JamesGecko

I like simple things. Wordpress? Isn’t simple. I don’t need a database to store all my posts in. Simple is not necessarily easy or fast, but it is flexible. So I’ve ported my blog over to Jekyll. It’ll let me manage static pages with it easily, which means absolutely nothing to anybody, but it makes me feel warm and fuzzy. I also broke a lot of URLs, but my gut tells me that nobody cares about that either.

In college, I always hated in-class presentations. What if the material I taught was too simple, or too obvious? Inevitably, I always overcompensated; delivering a jargon filled speech the rest of the class might or might not have fully grasped. But really? I don’t know most things. So here’s a link dump of pages I’ve learned from recently. Tries Trites are a neat, compact data structure. They compress really well, but take some time to decompress in slow languages or on slow platforms.

I installed the Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook edition on my mom’s MSi Wind this weekend. It comes with a brilliant relatively new interface, Unity, which does a lot of things differently to making using a netbook more enjoyable. There is little about the ideas Unity is based on which I do not approve of. Ryan Paul went over some of the major features here, so I’ll skip them. However, the current implementation is lame.

Langton’s ant is a very simple movement algorithm. An ant is on a grid, walking across squares. When it moves into a black square, it turns the square white, turns 90 degrees to the right, and walks forward to the next square. The opposite happens when the ant moves into a white square. It seems like this algorithm could be used to provide procedurally generated enemy behavior in games. The ant’s behavior is guaranteed to be interesting for at least ten thousand square moves, and likely a lot more if the player can change the color of the squares on the grid.