James Hague

@rich_4711 Never seen this one! Thanks!

@dadgumjames Here's another one from 1983 that had completely slipped my mind: Terror-Daktil 4D youtube.com/watch?v=0kl0Je…

I was recently asked about the first *home* game with a cinematic. Bugaboo (The Flea) from 1983 sometimes comes up. Astro Chase (1982) has intro and ending scenes. Anything earlier?

I never added a link to it, but the Programming in the 21st Century static site generator is at github.com/dadgumjames/pr…

@nothings From an insider perspective, Sumoner PS2 (2000) laid the groundwork for the subsequent console games.

Today the orange site reminded me of a neat article by @dadgumjames from many years ago that makes a point I think still holds a lot of truth and is worth remembering: most people (including, necessarily, most experts) don't engage in online discussions. prog21.dadgum.com/143.html

@jeriellsworth Is that a…TI Compact Computer 40?

I periodically write command line tools that generate HTML. Every time, I think it would be great to redirect output directly to the browser instead of creating a file, but no.

@ManuelaXibanya I live in the land of mo-cap for everything, so it's always a joy to see some hand-keyed anim.

you know it may not be perfect, or even up to the quality of an actual professional animator, but I think I've been really improving lately

At some point I stopped customizing desktop backgrounds and just make them completely black.

A UI feature that would save me time, but I haven't seen on anyone's radar: feedback that copy-to-clipboard actually occurred.

The "premature" in "premature optimization" means "Before you fully understand the problem." This is also the loophole that makes it okay for a domain expert to sometimes optimize from the get-go.

I spent much of the pandemic on a laptop, and now that I'm on a big monitor again I'm using smaller windows than I used to, with more programs visible at once. Resolution aside, feels like the ideal that early GUIs promoted.

This book was the inspiration for "Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers."

When building a UI for entering an AM/PM time, don't default to one or the other. Force AM or PM to be chosen before the (for example) "SET ALARM" button is even availble.

Over the years I've appreciated some principles of the Erlang/OTP team: focus is on large systems not microbenchmarks, slow consideration of changes, experimental ideas often set aside, language is kept clean even if some complexity is dealt with behind the scenes.

@timbray @opinali @jxxf Haven't used mine in a while, so I couldn't remember, but it's 160 lines of Perl + a 52 line HTML header. I never would have blogged at all without it.

@opinali @jxxf @dadgumjames My custom static site generator is a single 2900-line Perl file. Not a joke. Works great!

Personally attacked.

The MONOSPACE JavaScript demo sets up a rendering context using 59 bytes of code, and it contains 2 things I didn't know about HTML5/JS.

@bjorn_fahller @lukego I wrote lots of PLEX for AXE, and I knew about EriPascal, but never saw any. It was for some tangential system–billing maybe?

I've resisted the retrocomputing rabbit hole thus far, which in very grateful for, but I did just stumbled on some of Bjarne Däcker's manuals for the 1970s hardware that ran EriPascal (iiuc), a predecessor to Erlang. Imagine a prequel to Erlang The Movie...

The last several months have made me realize how many small businesses can't update their own websites. New hours, adjusted lunch menus, COVID restrictions, all go on Facebook.