TOGoS's New Writeups

Super Mario Brothers: The Lost Levels (thing)

2002-07-26T15:20:30Z

This was a Nintendo game very similar to Super Mario Brothers. It had the same graphics, the same basic layout (4 levels per world, 8 worlds in the game (sorta), etc.) But it was much harder. It was supposed to be the sequel to Super Mario Brothers, but was only released as Super Mario Brothers 2 in Japan. In America, we got a mutated version of Doki Doki Panic, since they supposedly thought that (according to other writeups) The Lost Levels were too hard for Americans. They can get it as part of Super Mario All-Stars, though.

Anyway, this game differs from the original SMB in the following ways:

There are poison mushrooms. They come out of question mark blocks just like regular mushrooms, but they're purple and they hurt you.
You can play either as Mario or Luigi, and Luigi can jump higher, but is otherwise less responsive.
Some levels include wind.

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CamelCase (idea)

2002-05-13T02:27:08Z

Here's a cute little pseudo-standard that I use:

Variable names, or names of structs, classes, etc. have names like KleenexBox (for the struct) and kleenexBox (for the variable), since those things are like a single word. Functions, however, are more like a sentence, so separate parts are separated with underscores. That way, you can have a function name like kleenexBox_empty(KleenexBox *), it makes it clear that this is a function which empties a thing of type KleenexBox, as opposed to a function that puts a kleenex in a box and empties it, or a variable which represents an object: KleenexBoxEmpty.

Also note that programmers tend to start function and variable with lowercase letters, names of types of things (structs and classes) with uppercase letters, and constants with all uppercase letters. The Ruby language actually enforces this practice. While I was hacking through the Wolfenstein 3D source code, however, I…

Aristotelian Physics (idea)

2002-04-07T05:37:51Z

In addition to what was said above, here are the main points of Aristotelian physics:

The realm of the Earth is corrupt, while the realm of the heavens is perfect. These realms follow completely different sets of rules. Rules and logic that appliy down here do not apply up there.
The heavens are perfect and made of quintessence. Quintessential motion is uniform and circular (this was actually proposed by Plato some time earlier). Nothing ever changes in the heavens besides the movement of the stars and planets (even the stars revolve around the Earth once every 24 hours, as opposed to standing still while the Earth rotates). The heavens are made of solid spheres of quintessence or crystal without any empty space between them because nature abhors a vacuum, and besides, why would the creator of the universe have put all that empty space there?⁽¹⁾
There are 4 earthly elements: earth,

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Ptolemaic system (idea)

2002-04-07T02:23:38Z

The Ptolemaic system was a system to explain the motions of the heavens, espoused by Claudius Ptolemaeus in Almagest sometime around the second century, C.E., and accepted for over a thousand years by the vast majority of people to be the correct cosmological model.

Unlike earlier systems (such as 'the stars move because that is the will of the gods', or the model of concentric spheres), the Ptolemaic model explained all phenomena in the sky, while holding to Plato's dictum which states that all motions in the heavens can be explained with uniform, circular motion, and obeying Aristotelian physics.

According to the Ptolemaic model, Earth is at the center of the universe. All heavenly bodies are attached to crystal spheres which rotate around the Earth. The moon is on the innermost sphere, and touches the realm of the Earth, thereby contaminating it, and causing the light and dark spots and the…

Dream Log: March 25, 2002 (idea)

2002-03-25T16:08:37Z

Let's see...

In the dream I had this morning, I was in this place where everything was upside-down. People said it increased efficiency somehow. I don't remember much about this part, though. I looked at a lot of pretty bridges and at one point, was watching someone do dental surgury. They had a weird way to fix teeth. And for some reason, everyone's teeth were just little slivers that could be pulled out easily.

But in the second part (I remember this more clearly), I was with some friends from school. We were in this place that looked like a camp ground. There were big pine trees all around, and some muddy gravel roads going through.

I went running around like an idiot from my friends to a road going south (I didn't have shoes on, so the gravel was hurting my feet). All the people around called me "the ugly sprinter" or something like that.

Then I was out west of this area, in a big lake. There were some bridges going…

Perl 6 (thing)

2002-01-05T08:38:22Z

"Perl 5 was my rewrite of Perl. I want Perl 6 to be the community's rewrite of Perl and of the community."
- Larry Wall, State of the Onion speech, TPC4

A complete rewrite of Perl by Larry and the gang. The internals of Perl 5 were full of kludges, it was very hard to extend, and people wanted new features, so it was decided that a complete rewrite would be in order. Perl 6 separates the parsing from the compilation and runtime, by using the Parrot virtual machine for program execution. Perl 6 will not actually execute code, but instead compile it down to Parrot bytecode and pass it on to Parrot. Parrot is to be a bytecode interpreter for weakly-typed scripting languages in general, so you will be able to share libraries between Perl 6 and other languages that use Parrot. (yes, the name 'Parrot' was originally the name for a joke language, but this is not the same thing, although this is more or less named after the joke language).

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