Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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Archive for February 2009

Posts (9) :: Photos (0)

Posts

  • I had time to kill before going to see my brother’s art exhibit at megamall, so I went and watched Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. It was so bad. I could’ve been able to forgive the fact that they roughly 80% of the story shied away from Street Fighter canon, had the movie’s storyline actually been good. As it is, you can expect short, unsatisfying fight scenes, ridiculous background stories, disjointed plot/scenes (reminds me of Smallville and/or Heroes writing =/), terrible wigs and the ridiculous sight of Michael Clark Duncan getting beaned by a pineapple.

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    Posted by under post at #Movies #Review #Pop Culture
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  • You may have noticed the new color scheme and new “Theme Switcher” widget in the sidebar. I had done some CSS work during the past month in the office and it made me want to tweak the stylesheets on this site a bit. I figured I might as well make it easy to switch stylesheets, so I wrote a small Theme Switcher django app. (Well, it’s more of a stylesheet switcher I guess)

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  • Zed Shaw -- the ACL is Dead

    Excellent talk given at the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference (CUSEC) last year (2008). The presenter is Zed Shaw who’s a famous Ruby guy or something. The video is around 70 minutes long. The first part of the talk is mostly about a Document Management System he worked on, kinda interesting, but the second part is better where he talks about people who program cool things as a hobby and how to avoid becoming just another corporate code.

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    Posted by under post at #Software Development
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  • Star Ocean: Second Evolution

    Amazingly, despite my work schedule I still managed to finish a rather old-school RPG. I finished Star ocean: Second Evolution for the PSP today, clocking in 30 hours of playtime. I have to say I quite enjoy playing RPGs on handhelds. RPGs are usually rather long games so it’s nice being able to handle them in bite-sized chunks while commuting, et cetera. Star Ocean: The Second Story was probably one of the best Japanese RPGs to come out of the Playstation era, despite the lackluster translations of that time (hey, it was pre-year 2000, all translations were pretty bad then!

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    Posted by under post at #Gaming #games
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  • At the Conflux release event, we were given posters of the four planeswalkers fighting againt big, bad Nicol Bolas. It got a friend and I talking: could Nicol Bolas actually win against the four planeswalkers? The situation is: Player A controls Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker, at starting loyalty. Player B controls Ajani Vengeant, Tezzeret the Seeker, Elspeth, Knight-Errant and Sarkhan Vol, all at starting loyalty. Assuming each player has no other permanents and they cannot play any other spells.

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    Posted by under post at #mtg
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  • Conflux Release Event

    I decided to attend the Conflux release event last Saturday, Feb 7 at Neutral Grounds Galleria. As usual, I still had to go to work first so I didn’t make it in time for the first 32-man flight and had to wait for NG to restock on product for the second flight. Unfortunately, they were short on SoA boosters, so we would be playing sealed with 6 boosters of Conflux. Yes, six.

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    Posted by under post at #mtg
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  • Code Quality

    I was doing code reviews on an interface file-processing framework to be used in one of our projects. The code was workable and already being used by several programs, and I didn’t see any major functional flaws. But design-wise I felt that it could stand for some improvements/refactoring to be “better object-oriented code” or “easier to maintain”. The current design required a lot of inheritance – the usual way of doing things in older Java code at work.

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    Posted by under post at #Software Development
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  • Conflux Prerelease

    It’s my first Magic outing after more than a month of hibernation. Hopefully Conflux shakes up standard and makes Magic more fun again. Let’s go! Usually I have to register an awesome pool and then get passed a mediocre one. I knew it was different this time around when the guy two seats to my right announced he was able to form a good Naya deck from the Shards of Alara packs alone!

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    Posted by under post at #mtg
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