May 5, 2017
On Thursday of this week (May 4, 2017) I released a mail client. It's pretty humble, but I've been using it for a decade and so it was worth it to me to iron out a handful of bugs and make it good enough for other people to use. Currently it won't be much use to you if you run Windows, Mac OSX, don't run your own mail server, or don't understand what fetchmail is*. But those things are fixable and I intend to fix them in the months to come. That means this blog post doesn't have to cater to end users, so I won't attempt to. This blog post will be about how I came to write a mail client and why it makes sense in 2017.
* The wording of that sentence was pretty bad so I'll reverse it. BikeIM-0.5 is usable to you if you run Postfix, if you run Dovecot, if you run OpenSMTPD, if you run fetchmail, if you use GnuPG, if you use Mutt, if you run Linux or *BSD, if you use Git, and understand how to report bugs.
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Mar 21, 2017
This blog is a continuation of this blog post which is a pretty good mix of technical and creative projects that this blog was originally written for. If you look at some of the way-way-back posts you'll see some of the things I've thought about and tried to work on from this perspective.
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Dec 7, 2014
Unproprietary 0.4: Nov 25, 2015
Unproprietary 0.5: Sept 11, 2016
unproprietary-0.5 [sig]
unproprietary-0.4 [sig]
unproprietary-0.3 [sig]
unproprietary-0.2.1 [sig]
Git repository: git clone https://www.altsci.com/repo/unproprietary.git
Lume is a simple point and click Flash game available from Steam and Humble Bundle. I got it as part of of the Humble Weekly Sale: Amanita & Friends bundle and played it because I was interested in playing a short puzzle game one night. Since it's only 30 MB, it's pretty much guaranteed that it's a short game. It took an hour or so to complete and had some excellent puzzles. One of the main features of the game is the graphics which were made by a good artist with good style. Today, I was able to reverse engineer the game in a short amount of time using some custom tools I wrote, so I'm going to release them and ask for pull requests. Reverse engineering file formats is not a difficult process, but it is time consuming and it is more difficult to automate, so tools that do the work for us are valuable. That is why I'm releasing this simple set of tools I wrote.
If you'd like to follow along, you can buy Lume on Humble Store for $5.99. It supports Linux, Mac, and Windows. Lume has a Metacritic score of 69 and a high score of 83 by GameShark. A sequel was released recently called Lumino City (5 days ago) and it has gotten good reviews. It looks brilliant but it isn't released for Linux yet.
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Sept 1, 2016
Yesterday I published a small piece of software to Small Wide World's git to very little fanfare. It was a generalization of a bad piece of software I wrote the day before. It uses NLTK to perform a simple task: parse a simple sentence which follows the form "subject verb object" with optional additional information starting with "because". Examples of this grammar include:
GnuPG is software
IRC is a protocol
software implements a protocol
Javantea is human
AI3 is software
Javantea wrote AI3
Javantea writes software
Javantea writes English
Javantea reads German
Javantea reads Japanese
Javantea reads Portuguese
Javantea reads Spanishnlp1.py creates this graph of the relationships:
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