malvasia bianca

It’s been a little more than a year since I joined Playdom, so I figured I should collect my thoughts about how it’s gone so far and get ideas about what I might want my next year to look like. Looking back, it’s kind of amazing how many different things I’ve done over that last […]

Scott Rosenberg has recently been making a case that web sites (news sites, at least, but I think the argument applies more broadly) should make the revision history of stories public. Which makes sense to me, and to enough other people that a Post Revision Display WordPress plugin is now available. Which I’ve just turned […]

I promised a post on why I created my linkblog, but then I forgot to talk about it in my recent Reeder post. The primary trigger was in fact my increased iPad usage: I find it annoying to read others’ link roundup posts on the iPad/iPhone, and it’s also a bit of a pain to […]

For reasons which I’ll explain later, I’ve decided to discontinue my occasional link roundups here, and instead put individual links on a linkblog at links.malvasiabianca.org/. So subscribe to that if you like that sort of thing, and don’t if you don’t! I decided to go with Tumblr, for what it’s worth; the bit of poking […]

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. Scary; I’m very glad Miranda is now a competent swimmer. Epic Wimbledon reporting; start at around 4:05pm or so. (Via @dan_schmidt.) Memory hierarchies and algorithm analysis. (Via @mfeathers.) Interesting point of view on hyperlinks and footnotes. (Via @scottros.) For all of you Plato fans out there: (Via here and now.) […]

David Wiley’s talk at GLS got me feeling a little guilty about the lack of copyright license on this blog. Not, to be sure, about the terms that the blog was therefore licensed under but about the fact that the terms were implicit in the first place. Copyright law is horribly flawed these days, with […]

Some quotes from the hundredth anniversary edition of The Progressive: The income tax is the fairest and most equitable of the taxes. It is the one tax which approaches us in the hour of prosperity and departs in the hour of adversity. Certainly it will be conceded by all that the great expense of government […]

Watch this illusion: Why can’t we make another Shadow of the Colossus? Super Mario World camera behavior. (Via @danbruno.) An Apple //e really does make a good iPad stand. Jupiter loses a stripe. (Via @stephentotilo.) Ruby Ramen? (Make sure to look at the different product pictures.) (Via @yukihiro_matz.) I’m not exactly happy to learn that […]

My WordPress dashboard tells me that this is my thousandth blog post. Which I find hard to believe; going through the archives, however, it really is true. I’ve been blogging for 2084 days, so I’m averaging almost a post every other day; I’m not managing that rate any more, but weeks when I do three […]

The Internet Archive has made a million books available for free to those who are blind or otherwise print-impaired. A delightful Bob-omb Battlefield performance. A city of staples. (Via @rands.) I love this attitude towards reuse. (Via @markhneedham.) “Games are too hard, they’re too long, and they provide way too much stuff.” (Via @ncroal.) CSS […]

In my recent post on habitable software, I proposed evaluating software through the lenses of functionality, openness, and habitability. Given that one of my schticks is to yank analytical concepts out of one context and try to apply them elsewhere, this suggested a followup question: does this classification only make sense when talking about software, […]

Daniel Floyd and James Portnow on Video Games and Moral Choices. Ryan from 37 Signals on applying Christopher Alexander to everyday work. Seth Godin’s April Linchpin session. A cat and an iPad. Which I find totally fascinating in a non-cat-youtube-video way. (Via @Laralyn.) I am a biotic god! (Via @truffle.) Amazing clouds. (Via @marick; also, […]

One of the surprises I encountered when reading The Nature of Order was that Christopher Alexander designed a bench at Fort Mason. (He talks about the process of its construction in the third volume of Nature of Order.) So when Agile Open California returned to Fort Mason last year, I made a point to duck […]

What core gamers should know about social games. Ian Bogost’s GDC 2010 microtalk. Roger Travis’s latest teaching experiment. This is not a spiral. A cool platformer twist. (Via @SimonParkin.) Jane McGonigal’s 2010 TED talk. A useful counterpoint to the discussion that Jesse Schell’s talk led to. The FarmVille diaries. (Via @SimonParkin.) Functional programming, OO programming, […]

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 […]

Today’s talks: 10:00 am: How to Manage an Exploratory Development Process, by Kellee Santiago and Robin Hunicke. I heard Robin speak in the microtalks last year; she’s at thatgamecompany now. Good talk, and surprisingly moving: they started off by talking about how, at E3 2008, they debuted Flower, the press and their publisher loved it, […]

When I was growing up, I had a subscription to Games magazine. It’s a puzzle magazine whose main feature is the “pencilwise” section that takes up the middle chunk; crosswords are always most prominent in that section, but they’re always in a minority, with a wide range of other puzzle formats keeping them company. Lots […]

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.

Interesting discussion of female video game characters. (Via @Brinstar.) Amazing high-speed photography. (Via @ashalynd) Criticizing games without playing them. (Though, in the case of Train, I can think of one way to reduce the chance of that happening…) And here’s another one on the theme of unhelpful criticism. @kateri_t finally has a blog! Or at […]