Odd Lots
- J. D. Hildebrand endorsed Contra today over at SD Times. He mentions a falling out we had in ancient times (I think 1993 or so) which I remember as being a publicity stunt. Even if it wasn’t, 20 years is plenty for a falling-out. From one J. D. to the other: You’re OK in my book. (His blog at SD is here.)
- Quite by accident, I stumbled upon a clock app written in Lua, a language which I had heard of (vaguely) but never read up on. I mean, really, does the world need YADSL? However, a closer look showed that Lua does not use almost-invisible curly brackets for structuring code and instead relies on those big, bold, evil kiddie-language END keywords. It is to rejoice. LUA for Windows is here; will report again when I fool with it a little.
- I’ve linked to this before, but it’s been a few years: Tom Swift Lives, home of some of the best fanfic I’ve ever seen, much of which is yards better than the original Tom Swift material.
- Over the past year, I’ve discovered that the most effective single pain reliever for my occasional migraines is…aspirin. I dropped Tylenol like a hot rock. Now there’s evidence that aspirin reduces the risk of cancer. Avoiding gastrointestinal bleeding is an issue, but I can’t imagine that that’s not just engineering.
- And here’s how the food industry’s quest to undercut butter and lard gave us trans fats, more heart disease, and the myth that animal fat is bad for you. I believe in evolution. We evolved eating animal fat. We did not evolve eating vegetable oils dissolved out of seeds with hexane. Q.E.D.
- I never gave this a thought, but it’s obvious if you think about it: Setting printed material in Japanese using movable type involved an immense amount of lead.
- Although I’ve never seen a railbike in action, the concept has always fascinated me, and here’s one that doesn’t need any welding. There’s no abandoned trackage convenient to me, but it’s around. My only reservation is that it must be easy to run off the rails by letting the front wheel pivot even a little bit. (In Europe railbikes are called Draisines.)
- Having killed Microsoft Reader, which I liked a great deal, MS is apparently investing in the future of the Nook. Will Reader return? Let us pray; I have a number of ebooks in that format.
- At least these Macbooks won’t be subject to trojans now. Or anything else.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: ebooks · health · humor · programming · railroads
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Lua has one interesting use out there: it’s an “extension language” for World of Warcraft, letting people write add-ons to the MMORPG client in a reasonably-safe manner. Its main strength is as an embeddable “little language,” something like you might use Tcl, Python, or JavaScript for, but much lighter in weight while sacrificing little in terms of power.
One of the things a little browsing around suggested is that Lua is fast compared to other scripting languages, which fascinates me. Is it possible that people use conventional wisdom about interpreters as an excuse to just write inefficient interpreters? Turbo Pascal shamed the world’s compiler writers into doing better, because a build that everyone assumed required twenty minutes could now be done in twenty seconds. Python code seems slow to me. I’m looking forward to seeing how Lua comes across in terms of code execution speed.
Lua is also used inside a sort of Lego-universe game called Roblox, which reminds me of a low-res version of my concept RAD Mars, the last idea piece I published in Visual Developer before the mag folded. See: http://www.duntemann.com/Breakpoint60.htm
And “RAD Mars” itself sounds a whole lot like a SF-y version of Second Life…which has its own “ErectorSet”-ish parts with which to build objects (in the form of prims, and, recently, mesh objects), and, indeed, its own “little language,” called Linden Scripting Language, for making constructed objects do stuff. (LSL is structured kind of like ActionScript or Java, and these days runs on the Mono runtime environment server-side.)
Jeff, on the MS/B&N deal, there’s a growing feeling on the open-source side that this is a payoff from Ballmer & Co ; B&N failed to roll over when MS demanded danegeld for supposed patent infringements by Android, B&N wouldn’t sign the NDA in negotiations and publicly called out the patents in their countersuit, they went to the DoJ claiming market strangulation by MS, and given the way the Oracle v. Google suit over Java patents has gone so far, MS may have figured it best to settle and avoid having *their* patents invalidated.
Where the various Android cellphone manufacturers simply factor the MS royalties into their costs, B&N’s main business is selling media; the Nook is simply their enabler. As such they want to hold down the cost to encourage adoption, and had zero interest in playing along with MS.
The deal also frankly opens up the non-US market for the Nook, and potentially gives MS a hook into the e-textbook market by giving them a share in the college-bookstore business B&N runs at numerous campuses nationwide. While I have no love for The Beast of Redmond, this may be a good thing for the Nook tablet in terms of marketing and expansion to the e-textbook market.
Agreed, and thanks for the additional detail, which I was too spent to chase down myself. I love my NC and would really like to have one with a 10″ display, since a 7″ display isn’t big enough to show detailed technical art. If MS cash helps B&N to get there, I’m all for it.
I think the pertinent psychology here on MS’ part is: “If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em.”
BTW, LuaTeX is a TeX based computer typesetting system with Lua scripting engine embedded …
http://www.luatex.org/faq.html
Jeff, thanks so much for the “Tom Swift Lives” link. I looked at one, not expecting much. But then, the magic happened! I fell into the story. I was a kid again, reading under the covers when I should have been asleep. I *had* to read it to the end, and didn’t crawl into bed until 2am.
You’re right; they really *are* wonderfully done. A true tribute to the originals.
Scott’s work is that rarest of things: Fanfic that actually reads better than the originals. I’ve been paid that compliment a couple of times for my “new” Carl & Jerry story “Infra Redeye,” granting that it’s too large to ever have been published in a magazine.
It makes me wonder what other such may be out there waiting to be discovered.