Anthony Bailey

Re: Re-opening Portal (my favorite custom maps) - http://anthonybailey.tumblr.com/post...

January 24 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"The author of the Loveglados map noted in email: "I had made a version 1.1 version of Loveglados that fixed the issues with the flings, it's available here: http://students.guildhall.smu.... The issue in version 1.0 was that my core testers and I all had the Portal Funneling feature turned off, and apparently leaving it on has an effect on your velocity as you exit a Portal. Those flings were never intended to be as frustrating as they were for some people. Sorry you got gated at the start" I should also note it wasn't a gate that didn't open if I kicked it hard enough. And the map is great!" - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: RESTful API Design: can your API give developers just the information they need? - http://blog.apigee.com/detail...

December 28 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"Oh, I'm assuming a large collection changing faster than one can page through all the items, and I'm not suggesting some kind of versioned / persistent store here, so the set of resources from all requested pages will necessarily be a stale snapshot of the whole collection, blurred across recent history. Yes, I'm saying "too bad" - after all, you'll miss the resources that are created a few seconds after you stop making requests too. :-) But I do want to avoid missing an item that sat constant in the collection across the whole sequence of requests, which can happen with the offset/limit approach. Simplest example using pages with a single resource: you ask for the first resource in the collection and receive A; A is then removed, so when you ask for the second resource you get C because B has now become the first." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: RESTful API Design: can your API give developers just the information they need? - http://blog.apigee.com/detail...

December 27 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"At scale, the dogs population varies over the time it takes to page through all of them. So I prefer to use a resource rather than a numeric offset to specify the start of a page. E.g. /dogs?limit=25&after=/dog/fido Also an API can make paging easier by providing an explicit rel:next link. (Thanks for this series. I'm enjoying reading it.)" - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Interview with Futility Closet blogger Greg Ross - http://boingboing.net/2011...

October 17 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"So you're saying that *as well as* the mistake with the repeated "the", the title is *also* wrong in its claim that there are two errors...? (It's a slight finesse on the classic "this statement is false" paradox.)" - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Interview with Futility Closet blogger Greg Ross - http://boingboing.net/2011...

October 17 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"The referenced work is actually called "There Are Two Errors in the the Title of This Book"." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

One case for queues

October 5 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Ted Dzubia recently posted The Case Against Queues. I have to grant him that, like anything else, queues can be over/misused, so probably they are being in some parts. Film at 11. (I would say that re useful metrics to alarm on, the time between a message arriving on a queue and it being acked as processed is typically easy to measure and to set sensible thresholds for.) In an Google+ discussion of the post the argument has been advanced that queues should be avoided wherever possible; that they cause more problems than they solve. My limited experience is the other way; I’m working on systems where I’m finding them to be a highly valuable abstraction and where I’m not seeing significant cost. I thought the discussion would benefit from more examples, so I present here one case where I’ve found them very useful. Suppose there are two systems, which I’ll call Truths and Consequences. They maintain state in related domains, but are decoupled - probably owned by different teams - and... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

One, Two, Testing

October 4 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

The first official DLC for Portal 2 came out today. It’s a new Co-op campaign. Now this kind of play is probably great fun, but I still haven’t managed to play the co-operative campaign that originally came with the game. Because, you know, you have to be organized enough to dovetail the windows in your packed social schedules and all that. So I was kind of hoping for a new set of Valve-quality Portal 2 single-player maps. It’s OK though, because instead the Internets sent me a new set of better-than-Valve-quality Portal 1 single-player maps: Try Anything Twice by HMW. I spent around four hours on Sunday playing through this masterpiece. Try Anything Twice is very much to my tastes. There are no very tricky moves, and fairly few halfway tricky ones - instead it’s all about the puzzles. Said puzzles are very well-paced; I was consistently stretched but never got totally stuck. There’s a nice central concept/conceit: you solve each of the five maps twice, the second time around with... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Forcing functions that are better than comments - http://anthonybailey.tumblr.com/post...

September 18 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"You may well be right Jon; I'm kind of context-free here, a combination of luck and not switching jobs very often means I don't think I've ever worked on a code base that was created by people who didn't care. I've seen and assisted in the creation of some significant messes, but could always assume a certain level of ability, plus a desire to improve both the code and the skills of those working on it. Er... hey, hope that new job is going well. I suspect disinterest is the key thing rather than lack of skill: taking the word of others for it, the literature claims most barriers to basic adoption of contemporary best technical practices are cultural rather than intellectual. (Although many of those writing do have an agile coaching / induction service to sell you!) I guess successes with getting decidedly average teams using these techniques have much to do with re-empowering them and so making them care once again. Anyway, yes, sure, let's take what we can get. An @Ignored test..." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Forcing functions that are better than comments

September 16 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

A recent thread at work discussed the value (or otherwise) of comments in code. I think comments on anything owned and used by a small team are usually a code smell. One of the excuses offered for comments was that if you wrote e.g. JavaDoc for some code, then that forces you to think about the details of the code’s behavior and the way that it presents itself to clients; and that such thinking catches edge cases, and prompts redesign all the way from minor naming tweaks through to major simplifications. I agree completely that the forcing function of explicitly expressing one’s intent has that value. And it’s a really significant value. But tests do it better than comments without any of the “eventual inconsistency” downsides. This is old news. But then I noticed a pattern I thought worth posting: One genuine usefulness of comments can be in providing the “why” instead of the “what”: to give the motivation for behavior rather than simply a description. And making motivation explicit... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Google Plus minus writes

September 16 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Google+ finally began to roll-out an API. Yay! But, it is read-only. Boo! I write my stuff here, in a space (i.e. under a domain name) that I own. Some people have chosen to follow me on Google+ and from this I conclude they may want to read what I write. The obvious way to link the resources is to post a link on Google+ each time that I write something here. I was hoping for a Google+ API that allowed writes, so that this could be automated. Oh well. Guess I’ll copy and paste manually when I remember too. Not that I write enough for this to be a big deal for me or for anyone else. But it does disappoint me. Perhaps Google+ really is intended to be a big walled garden within which you rent a plot where you plant your thoughts - but if I wanted that silly silo model, I’d be on Facebook. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Google Identity

July 27 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

These are some thoughts in response to a post by Pavlos on Google+, on Google+. (They are posted here on my blog in order to be consistent with their content! Consider this a trackback. Hmmm, whatever happened to trackback?) I have three things to say here. First, whatever Google’s worthy plans may be re other long-term benefits of having well-defined identities in this new space, we should not forget that real names, tied to real addresses, are worth more to a company whose primary business is advertising. Pavlos, I expect you are cognizant of this, but I didn’t see it in your posts yet. Second, anyone who believes in the value of having an online identity and who then gives a commercial company ownership of their main identity page is taking quite a risk. Google has previously been mostly on the side of light re supporting technologies (such as OpenID) that do this stuff right: which is, to let you define your identity provider somewhere that you control, so you can migrate identity... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

July 12 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

http://martinfowler.com/article...: Great write-up of a fascinating - nay, disruptive - architecture for applications that handle a very large number of highly interdependent requests - event-driven, tuned to processor caches, and pushing all the concurrency out to the edges. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Who is ready to make some science?

May 30 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

When Portal 2 came out, I had grand plans for a detailed post discussing the game, the multi-stage ARG that surrounded the launch, the plans for DLC, and lastly my thoughts on whether the less clinical look of the game would get in the way of homebrew levels. Skip to the end… no, it has not. Wish there had been another two scenes in the middle act of the game? Install this Sphere of Roundness / Old Faithful level pair created by mapper Lobster. Beautiful puzzles! Oh yeah, I keep meaning to organize playing through the co-op. Anyone up for that? - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Scripting News: Viewing RSS in a browser is broken, here's the fix - http://scripting.com/stories...

February 27, 2011 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"(I expect that arguing based on analogies is just going to emphasize how much any difference of opinion is grounded in our subjective tastes, but...) For me, viewing source is like lifting the hood. Clicking text or an icon that indicates "RSS/feed/subscribe" and getting the raw XML is more like pressing one of the buttons on the dashboard and having the hood pop open. It's not a crazy interaction, but it is a surprising enough one that we don't usually place those buttons prominently. I appreciate your odometer may vary!" - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Scripting News: Viewing RSS in a browser is broken, here's the fix - http://www.disqus.com/people...

February 27, 2011 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"(I expect that arguing based on analogies is just going to emphasize how much any difference of opinion is grounded in our subjective tastes, but...) For me, viewing source is like lifting the hood. Clicking text or an icon that indicates "RSS/feed/subscribe" and getting the raw XML is more like pressing one of the buttons on the dashboard and having the hood pop open. It's not a crazy interaction, but it is a surprising enough one that we don't usually place those buttons prominently. I appreciate your odometer may vary!" - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Scripting News: Viewing RSS in a browser is broken, here's the fix - http://www.disqus.com/people...

February 26, 2011 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"I preferred the old-school browser behavior too, but I completely buy that it was wrong for non-developer users. And I fear that presenting a view on the XML that is actually an HTML page is just making things even more confusing. If Chrome or Firefox ever give me an overly friendly rendering of a feed, I just view source. This works fine, makes complete sense, and hitting CTRL+U is quick enough." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Scripting News: Viewing RSS in a browser is broken, here's the fix - http://scripting.com/stories...

February 26, 2011 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"I preferred the old-school browser behavior too, but I completely buy that it was wrong for non-developer users. And I fear that presenting a view on the XML that is actually an HTML page is just making things even more confusing. If Chrome or Firefox ever give me an overly friendly rendering of a feed, I just view source. This works fine, makes complete sense, and hitting CTRL+U is quick enough." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

GoogleCL authentication with accounts that use non-Google email addresses

February 19, 2011 from Anthony Bailey's blog - Comment - Like

GoogleCL is a command line tool that uses the Google Data APIs, so that you can interact with your personal wisp of the Google cloud from your shell. I approve: many thanks to the Google devs who run this project in their spare time. However, there's an authentication issue for Google accounts registered under non-Google email addresses. This blog post describes a workaround that solved the problem for my anthonybailey.net account - but I'll use example.com as the domain name throughout to avoid personalizing the report. (I was clued in to this workaround through a forum comment by someone I can only credit as "sjoub..."..) So: you have a Google account under an email address in a domain that you own: mail@example.com. You have signed your example.com account up for Google Apps, and installed GoogleCL. When you run it, you'll have to grant it access permissions. This is what you do: First, sign in to your mail@example.com Google account in your browser. Run your GoogleCL command,... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

GoogleCL authentication with accounts that use non-Google email addresses - http://anthonybailey.net/blog...

February 19, 2011 from Anthony Bailey's blog - Comment - Like

Anthony Bailey

What would Feynman do? - Fabulous Adventures In Coding

February 15, 2011 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

What would Feynman do? - Fabulous Adventures In Coding: I’m not sure this totally disproves the value of interview questions that provoke thinking outside the box, but I found this to be a very funny dismantling of the well-known “three lamps and three switches” puzzle. - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Mixing a Modern web presence

February 3, 2011 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

Under the banner of Miss Fitz-Poste Modern Mixers, my partner Julie and her friend/cofounder Emily (henceforth, “the Fitz-Postes”) for about a year have been running a mostly monthly vintage-themed event: a new-fangled take on the old-fashioned concept of a social mixer. The exact content varies with the theme but this Sunday afternoon’s Hello to Berlin will do as an example: three burlesque performers, a band, DJ and compere, shopping from four craft stalls, hair and makeovers, silly games with prizes, and other bits and pieces. They are genuinely great affairs I’m unashamed to push at my readership because your cooler significant other gets it straight away even if you don’t, and in any case you get to laugh at what I wear on the door. Other than manning said door, my main contribution is to enable their online presence. The website is a zero budget affair, static pages hosted off the side of a slice I was already renting. The visual design is technically sound but that’s the nicest... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Machinima: The Most Impressive LA Tech Company since MySpace - http://www.disqus.com/people...

February 2, 2011 from Disqus - Comment - Like

""The word is mash-up of “machine” and “cinema” and refers to an underground trend of gamers recording their own videogame play and posting the videos online. It used to be limited to bragging– a hard core gamer showing off his skills. But increasingly, machinima has taken a more creative turn." No, from the moment the terminology was coined it referred to the more narrative / creative movie-like works as distinct from skillz demos / gameplay recordings, and it has always been used that way by the machinima community. The company has always been called Machinima.com - I'm not aware that they've rebranded and dropped the dot com?" - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Machinima: The Most Impressive LA Tech Company since MySpace - http://techcrunch.com/2011...

February 2, 2011 from Disqus - Comment - Like

""The word is mash-up of “machine” and “cinema” and refers to an underground trend of gamers recording their own videogame play and posting the videos online. It used to be limited to bragging– a hard core gamer showing off his skills. But increasingly, machinima has taken a more creative turn." No, from the moment the terminology was coined it referred to the more narrative / creative movie-like works as distinct from skillz demos / gameplay recordings, and it has always been used that way by the machinima community. The company has always been called Machinima.com - I'm not aware that they've rebranded and dropped the dot com?" - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Machinima: The Most Impressive LA Tech Company since MySpace - http://techcrunch.com/2011...

February 2, 2011 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"So did I, but I was convinced otherwise. http://anthonybailey.net/blog/..." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Machinima: The Most Impressive LA Tech Company since MySpace - http://www.disqus.com/people...

February 2, 2011 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"So did I, but I was convinced otherwise. http://anthonybailey.net/blog/..." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Review: Homestuck

January 31, 2011 from Anthony Bailey's blog - Comment - Like

(hreview version 0.2) (Reviewed on 31 January 2011 by Anthony Bailey) website Homestuck by Andrew "MSPaint Adventures" Hussie This epic ongoing webcomic is my favorite new artistic work of the last year. The core of the story concerns a bunch of children on interwoven hero's quests, exploring something like a video game. It has a few elements in common with Scott Pilgrim but is massively more ambitious and inventive, and the mythos is more fully realized. The plot mechanics are highly intricate: in particular the time-lines of characters and objects form a spirograph-worthy pattern that makes Primer look like an idle doodle. One character accurately describes the thing as "4 B1G S3LF FULLF1LL1NG CLUST3RFUCK, A HUG3 ORG14ST1C MOB1US DOUBL3 R34CH4ROUND" - and yet it fits together as well as any time-travel story I've seen. Creator Andrew Hussie tells his tale in a highly singular voice and using a boundary-stretching style. The medium is an unusual evolving experiment: all the MSPaint... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Review: Homestuck - http://anthonybailey.net/blog...

January 31, 2011 from Anthony Bailey's blog - Comment - Like

Anthony Bailey

Decloaked

January 24, 2011 from Anthony Bailey - Comment - Like

The last time I updated here, I said I was journeying off into the desert. More than three months since, if I had readers I didn’t know they’d probably be a bit worried about me. No, the trip was only a week as planned. A similarly brief description: the sheer scale of the landscape (mountains en route, then sands as far as the eye can see) was vastly impressive. I got to ride a camel through what was technically a sandstorm. I hung out with very friendly hosts and a weird mix of nice-on-average visitors circling a middle-class artistic hippie locus, although there was far too much deference to native musical and spiritual authenticity. (I judge modern clubs better at trance rhythms, and the music that gave me shivers of joy was Without Why on my MP3 player in the airport.) Whilst deserting, I also got to enjoy the practicalities of a cloaking device: a long hooded covering formally called a burnous. It’s particularly well-suited to the soft places of Morocco: quite light, warm when... - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Data Protectionism Begins In Earnest - http://techcrunch.com/2010...

November 5, 2010 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"If we're going to apply game theory, I think the right model here is the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Co-operating with a party means enabling users to migrate from you to them. Many players are co-operators, but Facebook are currently defectors. As per Robert Axelrod ("Evolution of Co-operation") the strategies that ought to prosper in the long-term are those that as well as being nice (co-operating by default) are also retaliatory (don't co-operate with defectors) and forgiving (co-operate again once defectors fall in line), and who exhibit those behaviors as clearly as possible. Google ought to be the first of many to very straightforwardly stop being a sucker who co-operates with the Facebook defector." - Anthony Bailey

Anthony Bailey

Re: Data Protectionism Begins In Earnest - http://techcrunch.disqus.com/data_pr...

November 5, 2010 from Disqus - Comment - Like

"If we're going to apply game theory, I think the right model here is the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Co-operating with a party means enabling users to migrate from you to them. Many players are co-operators, but Facebook are currently defectors. As per Robert Axelrod ("Evolution of Co-operation") the strategies that ought to prosper in the long-term are those that as well as being nice (co-operating by default) are also retaliatory (don't co-operate with defectors) and forgiving (co-operate again once defectors fall in line), and who exhibit those behaviors as clearly as possible. Google ought to be the first of many to very straightforwardly stop being a sucker who co-operates with the Facebook defector." - Anthony Bailey