IRC On Your Phone

If you're like me, you miss the good old IRC days. If you don't know, IRC is a powerful and refreshingly utilitarian social network that has been around forever.

While MySpacers were blinging out their homepages with horrible gifs that tanked everyone's AOL dialup, IRC was quietly doing its thing.

When the 'get rich by blogging' thing happened, IRC was still there doing its thing.

While Facebookers politick and generally piss each other off, IRC is still alive doing its thing.

If you're sick of bloated apps and websites hosing your CPU and or battery, ditch those social feeds and jump on the text-only IRC networks. I'll talk more about IRC itself in the future. Here I just want to give you some tools to get you started IRC'ing on your phone. I've only used a couple different tools on my phone so I will start with those. Surely in the future I will be sharing more.

For the Faint of Heart
(In other words, the sane ones)

AndChat for Android is a great IRC client. I tried a couple others but AndChat seems to be the best, so far, at keeping and re-establishing IRC connections. The connection is the roughest part when using IRC on your phone. Its interface is clean and clutter free. You can set up multiple saved servers and auto join channels etc. I am kind of a basic IRC user so I haven't explored its other tools. I just do my work manually, in IRC.

For the Nerds
(me)

IRSSI. I love me some IRSSI. It is a console based IRC client that has been around forever. It's powerful and can be extended with scripts. Minimalists can run it without any tweaks etc and enjoy its scant interface, but I believe it can be tweaked to have more GUI elements. I'll have to research that.
It isn't going to be native to your phone so you're going to have to find another way to run it (This is - in part - why I say it's for nerds). I personally use GnuRoot Debian and install IRSSI via apt, just like I would on a desktop.

Enjoy checking out IRC. And watch for future IRC topics!

Why HTML, Why?

I am actually getting close to code freeze on the text-based game engine. For the initial release at least. So it is time to put together a website for it. It's been a long time since I've done web work. So I fired up VIM, grabbed a simple single page template, and started tweaking etc. I just need a nice looking site. I don't want to have to work on it forever.

I apologize in advance to my web developer friends, but HTML is so horrible. Especially given it was born in the days, where code file sizes actually mattered. I realize that there are other ways to lay out web UIs etc. I'm just talking about HTML itself.

HTML defines presentation / layout. It really should be like Markdown and JSON had a child. At the very least make it more concise. If you read my posts about Norman Notation, you know that I moved my game engine definitions away from XML to what essentially is a very slimmed down sort of JSON - it at least has a kind of similar feel. That was the best thing I could have ever done to the game engine! Defining games is so much faster and far more enjoyable now.

No more dumb angle brackets all over the place. Just the bare minimum of code.

*ahem*HTML

Hacker's Punishment T-Shirt

Another official rm -rf shirt!

Check out the Hacker's Punishment shirt.

Via Zazzle

Selecting Text

Is it just me or is selecting text on a phone a major headache? Surely there must be a better way. It seems like a good idea in theory. A start and stop node appear and you can drag them to highlight what you want.

But your fingers obscure the very nodes you are dragging. In many cases the selection is erratic and selects unwanted blocks of text etc. It is difficult to get text at the edge of the screen selected.

It isn't just me. And the issue isn't a new one. Look at this topic, and the interesting 'smear' idea. I kind of like it!

Via Android Forums

Oh great, here comes my mobile OS rant again:
If the future of personal commuting is tablets and phones etc, mobile operating systems have a lot of work to do. And the linux?? is hopefully as open as standard distros. I shouldn't have to hack into my own computer and root it just to use it - for something more significant than popping bubbles or crushing candy.

Revisiting SCHelp

As part of the website for my text-based game engine I want to have an online version of the api help that is built into the admin utility. I personally like treeview and search driven help systems and didn't want to have to write my own (More on that in a second) so I looked around for a decent open source web/html help generation tool. Nothing that was quite what I was looking for.

So last night I dusted off a js/html based help system I built years ago (Called SCHelp). The interface is decent and bug free - but the admin tool for it is a nightmare! And being purely js you have to write your topic, generate the data and copy it into the Data.js file then refresh the admin. And the tree editing is wonky and buggy and terrible.

So I created a Java command utility that uses a toc.txt file and other plain text files to build the Data.js file. So you just write your table of contents. It uses indenting to determine the tree structure, and it points to the topic file it will open. The toc spec becomes json in the Data.js file, and the topic files become the js array used by the help system to display them (Huge help systems are probably not gonna work - sorry MSDN).

Here is an example, where we have a home directory, a couple levels of child directories, then an Introduction node that would show that topic.

TOC:
Home
  Getting Started
    Introduction@@topics/general/intro.txt

Topic (in this case intro.txt):
This Is An Introduction

Welcome to our <strong>amazing</strong> help system!

Run the Java utility with the root directory (where the toc.txt is) and it's done. My js help system uses the Data.js as its data.

At Least Give Us A Choice

I'm a fan of minimalism. I like the console, I like little to no GUI. Just give me the basics. Keep it light and flexible. Give me the ability to customize my tools, or the apps I use every day. What I like is the polar opposite of the web. On the web everything is flashy and bloated with whatever trendy eyecandy is the 'it' thing. Not to mention all the ads and spam. Ugh some sites are utterly unusable due to the piles of junk heaped on top of their content.

And phone apps don't seem to be any better. It's pathetic that I can take a phone charged to 100% and in 15 minutes of Facebooking etc it's been drained to less than 80%. What a jerk thing to do. Why would you build something so bloated it tanks people's phones or other devices?

Man at least give us choices. Let us choose slimmed down versions. Let us customize your site or app. Instead of wasting time on the eyecandy you're going to abuse us with, think about performance and efficiency and our experience.

Man, just give us some options. Quit treating us like sheep and let us choose how we want to use your site or app. Or, I for one, will just stop using it.

Bunny Trail - Generative Adversarial Networks

In reading about AI generated photos I came across Generative Adversarial Networks. It is the idea of having a generative process that submits its results to a discriminative process that attempts to determine if it has received 'learning source' or generated output. Kind of an iterative test driven AI.

Let's start with an introduction:
Via Aylien
Via Cornell University

And of course:
Via Wikipedia

This led me to Adversarial Networks vs Adversarial Training:
Via Quora

Oh! And what's a Convolutional neural network?
Via Wikipedia

 These should keep me busy for a while!