malvasia bianca

Michael Feathers on testable Java. Good advice, that is of course relevant far beyond Java. Quite the Venn diagram. (Via @kateri_t.) James Paul Gee on games and teaching. (Via @HackerChick.) Lots to think about here; I hope the VGHVI folks can help me figure it out. A remarkable meandering about games, genres, Japan, and countless […]

I’ve been working at Playdom for about a month now, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it so far. If any of my readers think it might be an interesting place to work as well, I wanted to point out that we’re hiring. (In a fairly big way, as the list of positions suggests.) Feel free to […]

Early in the summer I started going through Real World Haskell; unfortunately, conferences and job changes and other programming side projects kept me busy enough that I stopped reading it after a few chapters. That’s calmed down now; and, conveniently, a friend of mine got a copy recently and some others also expressed interest in […]

I’m kind of thinking I’m not doing nearly enough to minimize waste. (Via @littleidea.) Playing a bigger game. (Via @DianaOfPortland.) Luck as a skill. (Via @superkiy.) A good list of tech blogs. This round’s Pink Tentacle link is an anatomy of folk monsters. Magnetic Ink: (Via Dubious Quality.) And on (rather than just from) Dubious […]

Sorry for the delay between posts; Miranda asked recently if she could watch Haibane Renmei (which I highly recommend), so we’ve spent many of our recent evenings going through that. And I don’t have a real post now, either, but I’ll at least give a link round-up. (Besides, the Zork walkthrough is much more awesome […]

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, […]

I want to talk about a couple of talks I attended at Agile 2009. Both relate to experts, expertise, and how one develops the latter to become the former. The first was given by Jon Dahl, on “Aristotle and the Art of Software Development”. You can see video and slides of an earlier delivery of […]

I’ve been using a program I wrote to help me memorize stuff (mostly Japanese vocabulary) for more than a year now. And for almost all of that time, I haven’t modified the program at all: I had plans right from the beginning to add multiuser support (if for no other reason than to make it […]

I finished adding multiuser support to my memory project this weekend. I’d added the ability for users to log in and out while I was on vacation this summer, but I hadn’t actually linked up the users with their lists of items to memorize. The relevant models are a User model and an Item model. […]

I mentioned Roger’s Operation KTHMA last time, but it’s actually started now and sounds awesome enough that I’ll mention it again: day 1, day 2, day 3. Our whole household was playing Bunni Game: How We First Met last week. (You should be able to see my world at this link.) Victorian Homes of the […]

Tanuki testicle art. One day in kanban land. Pixie Driven Development. A plain-text version of the Declaration of Independence. (Via Kelley Eskridge.) Rock Band as a music theory teacher. Maira Kalman on Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. (Via @bos31337 and The Edge of the American West.) The red handprints are a particularly nice touch. Another […]

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 indexed in a […]

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 donate ivermectin to fight […]

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 essentially impossible to […]

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 spend a bit of time getting […]

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, but I wasn’t sure I’d be up […]

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 of operations has been routinised, one […]

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 job, and about things to keep […]

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 people jump you in a […]

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 […]