Archive for August, 2003

free MIT education material - OpenCourseWare

Tuesday, August 26th, 2003

Wired article on MIT’s OpenCourseWare course materials.

all current courses. Here for example are lecture notes downloads for a software engineering course, and lecture notes on “problems of philosophy”.

OpenCourseWare FAQ.

article: writing a Jabber IM log4j appender

Wednesday, August 20th, 2003

“Harness the power of log4j with Jabber”.

This new developerworks article is primarily a tutorial on Log4j custom appender creation. It does demonstrate simple use of Jive Software’s “Smack” API for Jabber, however. (August 12, 2003)

Eiffel on .NET

Wednesday, August 20th, 2003

MSDN article: “Full Eiffel on the .NET Framework” (about a year old).

free eiffel programming software

Eiffel.NET basic tutorials: 1, 2, 3

I should concentrate on improving my Python knowledge rather than starting on another lang, but I’ll bookmark this stuff here for now. The promise of being able to use a language with proper DBC support along with .NET’s big class library is tempting, though I expect you can’t make any assertions about what the class library calls give you?

I don’t see much on Python on .NET

audiopad: medialab tangible interface (to music sequencer)

Sunday, August 10th, 2003

Audiopad is an instrument for electronic musical performance that aims to combine the modularity of knob based musical controllers with the expressive character of multidimensional tracking interfaces. The performer’s manipulations of physical pucks on the Sensetable control a real-time synthesis process. The system projects graphical information on and around the pucks to give the performer sophisticated control over the synthesis process.”

I had to look at the video to see it being used, before I got an idea of why this might be a nice interface. Pretty.

via PixelMagick

Extreme Programming for Game Dev Teams

Sunday, August 10th, 2003

Extreme Game Development: Right on Time, Every Time

A Gamasutra article (the start of a series) in which Titus relate their approach and results with two games projects they are running with an agile “Extreme Games Development” production method.

May require simple registration.

Looking back, in 2000, there was also this article on how CreatureLabs automated the Creatures 3 build process. (mostly using perl, bash).

Fred Brooks on adding process discipline without dampening creativity as teams grow

Sunday, August 10th, 2003

“Programming effort in a start-up (company or project) usually begins with a solo programmer and grows to a small team. Then, with luck, it grows to a large team. And radically changes character! Here lurk all the difficulties of software engineering. Growth is gradual, and change often imperceptible, until suddenly the project is in trouble. Process discipline has become necessary, often well before it was developed. What discipline? When? How, without dampening creativity?”

Long video of Fred Brooks’ presentation: small to large: what changes? at GDC 2003. (Gamasutra. May require simple registration. The mic feedback isn’t a problem after a couple of minutes).

voice comms in multiplayer games spoil immersion

Sunday, August 10th, 2003

Not yet, you fools! - Richard A. Bartle on why voice comms in MUDs is a bad thing. I think it hurts a lot of otherwise immersive multiplayer online games which aren’t roleplaying (yelping 14-yr-olds on Natural Selection). It seems to matter less on CS which is mostly about bitching, anyway. I know the book “My tiny life” would never have been written, and the culture it reports would never have existed, had MUDs grown up with voice chat a feature.

I though the introduction of graphics into MUDs a Bad Idea. I haven’t played to find out one way or the other - MUDs are just too addictive - but my DAoC pals tell me otherwise.

The comments on the article are quite good: “I’ve been playing EQ for over three years now and it is the first game I felt comfortable roleplaying in. That may get ruined if I ever had to say the cheezy lines that I normally type.”

XIII playable demo

Sunday, August 10th, 2003

XIII playable demo (PC, 80meg). via penny arcade. The same posting says you can enjoy league of extraordinary gentlemen if you (among other things) undertake to “Deny That There Is A Rational God Which Regulates The Quality Of Human Endeavor”.

ibm wsad 5.1 out now (eclipse 2.1)

Friday, August 8th, 2003

Out today, IBM announces WSAD 5.1.

The biggest deal, I think, is that it’s based on eclipse 2.1 instead of 2.0. Oh and there’s weblogic server deployment support finally.

Disappointingly, db model support still not real: “There is currently no support for modeling indexes, check and unique constraints, triggers, structured types, or identity columns.” The struts support looks to have been vastly speeded up.

kidrobot toystore

Tuesday, August 5th, 2003

cool vinyl figures and other dinky toys at kidrobot. via the pretty my first mine.

just misc links for us

Monday, August 4th, 2003

history of roller performance - Dave Johnson.

couple of java/mozilla projects mentioned at the server side (java.mozdev.org)

Erik Hatcher’s second article on xdoclet + struts - the validator.

more half-life 2 movies - in particular, the one named “trap town” is excellent, showing the physics engine off as items and the map are interacted with. either there’s some good AI or quality scripting there, too.

article on hibernator (eclipse plug-in)

Monday, August 4th, 2003

Newbie article on using hibernate, specifically with the hibernator eclipse plug-in. From db2 dev domain library.