Monthly Archives: June 2005

General

Advertising in textbooks

I only wish the corporations had made the effort to improve _my_ education like this. These darn young’ns don’t know how good they’ve got it.

THE ABOVE IS A SATIRICAL COMMENT. Just so you know.

OnTheCommons.org | Advertising Invades Textbooks

General

“Software Development as a Spectator Sport”

Interesting idea over at CleverCS: Software Development as a Spectator Sport. I know that as a developer, I like to learn about how other developers work, or the decisions that led them to their implementations, etc. Making those sort of things accessible to a wider audience has some merit.

Of course, there are ‘popular’ books on topics in hardware and software development, and they do sometimes do a good job of making the content interesting to non-geeks.

I have also pondered the idea of ‘real-time development’, some sort of system that can let software development occur in a more continuous fashion than the typical edit-compile-debug cycle. That sort of system would possibly make for some interesting spectating too…

(I think there are a few projects out there in the world trying to create a real-time development system, but I haven’t researched them too much…)

Hey, remember that TV show where you watched people compete in arcade video games? I very vaguely do… And that vague memory is vaguely related to this post.

General

Simulation bugs

I love the weird situations that can come from bugs in simulations. I remember having a lot of fun playing with Transom Jack (which I guess is now Tecnomatix Jack) and purposely getting the parameters out of the healthy ranges… I think these sorts of behaviors can tell us something interesting about the subject of the simulation, too.

I was reminded of this while playing a game, as I watched the cracks in a windshield fall off the windshield and bounce around on the ground. How often do you see _that_ in real life?

General

Will Wright on “Lessons from Game Design”

Pretty cool talk by Will Wright.

General

Hazmat

Isn’t it weird when you’re coming home and find that your block has been blocked off and is now full of fire trucks, hazmat teams, cops… I think it is.

Glad the bizznizzle was across the street and turned out to be a false alarm anyway.

General

More precookery

Here’s a worthwhile post no I swear: in my quest to understand the state-of-the-art in ultraconvenient cooking, I tried two Hormel bacon products: their pre-cooked and their microwave-ready.

Both are damn expensive. The pre-cooked is too thin and doesn’t crisp well. The microwave-ready is a pretty good thickness and can be made crisp. However, it suffers the excessive-packaging syndrome (there’s a pad in there to suck up the grease, and a big bag to hold the spatters and steam in).

So, there ya go.