RT @futilitycloset "Do-Gooders"

From the Futility Closet:

In 1978, as part of an initiative to adopt gender-neutral language, the city council of Woonsocket, R.I., dubbed its manholes “personholes.”

After two weeks of national derision, they changed their minds.

Time reported, “The council members voted to go back to manholes, indicating that it will be a long time before a person-person delivers Woonsocket’s mail.”

Firefox's Tab On Top Delimma

An interesting video was recently posted on Surfstation that explores whether Firefox should leave tabs as they are or move them to the top of the window as in Chrome or Opera. The video also gives sneak peaks at some of the new features planned for Firefox 4. Looks impressive!

Click here for the video

It doesn't matter to me whether tabs are on top or bottom, though with the shift from larger screen size to more portability, anything that saves head room is a plus.

Merging folders on a Mac

If you're uninitiated in the Mac world, folder moving or copying on OS X doesn't work quite the same as it does on Windows. Since everything in a Mac is treated as an object, you can't, via Mac's native file manager, Finder, merge two folders as one. This presents a real problem when you're using a framework that involves, say, plugins. You've got to go to each folder's bottom and copy files in one by one... tedious?

The way around this isn't too bad, though if you've never been exposed to Linux/Unix it can be tricky. Since Mac's are built on top of Unix you can use the Terminal's cp or mv command to get the desired result (you can find the Terminal in your Applications folder). The syntax looks something like this:

cp -R [path of folder to copy] [path of destination folder]

In the above the -R stands for "recursive" and is needed for folder copying. The move command is similar, just replace 'cp' with 'mv' and remove the '-R', optionally replacing with with '-v' which will display all the files names as they are moved:

mv -v [path of folder to move] [path of destination folder]

If you're not sure how paths work, navigate to your folder and Command+click, choose the "Get Info" from the pull down and look for the text beside the "Where:" label.

Windows 7 now gives three options on a folder move: replace the folder altogether, merge the files, or cancel the action. C'mon Apple, pick up the slack? How hard can it be to tie the Finder's folder move/copy operations to the Unix commands?

Transformice

At GDC this past year I saw a presentation about how a collection of simple physics objects could be connected to create an entertaining game. At the time the presenter had some great pieces but nothing to put them together with. Well, it looks like he figured it out, because Transformice, a French game in which players compete (or sometimes cooperate) as mice to bring cheese to a hole, blends this mechanic with a multiplayer element that makes it a strong candidate for the 2010 Game Developer's Choice Awards. The controls are a little wonky at times, but the unpredictability of the game ensures a level of fun that's near perfect. A strange behavior emerges when you put a bunch of humans in the bodies of rodents and present them with obstacles - they begin to behave like mice. More than a game, Transformice is an experiment that gives insight into just how much we share in common with our little furry friends.

Warning, this is NSFW - you might not get anything done for a while after checking out this highly addictive game.

http://www.transformice.com/en

Rapid Prototyping with RevRun

In San Francisco for GDC '10 and taking a break from sessions after Microsoft gave me flashbacks of graphics class in a talk on block compression methods in texturing. Ouch. So far this GDC has been a significant improvement over the last. Not sure if the economy's pickup, better planning, or the free Google Androids are to blame, but the whole sphere is teeming with eagerness, the air electric in anticipation.

While on the plane I fiddled around for about 3 hours with a new language called Revolution (the IDE is called RunRev). It's a GUI prototyping language that boasts a more "human" syntax. My conclusion: RunRev is a cross between Visual Basic and Python that's good for prototyping but not yet ready for the mainstream. As always, the good before the bad.

A list of stuff Revolution is good at:

• it's really fast to get a handle on


• it has a pretty GUI system with an intuitive script flow


• it can toggle between build and run-time mode fluidly


• it has plans to launch a Mobile converter that will address Android, Blackberry and iPhone

Why Revolution isn't ready:

• It doesn't have a very robust or complete API. For example, it has a datatype called "point" which is any two numbers in a certain context separated by a ,. While there were a lot of functions built around the manipulation of the point, I could not for the entire 3 hours find some way to extract the x or y coordinate specifically from this basic datatype. If I wanted to do that I'd have to create and maintain custom Point object.


• The language itself was a headache to learn because it intentionally tried to break a lot of the conventions programmers are used to. This was to give it a more "human" syntax, but it really just frustrated things in a lot of places.
  


• The IDE itself failed more than expected.. often I couldn't open windows and had to restart.

So, here's the little sample game I built(you'll need the plugin). To play click "restart". A ball will enter the screen. Click the screen near the ball and it will change the ball's direction. Your objective is to get the ball into the hole.

The original idea was to have the ball bounce to a direction depending on the angle it hits the pointer at (the pointer representing a finger on the iPhone), but because I couldn't extract the necessary information it just bounces in a random direction.

Verdict: Revolution is a decent prototyping language, but there are better ones out there, and it's not yet ready for full scale production usage. I'll stick with Flash for iPhone and C++/Java for Blackberry/Android, perhaps visiting Revolution from time to time.

Math

Mathematics is the science of drawing relationships between quantifiable entities. i.e., x^2 + y^2 = h^2 is a discovered formula for finding the width of sides in a triangle (or triangular object, such as a wedge or ramp). It does not necessarily mean it is the only formula, but in theory, any formula intent on finding the width of 3 sides of a triangle using the other sides as components could, through mathematical operations, derive the above formula.

Now, if someone can explain to me the usefulness of integrals, I would really appreciate that.

Morning Roast

So, a webcam, as we all know, is that thing that sits on top of your computer that records your pretty face and sends it shooting across the interwebs to various chosen (and some unchosen) destinations. In our office it's used as a mirror that peaks over our head to let us know who's walking around behind us (we live in cubes), necessary as it's good feng shui to always have your entrances visible.

As with many things in the early tech world, the webcam started as an in-house tool for computer engineers. A regular camera's feed was sent over the local network at the University of Cambridge and provided a little 128x128 live update to monitor a coffee pot in what was deemed the "Trojan Room". The Trojan Room was far away (probably two doors down or so) from some programmers and the web cam provided a quick way to see if the pot had coffee or not to determine if a trip would be worthwhile. Read some more about it here.