Despite the dramatic shift toward simplification in software interfaces, the world of development tools continues to shrink our workspace with feature after feature in every release. Even with all of these things at our disposal, we're stuck in a world of files and forced organization - why are we still looking all over the place for the things we need when we're coding? Why is everything just static text?

Bret Victor hinted at the idea that we can do much better than we are now - we can provide instant feedback, we can show you how your changes affect a system. And I discovered he was right.

We can do better, and to that end, let me introduce you to

Wer ein Notebook mit "NVIDIA® Optimus™ Technologie" besitzt und z.B. Ubuntu installiert hat sollte sich einmal "Bumblebee" anschauen ... "Owners of optimus laptops. Install bumblebee, use the nvidia card while gaming, use intel chipset for everything else. Now with autoshutdown for the nvidia card." - Quelle

 

Mit dem Update auf Version 1.4.32 wurde ein Fehler behoben, welcher bei Ubuntu-Usern "/usr" löscht. daraufhin wurden in den letzten Tagen etliche lustige Kommentare & Bilder zu dem Thema auf github.com gepostet. Hier einige Beispiele ...

Last summer, I had the good fortune to visit a “very advanced” Agile shop. These folks really did embrace agile methods with a discipline, completeness, and a zealous fervor that would be hard to match. In many ways, they could have been a poster child for Agile methods...But these weren’t productive developers freed from mindless process dogma. They were Agile slaves. The dogma they followed was ours, and they followed it well. And as with many organizations in a similar position, they saw some promising results. Continuous integration, refactoring, unit tests, pair programming—all these techniques yielded some benefit. But they weren’t thinking, they weren’t reacting, they weren’t being agile. When problems came up, they addressed them with all the grace and elegance of a deer caught in the terrifying blaze of alien headlights. They knew how to do Agile; they didn’t know how to be agile.

The sarcasm in this talk does not represent anyone's actual opinion. For a more serious take on software, try Destroy All Software Screencasts: 10 to 15 minutes weekly, dense with information on advanced topics like Unix, TDD, OO Design, Vim, Ruby, and Git.

The neat thing about The Joel Test is that it's easy to get a quick yes or no to each question. You don't have to figure out lines-of-code-per-day or average-bugs-per-inflection-point. Give your team 1 point for each "yes" answer. The bummer about The Joel Test is that you really shouldn't use it to make sure that your nuclear power plant software is safe.

A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you've got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time. 

This is my little space for tutorials, papers and code for computer graphics, fractals and demoscene. I don't store the demos and other finalized works here anymore, I moved them to the vanilla page. Also, if you are looking for something and you don't find it here, go try my main site, perhapse you have more luck there. The content in this site have been written in the last ten years or more, and you can imagine it continues growing and growing. Yep, I try my best to upload the new material and keep it all up to date, but it's not easy since both the content of everything you see here and the site itself are made during my spare time. Also, note I'm neither native English speaker nor I do really spend long time writing the text.... so I'm really sorry for that. Yet I hope you enjoy it!

When I started programming many of the elements we take for granted now, did not exist. There was no DirectX and not many compatible libs were available for the free compilers of the day. So I had to write my own code for most basic programs, keyboard handlers, mouse handlers, video memory accessors, rasterizers, texture mappers, blitters… the programs I wrote then were 100% my own code and I had to be able to handle anything and everything.

Personally I’ve always been interested in what was going on under the hood so this suited me just fine. I always dug into the details and I almost always end up programming as close to the bone ON the hardware (or OS) as I possibly can both to eek out as much performance as possible AND to satisfy my own hunger for knowledge.

Late last year, the Netflix Tech Blog wrote about five lessons they learned moving to Amazon Web Services. AWS is, of course, the preeminent provider of so-called "cloud computing", so this can essentially be read as key advice for any website considering a move to the cloud. And it's great advice, too. Here's the one bit that struck me as most essential

Eve Online's players are a notoriously dedicated, and vociferous, bunch. Self-governing, focused and regularly taking part in huge interstellar fleet battles, meeting their expectations presents a daunting challenge to any AI programmer. We sat down with CCP Games senior programmer, Joel McGinnis, to discuss the difference between real and observed artificial intelligence, why MMOG developer's tend to push AI to the bottom of the to-do list and what we can expect from game AI in the future.

Looking around at some UTF-8 background, I see the same incorrect
story being repeated over and over. The incorrect version is:
1. IBM designed UTF-8.
2. Plan 9 implemented it.
That's not true. UTF-8 was designed, in front of my eyes, on a
placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992.

Goal of the IN4K site is to be the central resource about creation of 4 KB intros.
We hope to compile public domain resources into a single site, as well as mirror them incase of website closures or downtime.

The Game Prodigy strives to provide game design articles and discussion that are immediately practical to readers. We believe that a game design resource should be as useful to game designers as a programming how-to is to an engineer, or a style guide is to an artist. Game design discussion should be useful, concrete, and understandable.

Game Design in itself, not game programming, not project management, but just deciding what to build, is a difficult problem in itself. There are common problems in game design that have been solved, and designers should have access to those solutions from other games and developers instead of having to retrace the same steps.

For this reason, at The Game Prodigy we focus less on theory and more on results. We look at case studies of successful designs and see how we can use them in our own games. We discuss the merits of different designs and what platforms they are appropriate for. We avoid talking about designs in a vacuum, instead saying, “This design was used in this context and produced this result.”

Quora has taken the tech and entrepreneurial world by storm, providing a system that works so fluidly that it is sometimes hard to see what the big fuss is all about. This slick tool is powered, not only by an intelligent crowd of askers and answerers, but by a well-crafted backend created by co-founders who honed their skills at Facebook.

In this blog post I will delve into the snippets of information available on Quora and look at Quora from a technical perspective. What technical decisions have they made? What does their architecture look like? What languages and frameworks do they use? How do they make that search bar respond so quickly?

I'm reading Do More Faster, which is more than a bit of an advertisement for the TechStars start-up incubator, but it's a good read nonetheless. What struck me is that several of the people who went through the program, successfully enough to at least get initial funding, didn't know how to program. They learned it so they could implement their start-up ideas.

One challenge at yesterday’s CTF was a seemingly-impossible SQL injection worth 300 points. The point of the challenge was to submit a password to a PHP script that would be hashed with MD5 before being used in a query. At first glance, the challenge looked impossible. Here’s the code that was running on the game server:

It took an entire day to get In-App purchases to work.  TOTALLY unnecessary.  Apple’s docs on the subject are worthless, so I figure it’s time for another Coding Help Blog Post

Joe Bork has written a great article explaining some of the decisions that go into whether a bug is fixed or not. This means that I can cross that one off my list of potential future entries. Thanks Joe!

But while I'm at it, I'd like to expand a little on what Joe said.His comments generalize to more than just bug fixes. A bug fix is one kind of change to the behaviour of the product, and all changes have similar costs and go through a similar process.

The goal of a software product is to serve human beings. A good software product caters to the user’s whims, even if it means doing something hard and technically complicated just to save the user one click while he is watching pictures of lolcats. The way a good software product treats the user is kind of like the way a butler treats his master

Programming is hard. It's harder than you think. Right now you're probably underestimating the amount of frustration and discomfort you're about to experience, without realizing that by doing so you're creating all sorts of subtle barriers to obtaining a deep understanding of programming.

What’s on this page? I’m interested in producing complexity out of simple parts. This page contains bookmarks that I collected while working on games; I did not write most of the content linked from here. As a result the set of links here reflects the types of things I needed to know: only a few specific topics (not everything related to game programming), general ideas instead of platform-specific information (graphics, sound, compilers), and ideas and designs instead of source code (I find it easier to go from an idea to code than from code to an idea). Other sites, like Gamedev and Gamasutra, cover lots more topics than mine does. These are the topics I cover:

As I work towards completing my own game, I’ve been thinking a lot about finishing projects in general. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of really talented developers out there that have trouble finishing games. Truthfully, I’ve left a long trail of unfinished games in my wake… I think everyone has. Not every project is going to pan out, for whatever reason. But if you find yourself consistently backing out of game projects that have a lot of potential, it could be worth taking a step back and examining why this happens.

Most micro-ISVs use a serial number/registration code system to allow end users to unlock or activate their purchase.  The problem most of us have run into is that a few days or weeks after our software is released, someone has developed a keygen, a crack, or has leaked a serial number across the internet.

There are several possible solutions to this problem. You could license a system like Armadillo/Software Passport or ASProtect, or you could distribute a separate full version as a download for your paying customers. Each option has advantages and disadvantages. What I am going to show you is a way to keep “rolling your own” license key system while making working cracks harder for crackers to produce, and working keygens a thing of the past.

Making games run faster is a pet topic of mine. Code samples are too specific to help many people, so here are some general principles I’ve learned.

You’re not alone, I was also doing prototyping wrong until a few years ago. There are probably many different ways of prototyping games correctly, and maybe your way works great for you. In that case, a more accurate title for this post could have been “Prototyping: I Was Doing It Wrong”.

A good game prototype is something fast/cheap that allows you to answer a specific question about your game. The key points there are fast/cheap and specific question. It’s not a level of a game, it’s not a “vertical slice”, and it’s certainly not an engine for the game.

Chris Hecker and Chaim Gingold gave one of the best presentations on the subject of rapid prototyping. It was hugely influential for me, and it made me re-think the way I do prototypes. If you get a chance, find the audio for the presentation, it’s definitely worth it.

[In this much-referenced technical piece originally published in Game Developer magazine late last year, the team behind idiosyncratic MMO success EVE Online discusses precisely why sharing a single world between all of its players makes sense.]

If you haven't seen it yet, check out the JS1K demo contest. The goal is to do something neat in 1 kilobyte of JavaScript code.

I couldn't resist making one myself, so I pulled out my bag of tricks from my Winamp music visualization days and started coding. I'm really happy with how it turned out

You’ve been depressed for like a year now, I know. All the hardcore Objective-C developers have been having a hay-day writing apps for the iPhone. You might have even tried reading a tutorial or two about developing for the iPhone, but its C—or a form of it—and it’s really hard to learn.

“It looks like around 92% of the people playing the full version of [the pictured] Ricochet Infinity pirated it.” It’s moments like those that make people in the industry stop dead in their tracks. 92% is a huge number and though we were only measuring people who had gotten the game from Reflexive and gone online with it, it seemed improbable that those who acquired the game elsewhere or didn’t go online were any more likely to have purchased it. As we sat and pondered the financial implications of such piracy, it was hard to get past the magnitude of the number itself: 92%.

Why start this site?

Well, I believe that game developers are interesting, and have a lot to say. I also know that a lot of them keep blogs. But I don't think they promote them, and I don't think they are too easy to find. The reason that I think this is because I have too often seen people ask the question "does anyone know any decent developer blogs?"

Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 3: Make mobile Web applications work offline with HTML 5
Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 2: Unlock local storage for mobile Web applications with HTML 5
Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 5: Develop new visual UI features in HTML 5
Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 4: Using Web Workers to speed up your mobile Web applications
Creating mobile Web applications with HTML 5, Part 1: Combine HTML 5, geolocation APIs, and Web services to create mobile mashups

Welcome to another edition of Guru Speak. I believe that one of the hallmarks of a good writer is the ability to mold a complex topic into something both palatable and interesting. These are the characteristics I strive for in Guru Speak, and I hope you consider my efforts to be a success. Please be sure to let me know what issues tend to trouble you the most or in what areas you would like to expand your knowledge and understanding. I am happy to cater to my readers.

This edition's topic is storing sessions in a database.

Everyone knows that SmugMug is a heavy user of S3, storing well over half a petabyte of data (non-replicated) there. What you may not know is that EC2 provides a core part of our infrastructure, too. Thanks to Amazon, the software and hardware that processes all of your high-resolution photos and high-definition video is totally scalable without any human intervention. And when I say scalable, I mean both up and down, just the way it should be. Here's our approach in a nutshell...

This paper explains the design architecture, implementation, and some of the lessons learned creating the multiplayer (networking) code for the Age of Empires 1 & 2 games; and discusses the current and future networking approaches used by Ensemble Studios in its game engines.

You’re a programmer. Have you ever wondered how multiplayer games work? From the outside it seems magical: two or more players sharing a consistent experience across the network like they actually exist together in the same virtual world. But as programmers we know the truth of what is actually going on underneath is quite different from what you see. It turns out that it’s all an illusion. A massive sleight-of-hand. What you perceive as a shared reality is only an approximation unique to your own point of view and place in time.

XPath is used to navigate through elements and attributes in an XML document.

XPath is a major element in W3C's XSLT standard - and XQuery and XPointer are both built on XPath expressions.

It doesn’t account for database-specific syntax, but can allow for the process of switching databases and platforms to be fairly painless, simply by switching the connection string in many instances.

This tutorial isn’t meant to be a complete how-to on SQL. It’s written primarily for people currently using the mysql or mysqli extension to help them make the jump to the more portable and powerful PDO.

Lots of people want to know the answer to that question. Most indie games fail. Most indie projects never get completed. I don’t have any way to prove that, but any indie game veterans will know it’s true. Here are my top tips. Some of them may seem like they de-motivate, rather than motivate, but I get motivated by knowing how important and serious it is for me to work hard. Most indies don’t realise how hard they are going to have to work, and how good their game has to be.

About
The Setup is a collection of nerdy interviews, asking people from all walks of life about the software and hardware they use.

Despite appearances, the site is not actually sponsored by Apple - people just seem to like using their tools. We're a fan, too.

Diese Website ergänzt das Buch »Generative Gestaltung« (erschienen im Verlag Hermann Schmidt Mainz, 2009) und bietet direkten Zugriff auf alle Processing-Quellcodes der im Buch beschriebenen Programme.

Im Buch »Generative Gestaltung« geht es darum, wie Bilder mittels Code erzeugt werden können. Ein Bild wird also nicht mehr »von Hand« geschaffen, sondern dadurch, dass eine visuelle Idee in ein Regelwerk übersetzt und dann in einer Programmiersprache in Form eines Quellcodes umgesetzt wird. Die Folge ist, dass ein solches Programm nicht nur ein einzelnes Bild erzeugen kann, sondern dass durch Veränderung von Parametern ganze Bilderwelten entstehen.

My name is Iñigo Quílez (you can use 'n', that's fine). I was born the May 24th of 1979 in San Sebastián (Donostia), a beautiful city of the Basque Country, somewhere in Europe (Spain). I love life, I admire the universe (in a pretty natural sense), and I enjoy skiing, mathematics, dance, computer graphics, mountains, and probably many other things I forgot by now. Also, I have a cv.

Ten years ago I started this site as some sort of boxroom where I could drop my fractals, demos and other creations. Soon I started adding explanations, tutorials and presentations too; even code and other random stuff like personal pictures and a blog. Then at some point I decided it was time to split the big mess into smaller messes and point to them from a common kind of index. Guess what, that index is exactly where you are right now.

I have spent a few weeks putting together a basic web site which uses Facebook connect as authentication.
Required Features
Check if user is already logged in to Facebook, if so, retrieve the fb_uid, name, profile pic
Return a list of friends which have also connected to this application

I added facebook connect to a site running PHP and using MySQL for the database; this tutorial assumes you will be doing so as well. I used Facebook’s PHP API to connect my site, and the same goes with that. If you’ve ever build a facebook application before, you’re familiar with Facebook’s API.

Facebook Connect allows web developers to leverage the Facebook social application for their own off-Facebook applications. This tutorial will walk you through setting up a new Facebook application for use with Connect and provide some examples on how to use the Quick Start Facebook Connect PHP API library.

There are several ways to backup MySQL data. In this article we’ll look at how to backup your databases using different methods, we will also learn how to achieve an automatic backup solution to make the process easier. Starting with the mysqldump utility that comes with MySQL, we will review several examples using mysqldump, including the backup of your database to a file, another server, and even a compressed gzip file and send it to your email.

The following are axioms for software architects by software architects. These axioms have been contributed under the Creative Commons, Attribution 3 open source license.

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
These are the axioms accepted into the book which will be published by O'Reilly Media next year.

Other Things Software Architects Should Know
These are axioms that were contributed and are good in their own right, but were not accepted into the "97 Things" book.

Continuous Deployment isn’t just an abstract theory. At IMVU it’s a core part of our culture to ship. It’s also not a new technique here, we’ve been practicing continuous deployment for years; far longer than I’ve been a member of this startup.

Forum about indie game development

This Web site is IBM's premier technical resource for software developers, providing a wide range of tools, code, and education on AIX and UNIX®, Information Management, Lotus®, Rational®, Tivoli®, WebSphere®, and Workplace, as well as on open standards technology such as Java™ technologies, Linux®, SOA and Web services, XML, and more.

I've compiled a small list of some useful code snippets which might help you when writing your PHP scripts...

I've come across several posts this year (and last) about MVC/MVP and patterns in general. I'm sick of MVC/MVP. I'm sick of the Pattern Police - everything must be a pattern - hmph!

The Model-View-Controller (MVC) Design Pattern is much heralded as the "Right Way" to build web applications. Although MVC is undoubtedly a valuable and useful way to architect such systems, I believe it goes far deeper than MVC alone.

Roll back the clock by two years. That’s before AJAX, before Web 2.0, before Rails. Where were we then? Well pondering whether MVC was really such a good idea after all. Continuing from there…

SimplePie is a very fast and easy-to-use class, written in PHP, that puts the ‘simple’ back into ‘really simple syndication’. Flexible enough to suit beginners and veterans alike, SimplePie is focused on speed, ease of use, compatibility and standards compliance.

A question I hear once in a while is "why not make all your textual columns TEXT instead of VARCHAR?" I've never heard a solid answer, so I decided to run a simple benchmark - the results are somewhat surprising.

CSP is a notation for describing concurrent systems (i.e., ones where there is more than one process existing at a time) whose component processes interact with each other by communication. Simultaneously, CSP is a collection of mathematical models and reasoning methods which help us understand and use this notation. In this chapter we discuss the reasons for needing a calculus like CSP and some of the historical background to its development.

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

In this TechTalk, Mike Andrews will look at how web applications are attacked, walk through a testing framework for evaluating the security of an application and take some deep-dives into a few interesting and common vulnerabilities and how they can be exploited.

Ooh, hello there! Welcome to Zombie Cow Studios: purveyors of fine electronic entertainment, beamed directly into your eyes and brain via the technological marvel of The Internet.

Hi, I'm Jeff, Lead Architect and Co-Founder of Orbus Gameworks, a game middleware company located in Cambridge, MA focused on providing metrics gathering tools. Before that, I was an associate programmer at Bethesda Game Studios and before that I was a lead programmer at a small government contractor.

Damion Schubert has been working with making and designing online games for over 10 years. Damion started working with text MUDs, where he did significant work for CarnageMUD, a game considered by industry experts to be very important in the future development of MUDdom. There, Damion met Raph Koster, who helped Damion get into the pay-for industry years later.

CodePlex is Microsoft's open source project hosting web site. Start a new project, join an existing one, or download software created by the community.

Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community that used the wisdom of crowds to discover new business and technology ideas. Find out more about us.
Today, Cambrian House focuses on developing companies that emerged from our crowdsourced discoveries.

List of many APIs and language reference documents

.net problems... thoughts on c#... programming stuff... notes... Usability... best practices...

coding convention for .net

Microsoft.Xna.ProgramManager.Overhead.SomeTimes

I've been with Microsoft for about ten years and have been working on getting managed code and gaming to come together for the better part of that. I originally wrote and did all the work for Managed DirectX back in the day, and for the last few years have been largely responsible for implementing the framework (graphics, audio, input, storage, etc) included in the XNA Game Studio line of projects.

Papers from pixar on general and special computer graphics problems

Tiffany B. Brown - a web log about web development and internet culture with frequent detours into other stuff.

My real name is Jari Komppa, born in 1975, Finnish, and I've done my military service. (Which just happens to be mandatory in Finland)