Stream of Consciousness

07/27/15

I'm on the bus, having just finished a blog post, and not feeling like starting another one just yet. I was going to sit back and let my mind wander, but I really want to build the habit of writing down my thoughts whenever it's practical. And it doesn't get much more practical than on the bus with a laptop under my fingertips.

I'm focusing on taking deep breaths. I feel the pressure of a day's worth of thinking in my head, and I'm trying to simply appreciate it.

In.

Out.

It's incredibly relaxing.

A woman on the other side of the bus just showed a picture of her son to her neighbor, "This is a picture of my little beast."

There's this delicious smell in the air that I can't quite identify. A candy smell. They make me think of sweet tarts.

I want to start planning my time blocks with Rosse again. My unscheduled time has become frighteningly wasted.

Stream of Consciousness

07/20/15

Online harassment is on the mind again following Total Biscuit's post detailing the nonsense he's been going through. I read someone basically going, "Well, he's an asshole. He's the problem."

Ugh.

Completely unacceptable.

These people are doing exactly what they spoke out against in regards to Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian. The exact same thing.

Disgusting.

My mind is just a haze of descriptive words, though really it's mostly cursing.

I'm just incredibly tired of the distractionary tactics. "Let's talk about harassment," gets interrupted with "Zoe Quinn is a slut," "Anita Sarkeesian stole kickstarter money," "TotalBiscuit is toxic," and all manner of other irrelevant talking points about other people.

It derails the point of the conversation.

07/18/15

One of the first things I'm thinking is how tedious it is to init, write, and publish posts. I need to fix that. Let's look at my current script setup.

I have some scripts in there that I don't use anymore and were not documented very well. They probably didn't take very long to make, and they're version-controlled if I remember something I want to look at, I'm going to git rm all but two of the scripts.

Okay, now what I want is something that will initialize a post with the date and with the title (used as input into the script).

Returning to the Diary

07/18/15

So, I'm considering making a return to this diary, as can be seen by this post. I've found that while writing my thoughts are focused, and also I think I may make better decisions. The goal, then, is to simply write down what I'm doing and why throughout the day.

I may or may not make a separate posts for each. I'm thinking I'll have a "Stream of Consciousness" post for each day, simply to grab control of my thoughts and to save them more effectively.

Let us begin!

Plan Document

06/08/15

Planning

06/08/15

Okay, so the new strategy is to try to plan whenever I don't currently have a plan, and the blog post of the day is written and thus I have work I could be doing that isn't planned.

I actually don't have much time here, but on the bus ride home I'll probably be able to have a more-complete plan in place.

High-Level Goals

I want to iterate on my bucket visualizations using d3.js barcharts.

I want to merge the Scotch.io API tutorial and Login tutorial to make a spaced-repetition flashcard setup where I can put Japanese, code, and various other stuff I want to memorize.

I want to make helper scripts to slowly remove all tedium and repeat markup from these posts.

Okay, let's make timeblocks toward these goals.

Plan Document

06/03/15

Web Site: Graphing the Buckets

06/04/15

Okay, I just want to do a simple bar chart of my grocery spending.

Let's start with some sort of bar chart tutorial with d3.js.

Wow, lots to take in. I'd like to just do a bar chart of grocery spending per day for right now, I think. Using the json I already have access to. I'll make a simplified version of what I've got so I don't show any spending I don't want to with my real file just yet.

I'll start with this script:

Just getting this code working took the rest of the time. I also managed to console.log my spending json via d3.json's function.

I think that tomorrow I can at least mutate this to have charts of my grocery spending per day. Though, "tomorrow" is unplanned, so who knows when I next work on this.

Plan Document

06/03/15

Web Site: Logging In

06/03/15

Yeah! Back to the diary!

So, I had been going through the login tutorials I found manually. But, as interesting as learning this stuff is, I'd rather play a game than play a tutorial, so I'm just going to take their code and play with it in a sandbox, and get it so I can use it for my multiple purposes.

The code is on github here and I've forked it here.

And now I'm cloning onto this here computer of mine to play with.

Nice, the README has proper instructions on what exactly I need to change to get things working for me (database.js and auth.js). Oh, I won't use auth.js for now (using Facebook, Google, or Twitter to log in). And database.js might just work out of the box:

I believe this should work fine (mongodb will make the passport area for me).

Let's start up mongodb and the server.

Yep, it just works.

Awesome.

Okay, so from here, let's work towards....

Well, I have a choice here:

• Bucket Budgetting Login Setup
• Japanese Study-Tool Login Setup

Since I'm going to work on budget stuff tomorrow, let's work on Japanese study-tool now.

Logging in Setup for Japanese Study-Tool

I need to mix this logging-in tutorial with this API tutorial to create a system where I can create Japanese flash-cards on-the-fly.

External Distraction: Talking with Megan

No Japanese stuff now!

Plan Document

06/03/15

Planning the Rest of the Week

06/03/15

Okay, diary post. I think anytime I can do this I should try. My home system is getting less and less fancy in comparison to my work system, but the only way to fix that is to use this system.

And though I'm strapped for time, one of the most useful things I do is plan my days at work, and so I should, whenever I don't have a plan, try to plan as much as I can (though probably shouldn't plan farther than a week). Planning everyday just isn't viable, with the limited time I give myself for projects daily. Planning for the week may work, but I got to make sure to do it whenever I can, or else I will miss the time-frame I plan to do it, and end up not doing it, and lose precious productive time.

So, then, let's try to plan until this weekend. This task right now is blogging and planning (blogging already done). After this I want to devote an hour to website stuff. That hour will specifically be the goal of having a working login system on this here chromebook which I can build memory-based apps around.

Then I'm done for the day.

Okay, once I get home tomorrow, I'd like to devote 1.5 hours to web-site stuff. This'll be the bucket-budgetting system. Specifically, I'll work on graphing what I got so far. It's time to dig into d3.js again. And now I've asked a good friend what he thinks of that idea.

And I'm actually out of time (I didn't realize I accidentally paused my timer more than ten minutes ago when it was at 9:56).

Log

05/24/15

Log

05/24/15

Plan Document

05/24/15

Building Plan for the Week

05/24/15

Starting a little late in the weekend to get around to this, but it's better than not doing it at all.

Considering how busy I am, it's better to have one planning of things per week than per day like I do at work. I will try to timeblock this plan like I do at work, but for the whole week, so I'll also list the day in the items.

Not a perfect plan for the week, but it'll do for the first attempt. Hopefully it's something I don't have too much trouble updating a log for throughout the week.

Japanese Study Tool: Logging In

05/20/15

Okay, the long-term goal of this is to have an extension Japanese study tool. Right now, I have nothing, and I would like to start with a login capability.

I have access to a tutorial that goes over just that, so let's see if we can have something workable in one pomodoro.

I have the skeleton in place and will be able to actually configure login next time (aka I'm currently here in the tutorial).

I haven't really dug into the code to understand what's going on, but I feel confident I can understand it once it's in place and modify it for my purposes easily afterwards.

Initializing Posts with Node

05/13/15

So, it occurs to me that my current way of initializing posts could be greatly improved upon. Basically, I still just copy a template file, update the date, and start writing.

Internal Distraction: I can do more to help the people of this world.

And I think that making node handle a lot of that would probably be another good step to having this all running on node, more or less.

Internal Distraction: Thinking about GamerGate

It would also be a good parallel to something I'm working on implementing at work.

Blog Brainstorming

05/01/15

I do not know what I want to write for today's post.

Completely blanking.

Hmmm....

Maybe I should try my hand at some quick fiction.

CSS Reset

04/26/15

Okay, this page is starting with a CSS Reset.

I am now just modifying the general html template of my site. Let's get rid of that picture, and get rid of that "Rory's Diary" thingy.

Now, I need to make the "browse_bar" a navigation list instead of a bunch of divs.

It'd be best to make it so the nav list were styled as inline blocks instead of newlines, as I want it to be a horrizontal list.

I think having my banner image on each page would help with the text-heaviness of the site. In the long run it'd be useful to have a random banner load up each time.

More changes to come in the future. I'll keep them isolated in these CSS diary posts until it looks better than my current setup.

Log

04/25/15

Site: Pomodoro Plan Styling

04/25/15

Currently, I'm styling my pomodoro plans in the html, which means a lot of repeated html styling, which would make changing it later a pain. Better to make it so those planned pomodoros are styled in css and then I can give the html spans meaningful class names.

And then I can use my findReplace script to make all the individual html styles into the proper class setting.

And it works like a charm!

Site: CSS Reset

04/25/15

Okay, I think the time has come for me to redo my site's CSS setup. Let's just straight up start from scratch, and empty the current stylesheets of content.

All right, let's do a reset.

All right, let's see what this looks like without any other styling.

I think the first thing I'll want to do is reimplement that browse bar. I tried it out as a static thing on the left, but now let's have it be a horrizontal thing on top of the page. I think devoting so much screen real-estate to it at all times isn't ideal.

It occurs to me that I should actually make the browse bar a list of items, and simply restyle the list.

This is clearly something that will take some time, and I shouldn't switch over until it looks better. So, let's just have this reset file set aside, and keep my current CSS for right now.

Plan Document

04/25/15

Plan Document

04/24/15

RSS Thinking

04/24/15

So, I think I've decided to put my RSS item descriptions within each blogpost file, and give it styling that makes it invisible. Which makes me think, "Should I reset the CSS on my site before implementing this, then?"

And I think the answer is yes. So, switching priorities for a bit.

Log

04/23/15

RSS Automatic Update

04/23/15

Okay, so, where was I? It appears I verified that Cheerio can read regular old XML just fine. Good on you, Cheerio.

So, next step... do I have access to built-in node module documentation? I'd like to see how I run system commands from node.

I can build the documentation! Let's do it.

It looks like Child Process may be what I'm looking for. Let's see if I can run vim from it. Hmmm.... It looks like running vim from node won't work how I want it to. It might be smarter to couple the RSS items to the blogposts themselves (maybe display:none them in the html or something), and have my publish script use that to generate the RSS items.

Hmmm... can cheerio read comments? No, it doesn't look like there's anything in there to do that. I guess that makes sense. Althought, looking has revealed there's a straight-up xml function in cheerio. Good on you, cheerio, good on you.

So, I guess the smartest/easiest thing to do right now would be to have some sort of RSS item div hidden within each blog post file. It's also kind of a next step to having my posts saved in something slightly smarter than their own html file, I think.

TucsonJS: What the Fork is IO.js?

04/23/15

Another TucsonJS Meetup! Yay! Not as many people here as last time.... That's unfortunate. This presentation is on Github! I forked it to here.

Meeting starting. Introductions and notifications of snacks.

June 13th hack-a-thon! Throw ideas at him via Meetup or Twitter for how it should be organized.

Thinking of setting up a TucsonJS IRC or something. Again, throw ideas at him about it.

Omer Wazir is giving the talk. Works at Tucson Embedded Systems. This talk just talks about why io.js exists.

Building the presentation failed for some reason....

first there was node.js

General background given on node.js given. JavaScript everywhere was given to the world.

node.js was progressing slowly

Lots of node packages, not enough node releases. Core contributors wanted more releases out faster, and more contributions.

node forward started

Contributors to node created a repo to address issues they had with node.js. Focus on new contributors and new users and faster releases. They forked node.js, but Joyent wasn't okay with it as node.js was trademarked. Called it "Node Forward".

private node.js fork turned into io.js

Private node.js became io.js, and all work on Node Forward got merged into it. Uses open governance model, and so open collaboration and contribution became easier.

the technical committee

This is what governs io.js and controls the direction of the repo. Concensus-seeking model. 8 members. Majority-vote wins. It's easier to see the direction that io.js is taking over node.js. Very open.

contributors behind io.js

All contributors on node.js who weren't working for Joyent work on io.js. 29 people, 8 on the technical committee. Anyone who works a lot on io.js can become a contributor. They are pretty active members of the community.

Isaac Z. Schlueter used to work for Joyent.

Question: Joyent's opinion on all this? Unknown. Hard to figure out where a lot of people stand on this. What does TJ Fontane(sp?) think about it? One TucsonJSer is interested.

io.js impact on you

They don't want to split off from node forever. They just saw a problem and want to address it. The benefits are faster and more predictable release-cycles. About 1 release every six days, and there's always a public discussion about when it's going to happen.

Both node and io.js rely on V8, which gets updated every chrome update, which happen almost every six weeks. Faster release cycles are the answer to this. Hard problem. Trying to get there.

libuv is an asynchronous file I/O library that is cross-platform compatible. Created by Microsoft to get node working on Windows?

Keeping up-to-date on both these libraries is really important, and io.js is trying make it possible.

io.js will have ES6 support natively as it's keeping up-to-date with V8. It's hard to know what V8 is supporting today.

Easy for us to contribute to io.js. Lots of good resources on where to contribute and how. (This seems like it'll be a good thing for me to focus on when I do open-source contributions.)

io.js impact on your computer

Works with npm. It redirects node path to iojs path. Omer prefers nvm to manage io.js and node.js installs. (Looks like I have a good reason to install nvm now.) nvm also installs handles io.js version updates.

did node.js close the gap on io.js

io.js is the platform of the future and node.js is a "don't get your hopes up". io.js is way ahead. Catching up to V8 4.1 or 4.2 for node.js is going to be a ton of work.

io.js has gained a lot of momentum

Lots of contributions from contributors to io.js recently. Way, way more than node.js. node.js contributions are falling way behind the past, too. node.js tailed off pretty dramatically. Again, io.js gets a release every 6 days.

Lots of positivity about io.js.

reconciliation

io.js team presented Joyent with a plan to merge it back into node.js. Needs to merge governance model, code and release process. Really boring to listen to. Lots of buereacracy.

Question: what's the motivation to integrate the two baselines? node.js is the brand. io.js wants to avoid confusion, and Joyent wants to maintain node.js popularity. Better to reconcile than to start a conflict. io.js people look better than Joyent at this point, and so Joyent has a lot to gain taking io.js help, and io.js people never intended it to be its own project.

Governance model may be the biggest merge problem. Governance needs to be a proper third-party, not some corporate board. Omer doesn't know how anyone makes money off this. Joyent makes money off servicing node, not the code itself.

Needs a longterm support product for mass use applicability, but JavaScript moves so much faster than any other thing in the corporate world. Seems a bit outdated to talk about these systems.

participation

Got to the io.js org site and see what you can participate in! (Totally going to do this.)

Omer sees a problem going forward where io.js switches to an API that causes breaking changes, and node versions won't be supported. Interesting change in JavaScript expectations. You can't control the browser people use to access a site, but you could control the node version servers use.

is io.js hipster enough?

Nope. People know about it. :P

questions?

Discussion about reconciling versions when node.js and io.js merge.

Core contributions to io.js will be C/C++ as well as JavaScript. Definitely interested in contributing to this. Connections to V8 and libuv are C++ and C, respectively. Lots of good work for contributors.

Any easy tags for io.js bugs and stuff? Omer doesn't think so.

It's worth trying to contribute anywhere you think you could improve something. API, documentation, bugs, etc.

io.js really exemplifies how the node.js community works. Big, open, and really interested in grabbing new perspectives and insights, and encouraging people to think "I can do this better" and fork the code and improve it. node.js started open-source out of a need that was addressed and actually given to everyone. Super cool.

io.js shows that the community will see problems and try to do it better, but want to work with Joyent and merge it back in. They aren't divisive or anything. They aren't condescending or mean, and help is done with good intentions. io.js didn't result from anger, but from frustration and the desire to fix a perceived problem.

Show and Tell

Eric's showing an io.js thingy.

While he's setting up: a group of TucsonJSers go up to the NodeAZ Meetup in Phoenix. People go up and present what they're working on. Good to see how people use node and stuff.

IOJS BUNDLER

I NEED AUTOMATION

Maintain's a TexTMate plugin for <ev> development.

Relying on external dependencies is a pain.

Wants a good builder for this. Wants others to be able to write their own plugins for the in-house programming language.

IT [IOJS] HELPS AUTOMATE

Run npm in installed context.

IOJS-BUNDLER

Hangout Time!

Hangout stops when last person leaves.

Plan Document

04/24/15

Plan Document

04/23/15

Pomodoro Restart

04/23/15

Okay, so I haven't been great about the whole pomodoro planning thing. The days I do it properly feel productive and great, so I don't know why I don't do it properly.

So, let's plan the rest of today, and maybe even try planning tomorrow.

I already did my blog writing, and this bus pomodoro will be for this restart post and some Javascript Development, which I'll rename "RSS Automatic Update".

I will also have two pomodoros for the home busride. Those, too, will be for RSS Update work. Actually, they'll be the only ones, this post will take up all of this pomodoro.

At the end of today, I'd like to do my old routine and even a review, but we'll squeeze both into one pomodoro.

Now, for tomorrow, it's time to start doing start and end of day routines everyday again. I got a lot out of them, and I can choose to skip things to make them only 1 pomodoro when need be. I always have at least 25 minutes worth of stuff to do in both the morning and the evening, I might as well log it properly.

That I have resistance to doing it the right way also shows I need to improve the design and execution of "the right way" of doing it. Ideally in some way that captures information even better than the current way. Forcing repetition will help inspire better tools here, doing nothing will not.

Okay, that should be good for now.

Log

04/15/15

RSS Auto-Update

04/14/15

So, something I want to do is auto-update my RSS when I publish a blog post. Really, I want to make a temporary file that gets automatically opened in vim when I try to publish a blogpost. It'll have an init'd RSS item that I can edit to my liking, save, and have that be put in its proper place in my blog RSS file. This would be an experience similar to how I do things with git commits.

I think a good start would be to see if I can feed an rss (aka xml) file into cheerio:

And the output?

It works! Yeah! Cheerio, you are a cool, awesome friend.

That'll have to do for now.

ReactJS Meeting

04/14/15

Came late.

ReactJS is only for the view. ReactJS is not a framework. It's a library. It eschews best-practices.

Traditional MVC/MVVM shown. There's a distance between controller and view, which has problems at scale. React fixes this by making each controller and view a component.

React is awesome in that everything about it is just JS. Actually the best JavaScript, as it fully embraces ES6 (next version of JavaScript).

React is insanely fast. Renders to virtual DOM and batches updates to actual DOM. Only updates when changed. React vs Angular shown.

React gives you event delgation and synthetic events. Events are not consistent across browsers, React fixes that for you.

It makes your dev process simple.

Question: says that React isn't supposed to replace Angular, but React is being compared to Angular. React could be used with Angular, speaker is of opinion that that isn't ideal. What would you use with React? React is commonly paired with Backbone.js. Flux is their opinated thing you should use with React.

ReactJS has a simple structure (tree shown). Components enforce a uni-directional data flow. Useful for design purposes. Data in a component only comes from parents and self. This is setup as states and props. This allows a great means to find where some piece of data came from. Easy to build upon.

ReactJS syntax is... kinda simple? (Example JSX syntax shown.) That gets compiled into some basic javascript. Use JSX, it's weird for a few minutes and it's better than writing the complied JS by hand.

Component Life Cycle is only 7 methods.

Show and Tell

Code is available on github. Given tour of each piece of code.

Code forked. Starting to look at code... Missing some questions.

What is the order of functions called by ReactJS? All will's happen before render. Render gets called multiple times. Every setting of state makes state dirty, and then render is called. Props and state exist for rendering to change when state changes.

Most important part of the container is the getData method.

This is to showcase the app itself, but is not a proper architecture.

Usually there's a model.fetch that will get the data for you.

Cool ES6 example being described:

This... does something magical that I will have to look up later. The explanation doesn't really make sense to me. Some sort of parent inheritance thing. I commented on my confusion and was told it was called the Spread Operator. Will definitely explore that further.

You can define default things in ReactJS and it'll basically do some type-checking for you and report type errors. Can make good assumptions about what to do with data. In ES6 these are static methods.

React animations are super fast, and CSS transitions leave you wanting more, so good React animation libraries are really powerful for good animation stuff.

Best practices (maybe outdated): if something shouldn't be rendered, don't set display to null, just don't render it in ReactJS.

I think it might be beneficial for me to run this code.

Don't need anything else for a class than just render.

If you just want to generate HTML, you can do it. Doesn't have to be dynamic (seems like a good place to start for an enthusiast like moi).

How ReactJS implements components is the future of web components. It's the beginning of getting it right.

Soon, the old convention of keeping CSS, HTML, and JavaScript separate may be combined into components, and then they'll be properly portable bits of website development.

BrowserSync is recommended for use to everyone.

You can not return multiple children at once, there needs to be a single returned child to the parent.

State is yours, props should be treated as immutable.

At what point you stop breaking down the code into components is up to the discretion of the user. It can all be contained in one div, but at some point you lose the power of ReactJS.

Example of rendering only new data shown with app.

Question: waiting? Can't force thing to wait for render. Can't say best way to implement that with just armchair thinking.

Next talk will be about ReactJS unit-testing. Unit-testing tool is called Jest. Person who will give talk says it was overtly slow.

Size? 708 KB. A little bulky, but pretty good.

Error mapping back to uncompiled code? Not sure.

Facebook tooling is amazing.

Nothing about the main React API is dependent on the DOM. You can render on the Server, to Canvas, or to Native.

Faster rendering? A lot of this is going over my head. Haven't paid attention to this stuff, yet. Rendering on server is faster.

Upcoming topics:

• Unit testing React
• Flux architecture and Server-Side Rendering
• Animation using ReactJS

System Thinking

04/14/15

Okay, it's clear that my home system needs work. I am not doing the pomodoro system, even though I know that when I do I get more out of my productive time and make time for entertainment.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm making time for productivity. I just think I could do it smarter and also enjoy my entertainment more. Right now, I have Glee on while I blog or code away. Now, I've come to enjoy Glee, so this is not an ideal work-environment, and also only watching Glee is not my idea of a well-balanced entertainment diet (which reminds me, my food diet needs balancing as well, but that's something to talk about later).

Anyways, there's a few things I need to do:

• Update my plan document
  • No more daily morning and end-of-day routine
    • Not until schedule stabilizes
    • Let's make a weekly routine to compensate
  • Weekly-review is now biweekly
  • Make a day-off template vs. a work-day template
• Document my current schedule
• Analyze my current schedule
• Consider my ideal schedule
• Map a plan from current to ideal

So, I got a lot of thinking to do.

Plan Document

04/15/15

Plan Document

04/13/15

Post Publishing Script

04/13/15

Okay, now that I have a means of generating my blog and diary areas, I think it might be good to have a means of updating what is published to each area. I'm thinking using it should be something like:

So, I'll feed the area I'm pusblishing and the file I want to publish.

Now, in all honesty, publishing isn't a particularly complicated thing, and I got a vim macro that does it for me. The problem is, however, that it limits the design of this site to publish more-or-less manually. Further, I have this tendency to forget things that I should do before publishing, like make sure my links actually go somewhere. So a script will help me improve the system, and also be another step towards doing it all dynamically from the node server.

All right, let's start, as I tend to do, with a blank javascript file.

That's how I usually like to start a node script right now. The args function is still something I want to improve in general, though, but right now it's a good way to start.

Okay, I got carried away, and now I've got something I more-or-less like:

It works! Time to write a proper blog post about this.

Realization... putting '""' into this post flags it.... I'll just change the search string used instead of smarter verification. Smarter verifcation can happen later.

Blog Post Writing

04/13/15

Okay, it's gotten to the point where I need to decide what I want to write about. I've mostly run out of satisfying low-hanging fruit to write about. I either need to do some research or some work to make blogposts that satisfy me now. So I think a diary post in parallel might be of value from now on.

First, I'm going to explore the drafts I currently have:

• My various reviews
  1. Hire With Your Head
  2. A Whole New Engineer
  3. JavaScript: The Good Parts
• Vim
  • exrc Secure Combination
  • Sessions
• Does IEEE Know I'm HKN?
• The Presence of Death
• Max Subarray Sum: A Good Interview Question?
• Does the Internet Make Us Stupid? No.
• HACKS Room
• Crocpot: 365
• Wuxia Game: the Start Menu
• Kanji Radicals and the Seven Strokes
• Bad New Tools for Old Disciplines
• Secular Meditation
• Software Defined Networks
• White Hat Hacking
• Opening Up: Part 2
• Getting to Know My Neighbors

So, I have plenty of ideas for blog posts, but most of them require more work than just thinking, and the one's that require only thinking require deep-thought or a particular mood.

I suppose it's fine to keep blogging about my site scripting for now. Though, a lot of those posts above are good posts to write up, but right now I'm focusing on actual site iterating, and I like that I'm focusing on that.

Plan Document

04/13/15

Building Plan

04/12/15

Been a while since I did one of these at home. Either I'm planning my time or I'm not tracking it, and untracked time is probably wasted time.

Today's already mostly over, but I think it'll be good to plan tomorrow.

Okay, I need to go to the MVD and go grocery shopping in the morning. That means busride pomodoros where I will focus on blog/website.

I will then spend some time at home before I go to the doctor to get some bloodwork done. Again, I want to focus on website stuff for pomodoros. And then more bus work to travel to the doctor's. Basically, I'm addicted to website stuff and want to devote as much time tomorrow to it as I can.

Right now I'm not being specific, but I will try and be specific and guess how much work each goal will be as I get to it.

It's not a great plan, but I got something for tomorrow. I'll work on better plans as time goes on, but for now I just wanted some sort of plan.

File Database

04/11/15

Okay, so last time I printed out all the links on blog/index.html in chronological order, realized some links were still absolute paths, and made them relative. Now, I can get back to working towards some infrastructure that will let me construct index.html dynamically.

An important bit of infrastructure required is to have a proper list of the blogposts in the order of their placement on the page.

All right, this even caught a mistake where I didn't link a plan document in index.html to its individual file. Hooray for scripts that clean and DRY.

Okay, from here I have what I need to generate an index.html. Let's generate one in a test area first, so I don't lose anything I care about.

Okay, so this file kind've mirrors the previous one, as well it should, as it basically does the same thing, but backwards. Anyways, this managed two things, it taught me that jslint flags the use of synchronous functions (I have an idea of how to do it asynchronously now), and also that two posts in index.html were missing their linked to files. The files just didn't exist. Two in a row.

This happened in two separate runs. Luckily, all I needed to do to generate the posts was delete the link to the posts and run my generate links script through index.html again. Problem solved. Thanks past me for that tool!

All right, from here let's generate a index.html from the blogposts.

This generates a public/test/blog/index.html with all the appropriate blog content, but no other appropriate html. Let's make templates for the blog and diary index files such that the blog post html can be inserted into the content div and that'll be done.

This works! Though, I don't have a style.css in that directory, so styling is a little funky. I really should just use a single master css, I think. Which revealed an interesting property: Second Try Starting Now had a link to itself in its file. Also, I still need to actually link to the individual posts in the generated index.html.

How did I do it in my createLinks.js script?

The title function will be useful. I already have the filename necessary, so the filename generator function not needed.

And now each post is linked to! Before I actually replace the actual index files in the blog and diary areas, though, let's commit my files as they exist right now.

Nope, git is revealing some problems with my script. My impress.js post got nullified. The impress.js has a whole bunch of special stuff I need to consider.... For right now let's remove all id attributes in blogpost divs (collisions could be a problem in the index.html file, removal is easier for now).

This works. I forget... why did I make that div temp for the impress.js post? Let's undo it and see what happens. That's right, it screws up the slide-show. This'll be something I need to fix when I start learning CSS proper.

Yep, this is functional. Let's clean it up a bit and make a proper blog post out of this setup. Right now it's:

Really, I want to make it so that readFileSync is just readFile, and I want to make it as elegant as I'm able while I'm at it.

I like it! Each function is short enough to fit on a page, I kept it all asynchronous.

This is worthy of a blog post now, I think.

Making Relative Links

04/11/15

So, I almost forgot that I still have references to local links as absolute paths (aka http://www.ksionda.me/blog/ instead of /blog/).

I got a findReplace script (though I could also just use sed for this, I'm trying to keep site modifications pure HTML5), so let's make unnecessary absolute path links relative..

First off, let's find all the posts that have such a link. I'm going to break my HTML5 focus and just use grep. Let's just count the total occurances.

So, that's about 180 occurances, and 180 copies into the index.html files. Let's break this down by section. First, let's clean up the inprogress areas.

All right, so nothing in my blog inprogress area is trying to point at anything in my blog area. Let's go ahead and findReplace all occurances of '"http://www.ksionda.me' and '"http://ksionda.me' to ''.

Oh, wait, that's wrong, should still have a '"' in there. This is why I committed before starting these changes.

All right, absolute paths made relative in my blog inprogress area. Now, then, let's fix the blog area:

This makes each absolute link to a blog link from the blog area a basic relative link to that file instead.

This makes all other absolute links relative from the root of the server area (aka, from the public directory). This covers links to other parts of my site from the blog area.

There were lots of files changed with those last two commands.

Okay, where else do I reference ksionda.me explicitly?

Oh, look, this file gets flagged by that grep. That's only because I have the exact string it greps for... for obviouse reasons. The rest of the flagged files seem to all have the same cause of being flagged:

Should be easily fixed by:

All right, I think I've properly fixed all the links! Hopefully I didn't break anything. Hooray for cleaning up my site! Woo!

JSON File Database

04/10/15

Okay, so, copying each blogpost into the diary or blog's home index.html file is not a particularly DRY way to go about things. What would be much better is if I constructed the home index.html areas out of the individual blogposts. Unfortunately, the blogposts alone don't contain the necessary information for the proper order of the blogposts in the main area.

I mean, yeah, they are more-or-less in chronological order, so I could, perhaps, get away with date of the files.... Except, you know, I just recently created a lot of old blogpost files. So, quite clearly, that won't work. I also remember modifying some typos here and there after-the-fact, so it probably wouldn't work in the first place. Filesystem timing wouldn't be something that's particularly trustworthy.

So, currently, the only thing that is aware of the order of the blogposts are the index.html files. So, I'm going to have to steal that information from those files and save it to some other files.

Now, really, a proper database might be ideal, but considering my use case, I can get away with human-readable blog.json and diary.json files. For now, the files need but two things: index placement of post and filepath. The rest can be constructed from there.

Thinking about it, I guess it works better for it to be an array of filepaths. It could just be one json file, too. Let's just make it one json file that looks something like:

Now, then, let's hack together something that makes this file.

Actually, if we're going to hack something together, let's just make a blog.txt and diary.txt that's a simple list of the links. No additional syntax stuff required.

And, first-things-first, let's just print out the blog links in the order they appear:

This outputs the correct answer (output was long and so I'm not pasting it here, I think).

Oh, wait, spoke too soon, there is something interesting in that output:

That's right, I wasn't really aware of relative links when I first started doing links. Or I thought absolute paths were better for some reason. Well, for whatever reason some links are absolute paths. That doesn't really jive with me. Let's switch over and devote some time to ridding the site of unnecessary absolute paths.

This'll be continued tomorrow.

Every Post Gets a Link

04/09/15

So, when I first started this blog, I was just adding on top of an index.html file. So, a lot of my first posts are only contained in there, not their own file.

I figure that fixing this with cheerio might actually be pretty easy. First, I need to find all the posts that don't have a link.

Let's start from scratch. It's a good learning experience. First, let's count all my blogposts again.

Output is:

From here, let's count all posts that don't have an tile link.

This gives me an output of:

I'm actually surprised it took more than 21 posts to start making individual links (I've manually made some links to some of the posts before when I started linking things).

From here, I need to create some files where I can save the html to make each post its own page. Let's make it in a test directory while I'm figuring stuff out (don't want to pollute the blog area with poorly constructed filenames or anything).

This code outputs:

And if I check the test directory:

Yay! We'd be done now if those files weren't empty and if they were in the blog area and the index.html file html was updated to link to those files..

Let's make it so those files aren't empty and are in the blog area and that index.html links to those files.

Non-empty:

The files come out reading mostly like I wrote it by hand (except for the characters that are escaped for me that I didn't realize needed to be escaped). I had no idea that &apos; was a thing.

Updating the index file.... Actually, I realize while trying to do this that I need to restructure my code a bit to make it ridiculously easy to do this. And from there it's just a little change to make it so it's all saved to my blog area proper.

The final code:

So, after I've constructed the single blogpost html into blogData, I alter the html loaded into $ such that there's a link pointing to the file I'm about to create as the title of the post within the loaded index html. After all blogpost files are created, the index.html path is rewritten with the modified html. This rewrite also has the additional niceties of correcting any incorrect html I wrote the best cheerio knows how.

And just like that I've managed to make a script that makes working links to all the blogposts I had originally written within my blog's index.html.

Awesome.

Next time: save the order of my blog and diary posts into some sort of json file? From there, I can construct index.html from the files I have and said json file. Yeah, I think that sounds like a plan.

Also, I think this diary post is good enough to be a proper blogpost.

04/08/15

Following instructions.

Fiction: A Ramble and a Proposition

04/08/15

So, I am here today to make a proposition. Well, more a choice, really. There is no legal necessity to my actions today, but I believe there is a moral one.

You have provided my company a lot of value since almost the very beginning. It is something of which I am very grateful. It is much more value than you have been properly paid. A problem I wish to address here, but first if you'll humor me.

It was not my plan to exploit you, and I do feel like that's exactly what happened. Again, not a legal thing, but more a moral one. I did not expect success in the way that it happened. The system as it was setup was more defensive, able to survive with fewer users, fewer clients, and much less fianiancial circulation.

It turns out, through considerable luck, that the system scaled itself dynamically and efficiently. An exponential explosion thanks in no small part to the users such as yourself.

And thanks to my actions being the first steps to this system, and thanks to my legal ownership, I find myself with more money than I could ever really need.

There is a concept I find myself a believer of that I also find myself capable of approximating.

Log

04/07/15

Weekly Review

04/07/15

Following instructions.

Capture Notebook Items

One capture notebook item was already done, nice. Gamecube mod stuff is in motion, but I had to ask a friend where to buy the thing.

Loose Papers

I should probably use this to go through my tickler, but maybe I'll make priority for that next week. The only other loose papers I have are receipts, and Rosse is taking over that job, more or less.

Calendar

I missed Code for Tucson today, but that's all right, I had family visiting. I'll catch them next time.

Otherwise, nothing really to review here. Using the calendar to plan meals now, and I like that idea. Hope it works out. If my sleep schedule stabilizes, I'll try to plan my general schedule better. But it seems that that is a big if.

Empty My Head

I should start writing fiction in my diary. It can be really rough and unedited, but maybe lead to quality blog post items. Ideas:

• Basic income
• Dream world
• Vigilante revolution
• Time-travel

Projects and Other Lists

This is something I don't properly have, yet. Again, I'll put that off until next week.

Be Creative and Courageous

I am! Thanks for reminding me, though.

Incompletion Triggers List

Nothing triggered.

Plan Document

04/07/15

Log

04/06/15

Weekly Review: Blogpost Review

04/06/15

I am writing this shortly after midnight, wherein I have gotten about four hours of sleep and my body had decided to wake up for a bit. I have read that it is actually quite normal to wake up for a bit in the middle of the night for those that have a healthy sleep schedule. So, I don't want to fight this phenomenon, but I do want to be productive during this hour or so that it apparently normally lasts (though, I already feel like going back to sleep).

And so, as the title suggests, I will be doing a bit of my planned weekly review during this bit of time. Specifically, if my brain can be active enough, I will read through my posts for the past two weeks.

External Distraction: Dog is whining.

Diary Post Review

Game Dev Game Jam Invitation Talk Prep (03/23/15)

I didn't really end up using much of this script, but it was good mental preperation for talking to the class. It reminds me a bit of the script I prepared when I went and talked at my old high school. Talking in front of people about things is a skill I would like to continue to build.

Building Plan (03/23/15)

This was a kinda in-depth plan that I guess I should work on having again, especially for my days off of work. Lots of quality thinking about what I want to do, why, and in what order I should do it in and why.

Plan Document (03/23/15)

This was when I still put my whol activity inventory in each plan document. I'm glad I try to only put relevant items in there now.

UA Game Dev Javascript Talk Prep (03/23/15)

Unlike the script planning above, this prep was incredibly valuable and actually used during the talk. It also covered the beginning only, wherein I winged it from there. Though I had a backup directory of a working game to show off if I couldn't quite develop at the speed I wanted. I ended up using it at the very end.

Weekly Review (03/23/15)

This was a quick weekly review on the bus, and it shows. Though, it still gets the job done, mostly. I guess a poor weekly review is still significantly better than none at all. That makes me wonder... do I gain enough out of a poor weekly review such that a proper one is overkill? I'm inclined to think no, but perhaps that's incorrect.

Review (03/23/15)

Getting good at starting is smart, but I was too quick to dismiss getting good at finishing. As I point out in this review, I start and finish a blogpost most everyday. Might as well work towards starting and finishing other projects in a similar fashion. It's staying on one thing too long that is the problem. But not finishing would be a bad habit to start.

Review (03/24/15)

Deciding to do end-of-day reviews less was a good idea, it has, in fact, opened up my time to proper projects. I should still work on properly doing my morning and end of day routines, though.

Impress.js: The Beginning Draft (03/28/15)

This was a pretty cool post. It looks like a really short post in the diary area, but going to its page, it's actually a series of slides. The slides aren't styled at all, however. It's something I'll need to learn to do.

Development Tools Improvement: Vim Setup (03/28/15)

This was a short post alluding to me trying to clean up my hacked vimrc setups. It ended up taking a lot of time and I don't think it made any of the things I made that much more usable. I have decided to instead retreat into the pure, literal string representations of my vim macros for now. Functions need only be created when I need the same functionality regularly.

End of Day Review (03/29/15)

This review contained an interesting attempt to list all of my tickler items for the day. It's actually something that could end up very valuable if I got into the habit and made it pretty quick. It also translates well into making them proper pomodoro items in my plan and log documents. Definitely an idea that's worth returning to.

UA Game Dev Club Meeting (03/30/15)

This was me trying to take notes during the meeting. Taking notes of meetings and things where I'm a passive participant is something I wish to cultivate. Notes really help capture what I'm getting out of something, and help reveal what I want to get out of it, which motivates strats to bridge the gap between the two.

Weekly Review (03/30/15)

I ended up skipping the majority of the review to work on tools to make my weekly review more manageable. I think this was the right decision, though I've only managed to create one such helper script.

External Distraction: Rosse needed me to call her phone

That one helper script is quite valuable though, as it set up all these links for me, and so I'm using the work-in-progress post to go and read the documents-of-interest. Further, I think the script's code will be valuable for future script building. The beginning of a library? Hopefully.

Also, emptying my notebook helped make a few blog posts this week. Definitely getting value out of my weekly reviews.

End of Day Review (03/30/15)

A list of reasons I organize things the way I do would actually be quite valuable.

External Distraction: Rosse needs help getting Xanthum Gum out

I also still need to organize things into more finely defined bins.

Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init (03/31/15)

The beginning of my building my weekly review init scripts! Took about a week to get to the script I'm using now. Still lots of things to do with it, but it's usable for now.

I managed to get a basic introduction to cheerio on this post, which was the necessary beginning to what I desired.

It also looked like I didn't quite figure out code formatting at this point. Oh well.

End of Day Review (03/31/15)

Reusing plans was a good idea.

Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init (04/01/15)

I managed to count my blogposts this post, and properly feed in a file as a commandline argument.

Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init (04/02/15)

I didn't really know how to do things with cheerio. I managed to peer into the Readme.md that comes with cheerio, and just played with the various functions to see what I could use to do what I wanted. It turned out that my thinking on synchronous vs. asynchronous was not needed.

I managed to get all the posts since a certain date during this exploration. Another powerful step towards something useful.

Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init (04/03/15)

I forgot to format the code again, so it's all ugly again. I need to make a macro that does it correctly. Let's fix my formatting.

Fixed.

Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init (04/04/15)

And so my script finally comes into form, getting the main functionality I desired. Starting over worked out pretty well here.

End of Day Review (04/05/15)

Doing some various long-term planning stuff for my site: DRYing it up, CSS improvements, and then working on a personalized site-blocking tool that reminds me what I want to be working on instead of just blocking my work.

Though, actually working on CSS and stuff will probably be a ways away, as I want to prioritize review-writing again soon.

Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init (04/05/15)

In which I finish what I'd been working on, and have something I have already used to help me out. It's not perfect and saying I "finished" it is a bit inaccurate, but it's still a satisfying bit of code to finally have for use.

Diary Final Thoughts

The diary is perhaps becoming a place where I draft out functional pieces that will become long blog posts detailing some accomplishment. I still need to improve it as my means of planning my extracurricular activities, but this extra property is nice emergent behavior.

I will probably work on making the various Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init posts into one long blog post featuring my node learnings and my small accomplishment that opens up the doorway to greater things, I think.

Blog Post Review

Death Note Fanfic Outline (03/23/15)

This is actually a pretty good outline of my initial thinking on a Death Note rewrite. I didn't quite get to all the content I was thinking of, but outlining a three-way battle early on feels pretty interesting to me.

And I do, in fact, really love three-way battles. Well, the more the better, though I'm sure at some point it gets too convoluted. There's probably some perfect number of colliding motivations.

Magical Mundane (03/24/15)

This is another post I'm glad I wrote. I also can't help but continue thinking about "the Gamer", and how much I would find a perfectly ordinary existence skewed by a literal RPG interface.

I am super considering going ahead and copying this idea and going with it. I am also considering making an idle game out of this very idea, "Give the real world an RPG interface!"

It's an idea I'll keep on the back burner for a while.

Frozen Shouldn't Have a Bad Guy (03/25/15)

Something that's been on my mind for a while, and something I had alluded to talking about a long time ago. I think this small change could've really improved my opinion of the movie. Which is saying something, because I still quite enjoy the movie.

Vim: Functions (03/26/15)

This was a pretty good post showing off my growing vim-fu that may or may not be of use to other people exploring vim. I liked that I properly incorporated pictures and stuff. Really gives the post a nice composition.

Functional Javascript? (03/27/15)

A short and sweet post wherein I explore my own understanding of programming concepts and languages. It'll probably be worth revisting once my knowledge grows again.

UA Game Jam! (03/28/15)

I finally did some proper thinking about how to go about making first steps to a fantasy of mine: making a game-making game. The fantasy has a lot of properties, none of which are currently real. Making a game in impress.js does actually feel like a strong start in the right direction. As the post says, I gotta start somewhere.

Impress.js; The Beginning Draft (03/29/15)

A lazy repost of my diary post. It felt like a worthy blog post and I find reposting from my diary to be acceptable. It would've been proper to pretty it up a bit more, though.

Modular Development Environment (03/30/15)

This has led to me being introduced to some MDEs, so already worth the post. I also just like the post overall. It either reveals my ignorance or shouts about something that maybe should exist.

FindReplace.js is Back (03/31/15)

My return to javascripting! I'm really glad I did this, though I could have made a similar thing with a combination of good commandline tools. Again, it's something that, when combined with other things, may lead to transforming my site to a dynamic node setup instead of a static nginx setup. Even if it is ultimately throwaway code, it's throwaway code that will have a lasting effect on the direction of this site.

Hopefully, it was also a good learning experience in its own right.

Iterating My System (04/01/15)

I got to my script, but I didn't make the other things I mentioned, which was a place for all the things I need. Maybe I'll make time for it during my proper weekly review after this blog review stuff.

Training Everyday Plan (04/02/15)

This is the beginning of some longterm thinking about self-improvement. After blog-writing, I'm pretty sure I'll be doing drawing. After drawing, maybe music? I don't know, it's a long ways away.

Javascript: Cheerio and the Return of jQuery (04/03/15)

I'm thinking a return to jQuery will actually be quite useful. There's some cool things in there.

CSS Digging Deeper (04/04/15)

This is a plan I'm happily anticipating. Unforntunately, I'm a ways away from implementing it, I think. I may have to reconsider how much of a priority I want to give reading.... Or writing reviews. I could always get a book on css and/or graphic design and kill two birds with one stone.

Hmmm.... I don't know. Maybe I just really need to work on having more productive time per day to do all the things I want to do.

Vim: Tags (04/05/15)

This was kind've a lazy post. I didn't really show the strength of vim tags too much. Part of the problem is I use them almost exclusively at work. It did help me realize that maybe I should look into similar tools for developing in javascript or even python.

Diary Reposts (04/06/15)

It's here that I decide to let diary posts build up as fodder for longer posts. It lets me publish lots of diary posts about a concept, and also have a lot of content that I can modify into a larger, more-polished without the additional cost of creating all that content up front before publishing, and also while keeping the content in proper, bite-sized pieces.

It also adds another positive trait to my diary at no additional cost.

Diary Thoughts

I'm pretty excited to see useful content coming out of my diary. It makes me think that maybe I should be posting rough review stuff here in the diary instead of slowly making a review that I will heavily edit over and over.

Actually, yeah, I'm going to start putting review material together in my diary. Thanks for inspiration on that, diary.

UA Game Dev Club Meeting

04/06/15

Cindy has arrived and is dying. Forcing new members to introduce themselves.

Cynthia. ECE.

McKenzie. CS.

Andrew. Psych and CS.

Ben. Psych or CS, hasn't decided yet.

Few announcements:

• Signed up for newsletter?
  • Ask Cindy or Zuoming
• Signing up for officer-stuffs!
  • Link
  • Everyone will see this form fillout
  • Due Friday 04/10/15
  • Max of trying for two positions
    • Get elected by priority
• End of semester plans?
  • Laser tag?
    • Groupon!
  • Suggestions?
    • Sports game?
    • eSports game?
• twinyjam
  • Link
  • Make a text based game!
  • Lot of twines are surrealist and stuff
  • Posted on the Facebook page
• Website/blog
  • Link
  • Place for events
  • Past game projects
    • Please submit Game Jam games to Cindy
  • Something you want to see? Let Cindy know!

Threes: the Mobile Masterpiece

Talk by Jeremy

One of the best games of 2014. Link to free javascript version (not as good as the bought product).

Link to official webiste.

What's "Threes?" slide. It's actually important that it was made by graphic designers.

"The Game is Adorable". Each tile has adorable faces. Anthropomorphize stuff! Most of the development time was spent on the look. "Angry-birds approach." Angry-birds is a clone of Crush the Castle, but Angry Birds is adorable. "Branding is important." Humanizing numbers works.

Highest number is achievement. Give the number character. Cool, collectable trophies.

Engaging mechanics on a 1-button pick-up-and-play game. Quick-in and quick-out while knowing where you are and what's going on. The game increases in complexity and difficulty on a single, simple premise: make the numbers bigger.

All screenshots are from Jeremy. He's super good at this game. The tutorial is there, but the button itself explains the game.

Numbers are trophies and are shown to the player on startup. Blank spots for trophies motivate the player to try for it. Also, spoilers for the looks of the trophy!

Going through everything about the game and how much the little stuff does for each aspect of the game. Sliding is well-designed. Sliding has immeidate feedback. Swipes are continous motion that could be properly designed on any mobile game.

The game is intuitive and things are learned by doing. Larger numbers get introduced as the game progresses.

What's the difference between this and 2048? This game isn't so easily solvable, and it's also the first game.

The goal of the game is to get the highest score possible.

Bigger numbers show up when the player can use them, and the player doesn't need to be educated about it. It's an understandable addtion that explains itself when it needs to be present.

Threemails link.

The whole dev process was published online in their email form. This game was pretty from the beginning. When prettiness are a main part of the game, they should be considered from the very beginning. Work on the important parts from the beginning.

Threes wasn't the beginning, feeling and looking pretty was the focus of the beginning prototypes.

Come to Cindy's talks about art (though she's not a graphic designer). There's a difference between artists and graphic designers.

Questions!

Would ads have made this game free and as profitable?

Jeremy doesn't think so. There's a lot of problems with ads breaking the point of the game. It's amazing that such a sense of immersion came out of a game about numbers.

What about just one ad? Starting already hurts the experience. What about when leaving? laughter.

End of talk.

Zuoming: Ten Game Design Tools That You Can Use in 30 Minutes

Click-baity title. Been thinking about this talk for quite a bit. So, Zuoming hopes it's interesting. It's just written on a page. No powerpoint. Talking to Livio, he's of the opinion that just an informal talk should be written on a page, and then tangents can emerge naturally.

Conversations about what is useful about Zuoming's talk is anticipated and considered valuable. As long as Zuoming's been in the club, there hasn't really been a talk about design. Zuoming thinks that's good, as without making a game, talking about design is kinda detrimental. Don't build your castle out of thin air.

Now, however, a lot of people have made games, so now talking about design can actually be useful when applied to next game. Zuoming is qualifying himself a bit to prove he's allowed to talk about design. He's been making hobby games since 8th grade. Portfolio of games is at 25 games. Even with most of them being terrible, he's learned a lot about making games.

He thinks about game design concepts close-to-daily.

1) Initiative

When you enter a new game, you want to learn something, but it's a taxing experience. Would you play a new game everyday? No. It's exhausting. Learning can be daunting. A player comes in with some level of initiative with a willingness to learn how to play your game.

As the player learns to play the game, they will lose initiative until they do something cool that engages them. Eventually, they may just give up on playing the game.

Can your game get the player past their sinking initiative?

The beginning initiative is dependant on context and various factors.

• Assigned in a class
• Friends play the game
• Cultural phenomenon

2) Mechanics

No debate on what mechanics are. We'll go with base definition.

Different mechanics give different mileages. Trivial when said aloud. "How in the space of possible mechanics can I find the most mileage?"

3) Tutorial

Tuorials hurt initiative unless its hidden within the game. Or you can "bite the nail" and put it all in the beginning of the game, and make it short.

4) Affordance

Affordance is used in various design disciplines. "How can you use things that already exist in real life to make your design better?" An example given in the archetypical book on design the Design of Everyday Things: doors designed to know whether or not a door should be pushed or pulled.

Extra Credits example: low resolution game with cash register, green rectangle, and grey circle? That low-resolution stuff is obviously money! Affordances make it easier to add more things to your game.

Example: a button that will increase upwards velocity with downward acceleration. That's jumping. Constant upwards velocity? Elevator? Think of good affordances to make things intuitive. Eventually, though, things will get too complicated, so you'll have to just teach it in.

Another example that Zuoming loves: Braid affordances Mario (affordances is now a verb, deal with it). Real-life is not a necessary source of affordance. Gets into the concepts of genres (not on the list).

5) Conveyance

Choose how to limit the players to do what you expect them to do. The beginning of Mario is a good example. The game conveys to the player that the player must go right. Conveyance can reduce the need for tutorials.

6) Inherent Challenge

Made the terminology up, don't look it up online. Something that already exists that adds interesting properties to the game (related to affordance). Example: local multiplayer. It's hard to break local multiplayer into something not fun. Deck building (aka probability).

Question: definition of inherent challenge? Free packages of affordance.

Another example: gravity.

7) Elegance

Extra Credits talks about depth-vs-complexity. Zuoming thinks of it in terms of amount of initiative/intuitiveness required vs variety of the game. Elegance is important beyond beauty, good for design, because when there are few rules you can really play around with them and really make it adaptable and change it.

Jumping mechanic is intuitive, but orbits are complicated.

To be continued....

We'll add more things to next talk to make up for not getting to all ten things.

Plan Document

04/06/15

Plan Document

04/05/15

Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init

04/05/15

Last time, I listed out all my diary posts not before 04/04/15, which happened to be just one post because yesterday was 04/04/15. But the point was that my linkText and beforeDate functions worked.

With that verified, now I want to grab the date of the last weekly review, so I can feed it into this functionality and get a link to all posts since my last weekly review.

And so I've made a bunch of changes again to accomodate this:

Which gave me an output of:

Which will be something I plop right into my weekly review file tomorrow for prepping through the review of my last two weeks of blog posts (I may have covered a good portion of some of these last week, but I can easily erase the links I don't need to review).

And now, finally, I have a workable thing for initing my weekly review. I can defintely do more, but for now this is the most valuable part that I want to implement for now.

It might be good to switch my focus on other things for a bit, now. We'll see.

Plan Document

04/05/15

Plan Document

04/04/15

End of Day Routine

04/05/15

Following instructions.

End of Day Review

04/05/15

All right, it's been a while since I've done one of these and I think it's about time to do another one. I'm getting a lot of mileage out of bus-ride pomodoros for website stuff. I mean, it's slow, but every bus trip is a significant step of learning, self-improvement, and script development. All leading to something I can point at and say I made.

The steps I'm taking to be able to make a weekly review generator are also solid steps towards DRYing up my site and just having my site run on node in general.

I will continue to prioritize the time I make towards site stuff until I'm properly comfortable with where it's at, which is again the ability to point at it and say what I've done with it and not feel like I didn't do something major.

Afterwards, I want to focus on CSS for a bit and really pretty-up my site properly, and get some ability with it under my belt.

And then, finally, I want to actually make the productivity extension to Chrome that I've been thinking about. Make it a replacement for the site-blocker I employ now but don't really like. If it's easy enough, I'll try to make it an add-on to Firefox as well.

I need to get back to going to sleep at the same time every night until I start waking up early again. If I had a consistent schedule I could plan more things, and I would really like to work on Smash training routine, and just do some hardware stuff as well as software.

But I won't plan anything beyond my inability to have a consistent schedule or my lack of personal control there.

Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init

04/04/15

Last time, I managed to get the link, date, and links to all the blog posts since my last weekly review. Now, I want to learn a good means of striping the white space from the resulting string(s), but it's not actually necessary for functional code, the browser output will be the same regardless.

So now it's time to throw away this prototype code and start from scratch with a consideration for the design of my script. Why? Because a lot of the structure of this script is the way it is not for design reasons but just because of the process I took to figure things out. Now that I've figured out what I want, I should start over to structure things with more purpose.

Instead of actually deleting it, I'm going to create a new javascript file in my scripts area and work on it without looking at the old script. The old script will be used as reference when necessary.

So, to start things off, I want a jslint header that says node is present. Then I want an anonymous main function to keep my stuff from being global.

This script, specifically, will read in the blog and diary posts I've written since the last weekly review of interest and provide and init'd weekly review post with a header list of all those blogposts (with each blogpost being linked to proper).

External Distraction: Phone is dying.

Now, this end result itself can be throwaway, hard-coded code again, but here I want to make some functions that can be more generally usuable for getting at blog posts and stuff. So what I want is a function that will return blogposts that passes some kind of filtering function. In this case, I'll feed this function a function that passes blogposts written on or after the date of the last weekly review.

At first I scaffold the other parts of the code that would get that date and just hard-code the date for now.

Okay, here's what I got:

Both the linkText and the beforeDate functions above are pieces of code I find generally usable for various website-related scripts. linkText will be useful for generating various review posts (as I may want to review series of posts as well as all the posts between weekly reviews).

I really like how the naming convention worked out, making:

Reads exactly like what it does, grabs all blogposts not before the date 04/04/15 and links each post. And its output:

Which is exactly correct!

Next time, I'll grab all the blogposts, as well, which will take factoring out that readFile callback function.

Plan Document

04/04/15

Plan Document

04/03/15

Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init

04/03/15

Last time I hacked something together to list the title and date of posts since the date of my last weekly review. I think from here I could also try and grab the relative link of the posts and print those out as well.

One thing that might be valuable at this point is to clean up the code I already have a little bit.

Much better, now the code is a little more descriptive about what it's doing or trying to do. Some comments may also help but this is good for now.

Also, I realized I could print out the posts in chronological order via a simple reversal of the array. Yay!

So, getting the link should be as simple as

Is it really that easy?

Nope, getting a bunch of undefined values. Must be missing something. Let's check the documentation.

Hmmm....

Maybe find will do what I want?

It works! Even if there are multiple links inside a div post, the attr function will only return the value of the first one. Even so, I figure being more explicit would be better for the code in the long run. Though, that itself doesn't matter because this is prototype code that I will throw away soon, but still, practice makes better.

This code spits out:

And that's all the time I have for today.

Plan Document

04/03/15

Log

04/01/15

Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init

04/02/15

Last time I grabbed all my blogposts into an array and got the length of the array. This time, I want to do something a bit more complicated; I want to reduce the blogposts to the ones since my last weekly review.

Now, part of me thinks this is one of those things I should do synchronously, but I want to apply this ability to more than just a list of posts between points in time. However, I also want to keep the chronological order for each blog post that triggers correctly.

Hmmm.... Let's make a thing that does the thing and think about better construction after.

So... I don't know jQuery syntax very well. This is something I need to think about carefully.

This is something I need to research, actually.

And yet I still managed to hack something together that is slowly approximating what I want to do!

This code outputs:

Which is the title and date of each diary post of each day up until and including the day I wrote a post with a weekly review title.

Format it so it's html that links to the post refenced, and that's exactly what I want.

Next time?

Plan Document

04/02/15

Log

04/01/15

Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init

04/01/15

Let's continue where I left off and feed in an html file as a commandline argument.

Running this on my homepage's index.html file spits out... my homepage's html.

From here, I think I should play a bit. Could I count the number of blogposts in my blog area?

And running it gets me?

Only 239? I figured it'd be more by now. How many did I have at the beginning of the year?

Internal Distraction: Checking blog post from beginning of the year.

I had 150 blogposts at the end of last year according to my last post of last year (interesting, it seems my css link for that post is an abosolute path, still got some stuff to fix there).

So, I'm pretty close to 90 blogposts for this year, which considering my average of one per day, I feel confident that my little script there works.

Nice.

And that's all the time I have for today.

Plan Document

04/01/15

Log

03/31/15

End of Day Review

03/31/15

I don't do enough everyday to do a review everyday. I'll do a review when my plan for the day changes. Tomorrow's plan will be the same as today's.

End of Day Routine

03/31/15

Follow instructions.

Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init

03/31/15

Okay, system iterating. This pomodoro's foucs?

Weekly Review Template Generation

Basically, I want a thing that'll link to all my blog posts and automate as much as is reasonable. I write a lot of posts in a week, even for my home system. Being able to automatically link to all of them, and setup a place for commentary in my weekly review will actually save a significant amount of time.

Further, such a script could be modified to get other posts and stuff, which could be useful for various reasons (collecting all my vim posts and tagging them, for example).

So, how should I do this? I downloaded a node library called cheerio that gives me jQuery functionality on server-side html. Let's use that.

The cheerio that I npm install'd has a readme.md with the following useful code:

Okay, from here let's feed in an html file as a commandline argument....

I guess that's next time.

Plan Document

03/31/15

Plan Document

03/30/15

End of Day Review

03/30/15

So, I'm falling a bit behind on system review stuff. I'm making note of it, though, and doing it on purpose. I'm doing it on purpose to take serious note of my current organizational system and what tools I could employ or develop to make the whole process more efficient.

One such thing that definitely needs some helper tools is my weekly review. The content I create weekly is increasing every week, even at home, and it's hard to review it and make note of everything and organize everything, especially considering the system is still in its early, first rough-draft stages.

I need to make a plan based on my past weekly reviews, and see if I can conquer this thing in a more effective manner that still gets all the value I've gotten every weekly review. Even this one, which was cut way short and didn't do much, was still valuable I think.

Useful tools to develop:

• Auto generate list of posts to review
  • It could be since the last weekly review
  • Random other posts could also be inserted

More than just tools though, I just need some basic lists to help remind me of all the places I keep stuff, and why I keep it in those separate places. I finally added a list of places I keep action items in my weekly review, but why I have separate lists could also be valuable. Why an action is in a tickler vs. in email vs. in bookmarks vs. in activity inventory vs. calendar vs. etc. are all things I need to have well-defined.

Really, it all boils down to context and where it is useful to have an action and why. Simple as that. The physical tickler is good for physical actions that don't require a computer. A digital tickler is good for things I can only act on sporadically, and infrequent reminders are useful. An activity inventory are actions related to my current priorities. Someday/Maybe (needs to be implemented) are projects that are not actually planned. Long-term (needs to be implemented) are things that need to be boiled down into activitiy inventory items.

What this post is getting at is that my system needs to be reevaluated and its design iterated such that I do a better job at life. Don't get me wrong, it's powerful and useful now, and will continue to be if I keep using it as it is now, but it can be much more powerful if I scale it to handle considerably more complexity and responsibilitiy.

And so that's what I'm going to focus on for this week.

Planning Tomorrow

Mostly the same, but every spare pomodoro goes to iterating my system and, at the same time, catching up on my weekly review. The planned blog post will still happen, though it'll probably focus on my system as well.

That's good enough for now. Let's do this!

Weekly Review

03/30/15

My weekly review instructions can now be found here. The diary post is now commentary on the review, and it will also make note of any changes I decide to make to the guideline page itself. For example, I realize I never go through my bookmarks during the weekly review. There's a lot of good content on both my Firefox and my Chrome, and it would also be useful to merge the two together fairly regularly. So, I'll add that now.

Process Your Notes

Capture Notebook

• Everday training plan
• vnc prototype blogpost
• Mr. Money Moustache
• npm version rules

My everyday training plan is a blogpost idea that talks about what my blog has become, and how I'll apply lessons learned from it to other things over the long run, maybe. Adding it to my blog inprogress area.

vnc prototype blogpost is... something that isn't even ready to be an empty draft in my inprogress area. Striking it out for now.

Mr. Money Moustache was a site recommended by a good friend, Stephan. It's something I feel I encountered before, but I'd like to revisit it. Adding it to my browser actions list.

Having remade my findReplace node script, I became curious about what the standard convention was for versions on npm projects. I'm still unclear about it. I have found some resources on it, though, so it'll be a good blog post at some point.

Diary Posts of the Week

My last weekly review was on 03/23, so let's catch up on everything from there! Hmmm.... At work I made a script that grabs all the posts since the last week for me and prepares headers with links to the posts to insert into this post....

Worth doing at home, too? Took a good chunk out of my review, which is why I didn't finish the work review. Eh, screw it, this week is now officially "Work on my pomodoro system" week. No review writing, and maybe even the blog posts will focus on it.

So, I'm going to skip the rest of the review, incur some weekly review technical debt, and work towards tools that make this valuable system more efficient to use. Hopefully, these efforts are a great success.

UA Game Dev Club Meeting

03/30/15

Announcements

Game night this Friday? Same weekend as Spring Fling. No one cares, let's have Game Night! Need to ask if anyone else is using the IEEE room. We need to find out.

Officer elections happening soon:

• President
  • Organizer of meetings and talks
• Vice-President
  • Does presidential work delegated to her from president
• Treasurer
  • Planner of GDC and gatherer of funding (for GDC)
• Community Outreach
  • Network the club!
    • In classes
    • At other clubs
    • Outside the U of A

Digital Painting

Brainstorming

Ideas:

• Underwater Christmas with stringrays
• Flooded northpole
• Santa vs. Atlantis

Research: Gathering Good Reference Material

Really learn about the shapes and anatomy of what you want to include in your drawing.

The Process

Foreground elements darker than the background elements.

Coloring in the Christmas reef.

God rays can be saved until the end.

Interesting shapes important.

Composition important.

Horrizon position important.

Light/dark important. Got to have a good value structure to be able to see what's going on in the drawing. Good means of separating individual aspects of the value. Cheating here is okay. Called "value composition".

Color Blocking

• Choose base colors
• Put them in generally the right area

Painting

• Pick colors off the canvas and start painting on top
• "Magical" step
• Tends to be mysterious to non-artists
• Actually very straightfoward when you're familiar with art
• Catch mistakes early
• Don't be afraid to erase

Back to Underwater Christmas Painting

Art techniques make sense after a while.

Got lost in watching the painting and asking questions.

I got to get better at keeping notes.

Plan Document

03/30/15

End of Day Review

03/29/15

All right, I want to properly put my tickler items into my plans each day. Also, I will be back to planning my day and doing pomodoro stuff regularly. This past weekend I was exhausted and doing a lot of stuff, so I kinda let my plan fall by the wayside both Saturday night and Sunday morning.

Let's go over each ticklet item and

So, a bunch of those items shouldn't be tickler items. They should be Someday/Maybe or project items. They are in my tickler from when I abused the tickler as my only system of telling myself what to do. I need to fix that, but for now I'll throw most of the items that aren't ticklers and not things that need to be done ASAP to May. Maybe during my weekly review I'll review this list and think about how I want to do these things.

So, I need to plan tomorrow. Tomorrow will be busy, and I don't really know the plan yet, but let's try to plan some pomodoros anyways.

Oh, yeah, that's right, I remade my find/replace node script. It is now setup such that I won't be able to feed in the parent directory and replace every single character with a whole file's worth of contents. RegExp feed-in is esacped for now. Maybe I'll change my mind, but I don't think so. It's really just an exercise in node filesystem manipulation, anyways.

Plan for the Day

My first major thing to tackle is my weekly review. This may be the first time I devote time to it at home. Got to reread my past week of posts and think about what I want to focus on and why. At least one pomodoro should be assigned to developing deadlines again. That's something I haven't given any priority.

Other than that, I'm just going to go with a normal plan for the day. Let's see what happens!

Log

03/28/15

Development Tools Improvement: Vim Setup

03/28/15

I don't know if I enjoy the direction of my hacking vim to make my code and text typing. Trying to make it cleaner makes it look worse almost, and also makes it all take much longer than simply recording my keystrokes.

It's definitely going through some growing pains and I'm going to have to work through them.

Plan Document

03/28/15

Building Plan

03/28/15

Okay, so yesterday's home pomodoro stuff mostly didn't happen. I mean, I got my blog in but other than that I didn't plan my day or adhere to any kind of plan.

And now, at 01:00 on 03/28, I will make a 9-hour plan of doing cool things. Yeah!

The normal rate is 1.25 pomodoros per hour, so let's go for 12 pomodoros, and have an ideal plan of 1.6 pomodoros per hour. 14 total pomodoros? Yeah, okay.

The first pomodoro is this plan. There will be no morning routine this time.

External Distraction: Someone asking why I'm staying around

Now, I could do spaced repetition and stuff. Let's make that an ideal pomodoro.

External Distraction: Other person asking if everybody went home.

The first thing I want to devote most of my time to is making my beginning game-making game draft in impress.js. Then, I'll devote a pomodoro to local vimscript setup.

External Distraction: Everyone has a cow, man

Once I got my initial draft of impress.js, I want to insert actual game code in there, and this time I want a Crafty game inserted in.

External Distraction: Explaining that I'm doing pomodoro stuff

End of Day Routine

03/27/15

Put away all food in the kitchen.

Nasal spray.

Camera setup.

Process email items.

Publish blog post of the day.

Clear out backpack:

• Tickler folder
• Dirty laundry
• Lunch dishes
• Mail
• Items recently put in

Brush teeth.

End of day review diary post:

• What did you do today?
• What's actually pretty good?
• What needs improvement?
• What do you want to achieve tomorrow?

Push local chromebook setup to server.

Log

03/26/15

Review

03/27/15

Cowardly choosing sleep over a proper review here.

12-hour day wasn't the most efficient if I go by pomodoro-rate. However, the rate could have also been affected by general talking and my ability to be distracted today well before significant hours were put in. And it was a lot of good talking.

Bus ride home was fast so slow-going review writing got even less time today. I think I'll have to accept falling behind a bit while I find my way with this first review.

Packed for game jam, more or less. I might come home Saturday, or, rather, I will, so I don't need to worry too much. I like the theme, though I might not make anything along it as I can't properly compete and as such this is a great excuse to tackle any game idea I want to (I have several ideas). I'll bring Game Dev Cookbook for reference, as well as a few other things.

Excited for the weekend and what it might bring. Hoping I'm not too sleep-deprived over the course of it.

Plan Document

03/26/15

Plan Document

03/26/15

End of Day Routine

03/25/15

Drink big glass of water. Take Allegra.

Put away all food in the kitchen.

Nasal spray.

Camera setup.

Process email items.

Publish blog post of the day.

Brush teeth.

Clear out backpack:

• Tickler folder
• Dirty laundry
• Lunch dishes
• Mail
• Items recently put in

End of day review diary post:

• What did you do today?
• What's actually pretty good?
• What needs improvement?
• What do you want to achieve tomorrow?

Push local chromebook setup to server.

Log

03/25/15

Review

03/25/15

So, today I failed to follow the plan I made yesterday, but I still approximated it, and got my normal pomodoros in. Which, you know, is decent progress. Work was also a close approximation of what I planned, even with two hours less than I originally wanted.

Tomorrow and Friday will be busy days at work. Even if I could work ideally, it would probably be better to just get the extra hours in at work so I can more easily make the Game Jam on time. Tomorrow, however, I need to do a little bit of packing for Game Jam on Friday, as I will go from work to the U of A.

So, that means tomorrow needs a pomodoro towards that once I get home. Not too much work, just a few changes of clothes and maybe some snacks.

All done.

Let's do some thinking on my home system now. I like that I've moved a good chunk to the end of my day, makes it so I can have faster morning when I need to. And now that I'm moving more to the end of my day, it makes sense to have a larger amount of end-of-day routine tasks. Some of them should have been there anyways: tickler organization, empty my backpack. Improving my starting and ending routines are going to be very valuable to a fully productive day.

Ending a day right makes starting the next day right easier, and starting the day right helps me focus on what I find important.

All right, let's publish my items for today!

Plan Document

03/25/15

End of Day Routine

03/24/15

Drink big glass of water. Take Allegra.

Put away all food in the kitchen.

Nasal spray.

Process email items.

Publish blog post of the day.

Brush teeth.

End of day review diary post:

• What did you do today?
• What's actually pretty good?
• What needs improvement?
• What do you want to achieve tomorrow?

Push local chromebook setup to server.

Log

03/24/15

Review

03/24/15

Today was a really good work day, but again a minimal out-of-work day. I published my blog post, fixed some stuff with my blog RSS, and did some more review writing.

External Distraction: Rosse talking to me

Work was really, really good, though, and it motivates me to do really well at home, I think. Review writing is going to end up being much slower, I have to accept that. I might fall behind in my reading goals, but it'll be worth it for higher quality reviews and higher quality understanding and/or participation of the material I am reading.

Tomorrow, instead of review writing, I will do Javascript stuff. I will jump from thing to thing until I get stuck, and put clear notes on what I was getting stuck on. Hopefully, I can get to finishing a lot of good stuff. Game stuff, web site stuff, file-manipulating scripts, database stuff, personal productivity stuff, chrome extension stuff. Alternating days between reading (or, right now, writing reviews) and working on software projects will be good. If I can manage my time such that I do both everyday, all the better.

So, tomorrow—well, first let's fix the template document. The way I do things is a little different now. Also, some things should be ideal pomodoros, things I do if the day is going well at that point. Spaced repetition and Smash practice are things I aspire to, but they aren't priorities by any measure of the word. Not right now.

Okay, I'm going to try a new thing where I only keep relevant things in the Activity Inventory, and otherwise the template activity inventory is where I'll store everything until that become too unwieldy and then I'll iterate further.

Tomorrow's limited plan is: short morning routine, bus-ride blogging, bus-ride javascripting, end of day stuff. I got a long day of work tomorrow so this is realistic. Ideally, I can fit in more quality morning routine stuff, a spaced-repetition pomodoro, and do my first attempt at setting up my home Smash-station.

I think that's good for now. I could finish up this pomodoro talking about what I need to do with my system, and that could be really valuable, but I'm going to sleep late enough as it is, so I'll just void this pomodoro and call it a night.

Morning Routine

03/24/15

Start pomodoro.

Get dressed.

Comb hair and tie back.

Pack backpack with clothes.

Bathroom.

Brush teeth, floss, and rinse with listerine.

Refill water.

Feed dogs.

Refill cat's water. Feed cat.

Take out trash.

Do dishes.

Check ripeness of fruits and veggies:

• Avacados
• Tomatoes
• Spinach

Process tickler.

Pack up for work. Pack clothes, pack lunch.

Close/open necessary doors.

Plan Document

03/24/15

Log

03/23/15