Reactor is a game I’ve been meaning to write for a while. It’s a conversion of a board game I originally wrote on the C-64 called Reaction (not to be confused with Reaxion, a rather good tile flipping game).

Here’s some graphics I knocked out showing the …

Now, here’s something worth blogging about! I’d been wondering why there was no activity on Inform for years.

Graham Nelson has just released Inform 7. Now, this is no incremental release, it’s a revolutionary release!

Inform is a system for developing interactive fiction (or adventure games, as …

My sleep patterns are really screwed up.

I ended drifting off to sleep at 9pm last night, and woke around 3.30am. In an effort to send myself back to sleep, I knocked out PLGX, a small DHTML-based presentation system for those of us who neither want nor need …

Here‘s the Breaking News article.

What kind of fools does he take us for? Really. There wasn’t a cognizant person in this country who didn’t think there’s be some trouble. Does he really think that saying that “An Garda Siochana had prepared for a low key …

I’ve to check out of the hotel at 12pm. My flight’s just after 7pm. I might be meeting up with Mark later, which would help kill a lot of time. Of course, that’s all moot unless I can check in early.

Good news is I managed to …

Clashes in Dublin over loyalist march.

It’s time for some righteous anger and disgust from me over what’s been happening back home. However utterly wrongheaded and pointless I think the “Love Ulster” march was, I’d no problem with it going ahead. However, the last thing anybody with …

I don’t know whether it was that I picked up the ‘flu that’s been going around the office, or if I ate something bad while I was here, but I was in a complete mess Friday and Saturday. I was completely out of my head Saturday morning, but …

I received the DSL modem earlier today. I’m just testing it out right now. It’s sooooo fast! This rocks!

One annoyance though: I ordered a DSL modem with a wireless hub built in so that I could work in peace and quiet and not have to sit in …

Formkeys are something I first discovered when snooping around the source for Slashcode many, many moons ago. The idea is to embed a hidden field in a form that can be later used to check if a form has been submitted twice, or if somebody’s attempting to use it …

After three months of trying to get broadband off them, first satellite and later DSL, I’ve finally got Digiweb to activate my DSL.

This all really should have been done a month ago, but until today, they’ve kept putting me off, giving excuses like “we’re waiting on …

[Note from 2020: Syncope eventually ended up as AFK]

Here’s how Syncope, the kinda-but-not-really-a-framework I mentioned before, works. It’s really just a library with a bunch of canned request lifecycles. Those are the only parts of it that vaguely resemble a framework. It’s made to be as …

My vitriol isn’t just reserved for others. No, I’m quite happy to lash out at myself when it’s appropriate. There’s a lot of things I really don’t like about the code I wrote to drive this site. I thought it’d be good to get …

[Update from 2020: This post is mean. I appear to have been very angry at myself when I wrote this. It looks like it turned into an exercise in beating myself up. Some of it did come true: I got up to 105kg a few years ago, but managed to …

I promised myself I wouldn’t get involved in this rubbish again, but I can’t help myself: I’m just a glutton for punishment.

Why to people persist in bandying about the old trope of irreducible complexity? Orson Scott Card in an article on the eighth of this month …

Joel Spolsky posted on his site about several instances where where he needed to modify the Project Aardvark (Copilot) Functional Specification.

It was all fine, and stuff I agree with myself, up until close to the end where he wrote:

I can’t tell you how strongly I believe in …

In preparation for possibly adding a WYSIWYG editor to the site—mainly because people don’t seem to read the formatting instructions—I’ve written the best part of a HTML scrubber to ensure that the HTML markup returned from the poster’s browser doesn’t contain anything dodgy and …

This is an excellent explaination about what must be one of the most puzzling parts of AWT/Swing development: the GridBagLayout layout manager.

The original was an MS Word file. I converted it to LaTeX for my own use, but I think others might find it useful too. I redid …

About a fortnight ago, I was poking around the copy of Perl sitting on my laptop. I came across Memoize.pm. Having read the article that inspired it a few years back, I thought I’d take an attempt at implementing something to do the same in JavaScript.

Memoization is …

…is PHP, so why not use it?

function include_view($view, $vars=null) {
    # Start buffering the generated text.
    ob_start();

    # Process the view.
    if (!is_null($vars)) {
        extract($vars, EXTR_OVERWRITE | EXTR_REFS);
    }
    include("views/$view.php");

    # Grab the generated content and clean up.
    $content = ob_get_contents();
    ob_end_clean();

    return $content;
}

Last year when I was writing Orpheus, I knocked out a C++ wrapper around Expat to make using it easier.

It consists of two classes. XMLParser is the Expat wrapper and sets up the event handlers and automates setup and teardown of the parser itself. XMLEvtHandler consists of a set …