2008.07.02
Quote of the Moment
You learn something every day... ...and then forget it every night
Brilliant Hack of the Moment
--SpindlyQ, founder of Glorious Trainwrecks (who run that game jam I join every month) has made a way of playing the old Mike Tyson boxing game with the GameCube Bongo Controllers... "Mike Tyson's Jungle Beat"! It brings back a buch needed element of physicality to the game.
Personal and Professional Geekery of the Moment
Here mostly for reference: On kind of a lark, but useful for my team at work, a kind of dumb and slow 3D grapher of test results.
But also, a VERY excellent introduction for experienced programmers, Dive Into Python. It's free, you can download the whole thing as a single HTML page... and it doesn't pretend it has to teach you the fundamentals of programming, it just walks you through the structures and pointing out similarities and differences with other languages such as Java and Perl and even VBScript and PowerBuilder.
At work people are pointing out I should be using Python and not Perl. Which is tough... I realize I've been doing Perl for 14 years! But with this introduction, I'm digging Python. It's like a middle ground between Perl and Java. The "white space matters" thing is a bit overplayed (just like "unreadable Perl code" is overdone...) you can put in as much white space as you want, you just need to get the indenting right.
That whole Coors "tells you when its cold" can makes me weep for civilization.
Got my group to call itself "Team Angry Manatee" for at least a month... YES!