Tau Station considered Dangerous: Game Review

I thought I’d try out Tau Station for a couple of days and get a quick blog post out of it. That was three months and 11 levels ago. It took 2 months to wind down my obsessive nature and if not for Tau, I could have pushed a couple of new module versions to CPAN by now. That’s rather the reason that I don’t play games in the first place, so I can’t give great comparisons.

To sum up, Tau Station is a web-based, second-person adventure with resource management in real-time: a Choose-your-own-Adventure book crossed with Freeciv. Oh, and it’s free. Well, freemium, but the least obtrusive freemium game I’ve ever seen.

Perl is dead ... when I'm dead!

Too fanboy/girl-ish, perhaps?

Yes, I'm well on-trend, by a couple of months. As you see, lockdown has made a hot mess of my blogging schedule. I count myself very fortunate that is the worst effect it's had on me, alongside the gaining of some mass.

WfH WARNING! Watch out for those caramel waffles! A single Stroopwaffle has enough calories to feed a hungry village for a day and are not a sustainable treatment for anxiety. Two kWh per packet, not a word of a lie.

Lucky Number Per7

I swear it was Perl 5 just a moment ago. I turned my back for all of 5 minutes ...

I don't need the new features, but I don't like boilerplate and I'm happy to accommodate those who seek progress. Harking back to lessons from the past, SysAdmins of a certain age may remember the venerable a2p program for converting awk scripts to perl and the horrendous (but working) code that it produced. We had one of those running in production less than 2 years ago until I finally decided to re-write it in Modern P…

Enter the Matrix ... with PDL

We interrupt this k-Means broadcast to bring you an important message about threading (the PDL kind, not the Perl kind - darn those overloaded terms!)

The Assignment

Take two vectors, x and y, and create a matrix C from a function of the values of each element pair, such that

  k-Means
k-Means-er

As we take another lap around the k-Means race trace, the Porsche 914-2 and Volvo 142E are still neck and neck. This time we'll try a straight-forward normalisation that linearly scales all values to the range [0,1] and see if they still end up in the same cluster.