atroche.org

May 25

My ugly Clojure solution

Along with reading the Joy of Clojure and building toy Pedestal apps, I’ve been working through the exercises on 4Clojure. Each problem builds on the skills gained in the previous one, and you get to see the best solutions after you’ve submitted yours.

Occasionally I get the most elegant solution right off the bat. Most of the time I’m humbled. Sometimes I’m downright embarrassed:

https://gist.github.com/5647270

This is one of the things I love about Clojure: if your code looks ugly, you’re probably looking at the problem wrong.

It’s problem 43, by the way. Get on it.

Apr 2

Practical Promises in JS

I enjoyed James Coglan’s article about promises in Javascript, even though his political statements re. the node platform’s design are silly.

Mikeal Rogers is definitely right on this one:

The platform must make decisions that encourage compatibility and discourage incompatibility in the ecosystem.

node wouldn’t be such an astounding success if they’d tried to force everyone to use promises.

But if you can ignore that part of it, the article makes a great read for anyone wondering how to fit promises into his or her workflow.

Mar 29

To learn Chinese faster I’ve been reading their books, listening to their music and following Kevin Rudd on Weibo.

I’ve also been watching movies. And up until today, when I watched Blue Kite (the entirety of which is on YouTube, see above), I was disappointed. Crouching Tiger is fun but vapid. Farewell My Concubine (which won at Cannes in 1993) is beautiful, interestingly shot but ultimately a plodding, overwrought melodrama.

Blue Kite is subtle, touching and entirely human. It’s about a family living through the cultural revolution, and it hits hard. It gave me the same feeling as when I first read Animal Farm in primary school – you know the part where you realise just how bad things are about to get for everyone except the pigs and the dogs?

If you’re going to watch a Chinese movie, watch this.

Mar 28

One of the shots from our trial run of GIF Booth at the Toff in Town. These guys kept coming back and doing static poses, even after we explained how GIFs work. The mind boggles.

It goes from the most boring GIF ever to a pretty decent one in about 50 milliseconds, thanks to Adam.

Mar 27

“Mobile” is already outdated

I just got back from a having a chat with some savvy advertising guys in South Melbourne. The creative director asked me about “the future of mobile”.

I responded enthusiastically but blandly: “It’s the future, that’s for sure. Just look at the numbers.” But there was a nagging thought in the back in my mind, one I couldn’t flesh out without disrupting the flow of our chat.

Luckily I had a half-hour bike ride north afterwards.

Jan 28

Learnings from an art installation

A couple of days ago my friends and I installed a shed at Rainbow Serpent, a festival of ten thousand ravers and hippies in the middle of the Australian bush. Inside was an old TV that spoke and formed words out of flying stars. We watched wirelessly via webcam and had conversations with trippers.

It was fucking awesome. Here’s what I took away.

Dec 29

A prototype speech synthesiser from Bell Labs in 1939. Found the video while researching my upcoming installation at Rainbow Serpent.

Sep 6

JavaScript Indentation

JavaScript doesn’t have a PEP8 equivalent. There’s no official rule about how code should be indented. Community styleguides (of which there are many) have no clear consensus. What’s a coder to do?

I wrote a script to clone the 100 most watched JS projects on GitHub¹ and determine the type of whitespace they use for indenting their .js files.

Dec 17

Crowdfunding Political Donations

TL;DR version: Bottom-up Kickstarter for political issues. Let citizens pledge to donate money to political parties if they make certain promises.

Sep 20

Rapid vetting of startup ideas: IsThisCrazy.com

I have lots of dumb ideas for tech ventures.¹ When one hits me, I often think that it’s brilliant and world-changing and guaranteed to let me buy the solid gold house and rocket car I’ve always wanted. But after the psilocybin wears off and my friends calm me down, I usually see cracks in my plan², and put it on the shelf in my brain marked ‘not quite’.

atroche.org

My name's Alistair Roche. Follow me on Twitter here.

My ugly Clojure solution

Practical Promises in JS

“Mobile” is already outdated

Learnings from an art installation

JavaScript Indentation

Crowdfunding Political Donations

Rapid vetting of startup ideas: IsThisCrazy.com