An Independent Game Developer's Diary

Bookmarks for August 16th through August 21st

mib — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 23:17:53 +0000

These are my links for August 16th through August 21st:

CIA guide to Analysis of Competing Hypotheses - While ACH is a tool for intelligence services to analysis possible threats, we use something similar at the guardian for diagnosing critical issues. Well worth a read
Android Revenue for Advanced Task Manager by Arron La - Arron comes out and details his exact revenue over 18 months for a simple 99c app, total about $70k after the Google cut. It seems Android development can and does pay
Mastering the 960 Grid System Tutorial from Nettuts - An excellent tutorial into the 960 gridder system, which if you are a non-designing developer will give you a good framework for building a site with minimal CSS knowledge needed
HTML5 Boilerplate - A rock-solid default for HTML5 awesome - HTML5 Boilerplate is the professional badass's base HTML/CSS/JS template for a fast, robust and future-proof site. Plus it's awesome!
How to Become a JavaScript Bad- Shut Yo Mouth! (via Ajaxian) - A good guide to getting better at javascript, but also a great guide to getting better at almost everything.
CSS3 Playground by Mike Plate - Use this web application to experiment and learn about new css3 capabilities.

Bookmarks for July 21st through August 15th

mib — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 23:01:00 +0000

These are my links for July 21st through August 15th:

CLEditor - WYSIWYG HTML Editor - CLEditor a JQuery based fully featured text editor for your website or blog
How to meet interesting people in Cambridge by Martin Kleppmann - A nice list of events in and around Cambridge that should help you meet some of the interesting geeks in cambridge
Old School Color Cycling with HTML5 (Canvas) via EffectGames.com - Some awesomely amazing effects using canvas
Forcing Gzip Compression by Steve Souders - Awesome outline of how to force gzip compression for browsers that support it but don't say that they do. Essentially include an iframe that is always compressed that sets a flag if the browser can read it.
EuroPython 2010 Schedule Mobile Webapp - Something that @bfirsh and myself put together in a hurry at Europython

Bookmarks for June 9th through July 14th

mib — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:01:16 +0000

These are my links for June 9th through July 14th:

Hidden features of Python - Stack Overflow - Some really nice features noted here. My favourite is if 1 < x < 10: do_something
Packaging reuseable and testable Django apps with virtualenv, pip, and Fabric - Nice introduction to using pip, virtualenv and django together. I'll definately be using some of the fabric suggestions.
HTML5Rocks - Simply beautiful and useful
Designing a RESTful Web Application - A nice overview of HTTP, URI's and the PUT/POST dilema when it comes to RESTful web apps
London developers, graphed on Flickr - Matt Biddulph has graphed the london developers from github and I'm delighted to notice that I'm on there.

Bookmarks for March 29th through May 19th

mib — Wed, 19 May 2010 23:00:32 +0000

These are my links for March 29th through May 19th:

Google Storage for Developers - Google Storage for Developers is a RESTful service for storing and accessing your data on Google's infrastructure. The service combines the performance and scalability of Google's cloud with advanced security and sharing capabilities
Google Font Directory - The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and served by Google servers.
Fluid Grid System - The Fluid Grid System is great for rapid prototyping as well as final production layouts because designers can quickly design layouts and make changes to complex pages which have the ability to maintain well-planned horizontal and vertical rhythm
What iPads Did To My Family - Chuck’s Blog - Interesting note. I'm wondering about buying one when they come out over here. For the family of course
SmartPhone design templates for Android, iPhone and Palm Pre - nice design templates for mobile development

Bookmarks for March 5th through March 27th

mib — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 14:01:56 +0000

These are my links for March 5th through March 27th:

Pretty JSON - Google Chrome extension - As with the XML formatter, it's nice to see JSON in a nice formatted way too!
XML Tree - Google Chrome extension - I asked on twitter, and here it is, this addon to Google Chrome displays XML data in a user friendly way.
The Complete iPhone Development Toolbox - A nice roundup of many of the available resources for developing for the iPhone
Intranet Secrets - A PR Gag going viral? - This site started as a gag inspired by Post Secret, but then people started submitting some real secrets. Awesome!
Vagrant - Virtual Development - Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments.
Post-mortem for Feb 24th 2010 Appengine outage - Fascinating overview of why Appengine had an outage the other day. essentially because the documentation and procedures weren't up to date.

Bookmarks for February 19th through February 22nd

mib — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:05:57 +0000

These are my links for February 19th through February 22nd:

Simon Singh: The best explanation of Public Key Encryption I’ve ever read - "I put a message in a box, I close the lid, turn the key and send it to you. But you can't open it because I've still got the key. Some mathematicians, Diffie, Hellman and Merkle thought of another way to think about it.
"How about I put the message in the box, I close the lid and I padlock it and then send it to you. Now you still can't open it. What you do is you put your padlock on it and send it back to me. Then I take my padlock off, send it back to you. You take your padlock off and you open the box."
DreamPie: The Python shell you’ve always dreamed about! - A nice improvement on the standard shell. I'm not sure I'm ready to replace ipython yet, but it has some nice features.
Marco Armnet on why programmers are the worst audience - Interesting thoughts on the type of audience you gather when you blog on programming topics, and why they behave the way they do.
Michal Migurski on why Stamen don’t do user research - Really interesting presentation on why user research might not be as valuable as you think, and why Stamen does it's research in public.
Generation Y - What we really want - part of The Next Great Generation Sex Week - "Perhaps growing up in the overflowing privilege and senseless decadence of the 90s has left us feeling entitled. We want stuff and we want a lot of it; We want results, and we want them fast. GenXers are ambivalent, not caring or feeling. In the words of Lisa Simpson, they “feel neither highs nor lows.” Conversely, Gen Y craves experience, new experience. We want it not because we are a generation of go-getters; we want it because it’s there to be had."
nodeJuice - Automatic browser refresh on file change - An interesting use of node.js
Tara Hunt on “Why I’ve Fallen in Love with the Nexus One” - Tara Hunt of HorsePigCow writes about what features of the new Nexus One she enjoys. The answer is the google integration, also the reason I love my G1 and my wife loves her G1
Deploying a Django Site using FastCGI - Django Advent - Deploying django onto FastCGI instead of Apache

Bookmarks for February 10th through February 16th

mib — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:03:53 +0000

These are my links for February 10th through February 16th:

Twitter’s OpenSource Directory - Nice to see twitter showing off which open source projects they contribute to.
The Next Great Generation Gone Wild - The rather excellent blog about the next upcoming generation (which I feel I'm part of) is having sex week. See articles written by young authors on how 'Millenials' view the great private topic of sex
Chrome Sniffer - Find out what technologies a website uses - Cute, if a bit useless. Find out what technologies a website uses. It auto pops up to list things like jQuery, Google Analytics and so forth.
Pendule - Google Chrome Web Development Extension - Finally, an extension for Google Chrome that provides similar functionality to Firefox's Web Developer Toolbar.
Guardian updates its online crossword offering - Over the last few weeks we've worked very hard here at guardian to build a new accessible crossword web application. I was only tangentially involved, so I'm looking forward to the rush of comments about the new implementation.

Bookmarks for January 26th through February 9th

mib — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:03:04 +0000

These are my links for January 26th through February 9th:

Going for a trot on the Django pony - A newbies opinion of Django - Always nice to see a favourite framework from a new persons perspective
Google Buzz API - Google Buzz has the internets all abuzz (sorry couldn't resist). But despite the blogs claiming it's just Friendfeed or facebook rebadged, I think the API's all being based on open standards will make a huge difference.
JetBrains PyCharm Preview - Jetbrains, the company that bought you IntelliJ, my favourite java IDE, have finally released the public beta version of their Python IDE. It claims Django support as well.
Down with 64 bit pointers, up with 32 bit indices - Alex from Media Molecule has posted a nice post explaining how he has reduced the in-memory size of large tables by not using 64-bit pointers but instead using a large allocated block, and 32bit indices instead. This was presented at Scale Camp and it's nice to see a write up of it.
Equals Drummond on Fixing the Google Account problem - An excellent overview of Google Accounts, GMail Accounts and why identity systems are really really frickin hard

Bookmarks for January 19th through January 21st

mib — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:08:04 +0000

These are my links for January 19th through January 21st:

Kindle Development Kit - Yes! The kindle development kit is coming. VOIP and Ads are forbidden, and "not be a generic reader" whatever that means.
Top 20 free-to-play RPG browser games by Casual Girl Gamer - Exactly what it says, some nice free RPG games for playing online.
A successful Git branching model from nvie.com - Yes, actually true. This is a git branching model that "just works" tm. With the slight exception of needing to manually add –no-ff to a few of the merge commands, it looks perfect for internal development at many companies.
Wufoo, A/B Testing and why being small can help - "Incidentally, I think this is a good demonstration of how Rails, crafty application of cheap software, and the related bag of tricks let you be more nimble than you would be if you were e.g. running on enterprise Java. I’ve implemented surveys for the universities who are clients of my day job, and surveys of roughly comparable complexity typically require planning meetings so that we can add them to the schedule and eventually detail an engineer or two to get them started. There’s a place for that in the world, don’t get me wrong, but I’m already collecting data."
jsFiddle - for fiddling with javascript and several mainstream libraries - A beautifully put together tool for experimenting with one of the major javascript libraries. For trying stuff out and prototyping something this is very cool.

Bookmarks for January 8th through January 11th

mib — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:01:38 +0000

These are my links for January 8th through January 11th:

Yahoo! axes Shopping API - Another Yahoo! service is due to die, the Shopping API as of March 11, 2010. If you want to display products from the Yahoo list you need to apply to PriceGrabber, a paid for service.
Seth Godin - Evolution of every medium - It cynical, but probably true!
Free Furry Cushions Social Icons Set - Noupe - Cutest social icon set in the world! Ahhhh!
How we create and deploy sites fast with virtualenv and Django - The understanding of development and deployment is fast increasing amongst django developers. The Washington Post explains the methods they go through to quickly create and deploy new sites using virtualenv, django and some hand written tools
The Dungeon of D - A great example that you don't need flashy software to make a great and engaging game. The barrier to entry for making a board or card game is so low there's no reason not to try it.