Of Fish and Dreams

I've given the novel I'm writing for my thesis the working title, Of Fish and Swimming Swords. I don't have names for the second or third novel yet, but ideas are beginning to come together. They'll complete the arc begun in the thesis.The last two nights, I've woken with farely vivid dreams. Dreams aren't useful in their raw state. If you actually transcribe a dream, it won't make much sense because dream logic isn't sufficiently realistic. But dreams can provide interesting settings and plot pointers. That's what these two dreams have done.

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World of Warcraft, Part 1

This series of posts writen for the Emerald Dream forums tries to walk through the design of World of Warcraft and Emerald Dream. We will explore how WoW is designed and where guilds fit into that design. We will also take a look at how guilds should be organized based on similarities to real world organizations. Finally, we will take a look at Emerald Dream and its structure with a focus on understanding why it is designed the way it is. Hopefully, by the end of this series, everyone will have a better understanding of how everything works and how they can best fit in. We want everyone to feel that they are part of a family.

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extensible State Machines

One of the problems in web application design is the disconnect between traditional programming languages and the statelessness of the web. There are ways to work around this, storing session information in hidden fields, setting cookies and tracking session information there or on the server. There are languages designed for the web such as PHP and ASP. Traditional languages are made to work with the web: Java and Perl being two big examples. But none of these capture the nature of the client/server model fundamental to web applications. All of them require some reinvention of the wheel each time an application is built.

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Computational Analysis and Visualization of Old English Text: Some Preliminary Analysis

Abstract: We explore string comparison, graph theory, and dimensional analysis and their implications in computational textual analysis. In the process, we develop some expectations that can be tested on a large text such as Beowulf, though we only lay out those expectations and do not test them due to the computational requirements for doing so. We draw from Old English vocabulary for our examples.

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Seeing what happens when you collide the humanities with the digital