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Dropbox command line installer
I wanted a way to be able to drop my files between all my machines quickly and easily. I found that in Dropbox, but one downside is dropbox is more GUI based while most of my workflow is command line based. With this issue at hand I went out to create an installer that downloaded, installed and launched the dropbox daemon on linux.
here’s the script:
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Here’s an inside look of our newest installation downtown! Hive, a giant LED light installation by Leo Villareal was recently completed at the Bleecker Street Station. The LED sculpture takes the form of an ever-changing colorful honeycomb, dramatically filling an architectural elliptical-shaped space above the stairs that marks the brand new transfer point connecting the IRT (6) and IND (B,D, F, M) subway lines. Hive (Bleecker Street) has a playful aspect in its reference to games. Riders will be able to identify individual elements within a larger context and track this movement. The work explores the compulsion to recognize patterns and the brain’s hard coded desire to understand and make meaning. The patterns also take inspiration from the research of the mathematician John Conway who invented the Game of Life, the best-known cellular automata program. Whether you concentrate on mapping the movement, or just appreciate the colors changing this piece is sure to catch your eye.
Top: Artist Leo Villareal testing his piece before complete, Photo Credit: Rob Wilson
Check out more of Villareal’s bright installations on Co.Design.
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How Time Travel Works. (Thanks to @ChaseWhale for the heads up)
This. Is. Perfect.
Here I thought it was all wibbly wobbly timey wimy stuff..
- How Time Travel Works (yewknee.com)
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Porting DooM to Node.JS
After a lot of research on node.js I have noticed most of the tutorials are all geared to the most common neo-“hello world” apps, ie blogs and todo lists. I plan on solving this with the best and most fun “Hello world” app ever. DooM and Diablo in Node.
More to come..
UPDATE 11.01.2012: Found a port of idsoft doom to javascript, and the following DMCA TakeDown issued to Mozilla. No worries legal guys at ZeniMax, I’m going to do a full rewrite of the code from skulltag and Freedoom for the source iwad. No content from your subsidatry, ID Soft.
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Embedding GitHub Gists in Tumblr Posts
Tumblr’s utter lack of Gist support was pretty much a show-stopper for me, which is why this is my first post. In trying to figure out how to hack it myself, I ran across Jarred Grippe’s post describing how he hacked it. I refactored his solution a bit to add some error checking and a couple of features:
Most of the magic comes from the call to embedNextGist inside the document.write overrides. Typically when scripts are being added to the page programatically, you have to be careful not to execute code that depends on the script before the script is loaded. For example, if I had instead just put embedNextGist in a loop, all of the document.write overrides and appending of script tags would have happened long before the first appended script even loaded. The calls to the overridden document.write do not occur until the script has loaded, which would mean that all of the appended scripts would use whichever version of document.write was provided in the last iteration of the loop. That is, each Gist would, in turn, write itself into the last p.gist.
But in this case, all of that trouble is circumvented by calling embedNextGist from document.write which is called by the appended script (a call which, naturally, cannot happen until the script is loaded).
Two other small notes:
- Jarred’s version writes the stylesheet link for every Gist that it handles. My version never writes the stylesheet link because I have that link as part of my Tumblr template.
- My version caches document.write before processing Gists and restores it upon completion.
Here is an uncommented version and a 412 byte minified version.
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Prince of Persia Source Code, Open Sourced! →
Before Prince of Persia was a best-selling video game franchise and a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, it was an Apple II computer game created and programmed by one person, Jordan Mechner.
Not only is Prince of Persia now available as a paperback and ebook, but the source is now on GitHub!
The original Prince of Persia source code recently “just turned up” after being lost for 22 years. Jordan Mechner and two stalwart companions dedicated most of a day and night extracting the source and posting it on github. His friend Jamie — who knows the term “source code” primarily as the title of the movie Jake Gyllenhaal did after Prince of Persia — looking as confused as before, asked “Why?!?”
Why the source code?
Why spend a whole day trying to recover data from some ancient floppy disks?
“Because if we didn’t, it might have disappeared forever.”
Video game source code is a bit like the sheet music to a piano sonata that’s already been performed and recorded. One might reasonably ask: If you have the recording, what do you need the sheet music for?
You don’t, if all you want is to listen and enjoy the music. But to a pianist performing the piece, or a composer who wants to study it or arrange it for different instruments, the original score is valuable.
It’s possible, up to a point, to reverse-engineer new source code from a published video game, much as a capable musician can transcribe a musical score from listening to a performance. But in both cases, there’s no substitute for the original document as a direct line to the creator’s intentions and work process. As such, it has both practical and historical value, to the small subset of the game-playing/music-listening community that cares.
Source on GitHub - Blog Post - Image by Jason “Textfiles” Scott
(Source: thechangelog)
Digital Sensei
Regardless you speak electronic
I blog, tweet, and code geeky things. All the while working at CompuTEK Industries building great web apps for a range of clientele and prototyping cool tech toys.
