I started off the day by working with Jeff and Timur on deciphering the code from an example websocket implementation. I eventually felt like that was enough prodding to get at the basics of what a socket library should do for me, and decided to write a socket-based thing using some existing libraries. In this case, I’d let Express take over in place of the routing stuff I wrote yesterday, and Socket.io could handle my websockets. I mostly worked from the examples here, here, and here, and got the basic pinging described in the Heroku tutorial working, but not anything bidirectional.

Somewhere in there, I also attended the first part of a lecture by Stefan Karpinski on the vagaries of floating point, but the just-post-lunch spot is not a great one for my attention span during lectures.

In the evening, I went to Emily Short’s lecture on Versu, which was as fantastic as I expected; I left feeling really positive about the possibilities of artistic tools in general and the state of interactive narrative in particular.