Sarah Allen's WeblogSarah Allen's reflections on internet software and other topicsvideo game play: danger or not- June 30, 2008 Grand Theft Childhood is a new book about kids and video games (via Cyborg's Picnic). It reveals the results of a Harvard video game study that challenges conventional wisdom about the effects of gaming. I didn't read the book, but did read a bit about the study on the web. "For many children and adolescents, playing video games is an intensely social activity, not an isolating one. "Many games involve multiperson play, with the players either in the same room or connected...http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/archives/000446.html design for the expression on someone's face- June 17, 2008 I'm not much of a gamer. I prefer to find delight in creative projects that feel like play. It might be some remnant puritanical work ethic from my New England roots, or perhaps its just that most games aren't well-suited to my demographic. Nonetheless, I'm intrigued by game design and find that some aspects of game design can be applied generally to software design, as well. I read today a nice discussion of Wii Fit. Shigeru Miyamoto, famed Nintendo game designer who created Super Mario and...http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/archives/000459.html pipes, redirects and awk -v- June 15, 2008 I wanted to take the output of a command and put it in a temporary variable so I can append a string to it. (Trying to script perforce to append something to my client spec without interactive involvement.) First attempt: $ p4 client -o > $CLIENTSPEC c:cygwinbinbash: $CLIENTSPEC: ambiguous redirect I later learned that redirect is only for files. Next attempt: $ TEST=p4 client -o $ echo $TEST depotappsdiamond-calendar-preview... sallen-LENOVOsvnopenlaszlobranchespagan-deitiesdiamond-calen...http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/archives/000458.html learning bash- June 14, 2008 I started this post back in 2007, when I found a great tutorial on learning bash scripting. This excellent tutorial, written by Daniel Robbins, the Chief Architect of the Gentoo Project, gives two compelling reasons to learn bash: 1. You are already running it. If you are building web tech, chances are that some machine you use is running bash, even if you feel obliged to work on a Windows laptop like me. On Windows, you can run cygwin, which means your scripts will run locally and on your...http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/archives/000380.html bash: xargs is your friend- June 14, 2008 For some reason, since I set up my new machine, when I p4 sync I would get directories that aren't writeable. This means that lzx files won't compile since the swf needs to be written into the directory. To work-around this, I tried to just set permissions on all the directories. My first attempt (below), didn't work.... anyone know why the second one is more verbose and did work. $ find -type d chmod a+w chmod: missing operand after a+w' Try chmod --help' for more information. Verbose...http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/archives/000457.html OpenLaszlo SWF9 progress- June 8, 2008 The OpenLaszlo team has been making great progress supporting SWF9, which is effectively a 3rd runtime after SWF78 and DHTML. Check out the weather app running in SWF9. With that app you can't really see the performance improvements, but they are seeing substantial improvements in startup time with the SWF9 runtime. The SWF9 work is now in trunk -- you can download the latest nightly build to check it out. (Report bugs in the open bug base) They are approaching a 4.1, which will be a...http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/archives/000456.html Yahoo's BrowserPlus sneek peek- June 8, 2008 I checked out Yahoo's sneak peek of BrowserPlus this morning -- looks like there is some interesting stuff there. It think they have a good approach by getting feedback from people using apps before they open up the APIs to developers. I have always believed that to get the UI right, you need the user experience to drive the APIs not the other way round. Key Features Drag-and-drop from the desktop to the browser (my favorite!) Upload to FlickR Desktop Notifier (integrating with Growl on the..http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/archives/000455.html js meetup: ScrewUnit- June 6, 2008 Nick demonstrated ScrewUnit at the JSMeetup last night. My notes: behavior-driven development, particularly popular in the Ruby world with the RSPEC framework organize your tests, share setup global befores and afters let you effectively test the DOM nested describes, nested example groups in RSPEC What about continuous integration there's a ScrewUnit server, navigate URLs - only run those in that directory. There are callbacks when a suite endsbegins -- integrated into CruiseControl on GIT...http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/archives/000454.html js meetup: keyboard shortcuts- June 6, 2008 Alex from Acunotes () demonstrated a cool library for adding keyboard shortcuts to your site. They use gmail conventions, which are essentially borrowed from vi, but the feedback from their non-geek users is very positive. (Some browsers eat control keys, so we can't use standard desktop shortcuts. They can do key-combos with shift) My notes: competitive advantage for them, users like it open source, MIT license, GIT project 8k including comments :) nice intuitive interface, with concise...http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/archives/000453.html js meetup, paul sowden, client-side storage- June 6, 2008 Paul Sowden of meebo talked about client-side storage options at the JS Meetup last night. Great info! Here are my notes: Client-side storage... more options than cookies 3 examples: halfnote Update: thanks Paul! gmail sticky notes ... not too exciting, but we could do more exciting stuff if we can tackle the x-browser issues. Technology is different per browser, standard has variants. Gears: sync'd db, SQL interface, search over the DB, unlimited storage (at least in the beta) WHATWG, fr...http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/archives/000452.html |