Skip to main content

Friday Night Link Up

  1. PyPlus

    Creates a python-style C++. This replaces {} with indentation and removes excess parenthesis. Its definately a very interesting project, but how many uses it sees I am not sure of.

  2. Tiger Woods Wii: Doesn't look poopy :: DESTRUCTOID :: Hardcore gaming blog

    One of my favorite games on the Wii has been the golf of WiiSports, but it is very limited and toyish, as fun as it is. The Tiger Woods title looks absolutely fantastic and I've never been a fan of golf or golf video games, but I'll pick this title up on launch day.
  3. WiiCade.com - Flash Games on your Nintendo Wii

    I had hoped someone would do this. Bookmark the website on your Wii and get quick access to lots of web-based flash and java games that are friendly to being played via the Wii and Wiimote.
  4. Nothing But Videos: Man Shoots Electricity Out Of His Hands

    There really isn't much more that I can say about this after the title. He even sets fire to things with his fingertips, and does this on a regular basis!
  5. Offline Gmail and Blogger Using the Dojo Offline Toolkit

    This is a great idea that needs explored more thoroughly. Web apps become more and more widespread and even with the proliferation of always-on connections, we can't forget that things need to work when the network fails, I'm working off solar panels in the mountains, or the world has ended and only patches of ad-hoc networks survive.

    The idea is to enable web applications that can cache lots of data for offline use. I used to abuse Google Reader to do this before the long drives to and from North Carolina, by scrolling across all my hundreds of unread items they would all be downloaded internally and then even offline I would be able to read through them. This kind of functionality needs to be empowered, not accidental.
  6. Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation - Browsers Heading Apart Again

    I am more interested in how far Firefox 4 will go to providing a unique platform for web applications. Will we open up the embedded SQLite database to javascript in the pages, or bind OpenGL for accelerated rendering into canvas elements?
  7. Levy Interviews Steve Jobs About iPhone - Newsweek Steven Levy - MSNBC.com

    I was going to write about how Steve Jobs is a moron because of the whole "no third party software" thing on the iPhone, but then I realized that I'm sure I would absolutely love the iPhone. Does it point to a larger problem that one of the most important technological minds of our era can only solve the problem by just locking everyone out?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro...