malvasia bianca

In the fourth quarter, the Warriors went on a run a bit earlier, and it paid off. Dallas tried to come back with threes at the end, but the Warriors sealed the game by stealing an inbounds pass with 3.3 seconds left. I guess I’ll be watching a fair amount of basketball over the next […]

A puzzle from This Week’s Finds, Week 250: You and your friend each flip a fair coin and then look at it. You can’t look at your friend’s coin; they can’t look at yours. You can’t exchange any information. Each of you must guess whether the other person’s coin lands heads up or tails up. […]

I had the pleasure of going to the StreamStar launch in New York. In a private jet, no less; Sun execs occasionally take them, Fowler was using one to get to the launch, and the rest of us got to tag along. Which was fun. Not a transcendent experience or anything: the food was so-so, […]

The steal and dunk at the end of the third quarter to tie the game perhaps wasn’t quite as impressive as the midcourt shot at the end of the half, but it was pretty close. Or maybe it was more impressive: hustle rather than luck.

Not sure yet how this game will go, but it’s looking up all of a sudden. For much of the half, the Warriors couldn’t really get anything going; the Mavs weren’t doing anything too special either, though, so the Warriors stayed within 8 or so. But then Pietrus came in, and had several excellent blocks […]

I don’t watch basketball much. I don’t have anything against the sport – it seems reasonably entertaining to watch – but the baseball season alone already provides more sports than I really feel like watching over the course of the year. And it doesn’t help that my local team for the last eight years has […]

As promised, here’s some more information about StreamStar. (Which is officially known as the “Sun Streaming System”.) It’s an extremely high performance video server, targeted at cable companies and telcos trying to move into the video space; its distinguishing features are that it can pump out an extremely high number of video streams at a […]

The product that I’ve been working on for the last four years has launched! I am very excited. I will blog more later; nice to be able to finally talk about this.

Lego Star Wars II is a very lightweight adventure game based on the original trilogy of movies, with everything made out of Lego. Mostly fluff, but a fair amount of humor, and the whole package is really quite fun. The best part, for me: it’s very easy, and has a cooperative multiplayer mode. This meant […]

As presentations about how the world is changing go, this one is well done.

Wii Sports is supposed to be key to the system’s mass appeal. Rather than targeting gamers, it’s designed to appeal to everybody; rather than forcing you to control the game by manipulating two joysticks, a D-pad, six face buttons, and four shoulder buttons, it lets you just swing the controller back and forth. (Side note: […]

[ I apologize for all the acronyms in the first paragraph of the post. I will explain what one of them means over the course of this entry, but if you’re here for, say, video game thoughts instead of technical geekery, then you would be correct in interpreting that as a sign that you should […]

I was pretty nonplussed when I first started playing Elebits. It’s sort of a weird mix of Katamari with a first-person shooter: on the one hand, you have a gun that you use to “capture” these elebit creatures that are hiding and running around, but on the other hand you can also use the gun […]

Housing prices as shown on a roller coaster. I had no idea that the ups and downs had been so small until recently. An Agile Toolkit interview about movie making. (This one had some interesting non-programming analogies, too. Go Steve! Different ways of looking at the world.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is an old-style courtroom-based adventure game for the DS. It’s set in the near future, and apparently legal norms have changed somewhat: as far as I can tell, rather than people being innocent until proven guilty, they’re guilty unless you can prove during the (at most three-day trial) that some specific […]

I turned on Akismet a little more than a month ago; since then, it’s caught just shy of 20,000 spam comments for me, or just under 600 a day, allowing less than five a day to make it through. I haven’t noticed any false positives yet (though admittedly I get a low enough rate of […]

I was kind of looking forward to the Xbox 360 Elite announcement. I’m almost positive I’ll buy a 360 at some point this year: I doubt the Wii and DS will be enough to keep me happy this year, and it even seems likely that the 360 willl have more games I’m really interested in […]

There had been rumors at the end of last year that, some time this year, EMI would allow non-DRM versions of its music to be sold online, so I wasn’t completely shocked by the recent announcement. But I was still surprised, and surprised it happened so early. Nice to see one record company behaving sanely. […]

Since I finished rereading the Earthsea books more than a month ago, I suppose it’s time for me to say something about them. To be honest, I’m feeling a little intimidated by what I wrote last time; I should have done a better job of taking notes right after finishing the books. Ah well. I […]