Author: srittau
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German Card Translations
German card translations are a sad affair. They are riddled with clumsy translations, especially in the card names. It’s not such a great idea to translate english card names 1:1. The rules texts are translated sanely, i.e. using special German templates, although some of the template choices are a bit strange and more verbose than…
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Planar Chaos Prerelease
Today I head-judged the prerelease of Planar Chaos, the latest Magic: The Gathering expansion. The prerelease at the FUNtainment Game Center here in Berlin was attended by 71 players, a fairly disappointing number after the strong Time Spiral prerelease. Some people blame The Burning Crusade, the latest World of Warcraft expansion, out this week. Personally I also think the traditionally weak month of January plays…
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New Python unittest module?
Collin Winter blogs about an updated unittest module he wrote. His update fixes the internal structure, and therefore the expandability, of the module, but also cleans up the external API. There are still a few minor improvements I would like to see, but nevertheless I hope that his updated version will be included in Python’s standard library eventually.
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Java File API
I don’t like Java’s File API. It’s main problem is that is mixes several responsibilities into one class. One responsibility is handling of “abstract” file and path names, i.e. operating system independent file names. The other responsibilities are all file system related: Querying file meta information (access rights, access times, file type), creating files, and listing…
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Disqualifications & Coverage
I am glad to see that there is an extensive article about the double disqualification of Amiel Tenenbaum and his opponent in Wizards’s coverage of Worlds 2006. I just had the discussion with another judge on #mtgjudge, whether this should be covered and how extensive. I think covering DQs has several advantages: It generates interest in the game. People…
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Gaia shut down by Google
Clint: Did you actually read the letter sent by Google? I actually consider this to be a perfect example of “don’t be evil.” There are no threats in that letter, Michael Jones, the writer, is just explaining why Gaia hurts Google and in what way he think the Gaia project is violating Google’s Terms of Service.…
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Java: Iterators are not Iterable
This is something I stumbled across multiple times now in Java: Iterators are not Iterable. Java 1.5 introduced the foreach statement, which allows easy iteration over collections like this: for (MyClass item: myCollection) { doStuffWithItem(item); } For this to work class MyClass must implement the Iterable interface. This interface defines just one method that returns an Iterator: Iterator<T> iterator(); This works fine in many cases.…
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JavaScript Includes Revisited
I’ve given in in the JavaScript and Modules matter. I’m doing now what all the cool kids are doing: Using XMLHttpRequest synchronously to load external JavaScript files. This has the advantage that it works synchronously, a very important thing for includes. Therefore I don’t need callback and moduleLoadedhackery anymore. Also I have sensible error checking, i.e. I can notice…