Corinthia

I am proud to announce that I've been made a full committer and PPMC member of the Apache Incubator project Corinthia.

I'll be coding in C and Javascript, and I'll be looking to help with the editor and whatever else needs attention :-)

Fail to Plan --- Plan to Fail

'Fail to Plan -- Plan to Fail' is an itinerary planner to help you organise days when you have lots of little chores, or, it you want to see how long a process you have planned actually takes (Pi*thumb^procrastination).  It's quite useful for getting an idea of where your day goes.

The 'Help' drop down on the top far right has a tutorial to help you get started.

Some things to know about this little tool:

1) I didn't add a timer because I didn't want a nagplication.  Also, if you're in the garden, you won't hear your computer beep.

2) The 'now' button recalculates your day's plan to start 'now', if things take longer than planned.   I also find it useful to move a task to the end that I decide to do later.

3) Visually it's a bit of a jumble initially, but once you have practice (and worked through the tutorial)  it's actually not as bad as it looks.  I will try to fix this in later iterations.

4) The curry recipe is quite good -- it only looks that huge because I broke the process down into individual steps, it's actually not that difficult to cook ;-)

5)  I wrote this in raw javascript because it's hosted on Blogger for now, so, the drop down menus have been hand coded (I know... :) and... look accordingly.   I will try to move it to a saner space, where I have handy tools like JQuery available.

6) I'm no javascript/html champion, this started out as a little hack for fun and grew into something bigger than I estimated.  Advice/bug reports/collaborators are very welcome, mail me please. I have some more plans for this toy, for example, I'd like to be able to insert groups of tasks -- say, if you want to do the laundry, that consists of the tasks washing, hanging, drying & folding --- being able to drop those tasks in as a group would save a lot of typing.

7) Cookies in HTML 4 are limited in size, so don't go crazy with too many entries/files :-D

Enjoy!

Making Shape

Francis Roads explains making good shape like this:

 The term is usually employed where there are two or more moves that achieve a given objective. The goad shape move is the one that not only achieves the aim, but gains some other advantage, which may, however, be small and intangible at the time. The player with an understanding of good shape has a short cut to finding the best move in many situations. In a game free of gross blunders the accumulation of small advantages from good shape will decide the outcome.
Without further ado, therefore, here are my criteria for a move to qualify as good shape:

1. It maximises liberties
2. It maximises eye-making potential
3. It keeps options open
4. It influences as much of the board as possible
5. It denies the opponent good shape 

Of course Francis wasn't talking about programming there, but I think that programming is very similar to the game strategy he was describing.

Now that I'm starting be be semi-fluid in javascript and I'm wrestling a small octopus in form of a 2000 line script of a toy I'm creating as I'm figuring things out, I'm finding out just how good my 'making shape' jutsu is... (sometimes good, sometimes woeful...:)

Sometimes, that which beeps is gold

I was rooting around the web, trying to find a way of emitting a simple beep for a javascript toy I'm working on and happened upon this piece of code gold.  Nifty!

Promptly I was reminded of this song (oh noes!)

That little Casio the band uses was something else!