jcw

461 karma · joined June 29, 2009

jcwon A DIY 32-bit game console for the price of a latte

I want to develop games for this. How hard would it be for someone with no circuitry experience to build?

jcwon Bcvi - run vi over a 'back-channel'

This is really cool. However, one of the advantages of using vi is that you use it on any machine without really needing your configuration files, the defaults are comfortable enough.

jcwon Bcvi - run vi over a 'back-channel'

Is it just me, or is SCP very slow in vim?

jcwon The Demoscene -- an Overview

There's something really beautiful about demos and the demoscene. I'm glad they're being preserved and seen as an art form, was afraid that they'd be forgotten.

jcwon The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

Reminds me of the interesting ways the SNES Sim City has been exploited: http://incise.org/advanced-sim-city-strategies.html

jcwon The arrangement with my code is the same as with my text. I create, you consume.

And what about the idea that once you display something publicly, it's no longer really yours?

jcwon How I develop Clojure with Vim

Vim-shell isn't bad, but the version on the site is outdated. You have to scour their mailing list to find a working link to a patch that works with vim 7.2.

jcwon How I develop Clojure with Vim

Using screen to get a REPL alongside vim is pretty clunky. Conque is much easier, in my opinion: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2771

I really hope that a real shell gets implemented inside vim at some point, it's almost enough to make one switch to Emacs.

jcwon Teal and Orange - Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness

There's also that child laughing sound clip that's used everywhere, is there a name for it?

jcwon Windows 3.1 Online - With Minesweeper

Did Windows 3.1 have a Paint program?

Also, this reminds me about how I used to carry around MiniVMac (a Macintosh emulator) running OS 7 on a thumb drive to keep random notes and drawings. It would be kind of cool if you could sign up an account on this site for that purpose.

jcwon "Dabblers and Blowhards" - hackers are nothing like painters [2005]

I paint and I code, and this made me laugh:

* Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data.

* Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick.

It's funny, and maybe a little ironic, to look at this and see both a hacker's cynicism and a painter's habit of looking at things objectively.

jcwon Tabletop Pong

In Air Hockey, you can move your paddle in two dimensions, you can apply a variable amount of force to the puck, the goals don't encompass the entire width of a player's side, and there are those little holes shooting air that carries the puck. They may look like small differences, but even minute changes to a game's mechanics can result in hugely different gameplay dynamics.

jcwon GitHub Flavored Markdown

I do the same thing. Markdown lets you do this already, you just have to have two spaces at the end of each line.

One thing that I feel like Markdown is sorely missing is the ability to link to anchors within the same document. It would be nice if each heading had its own anchor tag.

jcwon Enchilada Programming Language

Having the REPL in a frame as soon as you go to the site is very clever.

jcwon LÖVE 0.6.0 (lua game library) is released

LÖVE is excellent, especially for prototyping. The fact that you couldn't access pixel data of an image was possibly its biggest shortcoming, but that's fixed with 0.6.

jcwon Ask HN: So HNers, whatd'ya get for Christmas?

Herzog Zwei is excellent. Congrats on getting that.

jcwon Lessons from teaching CS 1: Code fast

I think what the author means is that students have trouble breaking down large problems into small ones, and quickly testing out solutions to these small problems. As a student, I notice that people I know have some difficulty doing this.

jcwon Implementing A Scripting Engine

I found the site just recently, after getting interested in demoscene and 3D graphics. Excellent site.

jcwon Brace : Dialect of C that looks like Python

I would really like to mess around with this, but it doesn't compile under OS X because of some utility differences (namely readlink and cp).

jcwon Unreal Development Kit Released

Oh. Dang.

jcwon Unreal Development Kit Released

Ha ha. I'm in the middle of a class where we make an environment for UT3. Everyone gripes and complains about how limited we are, because we're only using the level/script editor that comes bundled in with the game, and that you need the super expensive license in order to make anything that deviates too much from the third/first person shooter formula.

This changes a lot of things. I know there will be a lot more interesting output from my school now that Unity3D and the UDK are free.

jcwon Unreal Development Kit Released

It does. You need a certain Python script to get Blender to export *.ase meshes: http://www.katsbits.com/htm/tools_utilities.htm#ase

jcwon Ooc - modern object oriented c

This looks great. Let's all hope bloat and feature creep don't turn it into C++ in a few years.

jcwon Play Sierra On-Line games in your browser (with added multiplayer)

I feel the same way. Too bad no company in their right mind would release a game with intentionally outdated graphics and physics. Imagine the public outcry. Maybe the current game-playing mainstream is so devoid of imagination that they're unable to play games that leave things to it.

jcwon HN top-100 sorted by karma per day

I think the community seems so large here because it's hard to identify people and their patterns, everyone seems so anonymous. I think this is easier on forums where people have avatars. Keeping with the minimalism of HN, maybe a small signature icon could appear next to people's names. A 10x10 pixel image with colors randomly picked upon registering. Maybe not the best approach, but I'd like to see something that would help identify people. The mind can pick out patterns of images much more quickly than text.

jcwon The original IBM Thinkpad

I saw these the other day and salivated a little. As a commenter over there said, you can get one of these on IBM's merch store, although they're not exactly the same:

http://logogear.americanid.com/ProductDetail.aspx?pid=42148

Having a vintage one, though, would be like ten times better than having a Field Notes pad (or Moleskine, or one of those rare unruled composition books).

jcwon Vim is a great text editor - try it

Ed is fun to use, and learning it makes you better at vi.

jcwon If Craigslist cost $1

The revenue of the site would soar, which means that the people running the site could ... change the economy of an emerging nation.

I find that whenever I say things like this, people either look at me funny or laugh. I wish more people shared this kind of naive optimism.

jcwon Efficient Editing With vim

I've hit ctrl-w and closed a window while taking a test in class.

jcwon Easy start for new vim user. Full vim's power available.

NetBSD comes with nvi, which is a clone of the original vi: http://www.bostic.com/vi/