Google+ is this service that google made that you might have heard about. It's like Twitter, except instead of 140 characters you can write a novel, or post every lolcat picture you find. Then, everyone's collected novels and lolcat collections then get collated and displayed into a single, mammoth, animated-gif-filled, crazily formated, document that google calls "your stream".
The C64 DemoScene
[To coincide with the transcendent Paris DemoJS party, here is a repost of an article I wrote for the Powerhouse Museum as part of their "The 80s are back" exhibition.]
It’s 1985, and millions of Commodore 64 computers are connected to millions of television sets around the globe. The sole purpose of these 1-megahertz, 16-color marvels is simple. Games. No question about it – the C64 runs the coolest video games this side of the local arcade, but from the darkest corners of the home computing landscape oozes something new, something that few people will ever see. A curious and passionate computer subculture is forming that exists purely to push this humble machine to its very limits for the purposes of self-expression. 1985 sees the birth of the demoscene.
How do you parse input?
Over the years I've written hundreds of small scripts and apps for various tasks I need doing. Although these are often quite useful, I rarely release or share them.
I'm not some kind of horrible code miser, mind you, it's just that my scripts are always hacked together in such a way that they work for my specific input data only.
Mr Speakers
I'm not really the type o' guy to go splashing my (albiet strikingly handsome) visage all over my website/facebook page/photo library so I receive a lot of requests from readers asking "PLEASE MR SPEAKER more pics! more pics!!!".
Well, I've got some good news for you guys and gals: Today Google released a new "search by image" feature. So while I won't be posting any juicy photos of yours truly, I will give you a taste of people that Google thinks my photo looks similar too... Happy viewing!
Signed copies are available on request.
Internet Explorer pizza. With extra obsolescence.
Did you know that over 18% of the worlds code was written by programmers fueled by pizza? It would surprise me if you did, because I just made that up. But at any rate, nothing tastes more disgusting than the pizza you have to eat because you're stuck at work on a Saturday desperately trying to finish a project that was due on Friday.
This Saturday, however, SpeedRabbit pizza gave us reason to smile. Perhaps looking to cash in on the lucrative "overweight programmer" market, they have developed the all-new IE8Explorer pizza!
_this = this
var _this = this. It always does. I write it oh-so-often to keep my JavaScript scope hanging around - and the idiom no longer makes me cringe. It's like an old friend. The only problem with my old friend is that Textmate doesn't have the same feelings towards him as I do. He certainly won't elevate him to the status of "keyword" - so he remains white, uncolour-coded, invisible. So in the same vein as my Syntactic artificial sweetener semi-colon reduction strategy, I've decided to fix it. Here's how you make _this equal this.
HOWAMI: a command line tool
It's good to be reminded that you're shit. Today Fabrice Bellard released jslinux - a 32 bit CPU emulator which loads a fully-functional linux kernel: including Emacs, and a C compiler. Holy Poopsmith.
Seeing as I now had a JavaScript-powered coding environment handy - and being inspired by Fabrice's unrelenting productivity - I decided code up a command line utility I've been intending to make for quite some time: howami.
Semantic game making
HTML5 means one thing, and one thing only: games! Okay, that's not true at all. Not even close, but heck - we are seeing stacks of fantastic games emerge, and the buzz that surrounds even the more mediocre efforts is considerable. So where's the love in the HTML5 spec for us game makers? When it comes to defining the appropriate uses for web technologies it's definitely a case of Internet. Serious Business.
“Products”
There's no room for hacking and learning with Apple. You don't dare waste their time working on projects... from now on you work on products and products only.
If you aren't incentivizing and monetizing your down-time then you don't deserve to be using Apple's next-level code enabler, Xresource4.