Andy Chase

Speaking of haunting love songs, The Blackest Crow is just about the prettiest/saddest such tune I've heard in the oldtime/traditional genre. One of these days I'm going to memorize and practice it enough to be able to do it justice. There's a great 3/4 instrumental rendition in Brad Leftwich's Round Peak Style Clawhammer Banjo book, but I think I like Arnie Naiman and Chris Coole's 4/4 version on their Five Strings attached with No Backing album even better (which for me is saying a lot, because I'm not a huge fan of oldtime/bluegrass vocals). You can listen to it at http://www.merriweather.ca/album.aspx?album=9&style=Banjo.

The most effective verses:

The Blackest Crow

The time draws near, my dearest dear
When you and I must part
And no one knows the inner griefs
Of my poor aching heart

I wish my breast was made of glass
Wherein you might behold
Oh, there you'd find your name lies writ
In letters made of gold

The blackest crow that ever flew
Will surely turn to white
If ever I prove false to you
Bright day will turn to night

Bright day will turn to night, my love
The elements will mourn
If ever I prove false to you
The seas will rage and burn

I don't spend a lot of time reading other peoples' code, but when I do, and when they format their curly braces like

if(foo)

{
 doSomethingWith(bar);
}

It drives me irrationally insane with rage.

if(foo){
 doSomethingWith(bar);
}

Is better. I will not entertain arguments.

Tagged:

• programming
• curlybraces
• style
• peeve

I finally got around to fixing a critical bug in Dastardly, my first interactive fiction adventure written in Inform.

As it turned out, all it took was the addition of two characters, trapping the PutOn verb instead of the Put verb.

It only took me about 10 minutes to track the problem down when I used Inform's built-in debugging tools: actions, messages, and changes. Why didn't I use those when I was first developing the game? Because I didn't read that section of the Inform Designer's Manual, and I didn't really know about the debugging tools until I was paging through the DM4 before bed a couple of days ago.

In fairness to myself, it wasn't a bug that came to my attention until well after the game was originally released for the Hours of Inform minicomp... that's what you get for releasing a game with absolutely zero third-party testing.

Also, I didn't mention this when it first came out because of that bug, but Dastardly was reviewed in SPAG #42:

http://sparkynet.com/spag/backissues/SPAG42

Tagged:

• inform
• interactivefiction
• zork
• rtfm

Simpsomaker
Originally uploaded by Usonian.

Via Steffe, make your own here.

This is by no means a complaint, because it's clear a lot of work went into this thing, but:

Things I would have included if I had made this:

• The Foghat shirt worn by the guy at the AM radio station
• A scene at the Android's Dungeon
• A scene in front of the Kwikee Mart

Save the SWF file to your desktop, because I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Fox cease and desists this into oblivion.

Tagged:

• meme
• simpsons

This morning I tried unsuccessfully to get CakePHP's built-in 'Access Control List' feature working. I get the impression that ACL is bleeding edge stuff, and that the current documentaion is not accurate (or it may be that the functionality just doesn't quite work right out of the box.) That's OK. CakePHP is still quite young, and for my current purposes ACL looked like overkill anyway.

So this afternoon I set about implementing my own lightweight user authentication system, incorporating 'Users' and 'Roles' tables in the database, with corresponding CakePHP controllers and associations. Scaffolding provided instant create/edit/list/delete functionality for users and roles, including the ability to assign roles to users and vice versa. Total set-up time: maybe 30 minutes for everything.

The bigger hurdle was implementing an authentication controller for handling the login form, logging in, and logging out. This took a bit longer, but at every turn I discovered that the typical minutiae (Setting a message to be displayed on the following screen, managing session variables, et cetera) had already been taken care of for me in the base Controller class, leaving me to spend most of my time worrying about logic instead of implementation. This is good stuff.

The next step will be to write a controller 'Component' for managing user access to controller functions.

Tagged:

• cakephp
• php
• framework

A few weeks ago I was working on a personal project, a web application that I put together using J2EE. (By no means is it an "Enterprise" application, but there's no other acronym that accurately summarizes "Servlets/JSP/Tomcat").

My web hosting company (Which does not offer Tomcat hosting as a service; they're strictly PHP/HTML) was even cool enough to let me run an instance of Tomcat on my account. The only problem is, Tomcat seems to get shut down every day and a half or so. There's probably some sort of daemon on the server that looks for weird processes and kills them, which is perfectly resaonable.

Since I'm not paying for Tomcat hosting, I don't think it would be fair of me to bug them about it; I need to either bite the bullet and pay to have my Java web app hosted someplace else, or rewrite it in PHP so I can just host the thing almost anywhere, and eventually even release it for widespread use.

I haven't done much of anything in PHP for a good year and a half, other than maintenance on existing applications that I wrote before that. I toyed with the idea of writing my own lightweight MVC framework in PHP, but didn't really relish the thought... it would be an interesting exercise, but really more than I want to take on for this relatively simple project. At the same time, I don't want to rebuild this application as a set of "throw this in as I need it" PHP scripts.

So I started searching for an MVC PHP framework, and came across CakePHP, which looks very encouraging... I haven't spent much time with it yet, but already I get the sense that my time would be much better spent learning the Cake framework than trying to write my own. It will be good to dust off my PHP brain cells, too, and familiarize myself with Eclipse (thanks to the PHPEclipse plugin.)

Tagged:

• php
• java
• webapplication
• framework
• mvc

Uketastic
Originally uploaded by Usonian.

I got my cheapo kit-built ukulele down off the wall for the first time in months last night... when I assembled it I glued the bridge into place ever so slightly off, and the intonation on the first string is bad. It makes playing it not a lot of fun, because that one note is always just wrong enough to be distracting.

But I found as happy a medium as possible by tuning the string a bit flat when open, and away I went. I had forgotten how much different it is from mandolin, whose strings are in double courses, much closer together, and made of steel. The ukulele's strings are nylon, and the neck is nice and wide so your fingers don't have to fight for space.

Then there's the tone... high like a mando, but soft and mellow, and definitely better-suited for leisurely strumming. I love the way 7th chords sound on this thing, and the strumming action is stirring up renewed interest in tenor banjo as well.

Tagged:

• ukulele
• banjo