Tag Archives: code

Open Thread: Music to $action by

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A friend of mine released some songs with the following note:

Originally conceived for release on 3″ CD, this four-track EP was inspired by the many difficulties encountered over the years by women who are writers and writers who are women. It encompasses glitchy droning ambience, mellow downtempo beats, aggressive drum’n'bass, and distorted rhythmic dance.

I’ve found I really like track two while I’m actually writing:

Ess EP by We v2 Collective

I listen to very different music when I write English (or French) than when I write code, though. For writing human language, it’s all about the classical with some jazz or wordless ambient electronica thrown in to mix it up. Or really, anything wordless can do in a pinch, but I find it hard to write and listen at the same time. And it’s much worse if I’m listening to a different language from the one I’m writing (an issue given that I radio-flip a lot and we’ve got a decent number of non-English stations here). But for coding, it’s completely different: there, it’s all about the uptempo (fast) stuff, and words are fine. As a teenager I once scandalized my parents and my friends by coding away happily to ABBA for hours, and I can listen to stuff while coding that I find to monotonous if my brain’s not engaged elsewhere.

So… what’s your music of choice for your geeky (and non-geeky) activities. Do you have any pattern?

And, as you likely guessed, this is an open thread, so feel free to talk about anything else that’s on your mind and needs sharing!

MikeeUSA’s code, now available on geekfeminism.org

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Trigger warning: some linked pages contain hate speech and threats of violence against women.

While I completely support SourceForge’s decision to remove MikeeUSA‘s code for violation of their Terms of Service, I can’t help kinda feeling sorry for the guy, because apparently he didn’t have any other copies.

Let’s face it, he’s not a very experienced developer, and he can’t be expected to understand advanced topics like, oh, keeping backups, especially since he spends so much time on his activism, which no doubt distracts him from real coding.

Good thing us feminists are here to help him out. It just so happens that we had a copy of some of the code that was deleted, so we’ve forked it under the terms of the GPL, and made it available at:

http://code.geekfeminism.org/mikeeusa/

It’s a Mercurial repository, and you can either browse it over the web, or clone it using your favourite Mercurial client. I know distributed version control can be a bit daunting for newbie developers, but perhaps Mikee can find a friend to help him out with it.

But we didn’t just post his code as-is. We’ve improved it! As a Perl developer and veteran CPAN contributor, I was able to make a start at cleaning up the worst bits of his slots game, though I must admit that my work was slowed down by the urge to send almost every line of it to TheDailyWTF.

$htmlsave =~ s/./__________THISISAPERIOD__________/g;
$htmlsave =~ s/W//g;
$htmlsave =~ s/__________THISISAPERIOD__________/./g;

And we also improved his Crossfire maps, especially one set in Russia which we switched to Ponyland, where you help the Pony Liberation Army free Ponyland from the trolls. Everyone loves ponies, right?

We think you’ll especially enjoy the new textures we’ve added:

Ponies - a vast improvement!

They might not improve playability, but from what we’ve heard, there wasn’t much playability to start with.

As Free Software developers, we honour the Four Software Freedoms, and gladly recognise Mikee’s right to run these programs, study and learn from them, redistribute copies, and even modify them — provided, of course, that attribution is given to the geekfeminism.org developers.

ETA: Comments on this post are now closed — yes, early — as we seem to have reached the point of nothing new being added to the discussion.