Most haunting of all was the game’s final stumper, in a place called the Garden of Cyrus, before a huge gate embellished with a giant cross. Though the game’s ruins and cities were different with each play, progress past this certain point was always impossible. Beyond it was a chapel. This was the final location, and within it lay the secret of the protagonist’s identity.

Nomen Ludi by Rob Beschizza

Exploding Ants
Exploding Ants is a skateboarding news links site.   Originally I envisioned 2 main goals for the site:  a continuously human-updated set of skate-related news links, and a wiki containing comprehensive data on skaters, sponsors, videos, magazines, etc.   News links would tie in to the wiki.   Every wiki page would have an rss feed and user-submittable comments so you could watch for news  and talk with others about your favorite skaters, sponsors, blogs, etc.   After I completed the wiki portion of the app, I started seeding it with data, which is an exhausting process.   My time was increasingly spent tracking down birthdays, ex-sponsors, video and magazine editors and filmers instead of writing code.  The skateboarding universe has a wealth of information, and finding it leisurely is a joy.  Finding all of it at once for data entry is tedious.   I took a break from it and haven’t gotten back to it.

Since it was easy enough, I added comments (using Disqus) and twitter integration (follow Exploding Ants here).  Despite my parental abandonment, the site is still alive and “useful”:  I try to post at least one skate news link a day.   It was a great exercise, fun to build, and keeps me current with skateboarding news.  There’s so much I’d like to do with Exploding Ants that I can’t let it go–I just need to find the time to fit it in.

EZDo
I’m always trying to find a way to manage To Do lists, and despite many solutions out there, I’ve never found anything that would last longer than a couple of weeks.   I dislike using pointy-clicky solutions to what is mostly a text problem, but I want my to do lists to be available wherever I go.   The system I used up until EZDo was to ssh into a personal account and manually add items to a text file formatted a certain way.   EZDo was written with text entry in mind.

The interface for EZDo displayed a text field that allowed you to enter commands like “add” “view x” “edit x” “complete x” (where “x” was a sequential number displayed next to the post), etc.   If you entered the “new” command, a form would be displayed that allowed you to enter a title, body, priority, and tag the entry, then save.   If you entered a “view” command, you would be presented with the markdown->html version of the entry which allowed you to tab to links and hit enter to access them.   Everything worked off keyboard entry from the “command line”–no mouse required.

But, like every other system, I stopped using it after a few weeks.   Maybe it’s a mental thing where I want the power of a full text editor whenever, you know, editing text.  Maybe it’s the fact that the text files on the server are in a format that can be easily read and edited with simple tools on any computer.   Whatever the reason, it’s back to ssh and text files.

After being productive with these sites, I’m ready to go back into learn mode.

Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.

-Hugh Macleod

The first time I came across the name “_why” was while I was looking for blogs that focused on the Ruby Programming language back when I decied to learn Ruby.  His blog Red Handed was recommended by many Rubyists.  I found it odd and frustrating–_why rarely ever wrote in a linear fashion.  Most of his posts were filled with what seemed like nonsense.   Some people really dug his style and would leave nonsensical comments to his posts.  It was almost like _why and his dedicated readers were speaking in a language you didn’t understand even though they were using English.   I still found his content  interesting enough to read all the posts in his blog archives.  That’s when I found Hoodwink’d.

There were some odd hints of Hoodwink’d scattered across _why’s blog.   You had to dig a little to figure out what it was.  He purposefully made it difficult to “get in” by blocking admission through puzzles and weird hints.  As I remember it, Hoodwink’d was comprised of a server piece hosted by _why, and a client piece written in Greasemonkey that you had to install in Firefox.  Once the script was installed, you had to create an account on the server,  and then you were granted access.   When you would visit a web page, the Greasemonkey script would submit the page you were visiting to the server,  fetch comments that other registered users had made about that page, then display them to you on the very same page.   So say you would visit a blog post made by someone, you could see comments people were leaving about that post without the original author even knowing they were there.  It was subversive, wicked, and creative all at the same time.  I was blown away.

Some time after Hoodwink’d (I think), _why created Try Ruby.   Try Ruby was a web page that had an interactive window that behaved like a command-line Ruby interpreter.  You typed into it, the text was transmitted to a sandboxed Ruby interpreter, the interpreter would evaluate your input, then the results would be displayed back on the window.  This in itself was pretty cool, but _why took it a step further:  he made an accompanying interactive tutorial that taught you the basics of Ruby.  Underneath the “interpreter” window was some explanatory text that would encourage you to type some input in.  When you entered your text, not only would the interpreter display the evaluated results, but the tutorial window would change to the next lesson/topic.  Words of encouragement and humorous comments were sprinkled in with the tutorial text.   It was so well done and creative that I was again blown away.

After Try Ruby, _why wrote an article called “The Little Coder’s Predicament”.   It lamented the fact that although programming power has increased over the years, we haven’t made programming easier for kids.  He talked about how kids growing up around his time turned on a Commodore 64 and had a basic interpreter staring them in the face, daring them to make it do something.  With your average Windows installation, there is little to help those who know nothing about programming yet want to create stuff.   As an answer to this, he created Hackety Hack.

Hackety Hack was a downloadable Ruby environment that allowed you to create programs and share them with other Hackety Hack users.  It had some of the same style as Try Ruby–interactive tutorials that walked you through creating gui applications that could talk to the web.   One of the tutorials walked you through creating a chat application that, once created, would connect with other users and allow you to communicate with them.  Again, it was so well done that my mind was blown.

_why had several other projects that he hosted.  Some were completely creative like the above.   Some were libraries used by enterprise-class users.  He was even working on a new language he was designing called Potion.

Then a couple of days ago he just vanished.  All his projects were taken offline without warning.  All his sites are gone.  All the mailing lists are gone.  The code repositories are gone.  The blogs with all their history are gone.   His twitter account was deleted.  People were shocked and a little worried.

Wherever he is, I hope he is okay and continues to create.

• Guy Starts Dance Party
• JK Wedding Dance Entrance
• Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale

I want to make things that put me in the position of innocence, that recreate the feeling of innocence in you.

- Brian Eno