Ruby, video games, and other ramblings
{ Monthly Archives }
Just had my second randomly-started conversation on Ruby of the day. Seems like everybody wants to program in it, but almost nobody actually does.
Doesn’t matter; with the kind of mindshare the language is getting, major corporate acceptance is probably less than a decade away.
Here’s yet another glimpse into my daily train of thought - my del.icio.us bookmarks page.
HTML:
http://del.icio.us/nephariuz
RSS:
http://del.icio.us/rss/nephariuz
I use “Lazy Sheep” (http://ejohn.org/apps/sheep/) to add stuff. It’s a JavaScript bookmark that I simply click when I’m viewing an interesting page, and it’ll add it to del.icio.us with tags borrowed from other users. Yes, I’m probably helping pollute the site with lame tags in some cases, but I wouldn’t submit at all if it weren’t for this shortcut. At some point I’ll go into the account and clean things up a bit.
So, anyone else have a del.icio.us/Furl/othersocialbookmarking account? If not, get one!
There’s a store called Half Price Books near my work that carries used media, including a small games section. I found a copy of “Magix Music Maker” for PS2, and at $7 I figured I could just write it off if it sucked.
It doesn’t - from an hour’s work last night I have the skeleton of a damn catchy tune. (I’ll be spamming everyone with a link once it’s polished enough.)
My success there inspired me to see what the MTV Music Generator franchise had been up to lately - another $7.50 on Amazon got me a used Music Generator 3 for XBox. I’m still pretty proud of at least one of the pieces I put together on the Playstation original, so we’ll see what can be done two versions later.
Ruby on Rails (http://www.rubyonrails.org/) lets you create a skeletal Web application with a few simple commands. How? By making the author give up some power of choice in how the application is constructed.
This is not, in my opinion, a bad thing. Choices made by a single developer (especially newbies) rarely reflect best practices.
Now comes Maven (http://maven.apache.org/) which seems to do the same thing for Java apps. Could this be the start of a trend?
Wow. Was browsing the new Top 100 on Google Video, and they had a gameplay video of Will Wright’s _Spore_. I’d heard it mentioned on the 1UP podcast, so I checked it out - this is *amazing*. I’m not even going to spoil the video for you, except to say that this is probably the deepest game in existence.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198&q=spore
You can share your creations with other players, so I hope all of you will get it, too.
> Nintendo E3 Press Conference Report news from 1UP.com
> “Wii Connect 24 is what the Wii goes into in standby mode,
> allowing the machine to operate key functions and remain
> connected to the Internet, yet it only uses the power of a
> mini-light bulb. The idea is that gamers can leave the
> machine on standby, yet other gamers can even still
> interact with your hardware. In Animal Crossing, someone
> could visit your village while you’re asleep!
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3150566
That addresses a major gripe with the DS Animal Crossing - we had to be logged on for others to visit our town. We even went so far as to leave the system powered on overnight, but given how crash-prone the connection was, it wasn’t at all practical. I found myself wishing for a PC app that would continue to “serve” our town while the DS was off. This may be the next-best thing.
Here’s the stuff that piques my interest right away:
XBox 360
-F.E.A.R.
PS3
-Virtua Tennis 3
-Virtua Fighter 5
Wii
-The Legend of Zelda
-Metroid Prime 3
-WarioWare
-Sonic the Hedgehog
-Metal Slug Anthology
PS2
-King of Fighters 2006
-Lumines Plus
-God of War II
-Final Fantasy XII
PC
-Reservoir Dogs
-Unreal Tournament 2007
PSP
-Lumines 2
Need to research:
-Army of Two
-Ridge Racer 7
-Tekken 6
-Rainbow Six: Vegas
-Super Monkey Ball titles
-Red Steel
-Battlefield 2142
-Dead Rising
-Lost Planet
-Medal of Honor Airborne
And while I don’t really care about it, “Throne of Agony” for PSP sounds more like a case of constipation than a game.
Anything else I should give a damn about? All others shall be ignored with extreme prejudice.
Buzz Aldrin was at a benefit for the Arizona Kidney Foundation (where Lenny’s grandmother works), and she managed to get him an autographed copy of his book (an illustrated autobiography for kids). We’ve been reading it every night before bed.
It never occurred to me that actual footage of the landing might be online, but here it is:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1416393771637021814&q=moon+landing
It blows my mind that they would actually take a rover up there. Guess the message was “in your face, Russia!”
