Allen Day’s Weblog

Went there on Saturday. I had no idea that it is so close (~1/4 mile) to CalTech. Ling took a bunch of photos, which I have posted to Flickr.

I was so psyched when Marc told me this was coming out on Xbox Live! Arcade. I’m a HUGE fan of Mr. Driller 2 coin-op version, and I was hoping this would be an Xbox, HD version of that.

They let me down. The XBLA Mr. Driller is based on Mr. Driller 1, which is not nearly as good because the width of the playing field is only 9 blocks, while the width of the field on Mr. Driller 2 coin-op is 15 blocks. The wider field makes the game more complex, a lot harder, and therefore a lot more fun and playable.

Oh, and did I mention the XBLA version online multiplay sucks donkey dick?

I have tried every version of Mr. Driller I can get my hands on, and none of them except the coin-op are any good. I might just have to start making space in my garage unless someone gets the MAME ROM working.

I just uploaded the getopt package to CRAN. This will make it easy to use command line options with Rscript #! “shebang” scripts. It’s pretty much like what is available in every other programming language (getopt.h in C, Getopt::Long in Perl), but oddly was not yet available for R. So I wrote it!

Example usage, to print a sampling of a random normal variable, you might make a script named ./rnorm that contains:

#!/usr/bin/Rscript
library('getopt');
opt = getopt(c(
'verbose', 'v', 2, "integer",
'help'   , 'h', 0, "logical",
'count'  , 'c', 1, "integer",
'mean'   , 'm', 1, "double",
'sd'     , 's', 1, "double"
));
if ( !is.null(opt$help) ) {
self = commandArgs()[1];
cat(paste("Usage: ",self," [-[gh]] [-[-mean|m] <mean>] [-[-sd|s] <sd>] [-[-count|c] <count>]\n",sep=""));
q(status=1);
}
if ( is.null(opt$mean    ) ) { opt$mean    = 0     }
if ( is.null(opt$sd      ) ) { opt$sd      = 1     }
if ( is.null(opt$count   ) ) { opt$count   = 10    }
if ( is.null(opt$verbose ) ) { opt$verbose = FALSE }
if ( opt$verbose ) { write("writing...",stderr()); }
cat(paste(rnorm(opt$count,mean=opt$mean,sd=opt$sd),collapse="\n"));
cat("\n");
q(status=0);

and can be called, e.g., like:

blink:/tmp allenday$ ./rnorm  -s 10 -c 10 --mean=100 --verbose=2
writing...
80.2953014070924
109.36715703278
104.856588724070
97.7983406914681
102.163515767212
90.7613417541473
97.8344921793064
108.918662445162
100.725143995218
105.285435884127
blink:/tmp allenday$

Yay! It’s a trivial example, but this can get pretty powerful once you can start passing in data files, reading from pipes, etc. I have some more example code for doing that, but it’s not getopt related so I need to dig it up.

Ok, I seriously need to get a syntax highlighter installed on this blog. Anyone have a recommendation? Isn’t there an enscript plugin for wordpress?

Update: I installed wp-syntax. There is no R support, but the C highlighter seems to work okay… wonder what it will do if I start doing the funky <- left arrow assign syntax…

Moving things over here from over there. The blog is not well-established so I doubt anyone will care, and this URL structure lets us bring Jordan onto the primary domain.

If I don’t get around to migrating the only useful post on the old blog, check it out, I managed to trick the iPhone to play internet radio. Yes, that means live broadcasts. iPhone can stream live video too, but I’m not ready to show it off just yet. I suspect this technique has some legs — Apple wouldn’t want to let their cash cow loose anytime soon, would they?

Managed to connect with Russe11 on Xbox Live! yesterday. Finally, another person in my friend list who plays Tetris Splash and is ranked higher than a bazillion.

Ling tells me her cousins in Taiwan like to play too, so maybe I can make some new friends and practice my Mandarin before we head over there.

Crazy, okay. So I was just searching for “Tetris Splash” to get an image to go with the post. Whose blog shows up in position #4 on Google? Russe11 again! Are there really no other NPR-listening, Tetris Splash-playing, mobile-web-developing night owls out there?

Check out a good review of matching/puzzle games here