A model, HTML5, games, the normal and the pathological

In the UK the powers that be finally recognise the need to introduce children to computer programming. Our future economic viability depends on no less. So many children are too locked into playing games to consider how games are created. New developments including the Raspberry Pi should help change this.

Here's a possible book intro....

While this book is considered an introduction to building HTML5 care applications with Hodges' model a conceptual framework, it is also intended to be a companion guide to help get you started making, and more importantly, finishing your care applications.

Now I'm not seriously proposing that a care application could be written in HTML5 (am I?). In trying to encourage a teen game player to try game programming, I came across a sentence in Jesse Freeman's short book Introducing HTML5 Game Development which I've revamped above.

The book is about Impact (not open source), a javascript framework. Skimming through the text's potential as a present, you appreciate the potential of games and simulations in health care.

In health care we talk about levels of care. In Impact there is Weltmeister a level editor.

The reader is also encouraged:

"Think of the canvas as an image, that we can bitmap data into." p.8.

There are maps: background and collision. There are Classes, Person is an inevitable example. Admittedly there is also a zombie, but then one of the domains of Hodges' model is frequently described as being populated by zombies (well, look at their movement and the fact that they are non-living).

There's talk of a GDD - a game design document. There is a need for a high concept, plus an asset pipeline, and if the design includes complex levels the likely need for a background, middle ground and foreground. If Life is about sprites running ragged around levels of game play, Death is in there too.

Additional link: Normal and Pathological

Cheat sheet for jQuery

Here [no longer... sorry] is a cheat sheet for jQuery that I found at edocr. I have just printed this one page overview which should prove very useful over the coming weeks (and months!). There are others to check out, such as a CSS help sheet. I just searched edocr for 'nursing', but there is nothing listed. ...

NetBeans, Eclipse and IntelliJ

I've made some progress getting to know Eclipse as a programming environment, but on Friday night (as per the post) I was told about JRuby (which I'd confused with IronRuby) and advised to take a look at NetBeans. So now it's installed, registered and yet another 'hello world' program has run.

Although I know little of Java I recognise an industry heavy weight when I see one. Walking past the coffee house at Oxford Road Manchester I often wondered wish I had time to get to know Java proper. Java's is too much for me and like the armchair astronomer I currently am, in theory so far Ruby has caught my eye and imagination. Behind Java though there is a huge catalogue of libraries and at present Ruby is written in Java.

Apparently the IDE of choice is IntelliJ, but this is not Open Source. I will download this too c/o a trial demo. Wonder if they sponsor worthy causes...? Following Scotland On Rails and Joe O'Brien's observation to focus on Ruby not just Rails, I must also use irb - that is interactive Ruby. It's copied on to the Eee PC now.

I'm working my way through the jQuery in Action book. One existing website page that will benefit from a review and recode is the FAQ. Already I'm thinking about what animations /effects it is sensible to use. It will be interesting to revisit the page created in response to Pippa's question on the humanistic-mechanistic axis. The jQuery used was lifted from a tutorial/blog site and although edited it probably contains some errors / redundant code.

I have not mentioned Drupal for a while, we'll get there.... There's another book on the shelf Learning PHP & MySQL. Must chase the new Drupal 6 book from Mercer too.

Friday night chatting another Ruby-Rails delegate in Edinburgh mentioned having been put-off by the prospect of tackling databases and then I realised: Yes, that's me too - the rabbit like eyes : the glare of headlights - it's all there.
Must seek some therapy, or get off the road....

Week ahead: Ruby/Rails conference and next paper?

It should be a stimulating week ahead as the clocks spring forward (why not two weeks ago?) and I check the schedule for Scotland on Rails and plan the sessions to attend. Now with a new Eee PC I should also have something to write on and connectivity.

Yesterday jQuery in Action arrived. I've started to read it and am finding already that the two CSS books that were until recently just sitting on the shelf are helping me to grasp what jQuery is about. One of those titles - Keith or Cederholm - highlighted that learning CSS helps you to understand and learn other languages and this really does seem to be the case. jQuery in Action will definitely be travelling to Edinburgh. Even though I'm only at chapter 2 it's a good read. There's a Selector Lab a web page to enter jQuery selector strings and see how the code relates to the DOM (document object model).

Over the past week I've been investigating Ruby graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits - specifically Tk (must check version 8.5). Just as with Drupal and settling on a theme, eventually - it seems? - I will have to choose a GUI. For now it's a case of seeing what they offer and how to run them within Eclipse (and without). The jQuery book will help push me with Drupal and enliven what will be essentially be static (archive) content:

• Archive - Brian's original notes; my introduction
• Biographies - Brian, myself - and who knows other contributors
• Chronology
• - still thinking about other content
• old - e.g. the informatics pages
• and new - a h2cm collaborative book.

There is no word as yet about the socio-technical chapter submitted in the new year, which may be good news? Although there's enough going on above, I like to have a paper on slow cook. So, we will see what arises on mapping, concept organisation ... in health care, communication and education. As a starter (c/o free access to SAGE journals) there are several papers on intervention mapping within public health and health promotion that will be essential reading. Another ingredient to (potentially) add to the mix - I've long wondered about case formulation within psychological therapies and Hodges' model. Time to make a start, but real slow like...

CSS, Case study layout?, jQuery - book

The directory for Hodges' model on my PC is full of erm* - essential files, plus quite a few that never saw service beyond the first writing. A timely find with spring not too far away!

Working on another iteration of the Q&A page, I came across a trial layout from one of my brief and sporadic forays into CSS.

The idea was to feature a case study with accompanying reference to h2cm. I'm glad I left that file sitting there, because now the idea of creating a community of h2cm users would fit in with this. It's a layout that begs for a database to populate it.

There are of course some critical data governance issues to investigate too!

Playing with this old page you realise the universality of context. Database or not, in the interview dialogue I've a health care worker (hcw) and client. Reading Dan Cederholm's Web Standards Solutions I've used label harnessing contextual CSS to highlight (colour) the speakers.

The CSS on the links pages (and in general) is a real mess and worth exploring; then I'll look at the h2cm content within Drupal. I never realised there were so many other tags associated with tables.

If this running around pages past and present seems a little haphazard, well one thing I'm trying to figure out is dividing the main (theme) style master.css and what would be custom.css ...? As I've started to use example pages there are a lot of CSS stuff and jQuery functions I don't need:

$(document).ready(function() {
$("#orderedlist dd:eq(1)").hover(function() {
$(this).addClass("green");
},function(){
$(this).removeClass("green");
});
});

I'm deleting the redundant code and it is working, learning 'bit-by-bit'.

There's no escape though, I'm in the market for another book - jQuery, plus there's another title due next month.

A good time to opt for an electronic copy.

*Some thing's going on here - three times I typed 'rem' - happy productive memories....

In brief: flu! Drupal, H-M axis question & jQuery

I hope this post finds everyone very well? Health wise here the holiday season was cast in a flu-ridden appearance. I did reflect on things for two days: looking down the toilet - balance gone, double vision and 'tiredness'. I'm usually fortunate and dodge the viral bullets. The flu started just after last month's Drupal meeting in Manchester. I was putting lessons learned into effect and had created my own template file when the room started to spin. Anyway enough of that - I hope...

Since falling about the day after, I have not Druped at all. I have managed to read up on CSS and think about Pippa's question on the humanistic - mechanistic axis. In the end I combined the two, namely using some CSS and jQuery, the javascript library used in Drupal. The result is a draft version of seven questions and styling, which a click will reveal and hide. It works (but is it accessible and should I be using a definition list?)!


I'd like to post the questions here with the javascript, but don't want to get side-tracked. I believe that adding the javascript code as a blog widget will see it added to the template. Compared with a great many blogs the template here is unremarkable, so tackling Pippa's question in this way will pay major dividends (he said) in styling the revised h2cm content for the new Drupal site.