Kevin Turner @keturn@toot.cat

infotainment high-five apophenia markup language support system

You still out there, Fediverse? Here, have a cat photo. #mastocats

In reviewing first draft #GSoC proposals, I noticed many folks setting *very* high expectations for themselves about how much they can get done as an intern in eighteen hours a week.

I wrote up some notes on things to consider when making a proposal about how long a feature will take: https://forum.terasology.org/threads/proposals-and-feature-task-breakdown.2345/

I'm a mentor with Terasology this year. https://terasology.org/2021/03/13/terasaturday-11.html

As an online multiplayer modular game environment, we're open to proposals from a wide range of disciplines. #GSoC

We're currently midway through the application period of Google Summer of Code, an internship program for open source projects. https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/

Applications are due by the 13th. Procrastinators, I know what you're thinking, and yes you _can_ bang out a proposal moments before the deadline. The catch is that becoming familiar enough with a project to know _what_ to propose will take a while.

Start now so you can get feedback on your proposal ideas and drafts before the final is due!

I'll be mentoring this round and would be especially interested in seeing proposals for internationalization, automated testing, or other ways to help the software run smoothly for players and maintainers both.

Unfortunately I did _not_ remember to try to get the project registered with Outreachy this time. Remind us to do that next round!

#GSoC

Terasology, the extensible voxel game, is participating in Google Summer of Code for the sixth year in a row! https://terasology.org/2021/03/13/terasaturday-11.html

That means that if you are a current college or university student, you could get a summer internship — with a stipend paid by Google — to help build this open source project.

Development of a multiplayer game provides the opportunity to participate in an unusually wide variety of roles, from devops to UI, technical writing to 3-D modelling.

Do I know any stamp collectors? I've found a White Ace album with blocks from 1948 – 1960.

and what is a person to do with all this coaxial cable???

The home network is shaping up.

I was pleased to discover this house is already wired with usable cat 5e. But it just ended here in a jumble, unterminated.

I installed a patch panel and figured out where _most_ of the cables go, but three mystery cables remain.

IT IS A 22-YEAR-OLD-REMAKE OF A 5-YEAR-OLD REMAKE OF A 27-YEAR-OLD SHOW, WHICH WAS BASED ON A 15-YEAR-OLD SHOW BASED ON A 12-YEAR-OLD SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL.

WE HAVE A PANDEMIC THAT MAKES LIVE THEATER INACCESSIBLE.

LET THE KIDS STREAM THEIR DAMN PERFORMANCE, YOU PUSWEASELS, OR THEY ARE GOING TO GIVE UP ON THEATER ENTIRELY AND GO PLAY _AMONG US _ON TWITCH INSTEAD.

A lengthy dream I had last night featured a number of you folks I'm friendly with but only really see during conference-times.

It was a big entertainment/social venue (in non-pandemic conditions), and there was a lot of "wait, does that interaction with those people mean I should catch up to them later and join their party here?"

So maybe I miss seeing you or something and even in my dreams I am socially awkward.

Checking in: Still here. My city remains mostly-not-on-fire for the time being. Anxiety is spiking; this is an unprecedented fire season on top of an abundance of other sources of distress in 2020. But I'm still breathing.

I saw a form that had a "select one" prompt where one of the options was "Gender Fluid."

It brought this image to mind.

boringcactus assembled a fine sequence of words describing the arc of the free and open source software movements over the past few decades: https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html

Kittens Game exploits hacks in my brain that make for a really unhealthful dynamic, so I have to cut myself off after only a day of becoming re-acquainted with it and its recent update.

But not before making sure that stylesheet I wrote in 2017 works again. https://gitlab.com/keturn/condensed-kittens-usercss

#UserCSS

yep nothin' like a little midnight-thirty loudspeaker message from the police to let the whole block know we have to move away from the precinct or they might tear gas us.

dudes, I am sitting in my apartment, and the precinct is a mile away. but I guess now you get to say we've been warned?

(the police vehicle seems to have moved on; I do not believe I am under imminent threat)

There's a loudspeaker outside somewhere. reciting the full “It was a dark and stormy night” sentence.

It's quiet for a bit before it repeats.

Why??? Is it a warning? A lure? A really weird hold message that someone put on speakerphone while they wait?

Nobody wants to burn that building down.

…

Yes, that was a simplification. This situation has drawn a lot of attention and I am sure there are some people attracted to the chaos who like to see things burn. It is true that during a protest three days after George Floyd's death, some people smashed their way in to the Multnomah County Justice Center and burned some stuff.¹

But you may note that is not the building inside this fence you're seeing all this footage of, and I don't think anyone has forced their way inside the county's building to light fires during the months of continuous protester presence since then.

Thousands of people have gathered to demand justice for George Floyd's death, for the abolition of the abuse of power that led to his death and the death and destruction of so many others, and for the resignation of this city's Mayor who oversees the police bureau.

They are not there to destroy entire city blocks in the center of their own town.

The building with the fence in the national news is the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse, across the street from the county's building. It's sixteen stories tall, placing it among the tallest buildings in Portland at the time of its design. It was built as a U.S. Courthouse from the foundation up with all the security features that requires.

Its lower levels are limestone and granite decorated with quotes like "The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave."²

It's not going to burn down with a book of matches and some oily rags.

If someone does have some kind of fire-breathing Godzilla that could take down a 16 story building, I doubt it would be troubled by a chain-link fence. And Portland City Hall (a block away, on the other side of the plaza) would likely go with it, along with half of downtown. Including the office of the city commissioner who oversees the Bureau of Transportation.

Complying with Commissioner Eudaly's cease-and-desist doesn't even require taking down the fence! It only requires moving it out of the public right-of-way.

Footnotes:

1. The night of May 29th: https://www.wweek.com/news/2020/05/30/video-portland-protesters-smash-windows-and-set-fires-in-multnomah-county-justice-center/
2. Street view of the Hatfield Courthouse from 2019 (without fences) https://goo.gl/maps/ACnCuQ5A7YwFtpGz9

blockygameplatform Teresology broke a 14-month dry spell with a new release recently, inspiring me to give it another spin. So I find myself writing some Java recently.

I came up with some unit-test code I'd love to have suggestions on.

The app uses JavaFX for the UI, so there are some observable beans, and I'm using ListenableFutures (from Guava) because that's the concurrency abstraction I'm most familiar with, and javafx also has an event system. Some other variants on `Future` jumbled in there too.

This code is at a point where I think it works and is reasonably readable: https://github.com/keturn/TerasologyLauncher/blob/6454f652ce2da1b7e98054c1ba9306d9f5697080/src/test/java/org/terasology/launcher/game/TestRunGameTask.java#L210

but the mishmash of different concurrency abstractions makes me want to know from more fluent java-testers if there's a more idiomatic way to write it.

#gamedev #javafx #unittests #java #junit5