February, 2012: Making panel applets for Gnome 2 and 3

In recent times, there’s been a lot of changes to the Gnome environment with the 3.x releases, including the introduction of the Gnome Shell and things like the GObject introspection stuff going on in the background. However, the Shell is a bit on the unstable side (even if you’ve got a good graphics card), and so I’ve been sticking with the “fallback” environment which still uses the standard panel layout.

Well, that’s what it looks like at first glance. Once you start digging around, it turns out that the panel you’re now seeing is superficially similar to the old one, but it’s built in a very different way under the hood, and that makes writing applets for it a somewhat different problem. Primary among the changes for the panel is the removal of Bonobo in favour of D-Bus, so we’re going to have to build the services needed for applets in a new way. (more…)

February, 2012: Transforming Ruby DSLs

Ruby excels at “embedded” DSLs – domain specific languages that are simultaneously plain Ruby and yet distinctly their own. RSpec springs to mind as an excellent example. At any rate, I have a DSL that recently underwent a fairly invasive change, and I wanted to automate moving model descriptions from the old format to the new.

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February, 2012: Being Shifty with Minecraft (part 1) — Haskell stubbing for fun and profit

Lost? Go back to the beginning.

A lightning quick recap haiku.

The last part sounds ominous and heroic. I like it.

Talking about Minecraft Regions

Go into the game, generate a world with a random seed, walk around for a bit, and then quit. Here’s what you might see gets produced in your Minecraft saved games directory (I called my world ‘testworld’).

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February, 2012: Being Shifty with Minecraft — Blue Sky Thinking

After spending a bit over three months at LShift, I am proud to leave LShift’s mark in the Minecraft Universe.

Frolicking over Minecraft’s cubic pastures and passing by interesting arrangements of hovering dirt blocks suspended in mid-air is all in a Minecrafter’s day’s work. But if you ever see light-blue wool blocks hanging around in the air, you can be sure that someone’s been . . . Shifty . . .

The ones you see in the picture above, in fact, have been put into the Minecraft world by a tool I wrote in Haskell. In this multi-part series, I want to share with you how I did it.

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