- atomize.js — a distributed Software Transactional Memory implementation in Javascript.
- mari0 — not only a great demonstration of what’s possible in web games, but also a clever mashup of Mario and Portal.
- Lessons From BerkeleyDB — chapter on BerkeleyDB’s design, architecture, and development philosophy from Architecture of Open Source Applications. (via Pete Warden)
- An API Ontology — I currently see most real-world deployed APIs fit into a few different categories. All have their pros and cons, and it’s important to see how they relate to one other.
ENTRIES TAGGED "games"
Four short links: 15 March 2012
Javascript STM, HTML5 Game Mashup, BerkeleyDB Architecture, and API Ontologies
Four short links: 29 February 2012
StuxNet Deep Dive, Museum 3D Scanning, Tracking The Trackers, and HTML5 Game Code
- StuxNet Deep Dive — extremely technical talk, but this page has a redux. The presenter’s thesis, well-argued, is that StuxNet was absolutely aimed specifically at the Natanz facility. (via Chris Douglas)
- Smithsonian Digitizing Items (CNet) — two-person project, only able to do a few items a year, but still an excellent advance. See also Bronwyn Holloway-Smith’s art project around artifact replicas.
- Collusion (Mozilla) — have your browser tell you the third parties tracking your web browsing. (via Hacker News)
- Survivor (Github) — HTML5 implementation of an Atari/C64 game. If you wanted to learn how to write HTML5 arcade games, you could do worse than study this project. (via Andy Baio)
Developer Week in Review: NASA says goodbye to big iron
Goodbye to big iron at NASA, Microsoft opens up Visual Studio, and open source meets a rabid fan-base.
This week, NASA marked the end of an era, as the last of its big iron is retired. Microsoft continues to signal that its forays into open source are legitimate. And a new open source gaming project has a little extra horse-power, thanks to the fans behind it.
Four short links: 16 February 2012
Wikipedia Fail, DIY Text Adventures, Antisocial Software, and Formats Matter
- The Undue Weight of Truth (Chronicle of Higher Education) — Wikipedia has become fossilized fiction because the mechanism of self-improvement is broken.
- Playfic — Andy Baio’s new site that lets you write text adventures in the browser. Great introduction to programming for language-loving kids and adults.
- Review of Alone Together (Chris McDowall) — I loved this review, its sentiments, and its presentation. Work on stuff that matters.
- Why ESRI As-Is Can’t Be Part of the Open Government Movement — data formats without broad support in open source tools are an unnecessary barrier to entry. You’re effectively letting the vendor charge for your data, which is just stupid.
Four short links: 23 January 2012
Wearable Computing, Secure Implants, Budget Game, Restoring Democracy
- Adafruit Flora — wearable electronics and accessories platform. (via Tim O’Reilly)
- Killed by Code — paper on software vulnerabilities in implantable medical devices. Discovered via Karen Sandler’s wow-generating keynote at linux.conf.au (covered here). (via Selena Deckelmann)
- DIY London — fun little Budget-Hero game to make apparent the trade-offs facing politicians. Kids should play Sim* and Civilization games: you get a sense of tradeoffs and consequences from these that you don’t from insubstantial activities. More City Hall games, please! (via David Eaves)
- Lessig on How Money Corrupts Congress (Rolling Stone) — glad to see Larry’s profile rising. This is key: I lay out my own voucher program that tries to do that, but the challenge isn’t as much to imagine the solution as much as it is to imagine the process to bring about the solution, given how entrenched the cancer is and how much the very people we need to reform the system depend upon the existing system. (see also an excerpt from Lessig’s new book) (via Long Now)
Four short links: 3 January 2012
Sumerian Data, Mobile Shopping, Design for Participation, and Chrome Native Porting
- What the Sumerians Can Teach Us About Data (Pete Warden) — money quote: Gathering data is not a neutral act, it will alter the power balance, usually in favor of the people collecting the information. I also loved the Sumerian boundary marker covered in the supernatural equivalent of “copying is a federal crime!” pre-roll DVD warnings.
- 2011 Holiday Shopping Mobile Numbers (Luke Wroblewski) — iPad and iPhone shoppers account for 90% of all mobile purchases; spend 19% more per order than Android users. All these statistics are jaw-dropping.
- Fifteen Things I’ve Learned About Designing for Participation This Year (Nina Simon) — most insightful to me “Make and share” is more powerful for many people than “make and take.” Most people–including kids–want to display their creations, not keep them. . Most thought-provoking: People of all ages can use sledgehammers with minimal oversight. We had over 400 successful bangers with no injuries. The risk of liability was worth it.
- Porting MAME to Chrome — This document describes how we ported MAME using tools on the Linux platform. The resulting code runs in the Google Chrome browser on all currently supported Native Client platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux). Jaw-dropping part: The port of MAME was relatively challenging; combined with figuring out how to port SDL-based games and load resources in Native Client, the overall effort took us about 4 days to complete. (via Slashdot)
Four short links: 27 December 2011
Log for Machines, Javascript Template Previews, Arduino Kit, Reconstructing Price of Persia
- Write Logs for Machines — argues that services should log in a format suitable for automated analysis, not for humans to read as has been the custom in the past.
- tmpltr — Javascript template previewer, open source on github.
- Dspace Badge — what my son and I are building this week, our first Arduino project.
- Prince of Persia C64 Development Blog — fascinating account of a chap reconstructing Jordan Mechner’s classic “Prince of Persia” game from Mechner’s notes. The original source was lost.
Four short links: 26 December 2011
Text Analysis Bundle, Scala Probabilistic Modeling, Game Analytics, and Encouraging Writing
- Pattern — a BSD-licensed bundle of Python tools for data retrieval, text analysis, and data visualization. If you were going to get started with accessible data (Twitter, Google), the fundamentals of analysis (entity extraction, clustering), and some basic visualizations of graph relationships, you could do a lot worse than to start here.
- Factorie (Google Code) — Apache-licensed Scala library for a probabilistic modeling technique successfully applied to [...] named entity recognition, entity resolution, relation extraction, parsing, schema matching, ontology alignment, latent-variable generative models, including latent Dirichlet allocation. The state-of-the-art big data analysis tools are increasingly open source, presumably because the value lies in their application not in their existence. This is good news for everyone with a new application.
- Playtomic — analytics as a service for gaming companies to learn what players actually do in their games. There aren’t many fields untouched by analytics.
- Write or Die — iPad app for writers where, if you don’t keep writing, it begins to delete what you wrote earlier. Good for production to deadlines; reflective editing and deep thought not included.
Three game characteristics that can be applied to education
A tech-focused look at how "leveling up," collaboration, and play can be woven into learning experiences.
Cloud technologies and thoughtful roadmapping of digital technology can ensure that authenticity, social interaction, and play remain central components of education.
Four short links: 18 October 2011
Search Education, Classic Source, Analyzing Encrypted VoIP, and SQL Injection
- Web Search Education (Google) — lesson plans and materials for teaching people how to use search, from operators to critically evaluating sites. This latter area is the weakest: when I teach innocents about the web, I show them organic vs paid results, discuss why people advertise, how people pay for their sites, noticing domain names and organizations, etc. I wonder how much of the weakness of Google’s materials is due to their business model.
- Metroid Source Code — reverse-engineered source code from the original classic Metroid. (via Hacker News)
- Speaker Recognition From Encrypted VoIP Communications (PDF) — speaker identification, even one encrypted VoIP communications, is 70-75% among a pool of 10 candidates. Impressive. (via Bruce Schneier)
- SQL Injection Cheat Sheet — rundown of the different techniques for doing SQL injection. (via Gaëtan De Brucker)
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