curtis.lassam.net

Cube Drone 5 - Purple Hazing

Wed, 09 May 2012 01:16:00 -0700

Cube Drone 4 - Poom

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:48:58 -0700

Cube Drone 3 - Coffee

Sun, 06 May 2012 13:23:49 -0700

Cube Drone 2 - Nyan

Sun, 06 May 2012 13:13:33 -0700

Cube Drone 1: Elevator

Fri, 04 May 2012 02:37:08 -0700

Busbus Website Compiler

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:13:35 -0700

So, if you’ve been following me on RSS, you may have noticed that my site is currently going through a little bit of crazy go-nuts wackytown times. The reason? I’ve switched away from my old pal, Wordpress, and am now using a blog engine entirely of my own design.

No, I have not gone crazy.

It’s a static website compiler. It takes, as an argument, a folder full of .yaml files, and produces, as output, an entire website. The compiler, the theme, and the content itself all occupy separate git repositiories, and if I change anything (and push it to git), it will re-generate my website using a git hook.

But why?

Well, recently, Wordpress has been giving me a lot of trouble. The site’s been hacked, the comment system is uninspiring, and honestly, I just wanted to build something. I like building things.

The entirely static website output is fast. Very fast. There is almost zero server overhead to doling out flat files. You can, should you so choose, page through my entire website, pretty quickly. Page load times are in the 100 millisecond range.

Of course, Wordpress handles that same problem well with the wp_cache plugin. And I’ll bloat that 100 milliseconds up with unnecessary javascript glitter as soon as I can. But still!

Okay, the much bigger difference? I wrote it myself. And the codebase is quite small. Yes. Nigh-infinite customization is at my fingers. If I want to write blog posts in markdown? Sure. Let’s say, I want to write a script that queues up a blog post for me in my favourite text editor. Done. Want to drop a chunk of content from my favourite IRC channel on to my blog without extensively hand-formatting it first? I could write a script for that, no problem. Heck, the whole system is designed from the ground up to be trivially easy to poke around in.

There are still features to add. Things like:

A website style that doesn’t look like I found it at the bottom of a box of crackerjacks.
DISQUS comments.
Unnecessary but shiny javascript features! (See also: DISQUS comments.)

And if you notice any unusual problems or huge errors, you should.. alert me to that fact. Perhaps using the comment system that I haven’t implemented yet.

Expectations v. Reality

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 17:38:09 -0700

Some of my Spring goals involve losing _another_ 15 pounds.

But in order to be willing to put up with the combination of hunger, pain, bland food, and general misery that weight-loss entails, I'm going to need to build up a good heady steam of general self-hatred.

I know, I'll get started by trying to draw myself!

A Meta-Project Project

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 04:00:16 -0700

"It's that time of year again: the days are getting longer, and I have a half dozen product ideas I'm excited about."

Yep. Spring is here. And while I've been making steady progress on whatever arbitrary things I work on, it's often hard to keep track of them all. There are just SO MANY PROJECTS that I want to work on. And so little time! And, worst of all, with so many simultaneous projects, it's all-to-easy to lose track of where I am on all of them.

So, I need to track projects! The thought came to me in the shower and I started mocking up the UI in my head almost instantly. Create a set of master projects. Put micro-goals in each category. A few major milestones in there to mix things up. Priority rankings! Categories. Tags. Stats!

Of course, the only problem with such a project is that it is likely to get mixed up with all of my other projects. Quickly. In order for me to make any progress on it - or backburner it, as I am wont to do, without forgetting about it - it would need to exist, already. The meta-project needs to exist within itself, and thus cannot exist (yet) !

So, in order to deal with the potentially infinite recursion of that problem, I started mocking up the functionality of the app using iPad Reminders.

Each project gets a tab of its own. Micro-goals get added to the reminders, and tagged with their project. It doesn't offer much in the way of stats, or tracking, but it's usable right away.

It wasn't until I started actually using it that I realized exactly how many projects I have on the go. 12. 12 projects. No wonder I'm so frantic all the time.

There's...

Diet & Exercise - Which is just micro-goals related to eating healthier and occasionally moving places.
Finances - Relating to saving smallish amounts of money, resolving my taxes, and that sort of thing.
Hygeine - Basic around-the-house stuff like "Do the dishes" and "Remove dead squirrel from microwave."
BusBus - A static website compiler built in Ruby. This started out as Stevedore, a static website compiler built in Python - but the original codebase was more of a prototype, designed to be a complete content management system, and quickly became an unmaintainable mess of scripts. So, green-field.
7 Languages - Relating to reading and doing the exercises in the book "7 Languages in 7 Weeks". Note that this book is the reason that BusBus/Stevedore is being rewritten in Ruby.
Gamification - Relating to reading the book "Gamification"
Wasteland - A board/card game that I developed in my spare time. Thanks to its 10+ playtests and many revisions, it's actually playable-by-humans, now, but it still needs a ton of work before it's _good_.
Food Truck - An experimental app built in backbone.js for managing restaurant food costing, as well as a JSON-event-store backend that I'm fiddlin' with.
Watchmaker - I released the puzzle game "The Watchmaker's Dilemma", but it still needs a lot of improvements in usability, stability, and user-persistence.
Paranoia - Paranoia is a pen-and-paper RPG set in a slapstick Sci-Fi orwellian universe where simply knowing the rules is treason and punishable by death. I'm working on reading the rules and putting together a PLAYABLE ADVENTURE. Then, later, I'll inflict it on some unexpecting people.
Leisure - Fun things that I've been meaning to do. Watch all of Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Play more Spacechem. Play through some of my Steam or iPad game surplus.
Distributed AI - Learn more about distributed systems. Learn more about AI problem-solving.
Godel Escher Bach - Every time I make it halfway through this book I get distracted and have to start again from scratch. Dammit.
Meta Project - This project. That I'm talking about. Right now.

Whoa. Lots of stuff to work on.

A nice bonus from the system? If I'm ever bored, I can just jump around and grab a sub-goal to work on from the Pile.

Books About Graphic Design

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:19:59 -0700

Gamification, Kickstarter, And Loyalty Rewards

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:21:16 -0700

Recently, I've been pretty active on Kickstarter - and I've started reading "Gamification by Design", by Gabe Zichermann & Christopher Cunningham. Don't worry - I'll tie those together in a moment.

The book starts in the first chapter (as books are wont to do), by describing four tiers of Loyalty Rewards that one can use to drive engagement in a site or community - Status, Access, Power, and Stuff.

Status - at least in a community environment - confers a higher status on one player than another. This could be through a ranking, through a score, through badges, really through any method that you might use to divide users into haves and have-nots. This is a powerful engagement driver because it tends to be very inexpensive, and players who are jockeying for status tend to be fiercely loyal to the system.
Access - granting information to the player that they would not normally have. The ability to see or even do things ahead of time.
Power - granting rights or abilities to the player that they would not normally have - the ability to moderate a forum, for example - or even the most basic functionality of a website, in some cases.
Stuff - stuff. Objects. Real-life things. Free hats. \ Objects are the weakest form of engagement motivator - first of all, people have a pretty fine-tuned sense of what 'stuff' is worth. Secondly, people tend to want to get their 'stuff' and then get out.

Now, you often see Status, Power, and Access rewards working together in gamey community systems, and Stuff-based rewards... well, whenever there are sales to be had.

Successful Kickstarter rollouts tend to offer all of these things. At the very lowest levels of backing, players get Stuff. The stuff that they want to buy. These are the players with the lowest engagement with the product.

As the players kick in more money, though, they get access to more add-ons, sneak-peeks, extras, and the like- Power, and Access.

And finally, at the highest echelons of support, there are players who get Status - and boy do they ever get status. The game "Wasteland 2" is going to be littered with the statues of high-rolling supporters. I honestly hope for the opportunity to deface them a little bit.

Anyhoo, ramble complete - now look at these Kickstarter projects. Sure, I'm unlikely to ever play a LEGO mecha game, but I'm glad that there's someone out there making one.