tadhg.com » personal

Trying d-cubed for Task Management

Tadhg — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:58:51 +0000

I’ve been falling behind somewhat in keeping track of my tasks. That’s not to say I haven’t been productive, it’s just that most of my productivity has been focused in things I’ve been working on obsessively, like preparation for the roleplaying campaign I started running last week, Vim customization, and Python workflow coding.

It would be good to track other things better than how I’m doing it right now, but somehow returning to TiddlyWiki for my task management wasn’t appealing. I used it for quite a while, but a bare install of it doesn’t seem to quite work for task management, even though it’s still really good for keeping notes about things in general. I’m going to try d-cubed, a TiddlyWiki-based tool, instead.

One of the reasons for this is that I like a little organizational reward when I finish a task; I find that this kind of thing helps my motivation. This is partly due to my liking for lists (which may be related to my left-handedness) and partly due to the benefit of formally marking something as “done”. So a bare TiddlyWiki wasn’t quite structured enough for this, and I found that moving stuff around became too unwieldy. Instead of fixing the problem at the time, I gradually abandoned that list, and have managed mostly fine without it—but now occasionally forgetting an idea for a post is annoying me too much again.

Incidentally, this highlights my somewhat schizophrenic organizational state: various aspects of my life are either highly organized and usually stable that organized state, using some toolset that I’ve made work for me (like my blog, my subversion repository, tracking my CrossFit results, etc.); or are completely disorganized, with me getting by on them just by keeping stuff in my head and getting to it from time to time. The former is generally better than the latter, but finding the right tools for the right area isn’t always easy, especially when you’re as picky as I am (it took me a long time and quite a bit of research to settle on reStructuredText as my primary document format, for example).

In any case, I’ll see how d-cubed works; I might also try out Team Tasks, another TiddlyWiki-based tool.

During these trial periods, I’ll do my best to ignore the fact that I really want an API (preferably Pyton-based) to interact with TiddlyWikis via the command line, and that while some tools are close none match this requirement; I’ll eventually tackle that project if nobody else does, but adding another dependency in front of the task of keeping track of my tasks just doesn’t seem like a good idea, even if it wouldn’t be entirely out of character.

Tags: handedness, organization, personal, productivity, psychology, software

Inkscape

Tadhg — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:09:10 +0000

I’ve been using the vector graphics editor Inkscape a fair bit over the last few days, and in the last few months have given it something of a workout. It’s been quite impressive. I was never a really heavy Illustrator user, but Inkscape seems to compare to it much more favorably than, say, GIMP compares to Photoshop. It’s a later-generation product, so perhaps that’s not being fair, but regardless it just feels a lot better to use. Maybe there are killer features that Illustrator has that Inkscape doesn’t, but since I don’t know what they are, I don’t miss them…

I’ve mainly been using it for map-making (related to this), and for that it’s been really good, and I’m rather glad it exists, because doing the same kind of work in a bitmap editor would probably be incredibly frustrating. I haven’t read through the documentation, but whenever I’ve needed to find out how to do something I’ve been able to without much trouble, so it seems that they’re doing a good job on that as well.

Tags: design, games, personal, roleplaying, software

Vim: the Killer Instinct of Text Editors

Tadhg — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:45:49 +0000

I played Killer Instinct a lot in the mid-90s. It didn’t have the multiplayer depth of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, but I wasn’t playing it multiplayer much—rather, I was trying to get the longest combination move I could.

But what does this have to do with text editing?

I’ve always been inclined to try to get things done quickly with computers. I generally try to find the keyboard shortcuts for operations and commit them to memory fast, feeling that doing otherwise will lead to a lot of wasted time, and also to there being too long a gap between my intention and its execution on the screen. This was probably most advanced (prior to now) when I was doing a lot of Photoshop work in the late 90s.

That work came after I’d been heavily into fighting games for a while. While not all fighting games do this, most of them have a concept of a “combination”, a series of moves that, if executed properly, all hit an opponent who gets hit by the first one—that is, once the combo starts, the opponent cannot block in between hits. This makes mistakes significantly more lethal, as if you leave an opening for someone who can reliably hit a powerful combo, you take a lot more damage than against someone who just knows how to hit you once or twice. Note: each “move” (sequence of inputs) can result in more than one hit; for example in Super Street Fighter II Turbo Ken’s heavy Dragon Punch (down, down/forward, forward, heavy punch) registers as three hits rather than one.

I got into playing Ken in Super Street Fighter II Turbo and focused on trying to finish opponents off with a five- or six-hit super combo (I think you could chain his super onto a heavy punch from the air), and this focus on combos made me a perfect customer for Killer Instinct, which took the combo approach and brought it to fairly ridiculous levels. Ken’s six-hit super combo in SSF2T (if you could indeed chain it onto a heavy punch) required this sequence:

Up/Forward, Heavy Punch, Forward, Down, Down/Forward, Forward, Down, Down/Forward, Heavy Punch

That’s reasonably manageable. It requires quickness and precision, because you have to do it pretty fast and the sequence has to be correct, but it’s not all that hard to remember or to execute. Killer Instinct, however, required somewhat more; here’s what Orchid’s 46-hit Ultra Combo was (if I recall correctly):

Back, Light Punch, Forward, Heavy Kick,
Back, Light Punch, Forward, Heavy Kick,
Light Punch, Back, Medium Kick,
Light Punch, Forward, Heavy Kick,
Back, Light Punch, Forward, Heavy Kick,
Forward, Medium Punch,

Down, Down/Forward, Forward, Light Punch.

I broke it onto multiple lines for clarity. That wasn’t the toughest or longest combo in the game, and there are certainly tougher ones in other games, but I think that Killer Instinct represented a clear next step from earlier fighting games in terms of combo intricacy. There’s a YouTube clip of what that input sequence results in (for reasons I won’t go into the combo in the clip results in 48 hits instead of 45, but it’s almost the same series of inputs.)

Part of the difficulty was execution and timing, but part of the difficulty was also remembering the right sequences and when they could be applied; in it and other fighting games just going for the big combo isn’t the right move every time, and you need to tailor your choice to the situation.

In that way, there’s a similarity to keyboard shortcuts in applications. This is much more significant on Windows and certain Unix systems than on OS X, because OS X doesn’t use the Alt key (plus whatever letter) to open application menus. This is one of the things I always hated about Mac OSes, and have only gotten past by figuring out other ways to get my applications to do what I want. However, where the Alt key approach is available, invoking certain actions becomes a matter of chaining together keystrokes—for example, in some versions of OpenOffice Writer, you get to the Zoom dialog by hitting Alt-V followed by Z. In applications where there are a ton of actions, remembering a sequence of Alt keypresses was often easier than memorizing the chord for each, assuming there was a chord for that particular option.

Certain other basic text handling shortcuts are similar, like (your UI’s meta key)+Left Arrow to jump back a word, or Shift+(your UI’s meta key)+Left Arrow to select all the text going back a word, but they reach a limit fairly quickly.

Your quick text manipulation capabilities rapidly reach a limit, that is, unless you’re using an editor that’s basically designed to work without a mouse, and to make text manipulation as easy as possible. Like Vim.

Vim is a modal editor, and so the typical text editor (or word processor) approach where you immediately see on the screen what you type is just one mode (Insert mode). Vim basically assumes that Insert mode is pretty easy, and that real power comes from manipulating the text in ways other than typing what you want. Where other text editors effectively give you access to non-insert modes by letting you use the mouse, or use chording keyboard shortcuts (which are often somewhat awkward), Vim gives you the whole keyboard.

h is move left, l is move right, j is move down, k is move up. So far so simple, and not better than the arrow keys. But… numbers in front of those commands make them repeat. 30k jumps up 30 lines.

What if you want to delete? d(something) deletes something. So dl would delete the next character right.

20dl deletes 20 characters right. Vim recognizes words in the sense of strings of letters broken by non-letter characters so instead of moving one cursor line or column you can move in chunks of words.

Delete the rest of the word your cursor is over? dw. Delete the next 20 words? 20dw.

The same kind of thing applies to copying and changing text; when I decided halfway through this paragraph that I wanted to remove the commas I had inserted between the keystrokes that made up the Vim combos, I hit jj to exit Insert mode, ^ to go back to the start of the line, f, to reach the first comma, x to delete it; then I realized that the rest of my line only had comma in the commands, so I hit vg$ to select to the end of the visual line, then :s/,// to replace the commas with nothing, and then A to return to Insert mode at the end of the line.

You might be looking at that wondering how the hell it’s useful to have to wade through all that crap in order to do something you could do with the mouse and a bunch of moves, clicks, and the delete key. The answer is that it’s faster this way once you know how, and that further the basic moves Vim gives you turn into combos quite naturally, and then longer ones as you learn to extend their power.

Unlike fighting game combos, in Vim you generally have as much time as you want to enter the next key for each one, but for me a lot of it is about speed. The narrower the gap between when I think of an edit and when I’ve made that edit, the better the chance of my keeping my train of thought, and more generally the more edits I can get done in a shorter time.

On top of this, I get a kick out of figuring out how to chain together the combo and execute it properly, just like I got a kick out of stringing together forty-plus hits with Orchid. It’s not exactly the same kick, but there’s enough similarity there that my brain responds positively. At the same time, it’s reinforcing the learning of skills that are extremely useful for many important tasks (such as writing and coding), and so doesn’t have the potentially unhealthy drawbacks I discussed when going over my history with Super Street Fighter II Turbo.

And I get most of those kicks without having to move my hands from the home row.

So is Vim an editor for people who like video games with ridiculously intricate move sequences? Not exclusively, no. I’m sure I’m part of a rather small minority, and Vim can be compared many other things, including Nethack, a game that’s rather far away from Killer Instinct.

If you work with text quite a lot, learning and using Vim is probably going to speed you up as much as learning to touch type (and possibly more). It’s definitely frustrating at first, but if you’re willing to put in the time to get the basics, it will prove a good investment later. I’m certainly very happy I’m using it, and (despite still having a lot of respect for jEdit) wish that I’d moved over to it earlier.

My adoption of it was slowed by my having become habituated to buffer management in other editors, and not so much by the concept of modes, or dealing with remembering what the keys did, so I don’t think my path for learning it was all that typical. Hence I don’t know if any of the tutorials I’m about to link to are any good, but hopefully you can find one that works for you.

The absolute first things you should know: i to enter Insert mode so that you can write the text you want to write; to get back to normal mode so you can edit, and move around, and start learning what the other keys do.

In Normal mode (i.e. after you’ve hit , or when you first open Vim), :help will give you help, and :vimtutor will start a tutorial.

Vim is free software and is available for more or less every platform.

Some tutorials:

Tags: games, jEdit, personal, text editing, Vim

2010 CrossFit Sectionals

Tadhg — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:52:40 +0000

I just registered for the 2010 Northern California CrossFit Sectional competition. I’m doing it for the experience, as I know that my chances of qualifying for Regionals are zero. Despite that, it should help my motivation for training and (just as important) for eating properly. It’s 27/28 March, seven weeks out—we’ll see how fit I can get by then.

Tags: CrossFit, exercise, personal

Operation: Squared Birthday a Success

Tadhg — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:36:12 +0000

One of my goals for 2010 was to celebrate my birthday. Yesterday I did just that, and had a great time. Thanks to everyone who came out! To those who couldn’t make it, I missed you and I’m sorry I gave you such short notice! Next year’s birthday goal will be to celebrate it and give people more reasonable warning…

Tags: personal

Comments on GMing After a 15-Year Hiatus

Tadhg — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 17:10:23 +0000

Last Wednesday, I ran a roleplaying game for the first time since late 1994 or early 1995. It was a one-shot, using the same broad setting and rules system hybrid that I’m planning to use for a campaign later this year.

It went quite well, and it was definitely a good thing to run it before starting the campaign proper, giving me plenty of useful information.

The setting is an evolution of my Fantasy World Sketch from last March. The rules system is the D&D 3.5 SRD plus Iron Heroes and a magic system of my own devising, with some other changes due to the setting (like the absence of clerics and druids).

I’d never run any of those individual pieces before, never mind the hybrid. I’d also never run a game for any of the players there.

I was happy with it—15 years later and it still felt like a completely natural thing to be doing. The eleven years I spent regularly running games prior to the break clearly haven’t disappeared into mist, and aside from specifics of the system, knowing what to do wasn’t a problem.

It was a relatively simple plot, as befits a one-shot for an untested system, GM, and players. I’m not going to go into the details, because it’s a one-shot I plan to run again with a different group. It worked well, although it definitely had some weaknesses; Dave pointed out later that it should have followed a slightly different narrative structure, and I realized that with my gaming preparation and with my fiction I tend to focus not on the story arc or narrative line per se but on the details and intricacies of what’s going on—situation rather than plot, or plot in the sense of intrigue rather than storyline. This focus has been a creative strength of mine, but my attention to story structure has probably been too lax, and that’s something I can do with some work on.

Due to a hectic schedule and some unforeseen time sinks, I wasn’t as prepared for the game as I would have liked. While this was mostly fine, I want to avoid that situation in future. I know from experience that it’s really easy to go overboard on preparation and then have the players do something that means that the preparation is wasted, but I still want to do more work on it. Some of it is basic mechanics: it’s a good idea to have stats for anyone the players are likely to encounter, and also for people they might encounter when they go off on random tangents.

More than that, it’s also good to have a set of personalities alongside those stats, so that improvisation isn’t always the only resource.

One fairly major, and natural, shift over the last decade-and-a-half is that my primary tool during the session was my laptop. All the characters were on it for my reference, all the rules were on it, and I used the d20 Dice Bag to make a lot of the rolls, although I also used physical dice. I definitely prefer the laptop approach, and was happy to not have to spend time searching through physical books—although some of the rules checks on the laptop took almost as long.

To represent combat, we used pencil and paper for longer-range situations, and then a grid for melee. The grid was actually a quilting mat rather than a gaming-specific mat, but worked fine, although we couldn’t draw on it. Miniatures might have been nice, but didn’t really matter; any tokens or pieces work fine. I know that some groups have moved combat onto a virtual tabletop, such as MapTool, but I’m not ready to make that step yet.

That being said, I am considering using the laptop more centrally for play, in a way that might seem totally wrong for fantasy roleplaying games: as a presentation tool. Even in a fairly simple one-shot, players had trouble with some typical things—like names, for example. So I’m seriously considering the possibility of using a projector (or other large screen) as a presentation aid during what are essentially briefings. Even just using the projector to display the name of the NPC the players are dealing with might actually help matters significantly. Using it at other times to display the names of the player characters might help too; in the full campaign I’m thinking about providing handouts each session that include things like character names, what’s known about each character, who the primary NPCs are, etc.

Of course, as a GM, I want players to remember this stuff, but that’s not how it works, and any aids to player recall might be worth the investment of energy.

Combat was a fairly major part of the session (eventually…), and while it mostly went fine, I was frustrated by some of it.

What I really want, and I suspect I’m not alone in this, is to make combat interesting as a tactical sub-game but also retain roleplaying cohesion and character identification during it, and further to make it retain the flexibility of roleplaying rather than reducing it to a boardgame. Combat could be reduced to a boardgame (in fact the whole D&D system evolved from small-squad wargaming), but while roleplaying is about cooperative storytelling and trying to see and choose with your character’s eyes and mind rather than your own, boardgaming (and competitive gaming in general) is about acting optimally within a ruleset. Those are quite different things, and the latter places quite a strain on the former.

I haven’t figured out what to do about this yet, but I’m thinking about ways to interrupt combat, to yank players out of the flow of it and push them back towards their character as a character rather than a gamepiece, and I’m also considering the opposite as a technique, forcing players to make decisions very quickly during combat to make them feel some of the stress that their characters feel.

I suspect players might not like this, but I hope to get past that if they see how it makes the game better overall.

I personally hate it when combat, particularly combat that’s quite significant, ends up being a no-tactics series of attacks back and forth—which means just a series of dice rolls. Sometimes that’s simply what makes tactical sense for both antagonists, but what should be a highly tense situation in which characters are literally fighting for their lives can turn into: “I roll. Miss. You roll. Miss. I roll. Miss. You roll. Hit. eight damage”—which continues until one of them dies. It’s hard, as a GM, to get past that, particularly since at that point the players generally want to dispense with detail and just know how much damage they’re dealing and how much they’re receiving, which is understandable. I need to find a way to get out of such situations when they arise.

Lastly, I’d like to get players to focus more on the combat situation even when it’s not their turn. This wasn’t a terrible problem in the one-shot, but I was reminded of how it can get fairly bad. This goes together with other things: if combat is faster, it’s easier; if combat is more interesting even when you’re not in it, it’s easier; if combat is tactically deep and players react to it as a problem to solve, it’s easier; finally, if the player is more invested in their character, then the mortal danger experienced by them and their comrades should prove compelling and thus make it easier.

Tags: games, personal, roleplaying

2010 Goals

Tadhg — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:53:36 +0000

Happy New Year!

Once again, my goals for the coming year.

Some of these recur from last year, but that’s okay. They’re not really in any order.

Write at least one draft of the fantasy novel.
Revive sfmagic.org. Many of my MTG-playing friends simply don’t believe I’ll ever do this one, but I’m still determined to make it happen, and right now there are fewer obstacles to doing it than there have been in years.
Celebrate my birthday. A strange-sounding resolution, perhaps, but I haven’t actually done any significant celebration of my birthday for a couple of years, and that’s just dumb. So this year I’m going to do something. I might need help figuring that something out, we’ll see.
Participate in the CrossFit sectionals. I don’t expect to qualify, or even come particularly close to qualifying, but I want to take part anyway to see what it’s like, and to give myself a training target. Given that at the end of March last year I was in fairly poor physical condition, competing in them at all will be an achievement.
I have some miscellaneous fitness-related goals I’ll lump together: break three hundred pounds on the deadlift, get to ten dead-hang pullups, get my shoulders strong enough to safely do kipping pullups again and then get to thirty of those, break 23:00 for the 5K. Just because it’s the first day of the year and I think I should set one of these that’s a lot further away for me, I’ll add this: do “Murph” in under 50:00.
Finish The Annotated Fantasy Bedtime Hour. Just five episodes to write up, I simply need to get down to it.
Run a roleplaying campaign. I haven’t done this in fifteen years, and it’s time to start again. This already looks like it’s going to happen, but starting and finishing are separate things… this goal is to run at least one story arc, and to make it good (but not worry about it being perfect).
I don’t like having amorphous goals, but this last one is going in regardless. I need to do something about building a sense of community for myself. I’m not totally sure what this means, and it’s not that I utterly lack a sense of community now, but it’s not quite where I want it, and I need to figure out what it is I want to change and how to do it. I have a post kind-of in my head about this, which I’ll hopefully get down in the next few weeks.

That seems like a good set. I also want to read 80 books, but for some reason this year that doesn’t feel like a goal in the same way as the above.

Tags: coding, community, CrossFit, exercise, games, goals, MTG, personal, reading, roleplaying, web-development, writing

CrossFit and Coding (and Meat)

Tadhg — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:28:59 +0000

In 2009 I achieved some significant things that weren’t on my list of goals, although they’re not concrete achievements in the same sense.

One of them was starting CrossFit—and sticking with it. Prior to this year, I had never been particularly fit. I’d never been horribly unfit, either. I’d always wanted to be fitter, and it’s a fairly common theme in my morning pages throug their eleven years—wanting to start some exercise routine or other, wanting to figure out something that would really work. Many of the things that I tried would have worked, but I never stuck with them for too long. Even when I had physical activities I really enjoyed (e.g. tennis), I didn’t get into enough of a routine with them for that to have a really positive impact on my fitness.

It was something I was quite frustrated with, in a low-level way, for years. As with many things, the gaps between where I was and where I wanted to be, and between my intellectual motivation and my realized action, were wide and extremely frustrating to me. I was somewhat resigned to this continuing, and to perpetually going through patches of being slightly more fit but never truly getting too far.

CrossFit has changed that rather significantly. Not only am I probably the fittest I’ve been in my life, but both my determination to keep going and my confidence that I will are strong. The approach to fitness that I’ve been following for the last six months or so is one that I intend to stick with for the rest of my life, with the confidence that in terms of major features it is the right way for me. Those are all new states of mind for me, and I’m happy about them.

I spend a lot of my time using a computer. My profession, my writing, and many of my hobbies all involve computer use, and this has been true for years. I’ve always been rather interested in optimizing my software environment, and tend to quickly pick up shortcut keys and the like. At the same time, I’ve been progressing as a programmer. The last few years in particular have been challenging in a good way, and I’ve learned quite a lot. This year, I finally put these things together and wrote code to help my daily computer use in a serious way.

Python, a language that really helps me get things done rather than getting in my way, was a big part of this. The work I did this year to build a reStructuredText–WordPress blogging workflow, my RTF/Word–reStructuredText toolchain, and a better word count for jEdit, all constitute a positive shift in my attitude to programming. I’d always thought of programming as a useful tool (obviously), but this increased willingness to use it to directly alter my working environment has put me in a different place in regard to it—a place that I’m happy to be in.

Finally, meat. Not an achievement like the prior two, and whether it’s an unequivocally positive thing like them remains to be seen, but I have felt better since resuming meat-eating this year, after almost ten years of vegetarianism.

Tags: coding, CrossFit, diet, exercise, food, health, personal, python

2009 Goals Review

Tadhg — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 01:43:17 +0000

I had eight goals for 2009, and all of them that I’m going to get done I’ve already completed. Time to review.

Here are the ones I accomplished:

Fix my blog. I resurrected the full blog in January, finishing on 27 Jan 2009. I’m rather happy to have gotten this one out of the way.
Fix my Subversion repository. I’m even more glad I did this, as version control is just too important not to have. It took me until 04 May to do this one.
Finish at least three software projects. More than three, even if none of them were sfmagic.org. The reST–WordPress pipeline, the various WordPress Plugins, and the RTF/Word–reStructuredText Toolchain all qualify.

I abandoned the “write a summary/review/synopsis of every book I read” goal fairly early into the year, on 27 Feb. I don’t think I’m going to try that one again, as it just seems that the practice simply isn’t right for me.

That leaves four goals I didn’t accomplish:

Write at least one draft of the fantasy novel. This, for me, is the big one. I didn’t get anywhere close, and in truth I feel like I never really gave it a good effort. I’ll make it a goal again this year.
Read 80 books. It was looking great until the middle of the year, when my reading inexplicably dropped off. I’ll be at 56 or 57 by the end of December, which is off by quite a few. I’m really not sure what went wrong with this one, and will probably try it again next year also.
Finish pafib. Well, I got one, so just five more of those to go… I might not make that one a goal for next year, and instead I’ll just leave that series hanging around to work on whenever the right mood takes me.
Finish The Annotated Fantasy Bedtime Hour. No progress, but I still want to get this one done, and so I’ll probably leave it on there next year as well.

Looking at it as “three out of eight” probably isn’t a great plan. Instead, I’m going to consider it a great thing that I fixed my blog, fixed my Subversion repository (both things quite central to my activities), and wrote quite a few bits of software that I’m happy with. The failure that stings is the fantasy novel, and with that, I must fall back upon the old chestnut of trying again.

Tags: Blog, goals, personal, reading, reStructuredText, software, version-control, web-development, writing

Favorite Posts of 2009

Tadhg — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:37:13 +0000

My best pieces this year. If I write an outstanding post in the next three days, I’ll cheat and add it to this list later.

Top Five

Reflections on Offendedness

Why being offended is a starting point for examination, not an argument in itself. I’m proud of this piece because it expressed reasonably well something that had been going around in my head for quite some time. 03 Aug 2009.
Bullying: Just a Hunch

Language, ‘sexting’, bullying, agency, and cultural toxicity. I’m proud of this essay because, again, it expressed well what I thought on the subject matter. 03 Dec 2009.
Violence in the Watchmen Movie

How the movie’s treatment of violence removes significant complexity from the narrative. I’m proud of this because it’s a good piece of criticism. 10 Mar 2009.
“Today’s 5K”

Poetry about running. I’m proud of this because it captures that run quite well. 03 Sep 2009.
Serena Williams’ Fine

Tennis-based, but really about the larger controversy. I’m proud of it because it’s a strong refutation of arguments I saw around the net and disagreed with. 11 Dec 2009.

Honorable Mention

A bunch of good stuff that I couldn’t quite put in the top five. In chronological order:

Some Thoughts on Racism and Science Fiction/Fantasy 13 Mar 2009.
My Take on Twitter 08 May 2009.
I Think I Think, Therefore I Think I Am Sun 10 May 2009.
Wimbledon, Women’s Tennis, and Sexism 30 Jun 2009.
Considering Carnivorism 20 Jul 2009.
An Instructive Example of CIA Wiretap Use 21 Jul 2009.
Don’t Watch Taken 10 Aug 2009.
NCAA Ethics Violation: Bagels with Cream Cheese 21 Aug 2009.
Yankee Stadium and What’s Wrong with America 09 Oct 2009.
A Photo From Yosemite 27 Oct 2009.
How Do Magic Weapons Work? 16 Nov 2009

Special Interest

These posts are good, but perhaps somewhat narrowly focused.

Fantasy World Sketch

I like this a lot and think it’s a shame that most of my non-gamer readers won’t appreciate it; on the other hand, I understand that it’s rather long (especially for a “sketch”). 09 Mar 2009.
Fifteen for Federer

I like to think that this captures something of what was a great match (and a tremendous achievement). 05 Jul 2009.
Tennis YEC: Swiss Better than Round-Robin?

Because it is, and I didn’t see this point made anywhere else. 27 Nov 2009.
Moving From Word Processors to reStructuredText

I strongly urge anyone who deals with text frequently to consider make a similar move. I wish I’d done it years ago. 12 Jul 2009.
RTF/Word–reStructuredText Toolchain

Useful to anyone trying to get away from Word/RTF, and something of a milestone for my personal document handling. 24 Sep 2009.
New Blog Functionality: Related Posts

My Related Posts plugin for WordPress is a good addition to any WP blog using tagging. 01 Feb 2009.
Python Script for Subversion Status

A handy script for anyone using Subversion. 02 Aug 2009.
Better reST–WordPress Pipeline

Useful for anyone using both reST and WordPress, and a good example of the kind of thing made easier by a format like reStructuredText. 28 Jul 2009.
Python Extended List Slicing and Some Python Tips and Tricks

Tricks I like in Python. 01 Oct 2009 and 21 Dec 2009.
Better Word Count in jEdit

I care about word count, so I did it properly myself. 19 Jul 2009.

Tags: personal, writing

Happy Holidays 2009

Tadhg — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 20:35:52 +0000

To all my friends, even those who don’t read this blog: love and best wishes for the season[*] and the coming year.

I hope we see more of each other in 2010, and that we make our time together as meaningful, focused, and fun as possible.

[*]	Just like last year, this covers the solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivus, Yule, (FSM) Holiday, and any other wintertime around-now holidays that I’ve missed.

Tags: community, personal

More on Health Care “Reform”

Tadhg — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 01:45:23 +0000

I wrote about this in early November, and I think things have only deteriorated since then… from a fairly bad starting point.

Arthur Silber has another take on it, and Who is IOZ also covers it.

Not for the first time, I think that there’s just no way to get anything meaningful done either without serious popular action or without reforming how American politics works at a fundamental level

I’m less and less inclined to think that a positive outpouring of popular political activism will occur, so I’m now inclined to think that it’s marginally more likely that attempts to reform things might have a shot, eventually. I vacillate between thinking that Change Congress can get somewhere and laughing at that thought as hopelessly naive.

Tags: personal, politics

RPGs I’ve Played

Tadhg — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:03:31 +0000

While talking to my friend Jeff recently, I realized that I’ve played quite a few different roleplaying games—by which I mean Sit Around The Table roleplaying games, and not MMORPGS, LARPS, or computer ”RPGs” like the Final Fantasy series—and my list-making tendencies more or less decided at that point that a blog post would have to be made.

“Magical d20” by kirk lau

So, a list of roleplaying games. That I’ve played. Asterisks denote games I’ve GMed, hashes games I’ve played.

D&D *# (various editions). Still a classic game in my opinion, although I’m rather skeptical about 4th Edition.
Traveller *#. One of my all-time favorites, and possibly the game I’ve run most often and with the most success.
Marvel Super Heroes *#. Quite a lot of fun at the time. I probably had more fun making up NPCs in this game than any other.
Paranoia *#. Fantastic game, but had the major problem that most of its books and modules were more so funny to read that playing them paled in comparison.
Shadowrun *#. This had definitely mechanical issues, but the cyberpunk/fantasy crossover was just an unbeatable concept.
Hero System #. Jeff won’t be pleased to hear that I’m still unconvinced by its rule system.
Call of Cthulhu (various versions) #. I love the concept, and have had some fun games, but while I love the harshness of a game where it’s more or less understood that the player characters are eventually going to go insane or die (or both), I don’t think it’s ever quite lived up to its promise.
Warhammer FRP #. Somewhat like a fantasy version of Call of Cthulhu. This has a great reputation, but I only played it a few times. (I’ve never GMed it.)
Mechwarrior #. I like the setting, but it’s a game based around piloting a huge robo-exoskeletal war machine. If you’re not doing that you feel like you’re missing something, and if you are doing that, you feel like you should be doing it using the rules of the boardgame it’s derived from, Battletech.
A homebrew cyberpunk/postapocalyptic game based on an obscure FASA supplement called the Book of Mars *. I think my best idea for this was a future religion based on Knight Rider.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #. I think this was reasonably lightheared fun.
Middle Earth Role Playing #. I still remember that one of the lines for critical hit results using a blunt weapon was “try a spatula”.
Cyberpunk 2020 #. This seemed like it had better mechanics than Shadowrun but never seemed as popular with people I knew.
Judge Dredd (Games Workshop versio) #. I recall that this was somewhat limited in scope, although the connection to the comic gives it tremendous source material.
Vampire *. I used the rules for a variant game I ran called Dusk, which was the last game I GMed (last session was in early 1995…).
Mage *. I used these rules for Dusk as well.
Star Wars (the West End Games version) #. I think this suffered too much from the weight of the movies and larger universe—if the GM stuck to the famous events and characters there wasn’t enough freedom, and doing otherwise made players feel as if they were bit players in someone else’s story.
GURPS #. I’m sure I’ve played it, but can’t remember any details.
Rolemaster #. I Don’t remember details here either.
Star Trek (the FASA version) #. This didn’t have the same problems as Star Wars, but I recall that roleplaying around things like military rank and discipline was cumbersome.
Twilight 2000 #. I recall the premise—postapocalyptic survival—being more interesting than the games themselves.
SLA Industries #. Like Cyberpunk with some early New Weird elements thrown in, and it was laudably dark in tone.
Maelstrom *. I loved the rules, but this really needs the right group of people to play—Renaissance history buffs who like highly realistic (and hence deadly) RPGs, essentially.

There’s one more, which was in paperback book format and which I had before I played D&D, but I cannot recall its name. I’ll update this if I figure out what it was. Not Tunnels & Trolls; may have been British.

My favorites, and the ones I’d be most likely to run again, are D&D, which benefits from its classic status; Traveller, which I had some great times with; Paranoia, because when it works it’s so much fun; and Dusk, the Vampire and Mage homebrew that I never managed to properly finish a campaign of. In theory I could see myself trying to run Call of Cthulhu—at least, that’s probably more likely than the others.

Tags: games, personal, roleplaying

Consider Taking Vitamin D Supplements

Tadhg — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:16:08 +0000

I’m not a doctor, and this isn’t medical advice.

I am, however, currently deficient in Vitamin D, and apparently so might many of you be—particularly those of you living in less-sunny climes.

Cholecalciferol-3d by Sbrools

Deficiency can result in diseases such as rickets and osteoporosis, not to mention that according to Wikipedia it’s also linked to high blood pressure, tuberculosis, cancer, periodontal disease, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, peripheral artery disease, cognitive impairment, and various autoimmune disorders. So I’ll be increasing my intake (I already take 400 IU/day) somewhat.

While it’s quite easy for those of us living a mostly sunless lifestyle (and note that I’m still deficient after a period where I’ve been in the sun quite a bit more that previously) to be deficient in Vitamin D, overdosing on it apparently takes quite a lot of effort. The current US Dietary Reference Intake upper limit is 2000 IU, but quite a bit of evidence seems to support the contention that we can handle a lot more than that safely.

It might be worth considering the possibility that you’re deficient; blood tests can determine this, and correcting it could be as easy as taking Vitamin D supplements daily.

Tags: health, personal

NaNoWriMo 2009 Fifth Check-In: Admitting Defeat

Tadhg — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:37:30 +0000

Yeah. Unlike the five previous times I’ve attempted to set a month-ish target for myself, it’s just not working.

“broken light” by laimagendelmundo

I’m not getting anywhere, and the smart thing to do is give up on it, relax, regroup, and next year try again. So that’s what I’m going to do.

My apologies for any expectations I raised with my announced intent to write the first draft. I also apologize for all of the “nothing’s happening” check-in posts.

I think it’s important to learn from failure, and here are some of the reasons why I think it didn’t work this time:

Muddled start. Not the start of the novel, but the start of the month. I had a bunch of things going on and wasn’t able to formally mark the occasion of beginning. It seems that I need things like this to start well, and so I needed to make more of an effort to kick it off well.
Too many distractions. Not a revelation, this, but I seemed to have too much other stuff happening in November. This wasn’t a question so much of time as of attention and focus. With my previous month-long runs, I’ve been willing to let lots of other things go, and that didn’t work this time. Next time out, I have to be willing to cut more stuff.
Mind tricks matter. In the past, I’ve used tricks such as not starting my morning pages or blog post for the day until I’d finished my fiction writing. This time I didn’t do that, partly because I just didn’t anticipate the writing being difficult. It turns out that isn’t the key factor, and that I should use tricks like that to ensure I comply with my own plans, even if that seems unnecessary.

I’m not giving up on the novel, which I will write. I’m just not going to get it done this year.

Tags: personal, writing

NaNoWriMo 2009 Fourth Check-In

Tadhg — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:24:57 +0000

I hope that you readers don’t hate reading these weekly notifications of zero progress as much as I hate writing them. It’s been a bad month, and I’ve been almost completely unable to get anything at all done with the fantasy novel. I’ll keep trying to get somewhere for at least a couple more weeks, but I’m starting to have some serious doubts.

Tags: personal, writing

Open Source Thanks

Tadhg — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 07:54:28 +0000

It’s traditional on Thanksgiving to list things you’re thankful for. It struck me today that I should be extremely thankful for the existence of free software, and the contributions of thousands and thousands of programmers who have made their work freely available for others to use.

When I startd on a path towards software engineering, there wasn’t as much softwre libre around. The server-side operating systems and services did exist, and Apache is one of the first of those I used at any serious level. The first “consumer-oriented” piece of open source code I used regularly was, I think, MAME. I loved the concept of open source as soon as I encountered it, however, and gradually I’ve adopted more and more of it.

Apart from a few experiments, I haven’t gone fully to an open source platform, but there’s not a lot other than my OS that’s proprietary at this point. (That’s on the desktop side—on the server side everything is Free Software.) So I’m extremely thankful that as I’ve tried to adopt it fully, more and more people have contributed, so that almost everything I use regularly on the desktop side now is open source software:

Firefox for browsing.
jEdit for writing and coding.
Thunderbird for email.
VLC for video.
Songbird for music.
OpenOffice.org for when I have to interactively deal with RTF or .doc files.
Adium for IM.
Inkscape for vector graphics.
The GIMP for bitmap graphics (admittedly I still have some issues here, but don’t do enough bitmap work at this point to justify giving up on The GIMP).
Subversion for version control.

That covers almost everything. I’ll move to a Free desktop OS at some point. The only other tool I really want that I haven’t found in the open source world yet is photo management software. That’s a small gap, and for all the excellent software that I can use now that’s non-proprietary, I’m thankful.

To all you open source and free software contributors out there: thank you. You rock.

Tags: coding, personal, software

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