Janko in a Jar

I was waiting for someone on some forum today. Eagerly waiting so I kept reloading that page scrolling to the bottom, scanning for his name and it consumed my time and energy again and again.. So a REBOL one-liner came to my help…

>> ;open rebol shell and type this in, press enter
>> online?: func [name][ either find find read http://forums.hidden.com/ "Currently Active Users" name ["yes"]["no"]]
>> ;you defined a function that loads a page over http,
>> ;finds "Currently Active Users" because that name could appear above in the list of last topics
>> ;than from that point tries to find the name and prints yes or no accordingly

Then instead of reloading and scrolling every half of minute press up arrow and enter. You type it the first time

>> online? "JackieChan"
== "yes"

Aha .. I got you now! You you … *****

I finally said it. I realized this partially a year ago when I got another programmer to help me with some big web-application. He tried to persuade me that our/my code is too complicated and that Smarty template engine is the way to make it more modular/flexible?? whatever. Well I felt in my guts that any template engine I have seen is actually the opposite of a direction to go IMO so I started thinking where exactly should we go if we want to move coding practices to another level. I started casually working on a thing that used the theory that came out..

Yesterday when I was looking at a very powerful language Scala I saw it… web programming is once you have all your libraries written mostly not programming. It is pure declaration. I program games and I program web-apps. The two most opposite things, one is real time and another is request/response. But I found another categorization where they totally differ. Games are mostly algorithmic and web-apps are highly declarative. Now I see new goals for that “thing”..

I hope I will have time to release it soon… (it will be open source of course)

Scala.. more than interesting language and a source code of an application that delivers ultimate truth that changes destinies of people that get affected.. Meet Scala the language a famous guru named TimerAnonymous

object TimerAnonymous {
  def oncePerSecond(callback: () => unit) {
    while (true) { callback(); Thread sleep 1000 }
  }
  def main(args: Array[String]) {
    oncePerSecond(() =>
      println("time flies like an arrow..."))
  }
}

By reading the title you now probably think that I will criticise the “Blog Action Day - bloggers for environment” which is today. No I won’t, I will actually do what they propose. I will criticise the ones that pollute this little planet… people

—

Most people like our “mother nature”, want the cute pandas to not get extinct, rain forests to flourish, and hate cruel tests of hair shampoos on little bunnies…

I said it wrong…

Most people like the idea of liking our “mother nature”..

—

My message for Blog Action Day is:
It doesn’t matter what you like, it doesn’t matter what you talk about… it matters what you DO!

—

And it’s not about grand, cute and popular things … it’s about not watering your flat green grass and instead planting some “smart” bushes that add some variety, life space and food to the “nature”. It’s about growing your own broccoli and not eating the one who must get shipped all the way from a huge farm in china…

It’s about a responsible and active attitude towards your life and life in general!

Back then I was not automatically impressed by the news that Greg Costikyan (a game-dev industry veteran) is abandoning the mainstream games and will make an indie games portal. I was not impressed because I didn’t know who this Greg is (ad I don’t even know who made doom, I don’t know people in mainstream game-dev).

Well I still don’t know who Greg Costikyan is but from time to time I really like to see what interesting things are cropping up in the indie game world and I didn’t know where to search for. I passed over his Man!festo games this week and I saw that this is the place to find the finest and most innovative titles from indie scene. And that is (if I am not mistaken) the main job of the portal, so congratulations Greg (whoever you are — ok joking now) for a job well done!

I am not the person who makes up jokes. But today something with a format similar to joke crossed my mind.. well it’s not a joke and it’s not funny, it’s sort of a bitter truth.

A: “Which website would a IE6 fan club probably decide to DOS Attack on the world ‘let`s do dos attacks’ day”

B: “http://validator.w3.org/”

Well it’s very slow and timeouts today, I hope it’s not the day. Good that FireFox has the “Try Again” button.