AlexNisnevich.blog

Lots of stuff happening in my life right now, so my reading list fell by the wayside this year.

It took me longer than usual to write my reviews this time (for a variety of reasons), but here it is: everything I read in 2024!

About a year ago, I “released”* Wordbots, the tactical card game with user-created cards that I’d been working on since 2016. (* I say “released” in quotes because this isn’t really the sort of game that will ever become feature-complete, especially not as

★★★★½ The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro An aging butler taking a road trip in 1950s England seems like a thin premise for a novel, and yet Ishiguro makes it into a profoundly moving work of literature.

(Thanks to Annie and Asali for all your help on this project!)

See https://nbviewer.org/github/AlexNisnevich/lingua-o-dialetto/blob/main/lingua-o-dialetto.ipynb

This was an unusually hectic year, so this set of reviews will be briefer than usual.

My dance-rock band Extra!

★★★★½ A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony 1581-1990 – James Forsyth Ah, just the book I needed to feed my obsession with Siberia and The Far East.

[Originally posted on Facebook] Every January, I post short reviews of the books I read the previous year.

Last weekend I had the unenviable task of moving a legacy ASP.NET application to a new server, and as part of the move I had to migrate the application’s database from SQL Server to MySQL, the only SQL flavor supported by the new server.

[Originally posted on Facebook] Another year, another reading list!

See https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/AlexNisnevich/blog/blob/master/_notebooks/music-graphs.ipynb

[Originally posted on Facebook] Here’s what I read last year: ★★★★½ Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel (“female” edition) – Milorad Pavič (tr.

(Or, the week I finally went off the hipster deep end) About six months ago, I read Tobias Toft’s excellent article “An intro to Pen Plotters”.

After 2½ years of recording, re-recording, production, mixing, and mastering, my swamp metal band’s album is finally out!

[Originally posted on Facebook] Per tradition, here are all the books I read last year.

[Originally posted on Facebook] [Listen on Spotify (full albums) – 3 hr 45 min] [Listen on Spotify (just the highlights) – 1 hr 22 min] Though largely unknown in the West, Leningrad in the 1980s was a center for Soviet underground rock music.

[Originally posted on Facebook] Continuing the tradition, here’s what I read last year: ★★★★★ The Wind-Up-Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami (tr.

See https://alexnisnevich.github.io/one-weird-electoral-trick/

See https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/AlexNisnevich/blog/blob/master/_notebooks/exploring-music-genres.ipynb

Joseph Turian and I gave a talk at Strata 2016 entitled “Secrets of natural language UIs: Translating English into computer actions”.

Update (6/2/16): Reddit user u/julesjacobs has managed to find an elegant recurrence relation for this problem!

[Originally posted on Facebook] Continuing the tradition, here are the book I read in 2015: ★★★★★ Tenth of December - George Saunders [thanks Danielle] House of Leaves - Mark Z.

-><- This postmortem’s been a long time coming, in part because I don’t know if I can call my team’s submission to this last Ludum Dare, Asshole Transit Bureaucrat 2015, a game, per se.

See http://alexnisnevich.github.io/bernie-donations/

[Originally posted on Facebook] I got back into reading fiction in 2014.

I’ve been playing around with Rust a lot the past couple weeks.

It’s been about six months since Greg and I released Untrusted into the world, so I figure now’s as good a time as any to write something about how Untrusted came to be.

Last weekend I had to restart my melody.py live demo, as the EC2 instance it was on was outdated.

[Original post on ludumdare.com] True to my promise in my last postmortem, I worked in a team again for LD#30.

I presented “A Snack in Every Port” at Appetite Obscure #8: Seacret, an interactive potluck.

[Original post on ludumdare.com] For this Ludum Dare, I worked with a group of friends to create Asteroid Tycoon.

[Original post on ludumdare.com] Well, I've never done one of these before, so here goes nothing.

Motivation For a research project that I’m working on, I made a survey that feeds data into a Rails application.

For my Computability final paper, I wrote about the Church-Rosser Theorem and the consistency of λ-calculus, as well as introducing the general theory of λ-calculus and showing how arithmetic can be performed within it.

I’ve been successfully using Steam on my 64-bit Linux Mint Debian Edition desktop for the past month, and I thought I should make a small post about how I got it working and how well various games that I’ve tried work.

Check out Sentinel for Linux, Windows, and OS X on GitHub I recently got my roommate a Dream Cheeky Thunder USB missile launcher.

The other day I had to reinstall Linux Mint Debian Edition.

Adventures in Reinventing the Wheel A few days ago, one of my friends posted this status on Facebook, and it got me thinking: how could I test a hypothesis like this?

(Note: I originally posted this on Facebook last summer, in my wild, PHP-loving days.

As a relative Ruby newbie, one of the things I love about it is how easy and elegant it is to modify existing classes.

Today I was faced with the challenge of having to refresh a Chrome browser window on a networked Ubuntu machine via SSH.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a blog, but I thought that it’d be nice to have a place to post projects, ideas, tutorials, and whatever else is on my mind, programming-related or otherwise.