Mambo Rocks

Ok, so I'm in the process of setting up the Grinning Gecko website, and I decided to try Mambo. Wow, it's really cool. There's a lot that can be done with it with little to no effort. Now, I'm a big fan of Joel on Software, and I like what he has to say on a lot of things, but I'm sorry, Joel. I don't think I'll be buying CityDesk any time soon.

By the way, if you go to the Grinning Gecko site just now, it's going to look an awful lot like a default Mambo site with very little tweaking. Hell, it even says Mambo on it all over the place. I really need to get that figured out sometime soon.

But I also need to write an adventure or six to sell on RPGNow. This whole thing is a spare time kind of project, and I don't want to throw any more money at it than I need to.

But even before that I need to log off, take out the trash, and go to bed. I've stayed up way too late too many times this week already, and I don't need to be doing it tonight.

Steal Your Own Identity

So I was just kicking around JoS and saw a thread on identity theft and someone (Simon Lucy) commented on how ironic it is that people who steal identities usually have more fun with them than their original owners did. I just had the weird thought of "Man, that could be fun!" and then I wondered on why that is and how it works.

Identity theft is about being somebody else without consequences, but it's also about being who you'd like to be. The illegal kind of identity theft is irresponsible. It damages the original owner of the identity.

What I'm talking about here is to dare to be who you want to be. Take a chance. I'm not saying throw away your credit rating on stupid crap. I'm saying to ask yourself if you were a total stranger stealing your identity, what would you do with it to create a life you'd want to live?

Then ask yourself why you aren't doing that.

Ch-ch-changes

Last week our older Honda died, so Saturday we bought a new one. It's nice. Yeah, there's the extra cost for the "new car smell", and there are benefits to leasing rather than buying, but you know what? I'm real big on owning my stuff. That car will keep on working for 7-10 years after we're done paying for it, and maintenance on Hondas tends to be pretty low. They go for 200,000 miles and then they die The Death.

In other news, we finally got around to getting broadband. I have no clue why we took so long to do it, but it's hooked up, and the cool part is I got it to work with my wireless router with almost no problems at all. 802.11g is handy to have when you've been crawling along over dialup for years. Again, don't ask why we took so long to do this - I don't have a good answer.

Footnote

Just so you know, I'm well aware of the irony that I, in fact, did own a company, and that the only products it ever released were gaming material. I made many mistakes with that company that I won't be repeating, and it was best to dissolve it.

One of the mistakes made was that the company was made with no specific goals in mind - games, no wait pharmaceutical software, no wait software development tools, no wait games - and then when I settled on games I focused on just hardcopy role-playing games. (Even then I still bounced from games to other stuff and back.) Both the lack of focus and the overfocus were mistakes. My desire is games - only games, but many kinds of games. Board games, card games, role playing games, computer games. (I'll still tinker with writing that language, Lore, but it's a tool to achieve the end of computer games, not an end to itself. That's why I'm open sourcing it.)

There were many other mistakes I made in my company, but I won't go into them here, or at least not now.

I want to create games

I had a good weekend. Today is my birthday (read the previous post) and over the weekend we met with a friend. She gave me two books - The Art of the Start and A Theory of Fun for Game Design. The first one was really good - one to go back to over and over - but the second one made me all verklempt at the end.

I have been a teacher at various times in my life, and it's usually a pretty positive experience, mostly with the kids that "get it". That happens more often with the brighter kids than average (or slow) ones, but sometimes you see that spark in an otherwise dull face, and that's really cool. That's the best part of doing it. Grading papers, on the other hand, sucks.

I really like being a dad. I'm looking forward to the next one quite a bit. I like seeing Ben grow, and it's so neat seeing him learn. I think that there are plenty of cool things I can teach him.

I really like Steve Pavlina's website and I think that he has great potential to help a lot of people with his new speaking career. That said, I do disagree with his decision to move away from his game company. I mean, he's free to do as he wants, obviously, and I wish him the best. But it's not what I would do in his shoes. I'd change what kind of games I make and sell, if I were in his shoes - if I already had a game company established.

I think that games are great way to teach people things. I also think that there are far too many games that focus on skills that are outdated in modern society. Spending time and energy on those skills will, in the long run, hold us back. We don't need violence. If you want to learn how to fight, go join the armed forces. Otherwise, it's a skill you learn for the sense of accomplishment and to stay in shape, and I don't have any problem with that. The key is to just not be in a situation where you need to fight.

I digress. My point is that in modern society knowledge of exponential growth is much more important than how to aim a gun, as one concrete example. A game is a learning experience in a low stress environment with little true penalty for failure. School does carry substantial penalties for failure, so either people don't learn, or only learn enough to pass the next test and forget it. A fun game that people play over and over will teach something deeply enough to ingrain it deeply into the brain. There are tests on the difference between men and women on spatial perception. Apparently men tend to do better on a pen and paper test than women. (Tend to, not always.) However, if the test is an interactive game that teaches as you go, the skew mostly goes away. The most interesting part is that if the pen and paper test is done after the interactive one, the skew stays gone. There is a permenent rewiring that takes place that shows that true learning took place. (I'll go look up the study and provide links if need be.)

I am in favor of win/win solutions. Cooperation will get our species a lot farther than competition will in the long run. Money spent on guns is money not spent on education or beautiful architecture or curing AIDS or colonizing other planets.

I want to write games that deeply ingrain constructive values in people. I think that I can help more people to live better in modern society this way than I can by teaching 20-100 kids at a time, or by doing public speaking, or most other things. Games are very subtle. Make them fun and people don't even realize what they are learning. This subtle manipulation of people's minds and value systems represents a pretty big deviation from my normal doctrine of non-interference in other people's lives, but I think it's perhaps my best shot at doing some good for large numbers of people.

Six-squared years

So a week from today I turn 36. It's not a bad thing, but sometimes I look back and wonder where my time has gone. I would like to have accomplished more by now, and certainly would like a larger paycheck. Overall life is good - great family life, good place to work, bills are paid - but I'm not entirely satisfied. Guess it's time to get working on something to sell that people will want to buy. Got any ideas? Let me know. Not a service, please - you can only sell your time once.

I sure don't feel 36. I should do about 10,000 sit-ups, though. Maybe run a marathon or two.

A snippet from the cover of The Void.

A few years ago I published The Void

I recently dissolved Stanton Industries, Inc. I think it's safe to say it's a failure.

Boo

I was looking for languages the people had written CodeDOM Providers for, and I stumbled across Boo. Go check it out. They are doing some really cool stuff, and Lore may wind up looking similar it in the long run, as they have implemented several features that I want to include. They even have a SharpDevelop add-in for it, which is on my to-do list.

There are things I want Lore to do that Boo does not, like compile to native code, and also to the JVM. The type system of the JVM is going to slow down that last bit, though.

Rain

It's been raining a lot here over the last two weeks, to the point where there's flooding to levels not seen in 90 years. I think it's because of the tsunami. Before you blow me off as being totally insane, let me explain a bit. The tsunami dumped a massive amount of water onto a lot of land, and while a lot of it drained back into the ocean, a lot just sat on the ground and is evaporating. That water vapor has to go somewhere, and I think that even if it rained out slightly east of where the tsunami hit, that still ramps up the water cycle. Water flows downhill, and I think that the water cycle would reach saturation and it would keep rolling across the globe until it stabilizes out. I don't know how long that would take, but I think it might explain the astonishingly crappy weather we've been having lately.

Or I could be totally wrong and the two are completely unrelated. I could still be insane anyway, but not because of this.

Dude, that's just...harsh.

So I dropped my son off at day care this morning and stopped off at the all-too-convenient Starbucks to get a latte before getting on the highway to go to work. On the way in I spotted something in the rain-soaked parking lot but didn't take the time to pick it up. I did on the way out, however, and found that it was the senior photo of a moderately pretty girl. That alone doesn't make this event blog-worthy, but what I read on the back does:

"Dave -
Well, buddy. We were always on again/off again friends. Being friends in 8th grade, then not talking again until junior year. I hope that after this year that this will not be the case. You have always been a great friend. Keep in touch. (heart) - Mari"

(I put (heart) there because I don't have a heart-shaped picture icon handy to insert there.)

Dave, you are either a careless klutz or a heartless bastard. Either way, shame on you.


(Edit: It's been pointed out that maybe she dropped it before giving it to him. I had considered that, and left that out of the original version of the post. So, if that's the case, she's a careless klutz. At least in that case she'll pretty clearly know that he never got it. In the scenario I paint above, unless he is a klutz, knows it, and admits it to her, she thinks that a good friend is blowing her off. Pretty crappy, huh? That or he is pretty heartless and tells her, which is still pretty crappy.)

Get out of Your Way

For much of my life I seem to have had some sort of mental constipation that stops me from functioning at my peak capacity. I have never figured out how to cure myself of it. I can overcome it for short periods of time, the longest of which got me back into school through a B.A. and a Ph.D., but it has long since faded. I had a coherent driving goal at that point in my life, but that's gone, and I'd like one back.

The title of this post is a statement I came up with in my last year of grad school as advice to a first year student in our research group. He was (and I assume still is) pretty smart, but was having some difficulty understanding some stuff. I knew he could get it, but his biggest problem was that he was convinced that it was supposed to be difficult. As a result, he was making the material much harder than it really was.

Essentially that's what I need to do - to get out of my own way. I'm pretty sure that I'm what's holding me back. When I was teaching highschool students a couple years ago, one of the things I told them was that "Most human failure is not a failure of ability, but of the will."

Funny how the person who gives advice is frequently the one who needs it most.

Amusing Side Note

So as it turns out, I was in fact not the first one in to the office Christmas Eve. Had I but looked in the main conference room, I would have noticed our newest employee asleep on the couch. Apparently he had worked late for us on the 23rd, gone to his other job and worked until 7 in the morning, and then come *back* to us to collapse onto our (very comfy) couch.

Pre-Holiday Ramblings

So most of this week I've been trying to get over a nasty head cold. I think part of it is caused by the dry air in our house. I wake up with awful headaches, sweating and dehydrated. The heat kicks on, and I wind up with what feels like a hangover, despite the lack of alchohol. Ugh. So I got an overpriced mediocre large orange juice on the way in to work today, and it seems to have helped.

On the way in to work today? Yeah, we don't have Christmas Eve as a holiday here, and I'm trying to save paid time off for March. I'm the only one here right now, though. (Ok, someone else just arrived. He's so new he doesn't have any accumulated paid time off, so he kinda has to be here, or eat the time as unpaid.) I'm going to leave in a bit and help a friend pick up an 8 foot couch he bought for his new apartment. We'll drag that up a flight of stairs, as I don't envision that fitting into an elevator with any grace at all.

The other bit about having a cold is that Ben had one last week. That sucked. He stayed home from day care Monday through Thursday, which played havoc with our schedules, but we got by. That's likely where I got this asskicker of a cold, though. Now I know how he was feeling. Poor kid.

It's very white here. We got a bunch of snow the last couple days, probably close to a foot here, about two feet of it south and east of us. I don't hate the snow or cold weather nearly as much as I did when I was growing up. I think what I dislike most about it is the dry air and how utterly inconvenient it is to discover you're trapped somewhere when you had other plans. Oh, yeah, that and frickin moronic drivers...but that's always true. I never have had much tolerance for idiots, and this weather provides plenty of opportunities for people to display their prowess at the fine art of being a total ****wit.

Huh. I wonder if I better go back and reread the ToS for this place and edit that. We'll see. (Ok, so I did go back and read the ToS, and maybe that extremely versatile word I had in place of those stars could be construed as vulgar or obscene. A pity that this day and age has me self-censoring like that.)

Anyway, tomorrow is Christmas. I was up til 11 last night building furniture for Ben's new room. He's not getting a bunch of toys from us, rather he's getting a new room. We want him to not feel displaced come March. He's got some cool stuff, and one of the things is a train table. That's sitting here in my office right now, and I need to get that home somehow today. Grandparents and a friend are getting hime some Brio train set stuff, and I think he'll love it. We are getting him some toys, too, don't worry, but the bulk of it is getting a new room ready for him. (By the way, Brio is a brand of wooden train toys. No electric trains for a toddler. They're pretty expensive, but I'm told they are also rather durable.) I'll let you know what he thinks of his new room.

I need to get working on Lore. I have projects set up on SourceForge, as I mentioned earlier, but it took some effort to figure out how to get CVS support to work right on my XP (Home, I'm afraid to admit) laptop. Once set up, it seems pretty easy, so now it's down to brass tacks. Lore-gcc is the first bit I'm going to work on. A front end to gcc via lex and yacc seems like a decent route to take. Several of the languages seem to define their own macros for code generation, so there's just one more piece for me to dig deeply into. Hey, if any of you know any good sites for designing MMORPG's, let me know. (As if I have magically established an enormous fan base for this blog. Hah.)

Well, I'm off. Merry Christmas and all that.

A Vile State of Affairs

I just got an email about this.

You know, it occurs to me that since it is pretty clear that the current state of affairs is being handled in much the same manner by much the same people as it was about 30 years ago, we'd all be fools to think that they don't have the next 30 years planned out in a similar fashion as well.

If that's the case, they should be grooming protoge's at this point, as some of these people simply will not be around in 30 years. It should be possible to identify those people.

Wouldn't be ironic if the first Black woman president was a Republican? It looks to me like there's one possible protege' right there. There should be more. These people are having their power base firmly established and entrenched even as we speak, and if those who believe in denying fear the power it seeks over humanity wish to stop these people from being unassailable in the future, we have an obligation to attempt to do so *now*.

I predict that in all likelihood these people will *not* be in elected positions at present, and will not be so until their power base is solidly established. They already recognize that it would be too easy to remove them from elected positions if they are otherwise weak. Political power that they wield will come from being in appointed positions. They will also be stockholders in companies that profit from the politics of fear.

I suggest that, as vile as it may sound, people who oppose fear also become investors in said companies. This certainly sounds counterproductive until you realize that these people will not sacrifice their own monetary base in order to weaken us. It also allows some degree of information and influence that otherwise would not be available. It also allows for better research into our opponents.

I do not and will not advocate violent or illegal methods to bring these people down. That is anathema to my position. What I do advocate is exposing these people to the light of day, and showing the convoluted network of connections they undoubtedly already share.

SourceForge

So I now have 5 new projects listed on SourceForge. I'm not going to link to them here just yet, as they are totally empty and will be for some time. I'll take a moment to describe them here, though:

Two are compilers for the same language. This sounds a bit stupid at first, but bear with me: One is a new front end for gcc, and will be written in C. The other will be written in the new language (which I am calling Lore), and will target a few platforms that gcc currently doesn't - the JVM and .Net. Both use a stack based system, and I heard that retargeting gcc to a stack is a pain. The second is a bootstrapping compiler, and I'll add more targets to it over time - Win32 will be the first, but Linux and Mac are also on the to-do list.

The next is pretty obviously a standard library for Lore. It will initially be just enough to get the bootstrapping compiler to work, but after that will be things like data compression and digital signatures. I want the compiler suite to be able to generate modern binaries and distribution units, and those are two mandatory parts.

Also is a miscellaneous category. In the course of creating a compiler, other tools will emerge, like a parser generator (think ANTLR), (maybe even a back end generator, like what lcc uses), plugins for IDEs, and editing modes. That's where all this junk will land.

The last project is a game. Both multiplayer and single player modes allowed. Think of it as a really lame Neverwinter Nights wannabe. ;) I figure that a language needs an application to be useful. Otherwise it's just an exercise in mental masturbation, and while that can be fun, it's pretty pointless.

If you get a wild hair to track down my projects, you now have enough information to find at least one of them, and from that get to my username, and then the other projects. Feel free to donate money once you get there. ;)

Ben

I have a son that turns three next month. A couple nights ago he got very excited when it was bedtime. We read him his story, and he climbed off the bed and started running around like he was a crazy man. We told him to head to his room, and he took off like a shot. His room has a small entryway where you step in, there's a wall, you turn left and there's the rest of his room. We have a small trashcan by the wall right there. Well, he's running full tilt, not really watching where he's going, and he runs right into the trashcan and smacks his forehead against the wall. I rushed in to console him, expecting a big bunch of tears. He staggers, turns around looking stunned, sees the look on my face, and clear as a bell says, "I'm okay, Daddy." He then gives me a big hug. Wow. He was concerned for me, and wanted me to not worry.

I have a great kid. (He was indeed ok, by the way. Not a mark on him.)

Grey

It looks like the Earth forgot to keep rotating. Combine the shorter days with overcast skies and the slight tint in the windows in my office and I feel like I'm working at the bottom of a very very large cave. I am affected by a lack of sunlight in a not very good way (ask my wife or anyone else who has known me for a while), and it's making me a little grumpy lately.

Language Design

So I've been doing some reading about different kinds of programming languages and found some really good references, and it feels like my head is going to explode some of the time. I think that there's going to be a bit of a tradeoff on how powerful a language is versus how readable and maintainable it is. It's nice to be able to get a lot done in a few lines of code, but if those lines of code make no sense to anyone but the writer, it just doesn't do much good. It's obvious to me that comprehension of code drops dramatically when a single function won't fit on the page at one time.

I think strong typing is a good thing. The ability to detect type mismatch at compile time (or in the IDE) as opposed to at runtime is a really good thing. I think that errors at runtime should be minimized where possible. However, I also think that implicit casting is also a good thing. I don't want to have to tell the damn machine that yes, I know this is an integer and yes, I want to use it as a float. It should just work, and if the cast is legit, it should do it with no warnings at all. Some type casting makes no sense, however, and that's when it should throw errors, or at least warnings for cases where it could be a problem but night not be.

Do I want to allow operator overloading? Really, that's just another form of function overloading, just allowing extending the definition of tokens with a normally fixed meaning at parse time. I don't want to have a language that allows redefinition of reserved words. That's just too painful for me. Sure, it's powerful, but that goes back to power versus readability. (Note that's not the same as allowing variable names to be the same as reserved words - that might be allowable due to a difference in scope, but it could make the parser too complicated.)

Ugh

It's a really long week. It's only Wednesday and it already feels like it should be Friday. In fact, yesterday felt like it should be Thursday. It's as if Monday was three days long. I've been tired all week. I realize I haven't gotten enough sleep, and that's part of it, but holy crap, this is annoying.

The stupid part of this is that I don't have anything really exciting coming up that would make it reasonable that I'm just being impatient. I could see how that would make time seem to flow really slowly. That's not the case here, though.

Feh.

Quiet musings

Sometimes I feel obligated to write something, anything. Not that I expect anyone in particular to read it, and not that I really have anything to say, but mostly to be in the habit of writing. This is one of those times. Like a really good bowel movement, sometimes you just need to evacuate your mind.

I'm running a D&D game lately with a group with a wide range of experience. I've played since 1979, and a couple of the players have played about that long. There are also a couple that have played, but not in years and years, and at least one that has never played before. The novelty of it all is something to see. There is such a plethora of material these days that it's really easy to get lost. I'm just using the core 3 books to start out, but in the design I am (will be) using several other texts. As people get used to the rules, whether new players or old, I'll be introducing some variant rules and additions to make it even more interesting. In hopes of not startling them too badly I want to collect the rules and give them something to read on their own. We've had a few sessions, and they've solved a couple simple problems. I'm also including hints for long term complexity, which is always fun - factions, alliances, recurring villains, and so on.

Unfortunately what I haven't spent enough time on is background. I need to spend quite a bit of time spread out over a much longer time to give it the substantial depth that makes a long term game worthwhile. I need maps, deities, organizations, and so on. Names and NPC's and rumors and legends. It's easy to ad lib a low level game for a while, but if you want a game to last 10 years or more you really need to do a lot of work up front. (I know - I've done it before.)

So anyway, I guess that's what was floating around in my head. As always, it feels good to get it out.