An Independent Game Developer's Diary

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.

Bookmarks for December 16th through January 8th

mib — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:18:23 +0000

These are my links for December 16th through January 8th:

Doing It Wrong - Tim Bray talks about how enterprise development should take a leaf out of the web development community.
UK snow map - tweet your pictures - Guardian.co.uk - 4 or 5 hours of frantic coding from idea to release to try to get it working before the snow came any further south. This is a tiny app I'm really proud of
tweetstream - twitter realtime python client library - Want to use the twitter realtime api's? Want to do so in python in a nice easy way? The rather cool tweetstream library is definitely worth looking at.
Nicholas Pi - Socket Benchmark of Asynchronous Servers in Python - Nicholas produces an excellent overview of the various python asynch server libraries available for massively scalable long poll servers.
50 Beautiful Free Icon Sets For Your Next Design - (via Smashing Magazine) - Some of these are simply beautiful. Not all of these icons are free for commercial use however, but they are all free for non-commercial use.

Bookmarks for December 9th through December 14th

mib — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:07:56 +0000

These are my links for December 9th through December 14th:

24 ways: Going Nuts with CSS Transitions - Natalie Downe writes about some of the cooler features of CSS3 animations and transitions. She shows how to make some nice graphical effects without any need for flash or animated images. Very cool
The impact of language choice on github projects - I'm not entirely sure what all the math actually means, but the graphs are pretty. I think it might be time to start learning some new languages for me then
Guardian iPhone App - I worked on the backend for this, which was a cool little django application. Very pleased that the app has finally gone live.
Code tutorial: make your application sync with Ubuntu One - ArsTechnica produces an interesting little tutorial to see how easy it is to integrate your ubuntu desktop application with Ubuntu One, the free Ubuntu version of Dropbox
Rackspace Cloud Servers - I've been playing with these recently. At about a fifth to a seventh of the price of EC2, they're a cheap way to play with cloud providers. The api is easy to use, but definitely not as full featured as EC2 yet. This could well be one to watch
Mathematically Correct Breakfast - Mobius Sliced Linked Bagel - I made two of these at work the other morning. Unfortunately the guardian toaster wouldn't accept mathematically interesting breakfast, so I had to eat them raw.
Development to Deployment in Django - Irrational Exuberance - In my quest to find the ultimate deployment methodology for Django, this is one of the better ones I've found.
Open Share Icons and Buttons - The Open Share Icon is designed tohelp users easily identify shareable content.
Google Chrome - Now available for linux - A fast new browser: Now available for Linux

Bookmarks for November 16th through December 8th

mib — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:40:28 +0000

These are my links for November 16th through December 8th:

(down)Loading JavaScript as strings - The Gmail mobile team and Charles Jolley from SproutCore have recently published some interesting techniques for loading JavaScript in a deferred manner. Steve Souders goes into some context for using them
Hosting and Streaming Your Own Videos Securely Using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (via evolt.org) - There's more than one tutorial out there about creating your own Flash video, and a handful that show how to use Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) to host them. I discovered recently, rather painfully, that if you want to protect your bandwidth costs by restricting access to the video, the details are sketchy and often conflicting
The Best Free Web Icons - A nice collection of free web style icons
Tartley solves the UK Digital Economy Bill - Tartley, one of the better internet commentators on the Digital Economy Bill claims to have solved the problem, by realising that the problem is not the bill, but that the political opinion is that we must be seen to do something…
TagSoup: Real life HTML SAX Parser for java - Struggling with parsing XML in java? Want something lightweight and simple?
TagSoup is a SAX-compliant parser written in Java that, instead of parsing well-formed or valid XML, parses HTML as it is found in the wild.

Bookmarks for November 9th through November 15th

mib — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:04:43 +0000

These are my links for November 9th through November 15th:

Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? - Times Labs Blog - This is the graph the record industry probably doesn’t want you to see.
CouchDB: The Definitive Guide - The book is designed to guide you gently through using CouchDB with clear but practical scenarios.
SPDY Protocol (Chromium Developer Documentation) - Speedy extends HTTP to enable faster throughput by enabling multiplexing, compressing headers better and enabling prioritised requests.
Google Closure: How not to write JavaScript - An interesting examination of the new Google Closure library that shows that it may not be without it's flaws.
Google opensources the Go programming language - Google has open-sourced a new programming language. Remember that Google's opinion of almost everything is "if it isn't invented here, it can't be good". It's a pity that this seems to hold true for so many things Google turns their eye to.
The Story - Once upon a time there was a storytelling conference - Once upon a time there was a storytelling conference, and it look really cool!
node.js - Evented I/O for V8 server-side javascript. - This looks pretty amazingly cool. Building on twisted and other asynchronous callback event based concurrent systems, this looks like an easy simple way to build massively concurrent web applications
PayPal X Developer Network - Paypal has launched it's new developer friendly API
Introducing Closure Tools - Millions of Google users worldwide use JavaScript-intensive applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps. Like developers everywhere, Googlers want great web apps to be easier to create, so we've built many tools to help us develop these (and many other) apps. We're happy to announce the open sourcing of these tools, and proud to make them available to the web development community.
30 Free Android Icons - The package includes 30 PNG menu icons plus the additional source files for further customization.
Why Git is Better Than X - Where x is one of (hg, bzr, svn, perforce) - funny, irreverent and true!

Bookmarks for November 2nd through November 7th

mib — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:09:17 +0000

These are my links for November 2nd through November 7th:

Designing Social Interfaces - While this is an excellent book, the accompanying pattern repository here is also useful
Love is not the foundation of our marriage - My wife writes a post about our upcoming anniversary, and why love is not the foundation of our marriage
What every developer should know about time - A good description f the issues surrounding time and date manipulation in programs
Come see Bruce Schneier talk in London - The Open Rights Group is presenting on 'The Future of Privacy: Rethinking Security Trade-offs'.
Bruce Schneier, internationally-renowned cryptographer, technologist and author, will share his vision of current and future technologies' effects on privacy. Schneier rejects the traditional "security vs. privacy" dichotomy in favor of a more subtle and realistic one.
Ignite London - Since 2006, hundreds of 5 minute talks have been given around the world. Mark your calendars for the first London, UK Ignite on Nov 18, 2009.
The power of “no” - Jacob Kaplin-Moss discusses why closed source software seems to provide more bullet points at the expense of elegance whereas open source seems mostly immune to these pressures.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 is now available for download - The Mozilla community is proud to release Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 for download