Stoneship

Monet

2008-08-31T06:00:00-05:00

A week ago, I had the idea of creating a game in Ruby. After evaluating a few gaming frameworks, I settled on Gosu. Gosu is a simple and minimalistic library, and I like minimalism a lot, so we started a loving relationship.

I wrote a small library named Monet on top of Gosu, providing functionality such as better event handling, views and subviews, buttons, and more. Monet is named after Claude Monet, an impressionist painter. This library also does a bit of painting, but that's where the similarity ends---Claude Monet has nothing to do with event handling, really.

The Gosu romance unfortunately didn't last long. For real-time games, Ruby is simply way too slow (Gosu isn't slow; Ruby makes it slow). Gosu and I broke up, and now I've moved on to a much faster language.

Monet is now available on github under a liberal MIT licence. It is very small and not feature-complete, but it should be fairly easy to extend it. I won't be developing Monet any longer, but I believe anyone who has used Gosu or is still using Gosu should check it out anyway. Fork and enjoy.

[link] ProtoChart

2008-08-21T02:52:18-05:00

Looks useful. Haven't tried it yet, though.

[link] Why HTML

2008-06-18T05:24:08-05:00

This is exactly why HTML > XHTML.

[link] Allison

2008-05-27T13:57:43-05:00

A much prettier RDoc template than the default.

[link] mullin797's music

2008-05-25T06:20:08-05:00

Not sure how long it'll take before this is taken down… anyway, this is pretty much exactly the music I love.

Exciting Times for nanoc

2008-05-22T10:30:00-05:00

nanoc turned one year a few weeks ago. I completely missed its birthday, so happy belated birthday to you, nanoc.

In the past 12 months, nanoc has grown from a hacky little script to a full-grown, powerful and flexible Ruby application. Quite a few people are using nanoc now, as proven by the small but growing community of active users out there (hi!).

So, what are the next steps?

There have been two distinct moments where I thought: "okay, nanoc is complete now, and there is nothing I can improve." Ah, I was so wrong. There are so many ways nanoc can be enhanced. I'm only limited by the time I have!

Here are some features and ideas I've been working on lately:

Including more plugins. nanoc is quite bare-bones. There are some really cool plugins floating around, but few people know about them. Bundling all the cool stuff in the standard nanoc distribution would make sense.
Asset management. A question that regularly pops up is how to manage assets such as images and stylesheets. The answer is an embarrassing "nanoc can't, so do it yourself." This'll change soon, as nanoc will get asset management.
A clean API. nanoc has been too much of a black box, so I'm opening it up. This'll make it possible to tell nanoc to generate pages for each of your tags, for example.

This stuff will all be in nanoc 2.1, which, because it's going to be a big release, will take a while before it's complete. It'll be worth the wait, though.

So, I definitely didn't get bored working on nanoc (but I should probably quit working on it for now---exams are coming up).

Exciting times for nanoc indeed!

CSS's Relative Units: Redundant

2008-04-17T13:30:00-05:00

These days, the recommended approach for setting all widths, heights and sizes in CSS is using relative units (e.g. em and %) instead of absolute units (e.g pt and px). Doing so has the advantage that the entire page "zooms" when the font size is changed, meaning that the proportions of all elements on the page are preserved.

With the recent redesign, however, Stoneship has—deliberately—gone from a layout set in relative units to a layout set in absolute units.

The reason why is because there is almost no point in using relative units anymore, as all browsers have or are getting full page zoom. Full page zoom, for those that don't know, gives browsers the ability to zoom pages as if you were using em's, except you're not using em's at all. Opera and Internet Explorer (!) already have it; Firefox and Safari are getting it soon.

So, why still bother?

The only real reason for still using em's or %'s is backward compatibility. People with older browsers may still want to have that full page zoom effect after all. However, if you really want full page zoom everywhere, why not ditch your old browser and upgrade? Also, it's not like you are preventing people with older browsers from viewing your site—the content is still there, but without full page zoom… so what?

I admit it's a bit early to completely banish em's everywhere, but once full page zoom is incorporated in all modern browsers, there's no need to bother anymore. Be lazy and use absolute units, like I did.

Movie Review: Délicatessen (1991)

2008-04-12T13:30:00-05:00

France, some time after the second world war. The country is in ruins, and there is not enough food around for everyone. The landlord of an apartment in a rural part of the country solves this by continuing his job as a butcher, regularly hiring new employees, eventually slaughtering them and serving them to his customers.

When Louison, a new hired handyman, falls in love with butcher Clapet's beautiful daughter Julie, the wheel starts to turn in the other direction.

Délicatessen is, however, not a horror movie. The story may sound quite macabre, but the setting actually has a surprisingly cozy mood. Maybe it's because the building's tenants are surprisingly happy given the situation they're in, or maybe it's the fact that the dominant color in the film is a warm brown.

The movie develops in a quite unpredictable way, and there's not a single boring moment. Every single tenant has its own, very eccentric personality: a cannibalistic butcher, an ex-circus clown and an old fellow living in a basement filled with snails and frogs are just three examples.

The movie does not feel dated even though it was originally released in 1991. Its style is not unlike one of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's other movies, Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain. Even though Délicatessen could be seen as a stylistic study that led to Jeunet's later movies, it is an excellent movie in its own right.

Délicatessen is definitely a must-see for everyone who enjoys French films, dark comedies or surrealistic post-apocalyptic movies.

Rating: ★★★★★

Minimal Earth

2008-04-05T06:00:00-05:00

I got tired of the old site design and built a new one from scratch.

I didn't like using borders for separating elements from each other. I didn't like giving separate elements different backgrounds either, so I'm simply relying on whitespace now.

I picked a brownish color scheme because brown is super cool these days. I'm calling this design Minimal Earth for a reason. I'll completely ignore you if you tell me my site looks like shit, so don't even try.

I also got rid of the comments. I never really cared much for the concept of letting strangers put their content on your site. I prefer to be the only one in control of my web site, sorry. I also couldn't get my sweet ajaxy comments implementation to function correctly on Internet Explorer, and I really didn't feel like debugging my scripts.

I also like starting my sentences with "I". I really do.

Renaming Internet Explorer

2008-03-18T13:00:00-05:00

After reading Joel Spolsky's excellent article regarding Internet Explorer 8 and its relation to web standards, a though occurred to me.

To summarise the article: Internet Explorer 8 is in a very annoying position. Even though its rendering engine is a lot better than its IE7 equivalent, many sites (standards-compliant ones no less) fail to render correctly because of countless Internet Explorer-specific hacks.

The alternative solution, which is to let Internet Explorer 8 render web sites using the IE7 engine by default, and only use the IE8 engine when explicitly requested, caused a storm of protest.

If Internet Explorer 8's rendering engine really is that much better, why not get rid of IE's legacy and start over, with a fresh name (and a fresh user agent string)?

Internet Explorer 8 would simply be like a brand new standards-compliant browser. IE-specific hacks wouldn't work, and the new name would be like a blank slate to start from. Doesn't that sound cool?

Of course, it's not like any Microsoft employees are reading this web log. Is this a stupid suggestion? Probably. Who am I kidding anyway?