Inklings: a tumblelog

Interesting approach to teaching how compilers work.

One of my favour its of music for the C64. My favourite bits start at 1:30 and 3:50, not to mention the intro starting the whole tune off brilliantly.

This is an excerpt from a comment I posted on EuroGamer. It summarises my main problems with the changes Bioware made between ME1 and ME2. I worry they’ll do more of the same.

The real problem with the mechanics wasn’t that they were inconsequential, but that they were half-implemented.

Take inventory, for example. The problem wasn’t the number of possible items you could carry but that:

1. they weren’t sorted by level and name, and

2. those of the same type but different classes weren’t stacked, with

3. stacking order being from highest to lowest when changing character loadouts to aid in equipping with the best kit and from lowest to highest in stores so you could ditch low-level crap you neither needed nor wanted.

Those three simple change would’ve improved inventory management no end.

Instead, Bioware just threw everything into an unsorted pile for the player to have to sift through every bloody time.

Thus with inventory, the problem was management, or rather the game’s lack of basic management automation. In ME1, the ability to finetune loadouts was essential and added to the game. ME2 didn’t need to scrap it, just fix it similarly to the way I outlined above.

I think the problem that a lot of a lot of RGP gamers have with the series’ progression is actually primarily one of frustration with Bioware being lazy about ditching flawed mechanics rather than putting in the thought to fix them.

Why-oh-why did I not learn about this sooner!

OCaml Batteries included (or simply “Batteries”) is a community-driven effort to standardize on an consistent, documented, and comprehensive development platform for the OCaml programming language.

Looks interesting…

Internationalized Domain Name toolkit 2 (idnkit-2) provides useful APIs (libraries) for application developers to make softwares IDNA2008-compliant, and also provides tools for system administrators to process IDNs appropriately according to IDNA2008 specification. The idnkit-2 is a toolkit revised by JPRS from the idnkit-1.0 developed by JPNIC, and it is released as an open source free software modified to comply with IDNA2008.

I need to investigate this, as it may let me replace the work I’ve done myself on IDNA support with something with wider support.