Taylor Swift

bool Manager::loadResources()
{
    if (m_resourcesLoaded)
        return true;

    m_resourcesLoaded = true;

    return true;
}

Terrifying shockwaves are coursing across the Famicom world as we speak. Why? Because allegations are spreading across Twitter that Takahashi-meijin’s skills at pressing the “shoot” button 16 times per second were actually pretty useless, since most Famicom games’ programming couldn’t register more than 15 button presses anyway.

Takahashi himself explains the issue in a 5/17 blog post reported upon by Inside Games.

“Japanese TVs use the NTSC encoding standard, which updates the screen image 60 times per second. As a result, games tend to operate in slices of 1/60th of a second at a time, making it easier to sync its operations with the game screen. For modern consoles like the PS3 or Xbox 360, I imagine buttons would be polled 60 times a second as well, but with the Famicom of the time, there was no meaning behind doing that — there weren’t games that demanded that kind of precision.

As a result, most games cut the number of polls per second in half — in other words, 30 per second. Each poll returns whether or not a button is pressed, so there was no point in pressing the button more than 15 times because it wouldn’t work anyway.”

Shocking! Does this mean that the events of Game King, the famed 1986 home-video release that was the closest to real-life Video Armageddon we ever got, are as tainted as modern baseball records? Not so — Takahashi went on to explain that this was the case for most FC games, but once the whole “16-shot” thing became a huge deal among Japanese kids in 1985 or so, Hudson took action to make sure it was more than just an ad slogan:

“With Star Soldier, Hiroshi Kudo (vice-president of Hudson at the time) said “Kids are going crazy for Takahashi’s quick-shot skills right now, so why don’t we have them try their hand at the record, too?”. So Mr. Nozawa, the programmer, upped the number of button polls so they could. As a result, for Star Soldier at least, you have the Lazaro enemy which requires you to shoot it 16 times in 1 second to fully defeat it.”

By the way, whether or not the Famicom could recognize it is irrelevant, because Takahashi definitely could do 16 shots in a second. In fact, people have played the Game King video in slow motion and have made an astounding discovery — in parts of the video, Takahashi is actually achieving 17 shots per second. (Nowadays, in his comfortable retirement from the game-master throne, he averages around 12 or so.)

Learning modern modular frameworks like Backbone.js and AngularJS involves mastering a large amount of terminology, even just to understand a Hello, World application. With that in mind, I wanted to take a break from higher-level libraries to answer the question: what is a module?

The Background Story

Client-side development has always been rife with techniques for patching missing behaviour in browsers. Even the humble <script> tag has been cajoled and beaten into submission to give us alternative ways to load scripts.

It all started with concatenation. Rather than loading many scripts on a page, they are instead joined together to form a single file, and perhaps minimised. One school of thought was that this is more efficient, because a long HTTP request will ultimately perform better than many smaller requests.

That makes a lot of sense when loading libraries – things that you want to be globally available. However, when writing your own code it somehow feels wrong to place objects and functions at the top level (the global scope).

If you’re working with jQuery, you might organise your own code like this:

$(function() {
  function MyConstructor() {
  }

  MyConstructor.prototype = {
    myMethod: function() {
    }
  };

  var instance = new MyConstructor();
});

That neatly tucks everything away while also only running the code when the DOM is ready. That’s great for a few weeks, until the file is bustling with dozens of objects and functions. That’s when it seems like this monolithic file would benefit from being split up into multiple files.

To avoid the pitfalls caused by large files, we can split them up, then load them with <script> tags. The scripts can be placed at the end of the document, causing them to be loaded after the majority of the document has been parsed.

At this point we’re back to the original problem: we’re loading perhaps dozens of <script> tags inefficiently. Also, scripts are unable to express dependencies between each other. If dependencies between scripts can be expressed, then they can be shared between projects and loaded on demand more intelligently.

Loading, Optimising, and Dependencies

The <script> tag itself has an async attribute. This helps indicate which scripts can be loaded asynchronously, potentially decreasing the time the browser blocks when loading resources. If we’re going to use an API to somehow express dependencies between scripts and load them quickly, then it should load scripts asynchronously when possible.

Five years ago this was surprisingly complicated, mainly due to legacy browsers. Then solutions like RequireJS appeared. Not only did RequireJS allow scripts to be loaded programmatically, but it also had an optimiser that could concatenate and minimise files. The lines between loading scripts, managing dependencies, and file optmisation are inherently blurred.

AMD

The problem with loading scripts is it’s asynchronous: there’s no way to say load('/script.js') and have code that uses script.js directly afterwards. The CommonJS Modules/AsynchronousDefinition, which became AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition), was designed to get around this. Rather than trying to create the illusion that scripts can be loaded synchronously, all scripts are wrapped in a function called define. This is a global function inserted by a suitable AMD implementation, like RequireJS.

The define function can be used to safely namespace code, express dependencies, and give the module a name (id) so it can be registered and loaded. Module names are “resolved” to script names using a well-defined format.

Although this means every module you write must be wrapped in a call to define, the authors of RequireJS realised it meant that build tools could easily interpret dependencies and generate optimised builds. So your development code can use RequireJS’s client-side library to load the necessary scripts, then your production version can preload all scripts in one go, without having to change your HTML templates (r.js is used to do this in practice).

CommonJS

Meanwhile, Node was becoming popular. Node’s module system is characterised by using the require statement to return a value that contains the module:

var User = require('models/user');
User.find(1);

Can you imagine if every Node module had to be wrapped in a call to define? It might seem like an acceptable trade-off in client-side code, but it would feel like too much boilerplate in server-side scripting when compared to languages like Python.

There have been many projects to make this work in browsers. Most use a build tool to load all of the modules referenced by require up front – they’re stored in memory so require can simply return them, creating the illusion that scripts are being loaded synchronously.

Whenever you see require and exports you’re looking at CommonJS Modules/1.1. You’ll see this referred to as “CommonJS”.

Now you’ve seen CommonJS modules, AMD, and where they came from, how are they being used by modern frameworks?

Modules in the Wild

Dojo uses AMD internally and for creating your own modules. It didn’t originally – it used to have its own module system. Dojo adopted AMD early on.

AngularJS uses its own module system that looks a lot like AMD, but with adaptations to support dependency injection.

RequireJS supports AMD, but it can load scripts and other resources without wrapping them in define. For example, a dependency between your own well-defined modules and a jQuery plugin that doesn’t use AMD can be defined by using suitable configuration options when setting up RequireJS.

There’s still a disparity between development and production builds. Even though RequireJS can be used to create serverless single page applications, most people still use a lightweight development server that serves raw JavaScript files, before deploying concatenated and minimised production builds.

The need for script loading and building, and tailoring for various environments (typically development, test, and production) has resulted in a new class of projects. Yeoman is a good example of this: it uses Grunt for managing builds and running a development server, Bower for defining the source of dependencies so they can be fetched, and then RequireJS for loading and managing dependencies in the browser. Yeoman generates skeleton projects that set up development and build environments so you can focus on writing code.

Hopefully now you know all about client-side modules, so the next time you hear RequireJS, AMD, or CommonJS, you know what people are talking about!

Of course, I’m referring to the homepage for the Aiseikai Hospital in Saitama prefecture, a small facility mostly specializing in ob-gyn work. (Clicking on that link may or may not trigger security blocks on your PC. Viewer beware. Totally worth it, though.)

Featuring MIDI music, a wealth of nonsensical imagery alongside  their office hours and photo tours, and a vivid, psychedelic design straight out of 1998, Aiseikai’s page has been notorious among Japanese net users for years now, in part because it’s  remained doggedly impervious to change for over 16 years. However, sad news trekked across the net today: The hospital chief’s son reported on Twitter that his dad intends to close the site within the next two months, triggering a firestorm of nostalgia on 2ch and other forums.

Aiseikai’s site has often been cited by Western Web designers as a classic example of Japan’s zeal for garish, cluttered, eye-destroying websites, despite being the culture that gave us finely-crafted paintings, Zen gardens, and an art style that emphasizes saying the most with the least number of strokes. It’s true that a lot of Japan’s web-dom is still stuck in 2005, sticking with Flash and tables and designs optimized for gara-kei feature phones. (Uniqlo is an oft-cited exception.)

Time, however, apparently waits for no ghost website, even if an entire nation’s worth of nerds adore it for nostalgia’s sake. I fear that he’ll just replace it with a boring old WordPress setup and it’ll look just like every other listless, yawn-inducing website. It’s the passing of an era.

with patrick kyle

Medical problems can cause your gas to smell horrendous or be produced in large volumes. So, assuming it works, the Subtle Butt “disposable gas neutralizer” might be great if you have this problem.

I put it here on this page for the customer who gave it one star because “I am looking for a product that will intensify the smell.” 

Loose #3 cover + pages. Has some drawing jams with Jonny Negron, Leslie Stein, Lala Albert, Ines Estrada and Keith Jones

Take a satanic, psychedelic color trip with one of the gnarliest bands Boston has ever birthed, GUERILLA TOSS. You will find “Drip Decay” on their upcoming split record Kicked Back In The Crypt with fellow New England NO-wavers Sediment Club, available via Feeding Tube and Sophomore Lounge this summer. Here is the video version of this mind-fuck punk jammer, made by their very own psycho drum-trigger happy ambadassador Peter Negroponte. THUMBS UP!

The post FRESH VID: GUERILLA TOSS – DRIP DECAY appeared first on The Boston Hassle.

Two of free noise’s busiest and brightest are caught at their best on one of the more exciting collaborations to surface this year. Bill Orcutt and Chris Corsano saw fit to release the fruits of their tour of the Northeast last year, and we couldn’t be happier. Orcutt sounds closer to his Harry Pussy days here than we saw on his last few records, with an electric take on the batshit momentum found on his excellent acoustic comeback albums. Corsano adapts ecstatically to Orcutt’s style, letting his finely – Cut chops enter into a freeform freakout that leaves no room for discursive disappointment. The Raw & the Cooked has been released on fancy gatefold vinyl from Orcutt’s Palilalia Records; sample below, and buy from Mimaroglu.

The post FRESH STREAM: Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt – The Raw and the Cooked appeared first on The Boston Hassle.

The photo was taken on Sunset Beach, San Francisco after mimosas from cheap champagne and oj in plastic cups on Valentines day. Real great day!

Photo: Robin Clason (San Francisco)

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Mayumi is a shoe designer we met in Harajuku. Her neon look instantly caught our eye. She has a blog on Tumblr where she posts her own illustrations.

The dress she is wearing is from H&M, paired with Dazzlin peep toe platforms and an oversized clutch from Nick Needles. She accessorized with a Kenzo cap and a pair of mirror lens Sly sunglasses, as well as a cross necklace and two minimal rings.

Mayumi’s favorite fashion designers are Kenzo and Givenchy.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Checking in with Allston’s DON GERO led to the discovery of this new track, something from a new album being worked on is the word on the street. DON GERO’s game is one of the hybridization of churning industrial/tribal rhythms and the dense textures of historic shoegaze or dream pop. Vocals are part of the stew, as are prepared electronics swirling around and around begging you to follow the funnel down. I haven’t dug too deeply into DON GERO’s music before, but I have to start paying more attention as this is some real post-noise rock kind of thing that I could listen to A LOT of. Looking forward to that full length. This is Zach from ARVID NOE’s solo thing, you should know. You have to check out their new record. We’ll be discussing it here soon enough.

The post FRESH STREAM: DON GERO appeared first on The Boston Hassle.

LOOK AT THE ROOF OVER YOUR HEAD. LOOK AT THE FUNCTIONAL NUTRITION DISPENSER. LOOK AT THE PULSING RED SKY OF THE PYRODOME THAT PROTECTS OUR CITY. YOU HAVE NOW LOOKED AT THREE THINGS THAT WERE PROVIDED BY ZARTOX. THIS LIST WILL CONTAIN FIVE THINGS, IN ADDITION TO THE THREE PREVIOUSLY NAMED. THEY WERE A BONUS PRESENTED TO YOU BY ZARTOX AS THANKS FOR YOUR SERVICE AND FEALTY. COLLECTIVELY THEY ARE A FOURTH THING THAT WILL BE EXCLUDED BY THE LIST OF FIVE THAT FOLLOWS.

5. THE REBELS HAVE BEEN BEHEADED
EVERYBODY AGREES THAT THE REBELS WERE THE WORST. I HEAR ONE TIME A REBEL PUSHED A GRANDMA INTO THE STREET WHERE SHE GOT HIT BY A HOVERCAR AND THEN GRABBED HER GRANDDAUGHTER OUT OF THE BABY HOVERCARRIAGE AND ATE HER. ANYWAY NOBODY HAS TO WORRY ABOUT THAT OR SIMILAR INCIDENTS BECAUSE THERE ARE NO MORE REBELS, THEY HAVE ALL BEEN BEHEADED BY ZARTOX. VISIT THE MUSEUM OF THE LIBERATION TO VIEW THE HALL OF HEADS WHERE YOU CAN SEE THE HEADS. ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY.

4. WE DO NOT HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT GLAUBATCH ATTACKS
FOR CENTURIES OUR CITY WAS PLAGUED BY THE VICIOUS GLAUBATCH, WHO WOULD SWOOP DOWN FROM THEIR PERCHES WITH THEIR LEATHERY WINGS AND ABDUCT OUR CHILDREN TO USE IN THEIR HORRIFIC RITUALS. EVENTUALLY THEY GOT LASER RIFLES SOMEHOW AND THINGS GOT EVEN WORSE. FORTUNATELY, OUR GREAT LEADER ZARTOX BUILT THE PYRODOME THROUGH WHICH NEITHER ENERGY NOR MATTER CAN PIERCE. NOW THE SIGHT OF THE GLAUBATCH INCINERATING AS THEY HIT THE PYRODOME IS A POPULAR PASTIME. NOTE: IF YOU ENGAGE IN THE PASTIME OF GLAUBATCH WATCHING YOU ARE WASTING VALUABLE WORK TIME ON LEISURE ACTIVITY. REPORT IMMEDIATELY FOR RE-EDUCATION.

3. UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE
I MEAN, COME ON, HOW DID WE NOT HAVE THIS BEFORE???

2. NO MORE DRAINS ON NATURAL RESOURCES
ZARTOX IS COMMITTED TO PRESERVATION OF OUR NATURAL RESOURCES, WHICH IS WHY HE HAS ELIMINATED THE UNDESIRABLES WHO USE MORE THAN THEIR FAIR SHARE. FOR EXAMPLE, THE PEOPLE OF DISTRICT SIX WERE KNOWN FOR THEIR WIDE NOSTRILS, WHICH TOOK IN 0.013% MORE OXYGEN THAN A NORMAL, RESPONSIBLE CITIZEN. DISTRICT SIX HAS BEEN ELIMINATED SO NOW WE CAN ALL BREATHE EASY. BUT NOT TOO EASY. REMEMBER: IF YOU SEE THAT THE METER IN YOUR HOME IS REGISTERING AN ELEVATED OXYGEN INTAKE, IT IS YOUR DUTY TO REPORT IMMEDIATELY FOR RE-EDUCATION.

1. WE ARE STILL ALIVE
IF YOU ARE READING THIS RIGHT NOW, CONGRATULATIONS! YOU ARE DOING BETTER THAN MOST. YOU COULD BE SLOWLY DECOMPOSING IN A SALT PIT, A FROZEN CORPSE ON THE MOONS OF RYLON IV, CHAINED TO A WALL AND BLEEDING OUT AT THE HANDS OF OUR HATED ENEMIES THE PORTACHEE…LOOK TO YOUR LEFT. NOW LOOK TO YOUR RIGHT. IF YOU SAW NO-ONE THERE IT IS BECAUSE YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE LEFT ALIVE FROM YOUR GENETIC UNIT. WHO BUT ZARTOX COULD PROTECT SOMEONE AS WEAK AND STUPID AS YOU IN THIS DANGEROUS WORLD? WHO WOULD EVEN WANT TO? ZARTOX WOULD. ZARTOX CARES ABOUT YOUR WELL-BEING AND PROMISES TO KEEP YOU ALIVE AS LONG AS YOU MEET OR EXCEED THE BASELINE PRODUCTION STANDARDS FOR YOUR AGE AND WEIGHT.

———————————————

THESE ARE BUT A FEW OF THE MANY REASONS WHY IT IS A GOOD THING ZARTOX TOOK OVER FROM OUR CORRUPT AND FOOLISH ELECTED OFFICIALS. I WOULD GIVE YOU MORE REASONS BUT IF YOU HAVE TAKEN THE TIME TO READ THIS ENTIRE LIST THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE INSTEAD SPENT THAT TIME WORKING. YOU ARE TO REPORT FOR RE-EDUCATION IMMEDIATELY. IF YOU SKIPPED TO THE END AND ARE READING THIS WITHOUT READING THE LIST, YOU ARE TO PROCEED TO THE BEGINNING OF THE LIST, CONTINUE READING FROM THERE, AND THEN FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS IN THE PREVIOUS SENTENCE. ALL HAIL ZARTOX!!!!

There’s a numbers station called UVB-76, also known in English as “The Buzzer” from the buzzy noise it makes.

In Russian, it’s called “жужжалка” which means “The Hummer”. I like this because it is onomatopoetic and then onomatopoetic again. I don’t know what the word is for that. But “жужжалка” definitely looks like how this radio station sounds.

Jean-Pierre Raynaud’s la Maison de La Celle-Saint-Cloud, closed in 1988, via Enclave/Frieze:

“A catalogue of the paradigms of modernity stands before the viewer’s eyes: the grid and apparently endless Cartesian space; the perspective that is its correlate; repetition; mass-production and the collapse of the original; and alienation through loss of the individual.”

Photo: Taylor Bradberry

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Highly knowledgable sweethearts Mark and Angela of WEIRDO RECORDS takes time out of their busy lives to share some of their favorite new releases with us common folks. Mark selects a new Anonymous Dog tape by true outsider musician John Shea. Angela picks Harafinso (Mississippi/Little Axe Recs), a compilation of northern Nigerian Bollywood inspired autotune pop. Get wise to what these cats are peddling.

The post WEIRDO RECORDS RECORD ROUNDUP #11 appeared first on The Boston Hassle.