Cooperstown

I’m on vacation with my parents and little brother this week. got into Cooperstown, N.Y. yesterday afternoon, having left home around 9AM. Long drive–glad my dad was the one doing the driving. (Why wasn’t I? Because I am a horrible driver; I’ve got the metal rod in my leg to prove it.) Last night we went to a little hole-in-the-wall pizzeria, and it was surprisingly good–if you ever go to Cooperstown, hit up Sal’s Pizzeria on the main drag and get a slice of stuffed veg. Best pizza I’ve ever eaten. Wings weren’t bad, either.

We got up at the unconscionably early hour of 8AM or so and went to breakfast, then headed to the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum (possibly the only reason ever to go to Cooperstown, I think). I went with my dad when I was younger, in 1998 or 1999, and boy, has it changed. It used to be bright and wide-open, but now it’s become a lot more like most of the other “new” museums I’ve seen. Much darker, more of the bad-countertop-plastic walls all over the place, lots of short-attention-span blurbs of text all over the place and entirely too many video screens. I was disappointed: my brother would rather rush over to a video screen than actually read the text and understand a little more about the game. I guess I was probably that way at his age, too, but it’s just disheartening to see. My dad thinks that my little brother’s all into baseball, but I’m not seeing it–seems he’d rather play video games.

Another thing that bugged me is the prominence of relatively basic information throughout the hall. I understand that part of the Hall of Fame and Museum is to educate people in the game. At the same time, though, it’s wasting a lot of space and a lot of potential value for the people who already get the game. Seeing a life-size picture of Jason Varitek (he of the Incredible Noodle Bat) doesn’t do much for me. I already know more about Varitek than most of the people walking through there and, more importantly, I’m well-versed in the game to the point where I could find out anything I wanted to know, be it hitting up somebody from Sons of Sam Horn or just some judicious Googling. The Red Sox/Yankees swag and photos seemed pretty disproportionate, too (and that’s coming from a diehard Sox fan). There’re other teams out there, fellas.

What I’d love to see is a sample of the archives. Have a floor–even the basement, if you’ve got to–for fans, as opposed to consumers. Excise the bullshit. You don’t need to tell us that the Red Sox went eighty-six years without a World Series title. We already know that. You don’t need to tell us what a brilliant player Josh Gibson was in the Negro Leagues. We already know that. And you don’t need to remind us that Bob Gibson and his ridiculous ERA were in part the result of a higher mound. Why? Because we already know this stuff. Just give us stuff to look at; I for one would prefer to look at it without the tour-guide-on-a-wall crap. Have sections for major league teams, for the Negro Leagues, for great players in particular (maybe pick a decade of Hall of Famers?), and just put stuff out to see. And you don’t need to spoon-feed to us all the information. Fans don’t need to see “This is the cap Clay Buchholz wore on Insert Date Here, when he pitched a no-hitter against the Baltimore Orioles, retiring twenty-seven batters without allowing a hit during his rookie season.” If you don’t know what a no-hitter is, you don’t belong on this floor. Just give us a little card with the name, the date, and the event, and let us drink in the history.

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Setting Up A Sample Project With libtcod-net From SVN

After posting my little drooling plug for libtcod-net, the maintainer, Chris, welcomed me to contribute some code. So I did, dumping a 182KB patch in his lap the next day to start refactoring stuff and streamlining the API. So now I guess I should recommend it even more strongly, eh?

Smok on the libtcod-net forum asked for a step-by-step on how to set up the library for use in a C# project. Since I’m expecting there to be more breaking API changes in the future, I’m going to describe the process using the libtcod-net Subversion repository on Google Code in order to stay up to date with any changes. (This does mean that your code will occasionally break in new and exciting ways until the API stabilizes. If that’s not your bag, go download the source packages available here and start following these instructions at step 6.) I’ll be assuming that you’re using Windows and Visual Studio as well, mostly because I figure that if you’re using Linux you probably already know how to deal with this stuff. The instructions are after the jump.

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A Bit of Buried Treasure: libtcod-net

So I was wandering around the Intertubes, having a hankering to play around with writing a Roguelike. (Why? Because I can.) Since I’m officially a C# snob, I needed a curses library (because my own old fake-SDL-console project, RogueSDL, quite frankly sucked–someday I’ll put it up on this site for everyone to laugh at). MonoCurses looks pretty nice, but it binds to ncurses; I couldn’t find ncurses for Win32 and while I could probably compile it via Cygwin, that would involve installing Cygwin and that’s just not fun for anyone involved. Curses# looks to be dead, as well as being a very thin wrapper over pdcurses and ncurses.

After a few magic words to Elgoog, this popped up in my search results: libtcod-net. I went “ooh!” and started poking around, and yea, verily, it is awesome sauce. It’s a wrapper around the BSD licensed libtcod, and to rip off a McDonalds’ trademark, I’m lovin’ it. My only issue is that it doesn’t feel very C#-ish: while the functionality is great (check out the sample demos to see what kinds of stuff this library can handle, it’s like the emacs of Roguelikes), it seems to have inherited some C-isms. Makes sense, though, as it seems to be a project mostly for his own use in his own Roguelike, Magecrawl. I shot him an email asking if he’d be interested in collaborating, because if I end up using libtcod-net for anything I’m going to have to make changes to make the bits and pieces more C#-ish. (I’m nitpicky enough to find something like “TCOD_key” as a class name absolutely painful. Yes, it’s a horrible habit. No, I can’t suppress it.) What’s especially cool is that he’s been filing bugs against Mono as he goes along. Anything to help Mono’s gravy by me.

Anyway, many kudos to Chris Hamons, the dev, and I encourage everyone to take a look at this library. It’s good stuff.

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Fixing Linux, Part Two: Bridging the Gap

In my last blog post, I discussed a few issues I see with Linux as an operating system (as opposed to the higher-level stuff; eventually I’ll put a few words into that, but right now I’m still running with an interesting idea drawn out of a question from a friend of mine: “how do you fix Linux?” In my last post I listed three major “spaces between” in Linux software.

  • The space between user paradigms. There’s a divide between the developers who use the command line and those who use the GUI, and invariably the users who use the paradigm the developers don’t favor get the short end of the stick.
  • The space between languages. Interoperability with various languages is pretty weak, and it results in a lot of work being lost because of it.
  • The space between programs. The tool-and-filter philosophy of the “Unix way” is nice for smaller, easily grasped problems (example: grepping through a file for instances of a phrase, then piping that into tail for the last 20 instances of it). It rapidly grows hairy and ugly when you start getting into more complex problems.

In this post, I’d like to put forth an idea that, while a fairly huge prospect, I think would be a great leap forward for Linux.

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Fixing Linux, Part One: “The Space Between”

I’ve been thinking about how to best improve the Linux* userland over the last few days. I was venting pretty loudly about my Linux gripe of the day–I don’t even remember what I was complaining about at the time, but it was a mess of shell scripting, pipes, and about half a dozen command line programs that were conspiring to drive me up the wall. Before I could get into a really quality rant, the kind that would peel paint off the walls, the friend who I was giving an earful to asked me a question, probably to shut me up.

“So what would you do to fix it?”

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The FSF: Pull Trigger, Blow Off Foot (Again)

This is an old post from my previous Joomla!-powered site; sorry for the retread.


A few days ago, the people over at DefectiveByDesign decided to barf onto the Internet another brilliantly stupid idea. Brilliantly stupid ideas are of course not the Free Software Foundation’s only export; I hear that some days they actually write code instead of just telling other people what they should be able to do with theirs, and since I hear that from some fairly reliable sources I’ll believe it for the moment. But this moronic concept really, truly takes the cake, and while I’m not exactly much of a blogger I feel a need to get this one off my chest.

FSF: Go, minions, and hit the Apple Stores with a meatspace DDoS!

Go give that a read. When you once again have the presence of mind to pick your jaw up off the floor, c’mon back and click that “read more” link. Go on, I’ll wait patiently.

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Paging Dr. Frankenstein…

This is an old post from my previous Joomla!-powered site; sorry for the retread.


The title’s pretty apt, I think–Cloverleaf is far less my code than anyone else’s at this point, made of bolting together all sorts of stuff. Open Source in action, yo. :-)

A few quick updates regarding Cloverleaf, as some folks have expressed some interest in the project. I’d like to throw a shout-out to Franz, whose questions got me off my ass and drove me to write a little documentation for installing the pre-pre-pre-pre-alpha CloverleafET code. If anyone else is interested, you can access that documentation on the Mono GSoC 2008 Google Groups page.

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So I’ve Got A Summer Project…

This is an old post from my previous Joomla!-powered site; sorry for the retread.


I’m not really much of a blogger. I’m pretty wordy when I write, but for me at least there’s this unshakable stigma attached to blogs, the kind of thing that makes you question if you really want to be the kind of guy who writes about what he had for breakfast that morning.

So, despite having a new, blog-ready site up for about three months, I haven’t posted. Guess it’s time to change that a bit.

If the really large banner at the top of the page wasn’t enough of a hint, my name is Ed. I’m a computer programmer and a student at the University of Maine. I’m working for Google this summer as a part of their Summer of Code program; I did it last year, too, and it’s a boatload of fun. One of the mentors for my organization, the Mono Project, suggested that we keep some sort of blog. Seeing as how we’re three weeks into the project and I haven’t, this would probably be a good time to start. My project, a set of tools for Visual Studio that I’ve taken to calling Cloverleaf (note the shiny happy logo to the left of this paragraph and drool at its sheer awesomeness), is designed to facilitate the porting of CLR code from .NET to Mono by providing useful tools to ease the transition. If you’d like to read about it, you can do so here. Anyway, Cloverleaf is ticking along nicely. Developers can choose to run a .NET application under Mono (without a debugger, as the debugger engine isn’t finished), run Gendarme, a totally cool code analysis tool, on assemblies of their choice, or run an ASP.NET website under the Mono ASP.NET web server, XSP2. All of these bits and pieces are useful, but today I’m going to brag about my favorite feature to date: remote invocation of applications and displaying them near-seamlessly on the user’s desktop.

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Apparently, using the sentence "Does Daddy have to shank a bitch?" is considered unorthodox parenting. Who knew? — Warren Ellis