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I sometimes say that QuickBASIC was the first programming language I ever learned. This is a half-truth; a shortcut that allows me to avoid a lengthy explanation of what ZZT-OOP is, and how it was really the first programming language I ever learned. But since this is my blog and not a casual conversation, we have a bit [...]
Twittjr is a system that allows an IBM PCjr to search the public timeline on Twitter. In case you weren’t aware, Twitter is a social micro-blogging service introduced in 2006 and has over five million active users. The IBM PCjr is a personal computer introduced in 1984 and has a 4.77MHz processor, 128KB of RAM, and uses 360KB floppy disks [...]
I had a post half-written for today, but decided it wasn’t going anywhere interesting and scrapped it. I still wanted to post something, so in the spirit of half-finished things, here’s a nice Ruby one-liner from a half-finished project of mine: gets.chomp.strip.scan(/[^ "]+|”[^"]+”/).map{ |s| s.delete(‘”‘) } This takes a line from standard input and splits [...]
Recently I’ve been getting my new project, “Twittjr” (a mashup of Twitter and an IBM PCjr), ready to attract people to the CSH booth at GCCIS for ImagineRIT. Coding in Cartridge BASIC on a PCjr is simultaneously a fascinating and frustrating experience. On the one hand, it’s kind of annoying to not have any modern conveniences like, say, functions. But [...]
These days, it seems like Python is the darling of high-level programming. People build MMOG servers with it, big companies build web app frameworks with it and start research projects to make it go faster, popular webcomic writers extol its virtues, major Linux distributions include it in their base package set, and its geek-tacular Monty Python references charm the pants [...]