malvasia bianca

More and more, I’m getting interested in programs because of their aesthetics. (Via Daring Fireball.) NPR’s 404 page. (Via @jpallas.) I should have spent more time in Mass Effect 2 with Tali and Garrus in my party. (Via @elenielstorm.) The whole world has linked to this one, but for good reason. There’s also a Wired […]

So many experiments to try in schools. (Via @Brinstar.) The most interesting response I saw to that Clay Shirky piece a month ago. (Via @deirdrakiai.) Why Firefox doesn’t support H.264. (Via @timbray.) Tale of Tales’ Realtime Art Manifesto. (I particularly liked the Ueda quote contained therein, “Reduce the volume, Increase the quality and density”.) (Via […]

This year I’ll be putting down my pencil and calculator and doing my taxes on a computer for the first time; any recommendations for software I should use? Either something web-based or something that will run on a Mac is fine with me.

How to lose an argument online. I’d been thinking for a while that ‘hardcore’ was only useful as a term in a polemic I had no interest in making. Three false constraints on game design challenges. I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I won’t be able to avoid playing Dragon Age. (But I’ll hold […]

Gerald Weinberg is, sadly, in poor health. Never tried doing Rock Band vocals this way… (Takes 15 seconds or so to actually start.) (Via @dan_schmidt.) R.I.P., Brother Blue. (Via @scottros.) The difference between motion and action. (Via @harlan_knight.) An unforeseen design problem. (Via @shawnr.) Nice perspective on slow programming languages. Glad to see non-Miyazaki Ghibli […]

When I started doing GTD, I kept my next action list on a paper notebook in my pocket. (Or, at work, on a pad of paper on my desk.) I did this partly out of a certain technological conservatism and partly because, at the time, I didn’t have any suitable electronic devices that were always […]

Really, everybody should have their own domain these days. Rands on Your People. Cave photos. (Via 25 Times a Second.) A handy list of Rails security tips, and a lesson on timing attacks. Sections. Tetris meets Magic Eye. (Via Offworld.) Being a blogger. A different look at the Beatles. (Via @dan_schmidt.) Two on programming hardware, […]

Neither my wife or I has ever had a mobile phone. This marks both of us as somewhat eccentric, and it’s not a dogmatic choice for either of us; the truth is simply that neither of us uses a phone much, so why bother paying extra to carry one around? For various reasons, though (probably […]

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 your database in a pre-2.1.3 WP, […]

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 several hours over the next few […]

I’ve been meaning for ages to write about Jim Womack’s article on Respect for People, but I don’t seem to be getting around to it, so I’ll mention it here. A TED talk on underwater astonishments; if the beginning doesn’t capture your fancy or you’re short on time, go to the 4:20 mark. Everything you’d […]

Comcast is forcing us to switch over to digital TV soon; given that this will break our DVR, we’re thinking that we should just give up on this whole cable TV idea, and set up a computer as a media center instead. Conveniently, Apple has just upgraded the Mac mini, so we’re going to go […]

This probably deserves a full blog post, but I’m not sure I’m going to get around to it, so: Brian Marick on communities of practice, communities of interest, and boundary objects. The examples just get funnier and funnier. Very interesting take on GlaDOS. I’d never heard of umami before, I’d always thought we only had […]

Game | Life on the death of next gen consoles in Japan. The Gallery of Fluid Motion. I like the second one too, though it takes a while to get going. Arlo Belshee on planning without estimating. As with his earlier promiscuous pairing experiments, there’s a lot to think about here… Interesting way to think […]

One complaint about twitter (and other websites which I have less experience with, e.g. Facebook) is that they provide a sham of real connection: you’re not really friends with all of those people, it’s just a sort of faux intimacy. This is true, but it’s actually a strength rather than a virtue, and being at […]

I trust you are all aware of The Big Picture? I thought this one was particularly beautiful. And unrepresentative, in that the pictures are all taken from a single source, the Earth from Above exhibit. My favorite video game business analyst giving an exegesis of a recent Nintendo interview. The backlog as a map. I’ll […]

Achilles’ Phat Lewtz, on the Iliad and MMORPGs; huge amounts of fun from Roger Travis. Jordan on David Foster Wallace. My heart sank when I saw that Retronauts episode 49 was almost 3 hours long. But it’s all about the Dreamcast, including a great segment with Tycho, the best three hours of podcast listening I’ve […]

I’d been feeling a bit nonplussed for some time by the fact that I was using the WordPress default theme for the blog. But not nonplussed enough to actually do anything about it: I have other ways in which I’d generally prefer to use my limited free time, I don’t have strong design skills or […]

Hmm, been a while since I’ve done one of these; sorry about the length… Visualizing the Python commit history. Leadership, responsibility, and sausage. Solving sudoku games via package management. Japan, computers, appliances. (Via Niels ‘t Hooft.) Breakpoints as a checklist. Programmers, insecurity, source control. I linked to a movie of strandbeests (amazing wind-powered sculptures that […]

I didn’t have much luck getting Grim Fandango working under wine; some of my colleagues suggested VirtualBox, so I thought I’d give that a try. And it worked better (helped by one amazing piece of blind dumb luck); not perfectly, but well enough that I should be able to participate in the inaugural run of […]