An Independent Game Developer’s Diary

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

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.

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

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.

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.