Let:

Then:

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Getting the server to work with Microsoft’s Telnet client that ships with Windows (or doesn’t, as is currently the case), proved to be a bit of a pain. In Linux I could connect to the server, type a command, and as I typed I would be able to see the letters appearing in my local terminal. When I hit enter, the server would receive the whole line I had typed. All good.

In Windows, however, the first problem I discovered was that the telnet client is no longer installed by default for Vista onwards. Vista / 7 / 8 users have to follow this guide to enable it.

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Rules of the game are the same as the standard version, but with the following additions:

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What’s happened with it since then? Well,

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As you’re probably aware, a table like this usually holds rows of data which can be sorted by any of the table’s columns. Clicking on a column header will order the data by that column. Clicking this column again will toggle the order direction between ascending order and descending order. It’s a great idea. However, my issue has always been with the icon indicating the order direction.

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What caught my attention, though, was that fact that the post consists entirely of a rage comic. A rage comic, for the uninitiated, is an internet meme wherein a hilarious anecdote is retold in the form a crudely-drawn comic strip, usually full of cartoon facial expressions which are themselves internet memes. I joked that such a blog post, due to its entirely rasterised nature, would be difficult for a search engine to index. Difficult, that is, unless the comic’s semantics could be encoded as text-based data. Sometimes, a joke gets out of hand.

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Making videogames has been a hobby of mine since since my mid teens. In fact, even before I learned to program I used to write choose-your-own-adventure stories based on games I had played. Yet, despite a long trail of unfinished projects, abandoned due to over-ambition, boredom or distraction, I’ve never released anything I would call a finished game. I’ve finished the occasional thrown-together competition entry for Ludum Dare, and now and again I’ve had the motivation to round off some small experiment into something functionally complete but too small in scope to be noteworthy.

You see, it turns out that making games is hard. Not just hard in the sense that it’s technically demanding, because after

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One annoyance I’ve found with this app, however, is the way the photo ordering is achieved.

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Motivation

Sometimes, a simple message is not a sufficiently productive way of communicating with someone. After a small number of back and forth emails, someone will decide to pick up the phone or meet in person to have a face-to-face conversation. This way, the feedback loop is shorter and each question can be devised based on the previous answer received in order to exchange the necessary information between participants.

Face to face conversations are not always possible, however. And waiting for

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Over the years, Twitter has become increasingly popular with indie game developers. At some point, the hashtag #ScreenshotSaturday was invented to tag screenshots of game developers’ work in progress each week. The hashtag is a great way to get a sneak peek at what people are cooking up, and a great way to discover creators and their games that you might otherwise have not heard of.

As the tag gained popularity, a couple of websites were created by the indie community to parse the twitter feed and showcase the images being posted to twitter. The first, screenshotsaturday.com created by Pekuja, and the second, screenshotsaturday.frogames.com created by Mathieu of Frogames. There may even be more, I’m not sure.

As an avid user of [Google Reader] however, I thought it was a shame that

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When it comes to text editors in Linux, there are two major players which have famously been causing holy wars for at least a couple of hundred years now: Vi and Emacs. They are both extremely powerful, lightweight editors whose ages are a testament to how useful they have been and continue to be.

If you are already a Vi or Emacs user, then great! If you’re not, and you do a lot of code editing under Linux, you should probably consider learning one of them. So, with that in mind, here’s another text editor that you may or may not have heard about: GNU Nano.

GNU Nano is a basic command-line text editor which is installed by default with many Linux distributions. Nano is not intended to be anywhere near as feature-rich as Vi or Emacs. It is a very simple tool, but this means it requires little to no time investment to start using for basic file editing tasks. Nano’s core commands are easy to learn because they’re written out at the bottom of the screen, and files can be navigated intuitively with the cursor keys.

I find nano extremely handy, and it has some neat features that you may not have known about. In this post, I’d like to share some of nano’s more hidden capabilities.

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``` text

( Start ) | | implement V
( Works ) | | refactor V ( Nice ) | | optimise

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Chinese encoding not accepted by this server

Chinese encoding? I checked the data being sent - there shouldn’t have ever been any kind of non-latin character data going into the emails. Maybe the application was using the wrong encoding for some reason? But I couldn’t find any evidence for this either.

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In other languages, like C for example, when you divide an integer the result is truncated to give an integer result. That is, the part after the decimal point is chopped off. For example, 10 / 3 is 3.333333… An integer division will chop the decimal part off the end and give the result as 3. Similarly -10 / 3 is -3.333333… and in C, dividing the int -10 by the int -3 will give the answer -3. Divide it, chop off the decimal places, easy.

Python’s integer division works in a subtly different way, however.

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The re module has a function split which takes a regex and a string and splits the string by occurrences of the regex, returning a list of substrings. Ordinarily it works how you might expect:

>>> import re
>>> re.split( "[A-Z]", "HowNowBrownCow" )
['', 'ow', 'ow', 'rown', 'ow']

Here I’m splitting the string “HowNowBrownCow” by capital letters. The

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Doctest will examine your source code, looking for what appear to be code examples. Any examples it finds, it will test using the Python interpreter and compare its result with the one documented. If they differ, Doctest will let you know.

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I’m going to talk primarily about generators in Python here, but generators exist in many other languages such as C# and Javascript, and I believe Unity3D also makes use of them for animations and such.

Coroutines

If you’re not familiar with the concept of a coroutine, excuse me while I blow your mind somewhat. When one calls a regular function, otherwise known as a subroutine, something like this happens:

``` text

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Being a total newbie to most of the games I’ve played recently, I’ve had to go through the process of leaning a new game quite a few times. Now, I’m not much of a quick learner, and I think that learning new games is probably a skill that one can get better at with practice. I imagine the more new board games you play, the better you get at learning the new sets of rules and adopting the appropriate strategies. But from my experience of trying to learn new games, I’ve noted a few things that I’ve found can help make things easier for newcomers.

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• Chips

What we actually call her:

• Chippies
• Chickpeas
• Pips
• Chipples
• Chipsticks
• Chipplies
• Chipolata
• Chiptastic
• Chippy-cat
• Pipples
• Chaps
• Chippa-Chips
• Chippity Doo-Dah
• Daddy or Chips
• Chippaaay
• Mr Chips
• Chip-Chippity Chip-Chippity Chip-Chip Cheroo
• The Fog Horn
• Blimp-cat