Preparing two more tables for May's Great Swamp Wargamers game night

Preparing two more tables tops for May's Great Swamp Wargamers game night. The table tops are 4'×3' hardboard glued and nailed on a framework made from 2"×1" pine boards. The edges are blue-taped to keep them clean until the terraforming is done. The terraforming is a simple process of

1. Glue down any surface features. In this case, I am using "splinters" to give the appearance of deadfall found in a bog or forest floor.
2. Paint the whole surface with an earth brown.
3. Paint the surface features as needed. In this case a "wet" brown.

The remaining surface features are added in reverse order. That is, if you want daisies then put down the yellow flowers first, then add the grass, and finally add the dirt. The goal is that the items added first will absorb most of the glue so that when you get to step 8 what is on top will fall off.

4. Using a spray bottle coat the entire surface with watered-down white glue -- about 1 part glue to 3 parts water. Use a spray bottle rather than a brush as it will apply a more even coating. A brush tends to leave ridges.
5. Using a sieve apply a pattern of grass. When using Woodland Scenics's fine turf add some coarse turf to the sieve to slow the casting of the fine turf. If you don't do this then you tend to get mounds of turf rather than an even application. 
6. Using a sieve apply to the remaining (non-grass) areas dirt. I use dirt from my yard that has been baked for an hour at 400° F to kill off the microbes. 
7. When dry, turn the tabletop upside down and tap to remove excess grass and dirt.
8. Finish with several applications of watered-down white glue or spray clear coat to fix the grass and dirt and make it resilient to playing on. I use a pressurized hand sprayer that is normally used for spraying insecticide. It can apply an even coat of the glue. The tabletop is noticeably wet after each spraying, but I do this outside on a warm day so that the glue drys before penetrating the hardboard.

Java 8 is not Java

Java 8 is not Java. Java 8 is a good tool. Java's shift towards being a functional language is unstoppable. Java, however, as a principled, strongly typed, object-oriented, imperative programing language is no more. I have heard the argument that as a developer I can stick with Java 7 syntax using -source 7, but this is not practical. Libraries will evolve to use use functional practices. Old bugs will only be fixed in these evolved libraries. As functional practices becomes ever more rooted in the libraries their use from Java 7's syntax will become ever more cumbersome and perhaps impossible. If you want to continue developing in Java then you and your team will have to evolve with it.

So these days I am thinking ever more about what language to move to. I think the perspective of my employer would be to remain with a language targeting the JVM. I haven't asked, but I know well enough its conservative approach to solutions. The software architect in me would like to pick a language that is more aligned with a fail fast approach to service runtime and its corollary of needing to start fast.

Lots of folks at this week's O'Reilly Software Architecture conference in NYC are favoring Go (commonly called "golang" to make the conversation clearer and searchable). That it compiles to a binary (and even a statically linked binary) for direct execution on the host is a significant boost to start fast. Starting slow would be your architect's fault: Too much in-process preparation and not enough just in time initialization or not enough externalization of functionality into a service. I will look at Go and its libraries. I do worry that is the new black, like Ruby was several years ago.

Its handheld not handsheld, people.

Finally, a sane design for a handheld device! The Kindle Oasis. Hopefully it rotates for lefties and for righties when writing notes on paper.

2D6 percentage dice

Sometime ago I found online a discussion about using D6 dice to simulate percentage dice. Unfortunately, I did not keep a link to the discussion. Anyway, I wanted to add my 2 cents and so here it is. You can use 2 D6 to compute a value over the 1 to 100 percentage range. The two dice, A and B, are treated as base 6 1st and 2nd place values. The range is 0 to 35, ie, ( A - 1 ) * 6 + ( B - 1 ), and so the percentage step is roughly 2.7%. This seems like enough granularity for most games using percentage dice. The lookup table is

	1	2	3	4	5	6
1	1	4	7	9	12	15
2	18	21	24	26	29	32
3	35	38	41	43	46	49
4	52	55	58	60	63	66
5	69	72	75	77	80	83
6	86	89	92	94	97	100

Source code.

Fuck you Wizards of the Coast! Let me play Magic!

I want to practice Magic the Gathering and so using one of Wizards of the Coast's applications seems like a good way to proceed. Now remember that Magic is a card game, let me spell that out C A R D G A M E, and so one would presume that the software is not too hard to write and it would have minimal requirements of the host machine. "No fucking way," says Wizards of the Coast (aka Hasbro) 'cause we are all about you buying more stuff. So, to be clear, ...

"No, you can't use that 2012 Windows 7 machine because you don't have enough graphics RAM."

"No, you can't use that 2014 MacBook Pro because we don't support Steam for OS X."

"No, you can't use that same 2014 MacBook Pro with a Windows virtual machine either you looser."

"No, you can't use that iPad Mini 1 because, well, we hate you."

Dear Wizards of the Coast, I want to play your game. I want to buy your cards. I will even buy your card sleeves. And buy them all again every 3 months. But I am not buying another computer to play a fucking card game!

The Internet is composed of unspoken inner thoughts

When will people figure out that the Internet is composed mostly of the unspoken inner thoughts of the ignorant, confused, bigoted, depressed, bored troublemakers? Evidence? See Boaty McBoatface and Tay.

Weekend Workbench 2016-03-19

This weekend's workbench was moving the workbench. Well, what I was using was not a workbench but the end of a large table that is also used for gaming, the kids homework, boardgames, and other activities that need to spread out. I had intended to move to a small table that I bought at Ikea a few months ago, but decided it would require that I add a back and sides and shelves and ... well it was beginning to become a bureau. I not did want to put that much time into that kind of project right now.

Next to my computer desk is a second computer desk. This had an old Mac Mini that the kids used to play on and do some homework with. Since they got Chromebooks, however, they really have not touched it. Its last use was for Minecraft, but even that obsession has past. So, I decided to repurpose the desk for modeling.

I packed up all the computer equipment, including two ancient x86 towers, added overhead lighting, and moved over the modeling stuff. I am glad I made this choice. The table is 6' x 2.5'ish so there is plenty of width and just enough depth. I have a couple of Ikea flat files for holding my unpainted figure, modeling bits, and infrequently used tools so I have a good amount of storage. I will likely build something akin to Linn/Darbin Orvar's small parts organizer caddy in the coming months.

So, back to painting those 6mm Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. Which, I have to admit, I might never finish. They are just not that much fun to paint. At this point I am thinking that for 6mm figures I will send them out to be painted. At 30¢ to 80¢ per figure a few hundred would be $100 to $200. Well worth the cost.

Staples and large format prints

A reminder that Staples prints large format (eg 36"×48"), black and white, engineering drawings at a very reasonable cost. They is currently having a sale on printing 24"×36" engineering drawings for $3.59. So, the next time you want a map of your dungeon crawl, space combat, 40K coloring poster, or you have the need to Feel the Bern (source) get it printed at Staples Copy & Print.

Confirming my market socialism tendencies

Posted to confirm my market socialism tendencies.

A mostly disorganized and violent tennis match audience

I am going to say it. I hate the giant spaulders, that bulbous shoulder armor, that so many 40K and Warmachine figures & factions have. I like my fantasy armies to have some grounding in practicality. How can the fighter use peripheral vision to see anything to his or her left and right? Will fantasy combat newsreel footage look like a mostly disorganized and violent tennis match audience? Heads wildly swinging from left to right and back again as they attempt to keep aware of the battlefield! Or perhaps spaulders are just the result of retinitis pigmentosa becoming rampant along with other degenerative, inheritable DNA mutations -- like shoulders wide enough to hold up the damned things. I should pity them.

Ok, back to your normal work.

(And yes, I am well aware that the Cryx Bane Thralls I bought have them. And yes, I feel the hypocrisy.)

Slack, "Jump to conversation", and a global shortcut

Slack's "Jump to conversation" Cmd-K shortcut is really useful to quickly contact one of our burgeoning staff or channels. Unfortunately, Cmd-K only works when Slack is the front-most application. Further, since Slack does not provide a "Jump to conversation" menu item you can't use the Keyboard System Preferences to make a global shortcut. So I wrote a small Service, SlackCommandK.workflow [1], that when run sends a Command-K to Slack. I then assigned it the Ctr-Cmd-K global shortcut. (I need to add Ctr as Cmd-K is used in other applications and their use of Cmd-K trumps the global use.)

To use the service download it, unzip it, launch it, give permission [2], install it, and then go to the Keyboard System Preferences to add the Ctr-Cmd-K shortcut.

[1] This is how tiny it is

tell application "Slack" to activate
tell application "System Events"
    keystroke "k" using command down
end tell

[2] Since this Service is not signed you will also need to override the default restriction on unsigned applications using the Security & Privacy System Preference. Go to its General tab and press Open Anyway button next to the text

"SlackCommandK.workflow" was blocked from opening because it is not from an identified developer."

I needed a quick and dirty worker pool within bash. Easy parallelization with Bash in Linux worked well. In short,

create-a-stream-of-bash-commands | xargs --max-procs=3 -I CMD bash -c CMD

A friend observed that dogs don't know disappointment. They always try again with joyful expectation.

Where did that data come from?

I have several reporting scripts that send me email overnight. When receiving such an email it is useful to know its origins. Using something like Rundesk that centralizes a catalog of scripts to be run on machines would be best, but I am not yet prepared to install and support this tool. And so, for now, I am just adding a line at the end of each message with its origin using the command

echo -e "\nSource $USER@$HOSTNAME:$(readlink -f $0)" 

which, for the hypothetical script at $HOME/bin/reports/tellme.sh on host42, outputs

Source ag@host42:/home/ag/bin/reports/tellme.sh

Weekend workbench 2016-02-27

I finished priming and painting the faces and arms of the 6mm Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. I like priming with black gesso as it is very matte and masks no detail, but I never seem put enough on to account for its extreme shrinkage during drying. So lots of spot touch ups were needed.

I bought a painted band of 12 Warmachine Cryx Bane Thralls at CaptainCon a few weeks back. The band consists of a leader, a banner holder, and 10 soldiers. This was an impulse purchase, something I don't normally do, and while I do intend to sell them I decided to find a use for them until then. So I am making a Saga warband and battleboard. The band was 2 thralls short to make 3 hearthguard units so bought 2 from GAV Games and painted them up this weekend. Now I need to think about the battleboard ... perhaps there is something on the Revenant battleboard that I can use.

Book of sci-fi artist Simon Stålenhag work

I have several of sci-fi artist Simon Stålenhag's prints. I just discovered that he has a new book, Tales from the Loop, of them out now.

A marked resemblance to this author

A marked resemblance to this author.

Weekend workbench 2016-02-20

Weekend workbench saw painting of a dozen 60mm × 20mm blue and red bases for use in learning To the Strongest while I prepare the actual figures and bases. A long time ago I bought some Baccus 6mm Vikings and Anglo-Saxons to play DBA and so am preparing them while I contemplate which 6mm ancients to buy. Which is really a non-decision as by the end of this year I am likely to have Rome and all her enemies.

Side note: While looking for map examples (and finding the kids book!) I also found these 3D models of ancient battles (DecoBoco Map Sengoku).

Unsettled note: Star Wars X-Wing is still in the box. Sigh.

Alcatraz by Jimmy Treehorn

One of the Wednesday Gamers visited Alcatraz recently and saw the giant model of the island and its buildings. The model was built by Jimmy Treehorn. Here is a collection of photographs of its construction. Very informative regards creating a large, strong landmass.

I really enjoy seeing how others build things. In software development, at least the kind I have mostly been a part of, very little of what is designed and implemented ever gets used. So, one has to have a mindset of the journey being the reward. Seeing other people's journeys is rewarding too.

Beautiful opposition & equivalence:

Taylor Mali's "Totally like whatever, you know"

Melissa Lozada-Oliva's "Like Totally Whatever"