet another device - you port it to the web.  So now, Halloween Artist runs on damn near anything, including those awesome (and cheap!) Firefox phones that are starting to spring up everywhere.

The platform-agnostic web app:
http://halloweenartist.penduin.net
Play around with it before reading on, if Halloween Artist is new to you.

But enough history; the point of this post is to dive into the jack-o-lantern guts and talk about how the program actually works!

Before we begin, some links!
To this day, I start here whenever I tinker with canvas:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/HTML/Canvas_tutorial
Back in the day I only used mouse events, and just recently added actual touch support.  Nowadays, I'd suggest going the other way 'round, or at least keeping both in mind:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/API/DOM/Events/Touch_events
There are many guides for doing simple drawing programs using canvas.  This one is very detailed:
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/html5-canvas-painting/

The first step is to get ourselves a pumpkin image in the background, and a canvas layered on top.  This canvas will track mouse and touch events and let the user trace out shapes.

Next, we need an "inside" image that will show through the carved shapes.  Over that, we'll draw the pumpkin but with the user-drawn parts cut out (made transparent).  As luck would have it, the canvas API has some handy compositing modes that are perfect for these tasks.  The main operation we need is "source-out".  Keep the destination image, except where it intersects with the source shape.  Then it's just a matter of doing a normal, source-over composite.

It's a start!  But to look like an actual carved pumpkin, we need to add some 3D magic to draw the inside edges.  Actually, scratch that - we're going to cheat.  :^)  We'll start with a lower-resolution, slightly-blown-up pumpkin image:

...then we'll lighten it up using canvas's "lighter" globalCompositeOperation and a globalAlpha value of, oh let's say 0.5:

...then we'll "source-out" the face, same as we did with the foreground:

...then shrink it a bit, center it, and draw it between the inside background and the outer face:

We're getting there!  But depending on the shape, our corners might not look very convincing.

Fortunately, all this cheating we've been doing - these composite operations and scaling - it's all very fast.  Even on mobile browsers.  Let's turn up the cheating to maximum and draw that middle layer in a loop, shrinking it less each time.

...While we're at it, each step could lighten up the current layer to a lesser degree than the previous (more "inner") one.  And while we're at that, let's lighten it using a more yellow color; our first pass looks a little pinkish.

By putting that middle-layer step inside a loop and making a few tweaks, we get much more realistic edges:

So, we draw a whole bunch of these middle layers, only to draw right over most of it during the next pass.  It's a bit wasteful if you think about it that way, but consider how much simpler this is than trying to simulate all these arbitrary cut-out surfaces "for real".  Instead, this code builds little bits of pumpkin shell, one layer at a time, from the inside out.  It's a fairly elegant illusion if I do say so myself; we can make a passably-realistic image with a sense of depth, without actually doing any complex calculations or intensive processing.

Warning: more history ahead.  I'll try to keep it brief and on-point.  :^)

Figuring out how "deep" to start (how much to shrink), and how many steps to draw in between, all while keeping the "carve" function reasonably fast, was one of those fun bits of experimentation and compromise.  On a high-resolution display, there can still be artifacts if you draw very steep, jagged shapes.  But as far as bang per buck, compatibility with low-end devices, and the 99%-of-shapes use cases, I'm pretty pleased.

I wanted this to be pick-up-and-play friendly, so every day I'd load the latest version onto my TouchPad and hand it to my coworkers, giving them no instructions.

Early on, it was suggested that the carved image should flicker as if the candle inside were burning unevenly.  Easy!  The carve function now produces two images, the normal one and a slightly brighter version, which is positioned (using CSS) right over the main one.  It fades in and out using a randomized timeout and CSS animation on the "opacity" property.  A few minutes of polish, and the illusion was even better.

I forget who, but one coworker went right for the "Carve" button before drawing anything.  Natural enough instinct.  So, added some logic to see if any shapes had been drawn yet, and if not, give the user some quick instructions.  I'm really glad I caught that, because in showing the app to more people later, about a quarter did the same thing.  Much better to show a hint popup than have users wonder why nothing's happening.

What if the user drew outside the pumpkin?  All kinds of goofy artifacts, that's what.  So, I used that handy canvas compositing and masked the user's input before carving.  As a nice side effect, you can now carve all the way out to the edge of a pumpkin, as though you'd chopped it in half.

This solution led to another problem.  When people realized they could recklessly carve giant holes, they'd see the empty, glowing inside surface of the pumpkin.  Where was the light coming from?

So, between drawing the background and drawing the scaled flesh layers, I dropped in a candle.  I actually took some photos of a nice white candle and GIMPed it into the shape of my blocky "penduin" avatar.  May as well include some kind of signature in this program, eh?  I made two different versions, one for each of the flicker-fading images, and made the flame a bit bigger on the brighter version.  It gives a nice little touch of animation, and adds a bit more to the illusion.

Well, that about covers it.  You're free and encouraged to poke around in the source if you'd like to learn more or add your own tweaks.  (Mind the mess; I left some experimental tweaks and previous-attempts in there, commented out.) Halloween Artist is GPLv3, and since you mignt not feel like scraping down the source from the web app itself (and since my lousy DSL might be down at any given moment) I've made it available on GitHub:
https://github.com/penduin/halloweenartist

Have fun, and Happy Halloween ... season.  :^)

Clipface

Here's "Clipface".  I don't know his real name yet.  He showed up today during a long conference call.

Murphy 2003-2013

Yesterday, after some heartbreaking weeks of decline, we had to have Murphy put to sleep.  There were so many things wrong with her, so many organs not working right, and the road before her was full of aggressive treatments - more drugs, strong painkillers, possibly major surgery...  We just couldn't put her through that.

It was the hardest decision we've ever made, individually or together.  It was the right thing, and the kind thing, but it's left a big hole in our hearts and our home.  We've each lost pets before, but Murphy was as much our child as our cat.  We miss her dearly, but we've done what she needed us to do.  She got to go with those who loved her most right there with her, quietly, quickly, and in comfort.  We're hurting now so that she doesn't have to.  And we'll never stop loving our baby girl.

Googly-eyed Ork

I'm not sure what to do with this yet, but I'd like to share it anyway since it's cute.

Ork is an alien critter I've been scribbling since childhood.  This particular version has some good personality to it -- he might need a platformer game or something, someday.  :^)

Whew!

Well, it was disgustingly close, but (enough of) the votes are in, and the campaigns are over.  We've said "no thank you" to the worst of the regressives.  Little by little we've said "we are equal" to gays.  And of course, we've said "yes we can" once again.

There's a great deal of work to do to keep this nation great, but we've made some positive moves.  Today, I'm relieved.  Today, I'm proud.

Voted!

Oh, the polls in Utah.  I've seen some crazy stuff here before, but I've never seen a polling place this crowded.  We probably have the LDS church to thank for that - gotta make sure all the good little drones go vote to fulfill their prophecy.  (Nope, not kidding.  Wish I was.)

On our way in, we passed an old couple leaving.  The husband wore two "I voted" stickers - his and his wife's.  The symbolism was priceless.

We were corralled into two lines by last name: A-E and F-Z.  I'll let you guess which one snaked around and out the door while the other actually ran dry a couple of times.  This, folks, is Utah planning at its finest.  After a while, they changed it to A-H and I-Z.  This all took place in a public school, where doubtlessly-stellar alphabet, arithmetic and problem-solving lessons are taught every day.

To everyone who's voted, even the ones whose rationale escapes me:  Thank you.  To everyone else:  What's wrong with you?  Get out there already!  You'll have no right to whine about the state of things if you don't even try to have a voice.

Vote!

It's time to earn your right to complain, citizens!  Get out there and vote!

I won't tell you whom to vote for, but if you support anybody from the anti-equality, anti-science, rape-is-a-gift-from-god party, you really ought to have your head examined.

Open webOS Cameo

Today, Open webOS 1.0 made its way into the world!
http://blog.openwebosproject.org/post/32462950628/open-webos-1-0-edition

This is a big deal to me; it represents a certain kind of immortality for a platform and project that I've got very attached to.  Enough pieces are in play to keep webOS alive now in ways never anticipated, despite the heartbreaking series of corporate blunders that nearly destroyed the project.  I feel a lot like I did when Blender was rescued and turned open-source.

Anyway, I have a small cameo in the Open webOS announcement video.  Not me per se, but my "penduin" symbol, specifically its use in my Picross icon.  At about 1:09 in the video, you can spot it near the upper-left of the app launcher.

To the Palm and HP teams and the entire enthusiast webOS community:  Thank you.  You've made me very happy today.  :^)

Tong on Wii

Well here's another fine mess I've gotten myself into: Tong can now be played on Wii!

It's fitting. Back in ... 1997? Some friends and I came up with the idea, and imagined it as a multiplayer game on Nintendo64, the party machine of choice at the time. That didn't happen, of course, but years later I did finish a single-player PC version. Years after that, I ported it to the GP2X/Wiz handhelds. Now, it's come all the way to a home console, and a Nintendo one at that.

...Plus, the line-breaking sound effect is me saying "Wheeee!"

Now before you go off to the Wii Shop Channel looking for Tong, let me save you some time. Nintendo doesn't endorse this kind of open/free homebrew, but unlike some manufacturers, they don't fight it either. Read up on the Homebrew Channel, then visit this site and use its handy packager to get homebrew running on your Wii (they've made it very easy, you won't break anything!) Once you have the Homebrew Channel, you can grab Tong for Wii here; just unzip it to your SD card.

My favorite bit of feedback about Tong has always been that it's a "bad idea well implemented". Nowhere is that clearer than on Wii, with tilt-controlled paddles. I've gotten pretty good at it, but it's probably the hardest and most insane version yet. Why I would be happy about that is a bit of a mystery.

For anyone interested in the technical details, "devkitPro" and "devkitPPC" are what you're after. Cross-compiling to Wii is mostly painless, and I only ran into a few snags. First, libfat needs to be initialized before doing any file access. That isn't the first thing that occurs to those of us who normally build stuff for OSes instead of raw hardware. Second, the guys who ported SDL to Wii did a pretty good job, but when it came to SDL_mixer, I think they got it working for their own stuff and then moved on. The easiest workaround is to resample your sound data to 32000Hz, which struck me as very odd considering how common 41000 and 20500 are. Also, simultaneously playing a Mix_Music and a Mix_Chunk causes some fascinating interference if they're both using tremor (ogg vorbis decoder). In my case that meant saving the short Mix_Chunk sound effects as raw .wav data instead. Finally, as much as I love to use my own simple-as-possible Makefiles, I had a much easier time working from devkitPro's examples. They're very flexible and general-purpose, I'll give 'em that. Everything's checked in; have at the CVS repository if you're curious.

To non-geeks who waded through all that, I should reward you with something clever and witty. ...Too bad. Play Tong for a few minutes; your brain will forget all about such small-scale confusion. :^)

Evacuations Lifted

This evening, things got well enough under control that officials lifted all evacuations in the area. There's still a raging fire burning up a mountain, and even when it's out, mudslides will now be a problem for people living around there, for years to come. I hope it was worth the thrill of shooting off guns at the dump, whoever you are.

So, our important stuff is back in the house, which I'm told is now as safe as the Subaru it was crammed into. All our servers are alive again, and the rest... will be dealt with in due time. :^)

We have two fundraising suggestions for the mayor, or for... whoever. After all, there's a great deal of effort and treasure being spent fighting this blaze.
- T-shirts: "I survived the great dump fire of o-twelve" etc
- A punching post
...The second one might need some explaining. Basically, we find the dumbass who started this whole mess (before he gets more ammo...) and tie him to a post. All residents of the towns he tried to burn down get one free punch, and additional punches are a dollar a pop. Fire fighters get a full minute free, those who were evacuated get an extra free punch (kids get double!) ...Well the details aren't that important, but you get the idea.

Ready to Evacuate

I've got the reader's-digest version of my life (and my wife's, of course) packed up in the car, and am prepared to grab the cat and flee should the need arise. Whether that actually happens will come down to which way the wind blows. Truly!

http://www.ksl.com/?sid=20945567&nid=148&title=eagle-mountain-fire-expands-to-more-than-4000-acres&s_cid=featured-1

In any case we're safe, the stuff we wouldn't be able to replace is packed, and life's good, just sort of on standby. :^)


update, Saturday afternoon:
No evacuation notice here as of yet. All is still well, if a little smoky-smelling outside. Links to up-to-date information:
http://www.inciweb.org/incident/2928/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Eagle-Mountain-City-UT/251442428207349?ref=tn_tnmn

Dear Restaurant Owners

Stop catering exclusively to rednecks and hillbillies by playing country music and/or hanging TVs on the walls in your establishments. Life is already too easy for these people; they've been wrecking things for the sane for some time now.

I go to your businesses to eat, not to be nauseated by twangy whining and have my peripheral vision harpooned by wrong-aspect-ratio sports talk.

Dear Technology Columnists

Stop calling webOS "dead". The world of technology is not full of "products", it's full of "projects".

Read and digest the documentation over at http://openwebosproject.org/ or at least play with http://enyojs.com/ for ten minutes. This stuff is very much alive and useful. There aren't any Palm/HP Pre or TouchPad devices to be found in stores right now, and that's a shame, but by the end of the year we're going to see webOS running on more devices than you've ever imagined.

That's the thing about opening a platform - it becomes un-killable. A project doesn't need to burn up sales charts in order to be solid, fascinating, and entirely not-dead.

Picross

Shameless plug ahead...

I've made a Picross game for webOS devices. (TouchPad, Pre, Pixi, Veer...) It also runs happily in a modern web browser, including those on iBerry and BlackDroid and AnPhone and whatnot.
web demo:
http://penduin.net/bits/picross/
webOS app:
https://developer.palm.com/appredirect/?packageid=net.penduin.picross

The idea behind the game is that the process of solving a puzzle, using numerical clues, creates a pixel-art picture. I didn't invent Picross; someone much more clever did. But, I turned the idea into an HTML5 toy, and spent many insomniac hours thinking up 8x8 pictures, then testing and re-testing them to guess at their difficulty and make sure the clues weren't ambiguous. I recruited some help too; my wife contributed a handful of puzzles, as did a coworker and an enthusiastic early adopter.

Like all my little pet projects, it's open (GPL3) and you're encouraged to peek inside and learn from or build on it. I do sell the 99-cent webOS app with all of the (384, but who's counting) puzzles and the builder tool enabled, but when I say it's open I mean it - it's not hard to enable that stuff anyway if you're broke/cheap/webOS-less. :^) For BlackBerry PlayBook users, I'll probably release the game and demo in the BlackBerry store too at some point, but for now the web version runs very nicely.

Happy Puzzling!

Fortune Cookie

Evil Potato

My wife got me a truly exceptional present for Valentine's Day, one so perfect it needs no explanation:


...Well okay. According to the spectrum of confused reactions this got at work, maybe it does need some explanation. It's a provide-your-own-potato kit, but more importantly, it's GLaDOS, the insane artificial intelligence from Portal, in humiliating potato-powered form, as seen in much of Portal 2.

I could explain further that Portal and its sequel are video games, crafted with wonderful dry humor. They are played in first-person, which means my valentine can't watch them in action without getting motion sick, but she has overheard much of the game's story and my resulting laughter. And now, we've got Portal's antagonist stuck in a spud in our home, ready to insult us and scheme about murder anytime.

So romantic, it brings a tear to my eye. ...Or is that the neurotoxin?

The People of Utah: Mr. Ice Fisherman

I overheard a (Mormon) guy talk about an ice fishing trip he took recently. This is either a quote or a very near paraphrase:

"It's fun for the first hour, but then you're like, it's really cold here and there's not much to do."

...Well, I suppose those things would be true if you forgot the beer, or if your religion forgot the beer for you. What's next, beerless inner tube rafting? Silly Mormons.