Horror Vacui

distellamap

Building upon his work in dismap and mariosoup, Ben Fry has created poster-sized images from the data in Atari 2600 games. They visualize the logic flow throughout the assembly code, while showing the graphics data assets in-line at their appropriate memory addresses.

The temptation to buy the Pitfall print is overwhelming.

Twitter's New Search Architecture

Twitter has impressed me with a couple things in this article.

First, they’re using, improving on, and contributing back to open source. This is admirable on its own merits, and the work they’ve done certainly seems impressive. Second, is that they called out the names of the engineers who did the work at the end of the article.

That second bit impresses me for a couple of reasons.

It flies in the face of the trend which seems to aim to hide the identities of those who do the engineering at big companies. Apple is one example of a company that used to be very public about crediting those whose work was on display in a product. Famous examples include the Macintosh team’s signatures being molded into the inside of the early cases. Their application’s about windows also once proudly named (and sometimes pictured) the program’s creators. Of course, Apple no longer does these things, and one possible explanation is that they want to keep the identity of their talented folks away from other organizations that might attempt to hire them away.

Now, obviously I don’t know the minds of those at Twitter. But the second part that impresses me is the simple act of giving the engineers public credit. It’s so simple that it ought not to be remarkable at all. Yet, it’s rare enough that I feel the need to give it some respect. If Twitter management “gets it” like I hope they do, they understand that a lot of what motivates engineering types is having a hard problem to work on, figuring it out, and then getting the respect of ones peers for the work. Mega-bonus points for lauding how awesome it is to anyone who will listen. That simple act gets you a bunch of happy, loyal, motivated engineers, and costs you almost nothing.

Tuning Canabalt

The author of the immensely popular Flash and iOS game, Canabalt, has written a blog post in which he explains some of the technical parameters and gameplay design decisions that went into getting the right game experience. Interestingly, most of the tuning was done to make the game more forgiving to the player. I think this points to the greater truth that all software should aim to be more forgiving to its users.

Terminitor - GitHub

Each time you sit down to work on a project do you find yourself repeating the same steps to get your command line environment ready?

Written by Arthur Chiu of the Padrino team, Terminitor (think: Terminal init’er) is a program for Mac OS X that uses AppleScript to quickly configure your Terminal workspace by automatically making tabs and running commands according to a configuration file you define.

Update from source control, open a MySQL prompt, run your tests, and start your web server; all in different tabs; all with one command. This is already saving me tons of keystrokes.

Google AI Challenge

Everyone loves a good AI competition! Organized by the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club and sponsored by Google, this year’s event pits participants’ AIs against each other in a game they’re calling Planet Wars.

Based on the popular game, Galcon, players send their forces around a 2D map with the goal of conquering all of the planets or exterminating their opponent. Galcon was one of the first games I bought for my iPhone, so I’ll be interested to see how this competition progresses!

Google Code University

This page contains classes, lectures, and tutorials about various computer programming languages. The technology lectures and classes provide a great way to pick up some new knowledge about your programming language of choice.

Nice. It’s a little sparse right now, but it’s hard to complain about another free coding resource from Google.

Swarmation

A fun entry in the Node.js knockout coding competition. It’s an entertaining game while also being an impressive tech-demo-slash-proof-of-concept.

It works great in Safari and Chrome, but I’ve heard about issues in Firefox.

Learning Ruby with the EdgeCase Ruby Koans

This is a simple, great way to test and improve your Ruby knowledge.  It presents its challenges in the form of failing unit tests. Make them pass one-by-one and meditate on what you have learned.