http://robert.zubek.net/blog Sat, 28 Jun 2008 02:34:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Some time ago I found a fascinating paper on the history of Erlang, written by one of its main creators: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Grundutb/Kurser/ppxt/HT2007/general/languages/armstrong-erlang_history.pdf It showed up on programming.reddit for about a day, and then disappeared right back into the deep waters - which is too bad, because the paper is illuminating. Erlang is a language ... http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2008/06/21/commentary-on-a-history-of-erlang/ (Edit: Welcome reddit readers. The following is a howto on setting up an embedded Jetty server in Clojure, and writing a minimal servlet that serves up dynamic content.) Last week I discovered a very nice language named Clojure. It's based on Lisp, but hosted on the Java platform, and running inside ... http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2008/04/26/clojure-web-server/ Game logic often gets split into "time-sensitive" and "blocking" parts. When dealing with I/O-bound components, we often want to let them run separately from the main game loop. This way they won't block the whole game as they're waiting for their data. The typical example is reading from disk, or accessing a ... http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2008/04/20/dealing-with-blocking-operations/ Here are my steps for setting up SBCL (Steel Bank Common Lisp) and Slime (Emacs Lisp mode) to work under Windows Vista. It's mostly straightforward, except for dealing with spaces in path names. It turns out that slime.el uses the (split-string) function to pull apart the Lisp command line, which won't work ... http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2008/04/09/sbcl-emacs-windows-vista/ Here's what I've been working on all this time: Whirled is now in public beta! Below is a live view into my room - stop by and say hello! :) http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2008/03/25/hey-young-whirled/ Casual games are fun to play and fun to make, but can a developer make a living from them? Funding the casual business was one of the prominent questions at this year's GDC. I want back and forth between the Casual Games and Worlds in Motion summits, and managed to gather a few interesting ... http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2008/03/02/gdc-funding-models-for-casual-and-web-based-games/ Viral Coefficient and Growth The viral coefficient is a measure of how many new users are brought in by each existing user. It's a quick and easy way to measure growth: if the coefficient is 1.0, the site grows linearly, and if it's less than that, it will slow down. And if the coefficent ... http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2008/01/30/viral-coefficient-calculation/ Here are the results of a little benchmark I ran a while back, trying to figure out how expensive are the different primitive operations in Flash 9 (ie. bytecode compiled ActionScript 3). Quick note on methodology: I ran these primitive operations in a tight loop of a few million iterations, to get average ... http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2008/01/12/actionscript-3-bytecode-performance/ AIIDE starts tomorrow at Stanford. We have a very impressive array of speakers this year, and an intriguing collection of papers. Hope to see you there! http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2007/06/05/aiide/ Ayman invited me to give a talk at Y!RB this week, about our web-based game whirled world. The talk was a lot of fun, though a little technical - I did go into fairly painful details on both our software and community development efforts. Afterwards, I got to hang out with ... http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2007/04/08/talk-at-yahoo-research-berkeley/