Le Liberateurs angry hardcore rave gabber jazz

Yarly! is a 1-player poker dice game with the same rules as Yahtzee written for the js13kgames.com 13k game competition. Here's the Yarly! entry page, or you can play it here.

Given this was a size-limited competition, I thought I'd write it from the start to be compact, which is the opposite of sensible, modern coding practice, and quite unhelpful when reading my source. Given this was just for fun I thought I'd only bother supporting WebKit, which again is not good. But this was an indulgence away from work, within the competition rules and WebKit has all the skiny right now. I also set out to use CSS to do mostly everything as a personal challenge, but didn't make it responsive in the least. Although I did test on iPhone and iPad. Excuses.

I got some sluggish webkit-transform animations on iOS 5 (and now, 6) Mobile Safari, and some weird black tearing stuff occasionally on Chrome 21 OSX 10.8.2. But this is the first animations I have done with webkit-transform and it's pretty exciting. Although I did give up and use setTimeout to chain transforms with logic because I couldn't get CSS animations to do what I wanted, it was giving me a kick to do Flash-like stuff with pure CSS and scraps of raw, no-libraries JS. This is the future, and I'm filthy with it.

The most challenging part was probably just writing a compact routine for picking out the poker scores, which seems to be a first year CS degree problem. I didn't study CS, so this is still amusing to me. It was also a departure not to use jQuery for once. Brought back a lot of olden days memories which probably ruined my code even more with olden days techniques. I hope no-one judges my coding from this - it's full of egregious sins.

As it turns out I had about 4k spare when I ran out of time. That could have been used for sound, or
better structure, or prettier score table, or responsive breakpoints. Or all of these. The filesize restriction is really only for programmer fun - time and effort are the real barriers. Time spent considering and honing and learning.

But overall, I'm still sort of pleased with it for being so much pure CSS, and for being usable enough for my mum to be able to play it.

learnt about my anatomical snuffbox and monocular haematomas first hand (right hand, actually)

gigs: saw oval wig out at cafe oto; welled up got to maurizio pollini at rfh; bugged out to de la soul and blackstar at the apollo; got freaky to laurel halo at the shacklewell arms; clapped steve reich at my first prom; saw the thing rock out like only a good jazz trio can; got pulverized by oneohtrix point never in a church (glitch has a new bed-fellow, only this time it is artefact rather than error that is being fetishised); and realised that 2 hours of b-boying was probably my natural capacity (during the 5 hour world b-boy championship in brixton)

talks: knelt at john gray and tom mccarthy's feet, less impressed with steve pinker's over-reliance on powerpoint qualified as a solicitor

thought the nt's cherry orchard played up the tragedy at the expense of the comedy

giggled at tim & eric live

played a lot of boggle in iona

art: chose my own advernture at ryan gander's locked room scenario, while discussing the merits of radio four over rinse fm with the participants; discovered john stezaker's unnerving, oneric collages

acted as legal observer at a trial in turkey

--

claimed housing benefit

go-karting first time

furthest north ever - visited the highlands of Scotland

bought a golf

started living alone

got a new job

replaced a head gasket myself

saw mini racing and banger racing for the first time

released WarPath - first iPad game

saw Serafinowicz at Tim & Eric

heard one of my own on IFM3

Luckily this is pretty easy on OSX thanks to the power of Applescript and the good old-fashioned cron scheduler.

The first step is to fire up Applescript Editor from Applications > Utilities and make two scripts. Applescript is pretty readable and self explanatory:

tell application "iChat"
	set the status to available
end tell

Save this to your home folder as iChat_available.scpt

tell application "iChat"
	set the status to offline
end tell

Save this to your home folder as iChat_offline.scpt

Now to test that they work, open Terminal and type

osascript ~/iChat_offline.scpt

...which should take you offline.

Now you need to add this to cron by running:

crontab -e

and adding the following lines:

30  8 * * 1-5 osascript ~/iChat_available.scpt
30 17 * * 1-5 osascript ~/iChat_offline.scpt

This will put you in vi, so to edit the file press i to get in insert mode, type or paste the lines, then press Esc to get out of insert mode, followed by :x (colon then x), then Enter to save and close the file.

These cron directives will set iChat to available at 30 minutes past 8, every day of every month on days 1 to 5 of the week, then offline on the same days at five thirty. If you want, you could add lines to take you offline or 'away' over lunch. Or annoy your friends by going online and offline every five minutes over the weekend.

• First ever Skiing! (Arinsal, Andorra, Big Snow Festival 2010)
• Went through two rounds on redundancy - survived the first one.
• first niece born
• released Rectangulous and Rectangulous Free for iPhone and Flash
• saw Stewart Lee twice - one of which was walking distance from my house - Kim Noble, Jonathan Meades
• first theme park: Chessington World of Adventure, for free thanks to a Wii Party promo.
• visited Dorset County Show, Biggin Hill Air Show, London Olympics site, Reigate Caves
• blissfully holidayed in Bordeaux - enjoyed first vineyard visit
• live: beardyman, autechre, russell haswell, prodigy, egyptian lover
• house dressing for halloween party: http://twitpic.com/32c0ni http://twitpic.com/32c08m http://twitpic.com/32c08k http://twitpic.com/32c08x
  http://twitpic.com/32bzv2 http://twitpic.com/329b2g
• "Destroydon" at the Croydon Clocktower http://twitpic.com/38ncgg http://twitpic.com/38lty4
• worked on iPad game "WarPath" graphics, music and sound effects.
• Won tickets to Thick Of It Q&A
• mostly switched to Chrome