http://malvasiabianca.org Sat, 04 Jul 2009 21:40:03 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm pleased to say that the Vintage Game club has chosen The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask as its seventh game. The discussion will probably begin on Friday, June 10th; it's a wonderful game, and one that I suspect has quite a lot to teach me; please come join ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/07/vgc-game-7-majoras-mask/ If you are considering building an experimental apparatus filled with liquid hydrogen, you might want to keep the following incident in mind: Deep within the bubble chamber, the inner beryllium window had shattered along a microscopic imperfection in its surface. Splintering outward, the inner window fragments blasted open the outer ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/07/the-perils-of-particle-physics/ The original paper on boundary objects gives a partial taxonomy of boundary objects; given my earlier thought experiment, I thought I'd see if I could find programming analogues to any parts of their classification. Star and Griesemer's first type of boundary objects are Repositories: These are ordered 'piles' of objects which are ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/06/a-taxonomy-of-boundary-objects/ The following bit from Brian Marick's summary of boundary objects caught my eye: Ivermectin is a popular drug for deworming animals. Onchocerciasis (river blindness) is a chronic illness that's a particular burden in sub-Saharan Africa. Since river blindness is caused by a worm susceptible to ivermectin, the manufacturer (Merck) desired to ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/06/boundary-objects-and-solid-principles/ Some evidence for anybody curious how well being good at Rock Band drums transfers to real drums. The neuroscience of illusion; I'll embed one of the videos so you can see the kind of thing they're discussing.(Via Kelley Eskridge.) A pleasant network logic puzzle game. (Via User Friendly, which makes it ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/06/random-links-june-21-2009/ One of the most interesting of the talks I attended at this year's GDC was Margeret Robertson' talk Stop Wasting My Time and Your Money: Why Your Game Doesn't Need a Story to be a Hit. Unfortunately, I didn't take any notes while listening to it, so my summary ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/06/margaret-robertson-on-no-story/ Over the last few weeks, I've been finding enough unusual projects imposing on my time that I think I'm going to have to shuffle my priorities, albeit temporarily. I've been wanting to do more programming at home than normal recently: aside from improving the memory project, I want to ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/06/change-of-focus/ I normally stay away from online video game play, both because of a lack of time and because of the bad things I've heard about strangers' behavior on Xbox Live. For the last six months, though, I've been meeting up every Thursday thursday to play games with people from ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/05/come-play-games-with-us/ It's been ages since I blogged about learning Japanese, so I figured I'd give y'all an update. I finished the textbook I was using last November, which raised the question of what to do next. I have some manga around and even a couple of collections of essays/stories, ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/05/update-on-learning-japanese-and-memorization/ I just tried to write a blog post containing some Unicode characters (I was blogging about 日本語 learning), and found that WordPress helpfully converted those characters to question marks. After digging around, I ran into this web page describing the problem (see also this thread): basically, if you created ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/05/converted-blog-to-utf-8/ Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce: the power of choices, of market segmentation. Two on folded paper: pictures by Simon Schubert (via @KathySierra) and a TED talk by Robert Lang on the origami that modern math and computers allow us to produce. An abandoned island city. (Via @japanesepod101.) Or, if ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/05/random-links-may-26-2009/ I can't say I've internalized (routinized? inscribed?) Latour's Laboratory Life yet, but in the mean time I present you with three quotes on routinization, inscription, and facts: To counter these catastrophic possibilities, efforts are made to routinise component actions either through technicians' training or by automation. Once a string ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/05/routinization-inscription-and-facts/ The third volume of The Nature of Order, while very good, didn't have the same impact on me as the earlier volumes did. Having said that, this bit from the conclusion is giving me something to think about: And in all this that I observe, when I talk to politicians, ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/05/christopher-alexander-on-our-birthright/ The fifth level of Flower is the most problematic by far. At the end of the fourth level, you get a pretty strong indication that matters have taken a turn for the worse, with some sort of black energy running along power cables that have glowing red lights; even ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/05/flower/ The Vintage Game Club chose Chrono Trigger as its fifth game. I never owned a SNES, so I missed the game its first time around; I did play through most of the PS1 port of the game, but found it a bit of a slog. Which, I'd gathered, ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/04/chrono-trigger/ I was pleased to learn last week that the workshop that Brian Marick and I proposed for Agile 2009 has been accepted. It's titled "Idea Factory"; since that link goes to a page behind a login barrier, I'll just reproduce the description here. Summary Ever heard a programmer say “I think ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/04/idea-factory-workshop-at-agile-2009/ One of my goals in going to GDC was to get a feel for what the industry is like on the inside. I think I succeeded in that, to some extent; what I wasn't expecting, however, what that I'd learn so much about what I like about my current ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/04/jobs-and-roles/ About 10 minutes into a talk he gave at the Philadelphia library, David Allen says: A lot of it was based upon my experience getting a black belt in karate. ... One of the things you need to learn is the strategic value of clear space. Trust me, when four ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/04/inbox-zero-and-technical-debt/ Despite our earlier plans, we are now back on cable TV again. We actually went pretty far in carrying out the plan: after getting lots of useful advice, I bought a Mac Mini and a PS3, along with various accessories, spent an hour or two rewiring things, and spent ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/04/back-to-cable/ For the second time in the last week, I am regretting that I didn't blog about a work as soon as I finished it. But the series in question is too good for me to completely ignore an excuse to write about it, and I did take a few ... http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/04/the-alchemy/