Read Online Reconfigure by Epredator, Ian Hughes - Free Book Online Page B

the same. That meant some of what nature could do she could recreate in code. The right iterations could rebuild, or destroy, real objects. She could, with a bit of effort, be able to reconfigure anything! She thought back to fractal code to generate a fern leaf, one of her college pieces of work on the history of computer graphics. Trees and leaves with their branching and re-branching made ideal subjects for code to create them. It was why file systems were often tree structures. Levels upon levels, bifurcating down to an ever deeper level from the roots. Pathways, choices, all with a beauty in their simplicity but gathering a massive complexity into one bundle. How can something be in two states at the same time, simple and complex? Yet they are! Roisin was in a great place. Her mind was alive, her hunger for exploration was being fed. She wanted more, she needed more. The varying degrees of OCD that make up the average tech geek latches onto these things. It is not a bad thing to obsess. Most of the great discoveries that have helped us evolve happened by accident. They are generally because of an obsessive behaviour by a human, she had read that somewhere. Either one trying to stop something or one trying to find something. Being obsessed, not taking no for an answer, had got her a long way, and all those great scientists too. She was feeling liberated. A vast expanse of land to explore and colonise spread out before her. She had put herself through RC survival boot camp. The training levels were over and she wanted to get on with the free roaming problem solving missions now. Again she stopped herself, this is not a game? She felt a tinge of guilt still for the Marmite, but she would sort that out and see them right eventually. She was foraging this new wilderness and just needed to take something from the environment in order to be able to give back. Yes, the Marmite was justifiable. She had her moral compass. It was hard to deviate from doing the right thing, as she always tried to do. If she started on some sort of evil destructive path now all those years of levelling up as a good person would be for nothing. She would keep herself focussed and made the decision to not be evil.

Chapter 6 - RC UI
     
    For Roisin talking to RC, so far, had been via the Web interface for Twitter. The Direct Message box posted the text across the Web into the servers at Twitter, and popped out at RC. Roisin had no idea if RC was screen scrapping the Web page, tapped into the Twitter API or having a well trained monkey retype everything for it. Either way the Web response came back to a RESTful webpage. It was not really any different to the very origins of the Web. POST and GET methods had been the same for years, a URL and a payload of data. It is asynchronous, unless the other end shakes hands using cookies, identifiers or other flags. Stuff just happens to look like it is realtime but in reality it is two distinct request/response attempts to a server. Each means something to each end of the conversation in context. Context is everything. Roisin checked the Twitter API documentation. She was pleased to see there was a section called User Streams. It looked as if she could open a more direct connection to any user via this API. It was as close to a remote terminal as Roisin could get at the moment. Unless she found another way into RC? It seemed odd that something this powerful would only talk via Twitter, but hey! Even the omnipotent want to join in on comedy hashtags like #filmswithfruitandveg, Tweeting, “A Fistful of Carrots”, “The PeaPodFather”, “Potato Blight Club” and alike. She couldn’t help it, even thinking about these quirky hashtag storms, of shared corny comedy lines, made her want to join in and think of some more.
    Like any system she had built before, for herself, she had a good starting requirement. A solid idea that she needed at the core. To enable a more direct and live continuous data flow with RC.