Eventyr

Coding Dojo Revisited

So on Wednesday we held our one-off Coding Dojo session.  I was exhausted post-XPDay but thoroughly enjoyed myself.

It will probably be the last time we try to hold it on a Wednesday.

It was a slight failure in terms of attendance (dropping from 12 to 5, due to a general inability to make Wednesday sessions or confusion over date), but it ended up being great fun.

The group revised the code from the previous session.  Once again the aim was to create a text adventure game in Java, with elements specified (a tribute to 24 Hours of Inform).

This time, due to more cohesion in approach (reduced numbers led to increased turns and increased agreement, amongst other elements) the group succeeded.

It was also nice to see the spontaneous introduction of storycards by Jez (who describes the interesting features from the session much better than I can).

Group Skills

After the HCT Group (Ideas and Interact Labs) get together I created a HCT Group StikiPad Wiki to list all the skills from members who had attended, based on our wall scribblings.

I am increasingly taken by the idea of walls that you can just write on.* 

I'd love one.

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* Although I admit it would be a potentially bad thing to confuse children with.

Distractions

In the run-up to the end of term (2 weeks remaining) my backlog is starting to look worse and worse.

This is sadly not helped now by finding this archive of Free Computer Books, Tutorials & Lecture Notes, giving me even more to worry about needing to read, and this set of links to online lectures to browse.

Come the vacation I shall be well in need of a rest, but also very proud of what I have achieved!

Gum Ground

Walking in this morning, past the local college, I looked down.

The ground was splattered, white like paint, with the ghosts of a million discarded chewing-gum souls, slowly fading away.

Extremely Skippy

RLT (the creators of mangonel.com and trebuchet.com) have now created a site dedicated to Extreme Exercise Equipment. 

I just wish I had access to the money and facilities to enable me to play with an aqua-skipper...

Female Designs

But generally there has been a "massive global failure to address this critical issue", Ms Bernhardt says. "To me the real issue is in the harder IT areas (of) programming and design. We have desperate shortages and a rapidly declining rate of girls taking up studies in this area.

"If more females were involved in designing and creating technology, we may see a world with different designs and one that takes into account an inclusive set of perspectives. We may even see technology that is simpler to use and more attractive. Technology designed without female input can be critically one-dimensional."

IT Women in the industry

Curious thought.

Still Going Strong

But don't worry. Almost a decade later, with Moore's Law still at work, there is still a board game in which humans reign supreme. The game is Go, an oriental game of strategy. It sounds superficially easy. The board is a 19 by 19 grid of intersecting lines. The pieces (called "stones") are black or white, and identical. Once placed on the board, they do not move (unless surrounded and captured) or change colour. The object is to use one's stones to surround as many blank intersections (called "territory") as possible. And that's about it.
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The implication is that computers are bad at Go because they're still bad at being human. Which might come as some relief. In 2002, David Levy, one of the earliest drivers of computer chess, wrote (in Do not pass Go, October 24 2002): "Perhaps Go will be the final bastion in man's attempts to stave off his inevitable intellectual defeat at the hands of the machine." Despite humanity's own best efforts to undermine it, the bastion still looks remarkably solid.

Good to see people are still writing about this. And nice to have the skill levels laid out as well (I rank about 16 kyu so still have a long way to go).

Why Eventyr?

Ok, so I should clarify the choice of name for this site.

Eventyr directly translates from Norwegian as 'adventure'.  I use it for this meaning as it represents the adventure that is my PhD research. 

However, the word is also used (as in Folke-eventyr) for folk-tales. 

This is doubly representative as I am also in the process of collecting folk-stories about software development. 

(That and I grew up with the Asbjørnsen and Moe folkeeventyr.)

Code Monkey

My like of Jonathan Coulton is growing more and more.

Code Monkey like Fritos
Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew
Code Monkey very simple man
With big warm fuzzy secret heart:
Code Monkey like you.

Flu Excuses

My sadness that the flu prevented me from attending the Brighton and Hove Web Awards, was eased somewhat by getting to attend the DScape Designers night the night after. 

I was surprised at how quickly I still wore myself out though.

I'll blame the flu on my inability to draw a decent badge or find the remaining people with my limerick. (My partial limerick was:  "and found out that it was quite true.")

Mostly better now, so no excuses.