A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

This SXSW talk from Merlin "43folders" Mann and John "Daring Fireball" Gruber has become my personal north star for the moment. (Here is a transscript.)

It boils down to this: If you wanna publish something awesome on the internet, figure out what really and truly obsesses you. Then follow it. Let your desire to be awesome lead you, versus your desire for ad clickthroughs. If you succeed, then further success shall come.

This is lining up to be my guiding principle for a lot of what I hope to do in the foreseeable future.

(Image credit: moleitau, after this.)

OK youze guys, after hearing about Microsoft's GDC keynote and its plans for XNA, I'm hot to buy an XBox. I mean, I kinda have been for two years, but I can more or less afford it now, and my justifications have never been more solid.

I understand (with Wikipedia's help) that it currently comes in three sizes, and that (correct me if I'm wrong) I want the middle-weight "Premium" one, versus the "Arcade" or "Elite" ones. (Sigh.)

What on-disc games that are available right now should I get? (Fritter me not with your talk of pre-orders.) What downloadable games should I get? Assume that Portal and Rez are already in my imaginary cart.

Any other things I need? Extra controllers? Who what?

I'm just going to play it on my old crappo TV for now. Yeah, I know.

They say that every Perl hacker's journeyman project is an HTML templating system. I'm learning about a variant, running into clients who each developed their own SQL abstraction modules before hiring me. Like every other SQL abstraction module, it really has just one purpose: an attempt to avoid having to embed one programming language (SQL) inside another one (Perl).

To this I say: Bleah. I used to agree with this sentiment, and for years used modules like Class::DBI, which treat tables as classes and rows as instances. Clever, and easy to work with! But now try doing a right join. Ha ha, no, I know: show me how do to a subselect with that. Yeah. Either you punt and shove raw SQL into your code anyway, or you insist on doing it "Perlishly" with loops and checks, in which case a query that should have taken a tenth of a second takes several seconds or more.

In fact, I'll wager that your code is already running at horrible efficiency because you're pounding the crap out of your DB with unneccessary loop-based SELECTs instead of carefully doing case-by-case SQL queries that get exactly the rows you need, each holding exactly the columns you care about, every time you call an information-seeking object method. I'll also bet your INSERTs are ass-slow because you're not using bind values in them. Actually, you're not using bind values anywhere, right? Yeah, see.

My friend, if you're going to work with a little raw SQL, I argue you're already blown it, and may as well just let it all hang out, throwing out your half-useful abstraction layer. There is no sin in openly acknowledging that you're using an SQL database by actually writing SQL. If the fastest way to get some particular information out of the DB is to write a crazy-long and baroque query, then you should do so. Let the database do the work it's optimizied for and stop treating it like a set of config files that you'll need to write your own logic around.

Another way to put it: If you're writing nested loops in your SQL-driving Perl, you're probably doing it wrong.

Hey folks. I didn't go to Origins; the Andys didn't wanna and the timing just didn't seem right. I am giving myself another day or three to decide if I wanna go to Gen Con. I don't have a really solid reason to go, since Volity is in such a weird transitional state. Networking is good, but until the web client's in full beta it all feels uncomfortably premature.

In any case, the Great Work continues. Today saw classicaljunkie off to Houston as I have for the last N Sundays (which means I stand in my doorway and wave bye-bye as she schleps her stuff away) and then turned to work on the web client. Right now the going is rough, and unavoidably a little frustrating, as I'm finally starting to interface my crazy library stuff with the website. Who knew, for example, that you can't make AJAX calls to a host other than that of the website making the call? Er, well, you probably did, sure, but the issue's never come up for me before, and since prototype.js treats this with silent failure[1] I got really hung up on it. A phone call to daerr resolved this.

I think I need to mix up my life a little more. Monomania is expensive, especially when you're working alone (or have the unavoidable perception that you're alone, even if you're not really). Focus is great, but there's a subtle gradation of diminishing returns, and sometimes the march can turn into a slog hours or even days before you notice. There's a constant assumption that whatever you could do is less important that The Project, and so you keep working on it, even when you really don't wanna. (Or worse, and too frequently: you really really don't wanna, and so you do something truly time-wasting instead.)

Right now I enjoy some variety because of the contracting job that I'm obligated to do, and I have no trouble letting myself context-switch into it three days a week. But that's still a task with the morphology of sitting on my ass planning and typing code, and anyway, that's my day job. It's also the only part of my week-by-week schedule from a couple months ago that I've stuck to; since writing that plan, I have spent exactly zero Sundays on video projects, for example.

OK, listen: Tomorrow, monday, after work, I'm gonna map out a plan for the next two months. On the Volity blog I called a shot that had me hitting a certain milestone with the web client by September 15. I'll scatter some subgoals between now and then, and then see if that doesn't show some places where I could fit in some other activity as well.

[1] No, I didn't try setting up an onFailure handler. But really, this seems like a job for exceptions. And now you'll explain to me how the architecture makes that impossible, sure, sure.

It has been a full weekend.

Saturday saw a lot of Volity hacking, breaking ground on the web client's server-side component. Once the complete skeleton is built I'll commit it as v0.1, but my fugue state didn't last more than a few hours and I had to be all "whoah" and raise my hands and step away before I could quite get there. Maybe I'll finish it today. Anyway, this will be the first Perl-based Volity sub-project that I've started since I got religion via Perl Best Practices, which taught me to start major projects by writing the tests (and, in so doing, designing the interface) first. So that's exciting. If you're me.

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In the evening, radiotelescope, cthulhia and I saw Day Watch, the sequel to last year's Night Watch, a.k.a. the crazy Russian vampire movie that everyone except for me and the people I saw it with hated. I liked this movie too, though not as much as the first. It replaced the crazy imagery and action of the first movie with some fun plot development. I dug it, but I missed the other stuff. It also contained one completely irritating character, who (among other things) failed Mo's Movie Measure the instant that she was able. Worse was that this occurred during an egregious and overlong "Freaky Friday" sequence, and so I spent five or six minutes in a sustained wince in the middle of this otherwise enjoyable flick, and that was unfortunate.

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Sunday was classicaljunkie's birthday! Following plans that dougo initiated a while ago, and also accompanied by Cthulhia, we drove to Kimball Farms to play miniature golf, or "putt-putt" as CJ calls it in her native language. I hadn't played since I was a kid but I'll be damned if I still didn't have reasonably good chops for it. My friends laughed when I said it was all the golfing video games I play, but I wasn't entirely joking! The place has two courses, and we played both, with me winning the first round and CJ the second (after Cth left), though the point spread was fairly tight.

The courses were enjoyable but rather bland, with one real standout whose like I had never seen before: one hole split in a vee a few feet away from the tee, with one arm snaking towards the cup in the usual fashion, and the other dumping into an artificial stream. As it turns out, the best solution involves purposefully putting into the water, which carries your ball under a platform and through a hidden tube, ejecting it right at the cup. But there's no explicit documentation about this; you either need to watch someone do it, or be intrepid enough to figure that there had to be some reason for the hole's stairway-to-nowhere design, making the leap of faith yourself. Doug was the brave one in our party, and he and I both got holes in one.

The rest of the course was really nothing special, but I just couldn't shut up about that one hole. Great design!

Also did some unexpected networking: the dad of the family playing behind us turned out to be a publisher of some computer and video game magazines from the 1980s and 90s that I loved as a kid! He couldn't help but overhear Doug and I talk about Volity and iPhones and such, and we chatted for a while. he was interested to hear about my startup, so I need to email him a little follow-up today. Had no business cards on hand, but wrote my info on the back of an extra scorecard for him.

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Then we went to dinner with dictator555, at Pigalle, in the Boylston vicinity. This was the first time I'd really experienced a fancy-dan restaurant where you pay exorbitantly for very little edible mass. It felt like something from a New Yorker cartoon. I ordered a $15 a menu item describing itself as gnocchi, and it meant this quite literally, featuring a gnocchi, one single piece, on a little bed of vegetables; an island in an otherwise large and empty plate. I did appreciate this, though perhaps not in the way they meant me to.

It was delicious, what there was, and I also quite enjoyed the sampling that my dining companions allowed me from their dishes. I said that I'd consider returning the next time I felt the need to really impress someone.

Finally. Sarissa did indeed ease my XML suffering; thanks for the pointer, jaq! Lots of other hangups to overcome, but nothing that stumped me. Much was learned.

Here's the same boring old Tic Tac Toe demo which works in MSIE (and, afaik, everywhere else) now, and here's a zipfile of version 0.2. Everything's up to date in Subversion.

Now that that's done I will stop seeming to obsess over this one example and start making some more interesting prototypes. Much of this suffering was done over JavaScript library code, so it should all carry into the future nicely.

Sexier version of that HTML UI demo. This Testbench port now has full support for Volity's JavaScript API, as well as its translation token protocol. Also, it no longer has Tic Tac Toe hardcoded into it, but you wouldn't know it to look at this. It's running TTT as a module.

I'm calling it feature-complete. Will document n upload n announce tomorrow.

Some notes carried over from the last post's comments (which, I have to say, charged me up quite a bit):

Both the Testbench application and the Tic Tac Toe UI are pure HTML/CSS, scripted with plain ol' JavaScript. You can look at their source if you dig around with your browser, but it will be all up in Subversion soon.

UIs don't have to be pure HTML, though. Our intent is that they can also be Flash, Java, even SVG applets, so long as the developer uses a JavaScript bridge that can pass messages between the embedded component and its container.

Yes, I want a demo of a Flash-based Volity Tic Tac Toe UI. I'd have already made it myself, if I knew any Flash. Maybe I can find someone else to help with this.

We have no plans to drop SVG or Gamut support. However, if my current feelings that the web-based client will be far more popular than Gamut bear out, we're likely to focus a smaller portion of our development energy on SVG stuff.

It's worth a personal blog entry, if not a Volity blog entry: Demo of an HTML game UI, running in an HTML port of Testbench. Testbench is otherwise a Java program that Zarf put together a while ago for testing SVG UIs.

This demo is probably boring and meaningless to you unless you're deep enough into the Volity trip to see where I'm going with this.

I am really on fire about the web client and don't wanna work on anything else. But I must! I'll suffer through one day of worky-work and then spend the rest of the week on this. I think I can make Web-Testbench feature-complete and also make good headway in the client as a whole before next Monday. (Yes, I realize I have a presentation to put together, too.) As things are for-real completed I'll announce them on volity.net forums.

Google and Wikipedia aren't coming through for me on this one:

Imagine that we have a utility which, in the course of its duties, reads and writes files to a file system.

What sorts of behaviors would make it not NFS-safe? I thought NFS was totally transparent to man and beast alike, but perhaps this is not quite so?

This week is Blank Verse Blog Week, an invention of my dear friends, the Freaks. They've been at this for several years; I don't do it coz I'm lazy. We're already a couple of days into it, but it's not too late for you to start, if you're into that sort of thing.

My colleague Zarf has started a Sourceforge project about Boodler, his wonderful soundscape generator. Several years ago he developed it up to a point where it was useable if you wanted to monkey about with Python-based command-line interfaces and manually manage your own sound libraries. I found the program's output sufficiently nifty that I would go through the ordeal - much of Perl & XML was written with its ebbing and flowing rainstorm module as background sound - but of course most people can't hack that. He and some other folks are now working on making the thing more accessible. There is a mailing list.

What other projects should I know about?