Archive for August, 2008
Giant Bomb
Posted by Boris in Video Games on August 29th, 2008
Giant Bomb is one of these websites on which you get used to spend time and time as days pass. Although this project is quite recent, it’s active and improved regularly. The main goal of Giant Bomb is to create a wide database about video games, using a kind of wiki software, a bit more specific to video games than usual ones. Now, let speak about the main thing: the systsem.
The system
So, the system is simple: anyone can create an account, and then log in. Once you are logged, you can start to edit pages. Actually, you can start to submit changes, because all changes are moderated, unless you have 1000 points. And that’s the point. You get points by editing articles, creating new pages, and adding images. But you don’t get those points easily, and most of users don’t have many. Indeed, you must follow guidelines to for your submissions to be accepted. So, a lot of pages are now created, and a lot still need to be done/completed. Even if there is nothing more to gain by having more points than to be able to edit (and then, after 5000 points, to create) pages without moderation, the concept of a specific wiki-site about video games is interesting; and it’s possible that one day, giant bomb may become the video-game-wikipedia.
Note: The site is kinda recent, so, it’s still buggy sometimes, and moderation is not always perfect.
LaTeX
Posted by Boris in Software and Development on August 5th, 2008
… Well, no. That’s not exactly what you are thinking of. Except if you are a nerd. I won’t talk about S&M stuff here. Not in this blog, and even less right now.
is an awesome programming language, designed for document creation. Actually, that’s not a “real” programming language, I mean, not like C or Python. A
document is composed by two distinct parts, each one merged with the other. On the first hand, you have text. Text you want to type, the real content of the document. On the second hand, there are “structural” parts, which allows to describe the document and its content, to specify font, font-size, etc. But these structural parts are not just about “global” structure, it also exists for local usage, like when you want to Italicize some given text. So, you are able to perfectly control what you do with text. But because of this feature, it’s not natively WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). And if I have to choose between perfect control and WYSIWYG, my choice is already done: I keep the control. Nothing’s more annoying than a document which “do what it wants”. People who have experienced problems with (especially old versions of) Microsoft Word would see what I mean.
Anyway, the syntax of this language is very well done, it allows complex evolutions: a consistent amount of other document-conception-oriented languages are derived from
. But speaking of
is a language abuse, because the real stuff behind it is
.
is a language more “primitive” than
+
(mostly called
). In fact,
is more like a layer upon
. The compiler is using
specification, and
just allows a more intuitive approach of it.
Finally, I would recommend
/
to those who want to have a reusable, precise, way to create and maintain clean documents. But if you just want to redact some crappy documents and if you don’t care about paying software a huge price (or if you are a student
), just buy Word 2007, it’s great, as long as you don’t compare it with
.