Jay McGavren’s Journal

You know, it wouldn’t be that hard to re-do the MythTV frontend system to be like XBox Live/Wii channels. Instead of shows, you’d flip through games available for download. When you found one you wanted, you could choose a menu entry to install it via the package manager.

Networking would be a little harder - you’d need a list of IP addresses for your friends/party members, which would then need to be fed to the command line for each game using that game’s options. I don’t think exiting back to the menu in the event of a connection failure could be made automatic in most cases, either, but that may not be a show-stopper.

I’m on this train of thought because I’m a little tired of dumping money into these locked-down ecosystems that I know will go away as soon as my console dies. I know I can’t attract people to play open-source games when the consoles are so much better integrated, so anything that ties a few titles together can surely help. There were some efforts in this regard a few years back, but I haven’t heard anything of them since…

Robert Frost once defined poetry as that which cannot be translated. No wonder anime and manga arrive in the US with the poetry removed.

Hirb is pretty object formatting for irb (and the Rails console). If squinting at the standard Object#inspect output is slowing you down (trust me, it is), you should look into Hirb. Here’s <5 minute setup…

Install the gem:

sudo gem install hirb

Add these lines to your $HOME/.irbrc file, which will cause Hirb to be auto-loaded at startup for both irb and script/console:

require 'rubygems'

require 'hirb'
extend Hirb::Console
Hirb::View.enable

Try it out in irb:

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> table ['foo', 'bar']
+-------+
| value |
+-------+
| foo   |
| bar   |
+-------+
2 rows in set
=> true
irb(main):002:0>

Try it out in script/console:

jay@dandelion:~/Projects/myproject
$ script/console
Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.2)
>> MyModel.all
+----+-----------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+
| id | name            | created_at              | updated_at              |
+----+-----------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+
| 1  | Foo             | 2009-06-16 23:38:10 UTC | 2009-06-16 23:38:10 UTC |
| 2  | Bar             | 2009-06-17 00:38:16 UTC | 2009-06-17 00:38:16 UTC |
+----+-----------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+
2 rows in set

Hirb has customization options I haven’t even begun to explore, so be sure to look at its docs.

class Bitch
  def love(person)
    puts person
  end
end
bitches = [Bitch.new, Bitch.new, Bitch.new]

me = Object.new
me.instance_eval {def rock; 'the projects'; end}

bitches.each do |bitch|
  bitch.love(me) if me.respond_to? :rock
end

#songsincode

@bm5k a,b,c,d,e=” bottles of beer”,”on the wall”,” Take 1 down pass it around “,a+b,d+c;(1..99).map{|i|”#{i}”+d+” #{i}”+e+”#{i-1}”+d} #songsincode

Resulted in:

99 bottles of beeron the wall 99 bottles of beeron the wall Take 1 down pass it around 98 bottles of beeron the wall
99 bottles of beeron the wall 99 bottles of beeron the wall Take 1 down pass it around 98 bottles of beeron the wall
98 bottles of beeron the wall 98 bottles of beeron the wall Take 1 down pass it around 97 bottles of beeron the wall

Which resulted in:

beer.mp3

    set_manager :physics, create_game_object(:BasicPhysicsManager)

    spawner = create :GameObject, :ReceivesEvents
    load_keymap :MouseKeymap
    spawner.handle_event :mouse_pressed do |message|
      object = create :GameObject, :Physical
      object.set_physical_debug_mode true
      case rand(2)
      when 0
        object.set_shape :Box, 10, 5
      when 1
        object.set_shape :Circle, 10
      end
      object.body_position = message.value.pointer
    end

Video here.

In response to a Twitter meme… Sarah McLachlan’s “Ice Cream”.

require 'test/unit'

class TestYou < Test::Unit::TestCase
  def test_you
    you = Object.new
    ice_cream = Object.new
    assert you.love > ice_cream
    anything_else = Object.new
    assert you.love > anything_else
    here = [’a', ‘b’]
    here.each {|body| assert_respond_to(body, :fight)}
  end
end