AltSci Blog

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.

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 Spanish

nlp1.py creates this graph of the relationships:

Feb 16, 2016

learn_kanji-0.2.tar.xz [sig]

For many years I have been learning Japanese as a hobby. I have spent years watching subtitled anime to get my comprehension higher. Anime's often slow and deliberate speech patterns make it fairly easy to grab words. But the pace at which anime goes if you aren't careful you can forget everything you hear. Of course, you'll be more prepared for conversing and remembering if you've heard something 1000 times rather than once, but that doesn't translate into instant comprehension.

If you ever accidentally delete /usr/bin/emerge (happened to me when I ran emerge -aC dev-lang/python-exec), don't panic. That file is just a wrapper for /usr/lib/python-exec/python2.7/emerge. So you can fix your system by temporarily using /usr/lib/python-exec/python2.7/emerge.

Yes, it's that simple. This is also a useful way to execute pylint and pyflakes on python3 files while still having your system's default python be python2. Simply run /usr/lib/python-exec/python3.3/pyflakes (substituting whichever version of python you use instead of 3.3) and you're set. Yes, it was actually designed to work that way.

In case you want more to read, read this. In case you're more interested in playing than reading, click here.