People call the United States a “nation of immigrants”. It’s meant to say that we have no right to turn away immigrants who simply happened to arrive later than us. This assertion is false, and explaining how it is false should go some way to showing why we have our current attitudes.
The joys of .NET Core
I wanted to check out this whole .NET Core business, so I downloaded it and started hacking. Oh, and I’m using Linux, so it’s all command line. Recipe for success, right? Let’s dive in!
Even more efficient UTF8 processing in C#
Last time, we took a text processing program and slashed its string allocations by a factor of one thousand, with execution time going from 1.02s to 0.07s. That’s not good enough. Let’s make it even faster.
Performant text processing in C#
I recently converted Subtex from D to C#. With the same amount of optimization, the C# version was thirty times slower. Let’s look at why.
Mirror, mirror on the wall — who’s the scrappiest scraper of all?
I implemented Silvermirror, a website mirroring tool. It’s got some interesting aspects that make it better than wget in some cases. Let’s dive in!
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Implementing calendars
Calendars seem simple at first, but no system survives first context with reality. Let’s go through what types of calendars exist and how to support them all in one codebase. Our eventual focus will be on producing a calendar for games — but those more on the Dwarf Fortress end of the spectrum.
MUD life: time
We’ve been talking about procedural content generation for a MUD, but it would be rather sad to have a procedurally generated static MUD. A place where nothing ever changes.
If we want to talk about change over time, we need a notion of time.
MUD procedural generation: drawing the walls
This is the second post in a series on procedural generation for a MUD, which is a text-only MMO, or a multiplayer Zork. The eventual goal is to create a large, varied MUD containing multiple cities, towns, and wilderness biomes, and a wide array of NPCs and items, as the basis for more personalized and customized work.
Last time, we spoke about placing towers for the city walls. Let’s create the walls themselves.
MUD Procedural generation: outlining city walls
This starts a series on procedural generation for a MUD, which is a text-only MMO, or a multiplayer Zork. The eventual goal is to create a large, varied MUD containing multiple cities, towns, and wilderness biomes, and a wide array of NPCs and items, as the basis for more personalized and customized work.
Today we’re looking at generating the outline of a city: the city walls.
Subtex: doing a BBCode with LaTeX
I created Subtex, a LaTeX-inspired markup language for ebooks. Here, I’m going to talk about what caused me to create this language, what it does, and what’s interesting about it.