Rules

We seek definition to understand
the system so that we can discern
the rules so that we
know what to do next so that
we win.

(from "Being Geek")

POP

So last night I finally sat down and read "The Making of Prince of Persia", a compendium of Jordan Mechner's journals from his time developing said game. I really enjoyed it. There were many parts that resonated with me personally. I tried to make note of parts that stuck out to me either with some comedic value or just plain inspirational so I could share them here.

Videotaped David running and jumping in the Reader's Digest parking lot. It'll do for a start.

Microsoft Word 4 arrived via Fed Express. I booted it up and it crashed immediately.

Roland spent the whole morning helping me switch over to Merlin and ProDOS. It was kind of a thrill to watch. Roland is a hacker of the old school. He's polite and unprepossessing in his dress and demeanor, careful about money and contracts. He drives a Saab with license plate SNAB-BIL. But under that conservative surface is a demon -- a guy who will put his day job on hold for 72 hours and sit down and reverse-engineer an Apple II conversion of Tetris, just for the pleasure of it. Watching him do what he did for me today, I felt a little of the old joy come flooding back. I'd almost forgotten the most basic thing: programming is fun.

The more experiences I have, the more I realize that working with people you like and respect is more important than anything else.

Roland came over for breakfast and we installed an extra 1 MB in my Mac. Roland tested it out by creating an 8,000 page document in MS Word.

There's no guarantee the new game (Talking about PoP) will be as successful. Or that there will even be a computer games market a couple of years from now.

Apple II is a piece of shit. Kyle's sound routines are a piece of shit. His user interface is a piece of shit. The music we play on the CD player for inspiration sounds fucking awesome. Maurice Jarre's rousing overture to Lawrence of Arabia -- amazing. Then when we try to recapture some of that drive and ferocity on the Apple II, it sounds like a bunch of frogs' croaking being drowned out by the crinkly of cellophane wrappers. It's depressing.

SHADOW MAN. Credit Tomi with this one. I was explaining to her why there are no enemies in Prince of Persia. The animations for the player's character are so elaborate, there's not enough memory left to add another character. "Why not use the same animations for your enemies, the way you did in Karateka?" "Wouldn't work so well this time. The character is designed to look cute. He has a very specific personality in the way he runs and moves. The enemies would have to be cute too." "Can't you just change the face, or the costume?" "Not possible. If I change anything , it's a whole new set of shapes. There's just no memory." She wouldn't give up. "Couldn't you make him a different color -- say black?" I started to explain: "This is the Apple II..." and then it hit me: What if I exclusive-OR each frame with itself, bit-shifted one pixel over? I visualized a ghostly, shimmering outline-figure, black, with white face and arms, running and leaping, pursuing you. I described it to Tomi. "Shadow Man!" she exclaimed.

Eleven hours at the office on a Sunday, making this my first recorded 72-hour week.

I gotta finish this damn computer game. I have no excuse for slacking off. As Adam Derman once told me in a letter (about Karateka): "You dumb shit. You've dug your way deep into an active gold mine and are holding off from digging the last two feet because you're too dumb to appreciate what you've got and too lazy to finish what you've started."

I know I missed a lot of gems, however this should give you a taste of how it reads. It's definitely not the next adventure thriller, but rather an intimate look into the personal life of an independent programmer.

Tom Mast: Professional Vagrant MMXIII

The past 22 days have been a whirlwind. My lease in Muncie was up at the end of July and since then I've been roaming the state of Indiana. I had been gradually packing and moving stuff since the holidays, but it didn't really matter how much preparation I did. 50+ boomboxes, well over 500 records, and 7 bikes are always going to be a pain to move.

When I finally had my car packed with the final load I said my last goodbyes and hit the road with Lisbeth. Seeing the place I had spent so much time growing up in just fade away behind me was a weird, weird feeling. Memories of my entire career as an aspiring computer scientist filled my mind. My mistakes, my successes, enough to fill an entire book (OK, OK, my mistakes alone are enough).

I am more than happy with the education I received at Ball State. I loved every single one of my Honors courses, and regret not pursuing them in a more focused manner. I have my share of complaints about the CS department, but I feel comfortable with the well-blended knowledge of theory and application that I left with. My personal experiences with a handful of the CS professors have forever shaped my views on the way I approach personal learning, team-based interactions, and how to maintain an excellent work/life balance. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I felt way too often that I was being taught a CS equivalent of the Donnie Darko Fear/Love lifeline.

Our field moves way too fast for you to try and teach me using your slides from 10+ years ago, I'm sorry. 

Life since then has been one long interview process. I sometimes feel that I'm being too picky. I know where I want to work and I know the type of team I want to join. I've turned down potential offers that don't fit this criteria. I was in process at ThoughtWorks, but broke it off. I know I would love the work and it would be great for me professionally, but I just cannot do the 80% travel gig. I know I'll find the place that's right for me. 

Barring the lack of income my life rules right now. I wake up, play with Lisbeth, and then study or work on whatever I want to all day. Want to implement Boyer-Moore or play around with Elasticsearch? Go ahead! One of my goals for the summer was to complete 50 Project Euler solutions, but then I discovered CodeEval where your solutions are ranked based on running speed and memory usage. I set myself a goal to break the top 100 and just recently accomplished it (loadstar81).

I've also been running/cycling on a consistent basis. Growing up we had an old, out of service railroad track right down the road that we used as a walking trail. This has since been converted into a legitimate bicycle trail called the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail. 

I'm usually not the biggest fan of running, but taking Lisbeth on this trail is awesome. She stays right next to me, even off the leash. While I crave the bustle and technology scene of a big city, it's had to argue with this.

C++11

I can definitively say that my favorite addition in C++11 is the fact that I can finally write this:

std::vector<std::vector<int>>

Instead of this:

std::vector<std::vector<int> >

Pimp My Raspi(de)

The summer heat gets to all of us, even our machine friends. I thought I'd give the gift of cool to my Raspberry Pi in the form of some heatsinks.

I realize it's pretty hard to mess up a heatsink, but I'm happy with these little guys. A quick before and after reading (vcgencmd measure_temp) shows a drop of a few degrees Celsius on my stock cpu/voltage Pi. 

My only cosmetic wish is that the second heatsink was more size appropriate for the LAN controller. 

Charles Bukowski, Factotum

If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise don't even start.
This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. 
It could mean not eating for three or four days.
It could mean freezing on a park bench.
It could mean jail.
It could mean derision.
It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it.
And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. 
If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that.
You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter.
It's the only good fight there is.

No offense Charlie, but this is complete bullshit. What is success without someone to share it with?

Tick Tock

I promised myself I would be better at making lists, so here we go.

Books Tom has read at least halfway through but not finished:

1. Clean Code
2. The Ruby Programming Language
3. Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
4. The Art of Computer Programming: Fundamental Algorithms
5. The Pragmatic Programmer
6. The Algorithm Design Manual
7. Understanding Comics

Things Tom has plenty of:

1. Stress from working on Master's thesis
2. Stress from looking for enjoyable employment
3. A great girlfriend
4. A dog that thinks she is a human
5. Interests

Things Tom will do this summer:

1. Finish thesis work
2. Find employment
3. Complete 50+ Project Euler solutions in at least three different languages
4. Write some audio effects for Mixxx
5. Finish the Raspi/Arduino controlled treat dispenser website for Lisbeth
6. Create a tiled screensaver/installation of public IP cameras using GStreamer
7. Finish the work I started on a granular synth for Buzztrax

Things Tom does not have, at all:

1. One focused interest
2. Free time
3. A pet Grue
4. The new Boards of Canada vinyl (why did I order from overseas...)

Aaron

Finally got my Spring 2600 issue, this was the opening article. I wanted to share it but couldn't find an electronic version so I apologize for the scan quality. 

Aaron's passing definitely hit me hard. I never even knew the guy, but I feel like I did. Same age, the same interest: Learning/Growing/Fixing.

Raspberries and Dremel Tools

The official camera module for the Raspberry Pi was just released and I received mine a few days ago. I've had an idea for a neat case for one of my rPis and this was just the kick in the pants I needed to follow through on it. Plus it was nice to get away from my thesis work for a bit.

Backstory: One of my goals for the next few weeks is to get a tracer bullet for a side project involving a  raspPi, an Arduino, a camera stream, and a doggie treat dispenser. I plan to run a Node.js server on the rPi that hosts a game (HTML5/libGDX) starring none other than my dog Lisbeth. If the player wins the game, the rPi will tell the connected Arduino to dispense a dog treat from a servo-driven treat dispenser.  The site will also have a live stream of Lisbeth, who will be alerted by a sound when the game is started. For the bullet a simple "click to win" resulting in the servo turning will be enough for me.

I never purchased an official case for the rPi, wanting to do something creative on my own. I toyed with the ideas of putting together a Lego case but those are all buried away in the depths of my childhood, somewhere far away in the countryside of northern Indiana. A quick search of my apartment provided me with the perfect specimen, an old Panasonic mono boombox (complete with a New Kids on the Block sticker).

I ripped the guts out and went ballistic with a Dremel tool. The rPi sits very comfortably in the back, while the Arduino takes the place of the cassette up front.

I power my rPi through a powered USB hub which I attached to the back of the boombox. Throw in some purple LEDs controlled by the Arduino and we can call it a day!


I'm very pleased with the camera module. I was able to set up RTP streaming from the rPi to my laptop using GStreamer1.0, but haven't been able to embed a stream as of yet.

Booming

I have a problem with collecting things. Some might call it hoarding, I call it electronic adoption. One of the items I am constantly on the lookout for is a boombox. You know, those huge clunky 8+ D-cell battery monsters from the 80s. Awkward to lug around, audibly intrusive into other's bubbles, and built around a physical form of media that is all but extinct in the present day. I find it interesting that the image of a boombox is still an icon in today's graphics, and recognizable to those kids who have never even used a cassette tape. Kind of like the floppy disk icon still being used as the universal "Save". But anyway, on to the point of this post.

Some of these boomboxes were built with TVs inside of them. The model I find most often like this is the Emerson XLC-450.

In actual boombox levels, it's a pretty weak contender. One thing going for it is a line-in option, but this guy pretty much just sat on my shelf gathering dust until I started to read up on possible ways to utilize the TV screen for some cool visual stuff. There are plenty of tutorials around the net on how to turn an old TV into somewhat of an oscilloscope, so I figured why the hell not. This will be the third of these models that I've modded this way, so I decided to document the process.

DISCLAIMER: I am not any sort of electronics expert, and honestly am surprised that I didn't blow something/someone up in this process. Attempt at your own risk.

So a CRT display basically works with two coils. One coil moves the electron beam horizontally, the other coil moves it vertically. Looking inside this boombox we can see these coils, with four wires leading up to them.

Two of these wires control the horizontal coil, two control the vertical. By trial and error you can find the pair that controls the vertical coil (disconnecting the vertical coil will result in a horizontal line on the screen, and vice-versa).

What we're after are the pair of wires that control the vertical coil, which are then resoldered onto the horizontal coil. This is because of the vertical frequency 60Hz, as opposed to the horizontal of 31500Hz, gives us the output that we're after. Switching the wires around the other way (horizontal coil wires stay put, input on the vertical coil) gives a horizontal line that just moves up and down with the input signal. At this point we're ready for some input! I simply split the right channel into the vertical coil. Feeding in a square wave gave me this as output:

Not very impressive so far. If you look around the board itself, you'll see several potentiometers that control the various properties of the screen. (SERIOUSLY: Be careful about poking around in there). 

I'm sure these vary from TV to TV, but by twiddling around with different positions of the pots I eventually got a nice solid horizontal line across the screen. The only thing left to do: dim the lights and play some tunes!

The birth of a bike polo mallet

I've recently been introduced to the interesting sport of bike polo (or more specifically "Hardcourt Bike Polo"). It's basically polo on bikes, 3 people on a team and your feet cannot touch the ground at any time. If you do touch the ground, you are then out of play and must tap back in at center court at the wall. The sport greatly surprised me with how fun and addicting it is to become better. It's also another reason to do one of my favorite things, build up and ride a bike! Almost everything about bike polo is centered around "do it yourself", which is another enjoyable aspect in my opinion. This past week my friends down at PROJECTiONE helped me build up a polo mallet of my own, as I was pretty clueless about the whole process.

A bike polo mallet begins with a shaft. Where does one acquire these shafts? Ski poles! A quick trip down to a local thrift store with my trusty bike trailer and I had about a dozen poles to work with, all for $5.

Next stop, the PROJECTiONE workshop. These guys are awesome at what they do: laser cutting, welding, basically anything creative. My next big decision was which pole I wanted to use for this mallet. This is very important, it's like your Pimp Cane on the court. I ended up choosing a cool white one, surely from the 1980s with "Racing GIPRON" printed on the side of it. It's obvious that GIPRON backwards is NOR Pig, some sort of weird logical riddle that will stump my opponents and allow me extra time to score.

Now that my trusty pole has been chosen,
I stripped all the extra parts from it and measured against other mallets to gauge how long I wanted it to be. Next step: Chop!

As my new shaft lay there on the ground bleeding out, we made a quick trip to the hardware store to buy, um, some hardware. The basic idea is to drop a nut (we used a coupling nut to keep it straight) down the shaft from the top and thread a bolt in from the bottom, pulling the mallet head tight.

Utilizing my extensive computer graphic skills I have created an intricate diagram to further explain this step.

We ran into a slight problem here. The nut was too wide to fit far enough down the shaft for the bolt to catch.


Kyle knew exactly what to do.



Conclusion:

Sparks are cool.






Almost done! The next step is to file some teeth into the very end of the shaft so it bites in the mallet head (a tube of UHMW Polyethylene). Drop the nut in, thread the bolt nice and tight and you've got a shiny new mallet to go smack some balls with. You can drill holes into the mallet head to get the weight where you'd like it to be, I'm still experimenting with what I want. I wrapped some old bar tape around the handle to provide a nice grip, and stuck a bouncy ball on the end for some flair. Sadly the bouncy ball didn't last long in actual play, and I'm now in search of a cool new top to my polo mallet.

If you're interested at all in bike polo, I urge you to look for a group in your area, we play here in Muncie at least once a week (Wednesdays at 6:30 behind Savage's Ale House). Check out our group for more info!

cheers