I thought I’d share a funny story from some years ago.
This was when I was subcontracting at a Certain Large Finnish Mobile Phone Maker.
It involved email and rickrolling.
Rickrolling a lot of people.
Could you use Minecraft to teach programming?
There are two mods (that I’m aware of) for Minecraft which let you build computers inside the game.
ComputerCraft allows you to have Lua-programmable computers and robots, with basic wired and wireless networking capabilities. RedPower 2 on the other hand has a 6502-like CPU based computers, which are programmable either using 6502 Assembly or FORTH.
What if you used Minecraft and one of these mods as an environment to teach programming?
I made a thing: Planetside 2 minigame
Random ideas and idle hands lead from one thing to another. While waiting for the Planetside 2 (a large scale MMOFPS) beta to land, I decided to make a hex-grid of the game’s map.
Once the map is complete, someone suggests it should be colored in one of the three in-game faction’s colors… then I realize, why not just let the user click the map to change the color of a hex to his favorite faction’s?
End result: In the span of 12 or so hours, thousands of people come to play a game where the sole purpose is to franctically click hexes in competition with everyone else playing it.
Read on to find out what on earth am I talking about, how it worked (hint: node.js) and some thoughts on why it became so popular for a while.
Best practices for building embeddable widgets
With all the embeddable buttons, such as Facebook like buttons, and widgets like Disqus comments and whatnot these days, you’d think there was some nice info on how they are actually built.
But it turns out no, not really. I found this first hand when we had to build some FB like button style things at work, and had to basically invent the whole process myself.
Here’s some ideas and best practices for implementing embeddable widgets in the style of FB like buttons or anything else. Some of this is based on an answer I gave on Stack Overflow on a similar topic.
Is Haskell good for web development?
I’ve been trying out Haskell for developing a web application, using the Yesod framework.
I always found Haskell quite nice, but never tried developing web apps with it. After using Yesod, I’m slowly starting to think that Haskell might be much better for it than many of the commonly used languages like PHP, Python, Ruby or JavaScript.
Here’s why:
How to run Apache and NodeJS based sites on the same server with Varnish
While developing Battlefield 3 Web Commander, I wanted to keep it on my VPS where I was already running Apache.
Of course I had the option of putting it in a non-standard port like 8080, but it wouldn’t be nice if the URL would be somedomain.com:8080. The second option was ordering an extra IP address from Linode. That would’ve cost me a bit each month, so I didn’t really want to do that either.
The third option turned out to be pretty easy: Use Varnish.
Here’s how I did it…
Nodejs application architecture: Battlefield 3 Web Commander
In this post I’ll talk a bit about the architecture of my first nodejs application, Battlefield 3 Web Commander.
In addition to your usual web app stuff, Web Commander talks to Battlefield 3 game servers in real time and has many features related to that. It also displays data from the servers in real time. Because of these, there is a fair bit of complexity to it.
Creating custom dojox.dtl filters
Dojo’s implementation of the Django Template Language (DTL) is pretty convenient for client-side templating in Dojo applications.
However, sometimes you need to customize formatting of values, or add other custom logic to it. Using a filter for this purpose is quite convenient, but Dojo’s implementation is completely undocumented as to how you would add your own.
Turns out it’s actually quite easy.
Why does everything need to be integrated into a framework?
There is occasionally people asking about things such as “Is there an integration for X in framework Y”
Then they are disappointed when it isn’t, acting as if it’s a really bad thing.
But why do things need to be integrated to begin with?