... now with 35% more arrogance!

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

You Cannot Has Random Modules

After doing a random module name generator yesterday, I was thinking about doing another one without the need for pre-defined lists, using Google Sets. But guess what? Google Sets was shut down two weeks ago. There's no plans to bring it back. Most of Google's experimental features are going bye-bye.

I'm currently messing around with a spreadsheet to automate the process. Sure wish I still had a web host with Perl, so I could whip up a script for everyone; but that's a frivolous expense.

7 comments:

  1. An HTML page with Javascript code could be put together. It might not be as fast processing as Perl (nothing is...) but users could then have it locally on their computer and just point their browser to it...

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  2. Unfortunately, only webspace I have available anymore is Google Pages, and they don't allow Javascript any more. I know considerably less about Javascript, anyways.

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  3. Hey,

    If you want to save yourself some work, don't worry about this: I wanted to see how your generator's results looked, so I actually did write up a web application that can handle tables of this sort.

    Basically, it lets you write your tables into a text box on the page (right now the default is the table set you put in your blogpost) and then click a generate button to produce results from it.

    I'd like to polish it up a bit to make it handier to use (for instance, I'd like people to be able to log in and save their own charts, so they don't have to save their custom charts in files on their hard drive and paste them into the box when they want to use them). I may also make a more 'friendly' UI that lets people create their charts using a webform instead of by editing a chunk of text.

    I have webspace on which I will host it and will also offer the source for people who want to host it themselves (for instance, it could be useful to run it in a webserver on your laptop for use at a game).

    Polishing it up like this for public consumption might take me a couple of days but I'll be sure to comment with a link to the result once it's done.

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  4. So far, I've written mine in JavaScript/AJAX, so it should be able to run straight from the file in any webbrowser without actually even needing a file behind it.

    The polished version, due to needing to be able to keep track of login information and saved tables, will require PHP and a MySQL database.

    I'll probably pack both a 'full' and 'lite' version, where the light version doesn't have those extra features but doesn't require PHP or MySQL, since some people might not be comfortable setting those up.

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  5. Hey,

    A preliminary version can be seen here:

    http://www.masseautech.com/tablegen

    No login/saving tables yet, but there are a handful of example tables available in the dropdown menu at the top.

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  6. Cool!

    I've posted the link in a separate blog post.

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  7. I've been extremely pleased by the free development and server environment offered by kodingen for my javascript game tools.

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