Michael Cook’s Place

I did some more Clojure tinkering on Friday and wrote a little program based on an algorithm on Wikipedia to generate a Sierpinski’s triangle. You can find it on my Clojure page. It was surprisingly easy.

I’ve been doing a ton of reading lately, so here are some more book reviews.

Almost Perfect

A book by W. E. Peterson, one of the head-honchos behind Word Perfect wrote this book quite a while ago (~’92 or ‘93). Almost Perfect is out of print, but the full text is available online, which is where I read it. The book tells the story (from Peterson’s perspective) of how the little company was founded, handled it’s exponential growth, and how things ended when he left (at which time WP was still a big player and OS/2 still looks like it might matter). A very interesting read.

Racing the Beam

A book out of MIT, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies) is the first book in a series (which I can’t wait to read more of) that gives a very in depth discussion of the Atari VCS/2600, and how it’s design both allowed games to be far more advanced that originally planned, but could also be very limited (causing things like the infamous Pac-Mac port). The book dissects a couple of games (Yar’s Revenge, Pitfall, Pac-Mac, and a few more), showing how the games were changed or invented to work around (or take advantage of) limitations in the system’s architecture. I’ve never read such a technical discussion of how a platform and it’s games were tied for such old systems, which is supposed to be the point of the series. I really enjoyed this book, I just wish it was longer and covered more games.

The Design of Everyday Things

The last book I’m going to write a mini-review of here is The Design of Everyday Things. I’ve been meaning to read this for a few years since I first saw some discussions about it and it is a very worthwhile read. Some of the suggestions in the book about ways to improve computer interfaces are interesting, considering they were written in 1990 and many of the suggestions have been incorporated by now. The author does a very good job explaining what kind of things to look out for when designing interfaces to things (it’s not computer specific at all, it’s mostly about physical objects) in a way that will be easily usable by people without causing all sorts of undue confusion.

I’ve been kind of busy lately. I’ve discovered and started playing with Clojure, a Lisp implementation for Java. The best guide I’ve found so far is Clojure - Functional Programming for the JVM. I’ve made three small programs (really two), which you can learn about on my Clojure page.

The other thing I’ve been doing is catching up on some of the reading I’ve been meaning to do. I’ve gone through most of my backlog of magazines, and I’m working through my book list as well.

First I read a book I received for Christmas, The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey. It’s 25 years of articles from 2600. There is so much in this book, from history of lawsuits, how the phone network used to work, and how inept many companies can be about security. It was a great read.

Next I read a book I’ve been meaning to read for over a year. Forbes magazine kept mentioning The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes and I hadn’t known much about the Great Depression in depth. The book is a very well written history of The Great Depression, starting a few years early. Each chapter covers one year of history, going through pivotal events. The book is basically focused on President Roosevelt’s actions and decisions, and the stories of the men under him advising and running many of the programs. The book first covers how things start with President Coolidge and President Hoover’s actions in response, but Roosevelt gets quite a bit more time (since he presided over much more of the depression). It was very engrossing, especially so considering how much I’m avoiding current financial news because I’m so tired of hearing it. There are so many parallels in the book to other current and past events in the world of business and government it was very fascinating.

Now I’ve just started a book I’ve been meaning to read called On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore. That’s a period of computer history I wasn’t a part of, and I’m very interested in learning more. The book talks about revisionist history (how most discussions of computer history focus on IBM, Apple, and Microsoft, the companies that were later the winners) so this part of the story is something I’m not very familiar with. I’m mostly enjoying it, but the quotes from Chuck Peddle often contain unnecessary profanity, which is something I honestly wasn’t expecting. I find that a little distracting. I’m only two chapters or so into the book at the moment.

Gravitoids has been updated again, this time to version 0.6. Some big angle and gravity calculation bugs and weird corner cases were found and fixed.

I am continuing to work on Gravitoids. While working a little while ago I found one of the problems that’s been in the code. When the force of gravity on an object was set, it was actually being done as an addition. So instead of the correct way of doing things (pseudo code):

object.forceOfGravity = calculatedForceOfGravity

I was doing this:

object.forceOfGravity += calculatedForceOfGravity

This has made a noticeable difference, although I still suspect something odd is going on in a different part of the code. I’ve also added methods to be able to turn off the influence of either gravity or thrust during testing so I can see what’s going on easily in the middle of a simulation. All you have to do is press the keys to enable/disable the (E)ffect of gravity or (F)orce of thrust.