Published on Monday, 17th December 2007 .
I like Strategy games. I get quite addicted quite easily and so I tend to keep wellll away form them. I recently got the itch again, like an ex-smoker and started to look into playing the old ones on my mac via VMWare.
The first thing I found was Master of Orion II, which I played for a night and realised that its actually quite a mundane game, but never the less you find yourself there for hours hitting the “Next turn” button to see if anything you have planned to build has finished, and how much cash you have. Its all virtual and the moment you step away your over it but once your in, your hooked.
I was thinking that this type of addiction would be very handy if you could apply it to more productive tasks like learning. So I’m trying to figure out what the key things are that make strategy games addictive.
Continue reading ‘Strategy learning game’
Semantics in regard to HTML markup is a murky water. This is because web pages are usually not an essay style document, which HTML was designed to markup, and contain information that is not actually relevant to what the page is about. Examples would be: menus, shopping cart information, summaries of forum activity, and the other half of HTML design: user/human interfaces. To say or even think that HTML can encapsulate all the “meanings” that human language structures can come up with (which are actually infinite), not to mention the non-language structures found on web systems representing a computer system interface, is naive. It is also an assumption that has never been backed up by any standards body in argument and thats because its simply wrong. The Microformat standard and now POSH process seem to be unwittingly dealing with the problem without understanding it. This is actually an applied philosophy problem!
Continue reading ‘Defining the Semantic of Markup’
Published on Wednesday, 24th January 2007 .
Its a hard problem and not many people are tacking it in the web development world. Heres some research into presenting content in different languages via HTML.
To frame the problem here is a good break down of the three technical issues:
There are three considerations for presenting HTML in non-English languages. First, that the document is delivered in the desired natural language (such as English, French, etc.) and dialect (US, British, etc.). Second, that the document is presented in the correct character set. This is a requirement for most Eastern languages (Russian, Japanese, etc.). Third, that the document is presented in the correct directionality. This is a consideration for languages such as Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese that are customarily written right-to-left or top-to-bottom.
Continue reading ‘Going multi-lingual’