Stoo

That's it. This is often called the module pattern. It's often used to avoid polluting the global scope with variables, e.g.

(function() { var x = 1; console.log(x); })();

console.log(x);

Would output:

1

undefined

I've used Crunch since I began contracting towards the end of 2009. So I was one of their early customers. I would say their software keeps getting better but their service as a whole has worsened as they've got bigger. That's not to say their service is bad, it's just not as good as it was when they had less than 100 customers. I've had a couple of instances in the past (around two years ago) where I've had to correct my account manager when he's told me something I've known to be wrong.

Having said that, just about everything is automated or part of their software now and I haven't had to speak to anyone there since last summer. Maybe their service hasn't gotten any worse, it's just become less personal.

Still working on Storytella[0]. I'm currently working with a copywriter to get some much needed user guides in place.

[0] https://storytel.la/

If you haven't seen it Andrej Karpathy's article on neural nets was posted on HN recently: http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

Accelerando by Charles Stross (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando). I'm mostly enjoying his look into humanity's near and not so near future and his views on business, economics and technology. It's interesting and I like his writing style but sometimes it doesn't feel like much is going on story-wise.

I tried the infamous blue dress image and also got "instrumentation". Some sort of default fall back keyword, perhaps?

My main focus is still on Storytella[0]. I'm currently speaking to a copywriter about getting some good quality user guides set up. I set up writing-ideas[1] this week, just for fun really, and a chance to write some code without much thought for architecture or performance or testing or any of that professional kind of stuff that I have to do for Storytella. There's also Sunstone[2] which is in need of some love. Outside of code there's also Hollow[3], where I get to flex my music skills.

[0] https://storytel.la/

[1] http://www.writing-ideas.com/

[2] http://sunstone.stoogoff.com/

[3] http://www.hollow-audio.co.uk/

Actually, yeah, whenever I need to search for something code related I don't go to Google, I just redo the DDG search with !g at the end. The shebangs are incredibly useful for that.

I almost exclusively use Duck Duck Go (https://duckduckgo.com/) as an alternative to Google. The only time it doesn't give me the answers I need is occasionally for code / bug related searches, in which case I go back to Google.

I subscribe to the apostrophe / boing methodology[0] so "reboinglyeh".

[0] http://issendai.livejournal.com/429293.html

If it's just static hosting you're after Amazon's S3 is worth looking at: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

I was in two minds reading Altered Carbon. I really liked the setting, the world building was great and the story worked well but the lead character just came across as too powerful for my liking. He was constantly getting threatened or beaten but would always make it out of impossible situations. That felt a little tedious after a while. However, I think it would make an excellent TV series and I would love to see it.

While that's all true it looks like the intellectual property belongs to A. So while A isn't responsible to the backers, B is, it's A's IP and reputation which is being damaged.

I've just had a look at the Storytella editor using the === style of headers and it doesn't work. You can see it for yourself in the editor demo, here:

https://storytel.la/demo/chapters/edit/

I've always used the starting hash header form:

# Header

## Header

So I haven't come across that issue before. Thanks for pointing out a possible issue!

Storytella[0] takes the same approach. It uses a Markdown editor in a single pane, no preview, which is also based on CodeMirror[1]. CodeMirror makes this kind of editor straight forward to build, with a lot of configuration and extension options. This seems to hide a lot of the configuration, so I would think is great for dropping into new admin or comment systems where you need rich text but don't want to allow arbitrary HTML.

I would consider switching over to it, as it would mean less code for me to manage, but I'd need the CodeMirror extensibility exposed.

(disclosure, I built Storytella)

[0] https://storytel.la/

[1] http://codemirror.net/

Recently read:

Blindsight (Peter Watts) - Hard sci-fi with themes of perception and identity.

Ancillary Justice (Anne Leckie) - More of a murder / mystery sci-fi with themes of gender.

Reading:

Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson) - Hard sci-fi covering the terraforming of Mars. Very political, takes a broad scope.

The docs for Phaser are a bit lacking but I found just about everything I needed by reading through the provided examples.

I'm near the end of Green Mars at the moment. It's a fascinating story. I'm never sure if the science is accurate (not my forte) but it's definitely convincing and a compelling read.

I also write and make music, but not the generative kind. I'm interested in the generative fiction, what do you use and how does that work? What kind of stories come out of it?

I always thought the Internet Explorer branding was the one thing they got right. If you're not a technical person and you've got a new computer and you're trying to get onto the internet for the first time do you use:

  Firefox  
  Chrome  
  Opera  
  Internet Explorer

The last one says exactly what you want to do.

Sounds interesting, I'll check it out.

Also a writer. The first time I was given a writing prompt as a timed exercise I was surprised by what I came up with. If I'd sat and thought of what to write I never would have written what I wrote in a five minute unthinking flurry.

Some members of my family have the same problem. Their surname is Money and none of them can use it on Facebook.

The cost of incorporating in the UK is cheap but you're creating a legal entity so there's more to it than just coming up with a name and parting with the cash. I'd have a read of the following to get an idea of what it entails and what other options you have:

https://www.gov.uk/business-legal-structures/overview

AWS also has a calculator, which I only discovered yesterday:

https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

It allows you to enter your expected usage and works out costs from that.

Storytella[0] is running on AWS. Currently I'm trying to keep costs down so everything is running on micro instances which are free for 12 months for new sign ups. I have set up:

EC2 micro instance running a django application EC2 micro instance running CouchDB RDS micro instance running MySQL ElastiCache micro instance running Redis S3 storage for user images 1 Lambda function for resizing images

That set up is handling roughly 1200 sessions per month at the moment and costs me roughly $15 per month, which is mainly for the second EC2 instance. If I was paying for everything it would be more like:

EC2 instances x2: $15 RDS: $25 ElastiCache: $12

The S3 and Lambda services are a bit more tricky to work it and I'll worry about it when I need to. For everything else it's roughly 750 hours per month x hourly cost.

If you've got any follow up questions let me know.

[0] https://storytel.la/

It wouldn't let me create an account directly and there's not enough information up front to convince me to sign in with Facebook or Google+.

I normally end up building things that are useful to me. Storytella[0] was started for a Nanowrimo one year. I wanted something which would allow me to write at home or at work without having to worry about losing anything or having to keep files in sync. It also needed to make it really easy to change character or place names because I'm often indecisive about these things.

Sunstone[1] was built (and still needs a lot of love) because I'm a role-player and I often need to make maps. There are plenty of cartography tools available but they all seemed mediocre or required a Java install.

[0]: https://storytel.la [1]: http://sunstone.stoogoff.com/