Nodal Point

Magic Ink

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:23:00 +0200

Highly recommend this read to all programmers and designers. Very inspirational.

It intersects with Metta’s ideas of supporting creativity freedom, and is written a lot better than I could ever dream to write myself.

9-bits: Menlo, a new monospace font being included in Mac OS X...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:17:47 +0200

9-bits:

Menlo, a new monospace font being included in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The chart above shows Menlo being compared with the open source DejaVu Sans Mono (a personal favorite).

Photo

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 04:10:49 +0200

An iOS Developer Takes on Android

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:14:49 +0200

nfarina:

Recently, we released the Android version of Meridian, our platform for building location-based apps.

We didn’t use one of these “Cross Platform!” tools like Titanium. We wrote it, from scratch, in Java, like you do in Android.

We decided it was important to keep the native stuff native, and to respect each platform’s conventions as much as possible. Some conventions are easy to follow, like putting our tabs on the top. Other conventions go deep into the Android Way, like handling Intents, closing old Activities, implementing Search Providers, and being strict about references to help the garbage collector.

Now, our platform leverages HTML5 (buzzword, sorry) in many places for branding and content display, so we got a fair amount of UI for free. But there was much platform code written in Objective-C that needed translation into Java, such as map navigation, directions, and location switching.

So, we rolled up our sleeves, downloaded the Android SDK, and got to work.

Read More

Uncharted 3

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:26:47 +0200

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is so far the best game of the whole trilogy. With just enough puzzling, action, cinematics mixed in a very well measured proportion the game keeps player engaged from the first flashback to the last screenful of pixels. There’s love, horror, friendship and betrayals, like in a good novel. Amazing graphics will make you want stay around forever and look at the desert sands, wonderfully formidable ocean waters or pillars and towers of Iram. And once you’ve found all the treasures in the single player campaign, there’s absolutely phenomenal multiplayer - you will have to try each mode at least once, they all are an amazing experience and a lot of fun with friends and foes alike.

Highly recommended.

assocfs note

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 10:39:50 +0200

assocfs note:

A little writeup on my assocfs, pretty small but I think I captured a few interesting points there.

Font rasterization theory and techniques

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 17:58:14 +0300

Font rasterization theory and techniques

Spelt Number to Decimal (Updated)

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:41:09 +0300

arachneng:

This post is last updated in 2011-07-11 13:20 UTC.

I certainly like a code obfuscation and golfing: the recent example includes this and this. The today’s project is more like the former, where very short code takes much time to explain. Without further ado, here it is: (Gist)

This little program reads a spelt number from the standard input and writes the corresponding number to the standard output. It supports numbers up to 10¹⁵-1 and still weighs only ~~256~~ 243 bytes of C, if you ignore the backslash at the end of line which just wraps the line. (There is also a shorter version that can handle up to 19,999,999 and does not use long long.) The input should be correct, although it will handle “a” and “and” correctly and ignore some invalid words.

It assumes the ASCII character set and 2’s complement representation, and requires int and long long to be at least 32 and 64 bits long, but that’s all they expect from the compiler. For example, it does not matter whether char is signed or unsigned, EOF does not have to be -1, and so on. (Yes, I did keep it in mind while writing this program.)

While I left the explanation of the BF interpreter as a reader’s exercise, in this time I’ll give a detailed explanation of the program. Keep in mind that there are two versions of the program; the explanation is primarily for the longer version.

Read More

Yippie!

Metta MMU module init

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 23:33:49 +0300

Since tumblr doesn’t properly support importing any texts I’ve done in Pages, I will just link to it here as a PDF: MMU init.

A historical moment

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 04:21:01 +0300

OMAP3 beagleboard.org # mmcinit OMAP3 beagleboard.org # fatload mmc 0 0x82000000 kernel.bin reading kernel.bin 640 bytes read OMAP3 beagleboard.org # go 0x8200024c ## Starting application at 0x8200024C ... hello, world! ## Application terminated, rc = 0x0

Steven Frank - Disable Flash in Safari 5 the good way

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:50:56 +0200

Steven Frank - Disable Flash in Safari 5 the good way:

stevenf:

When I heard that the new MacBook Air models were shipping without any Flash plug-in installed, the first thing I did was check to see if one of my long-standing Safari annoyances was fixed. It was.

It used to be that if you completely removed the Flash and Shockwave plug-ins, by deleting or…

Somebody posted this on tumblr, but I’ll never know who,...

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 03:34:26 +0200

Somebody posted this on tumblr, but I’ll never know who, because tineye cannot find it. Anyway, sweet.

seeksthenight: That is all you should be. Whatever that is.

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 03:32:52 +0200

seeksthenight:

That is all you should be.

Whatever that is.

seeksthenight: the question He had for her was how long could...

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 22:33:55 +0200

seeksthenight:

the question He had for her was how long could she stay in this position once His mouth took her

Mmmhm.

Just been to, and touched, the Center of the Universe at the...

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:39:44 +0300

Just been to, and touched, the Center of the Universe at the Reality Checkpoint.

Grasp firmly.

Jeff Rock: Down the Memory Hole

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 15:38:21 +0300

Jeff Rock: Down the Memory Hole:

jeffrock:

During the Apple Fourth Quarter Results Conference Call, Steve Jobs made a rather curious redirection:

Audience question: Any updates on your stance on Flash?

Jobs: Flash memory? We love flash memory.

The gentleman that asked that question was obviously referring to Adobe Flash…

early-onset-of-night: Say hello to mechanically separated...

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 11:29:17 +0300

early-onset-of-night:

Say hello to mechanically separated chicken. It’s what all fast-food chicken is made from—things like chicken nuggets and patties. Also, the processed frozen chicken in the stores is made from it.

Basically, the entire chicken is smashed and pressed through a sieve—bones, eyes, guts, and all. it comes out looking like this.

There’s more: because it’s crawling with bacteria, it will be washed with ammonia, soaked in it, actually. Then, because it tastes gross, it will be reflavored artificially. Then, because it is weirdly pink, it will be dyed with artificial color.

But, hey, at least it tastes good, right?

High five, America!

*smack*

Dave Newman: Leaving .net

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 12:06:35 +0300

Dave Newman: Leaving .net:

whatupdave:

The .net community operates in a non-collaborative vacuum.

The community is sick, poisoned by the component vendors with closed source software “solutions” and stymied by Microsoft themselves who are so cleverly changing just fast enough to keep developers from solving problems themselves.

[….]

Tomorrow I start a new project in Ruby. I will have access to a massive and diverse array of talented passionate people who are genuinely interested in collaboration and advancing the craft for everyone.

Flood Lite: Apple's Attention to Detail

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 23:30:00 +0300

Flood Lite: Apple's Attention to Detail:

In July 2002, Appled filed a patent for a “Breathing Status LED Indicator” (No. US 6,658,577 B2). They described it as a “blinking effect of the sleep-mode indicator in accordance with the present invention mimics the rhythm of breathing which is psychologically appealing.”

Read more in the link above.

What is this if not the dreaded Java Garbage Collector?

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:04:05 +0300

What is this if not the dreaded Java Garbage Collector?