World of Warcraft, keeping track of TODO items, and more.
Phasing in World of Warcraft : One of my biggest gripes with current gen MMOS is that, in fact, you as a participant in those online, virtual, worlds usually don't get to shape in any way or form the world structure, physically or otherwise. It seems the wizard at Blizzard found a way to ease by employing the 'phasing' concept. Read on for more.
Erlang vs Scala : I like Erlang (related post) for various reasons, none of them related to it being partially a functional language. Apparently, twitter switched to Scala from Ruby (the kind of mistakes people make) and it has worked pretty well, so far, for them.
As I was, perhaps not so actively, looking for better ways to organize my life, I have been lucky enough to realize the obviousness of the truth; nothing beats using a text file for my needs set. I maintain a single TODO.txt file. This file resides in ~/Dropbox/TODO.txt, my Dropbox folder. There is an alias (symbolic link) to my desktop for that file. So whenever I think of something, I write it down there. Most of the times I devote a whole space (virtual desktop) to an vim window for that file so whenever something comes in mind, I switch to that desktop and write it down. Because of Dropbox, whenever I use another computer ( be it my iMac at work, my MBP, etc ) I will continue to use the file the same way; it will be kept in sync thanks to Dropbox's mirroring facilities. Because its a text file, I can format and rearrange the text it however I want, find stuff on it using spotlight, move things I consider more important to the top, build lists, you name it. I also tend to 'migrate' things from that file to my bookmarks, my 'notes vaults' folder files, other text files that I use for keeping track of 'domain specific' information(related post). Other times, I just complete tasks or implement ideas and remove the respective content from the file. If you are tired of trying one application after the other hoping to find the one true solution to this problem, perhaps you should sit back and look at the bigger picture; Simple solutions work best.
Wednesday, 26 November 2008 9:55 pm
Links 26.11.2008
Javascript - The Good Parts : Yahoo's chief javascript architect, revered Douglas Crockford talks all (good) things Javascript.
The Art of Hashing : Most high level programming languages performance and dynamic nature is defined by the efficiency and power of the hash table implementation(s) they employ. Enough said.
Programming with Linux on the PS3 : In case previous blog posts didn't make it clear enough, I absolutely love the Cell processor architecture, much as I like Sun's Ultraspark and Intel's Core 2, albeit for different reasons.
Tamarin Internals : I wonder how long it will take for someone to do the smart/right thing. Use LLVM to build a super fast Javascript runtime. Not long, most likely.
RISC vs CISC in the mobile era : RISC, FTW!
Linux assemblers: A comparison of GAS and NASM : GAS has been more than fine for my needs, plus I prefer AT&T syntax over Intel's.
Wednesday, 26 November 2008 0:13 am
Links 25.11.2008
Detecting spam just from HTTP headers : Simple ideas sometime work unexpectedly well.
Google Exec hints at Future Open Platform : This comment sums it up nicely.
Which Phone to develop for? : Almost 4 billion cell phones in the wild, what are the odds an app, any app, wouldn't sell in such a market? Speaking of which, I am extremely let down by Apple Developer Connection folks. I faxed them my credit card information ( you need to pay them $99 before you are able to deploy an application on your iPhone and eventually to the App Store ) and haven't heard from them since ( over a month now ). I even tried to call them and contact ADC US, to no avail.
CouchDB implementaton : I am not big on document oriented databases, mostly because of the performance penalties that come from the lose (i.e not based on well defined structures ) representation of objects(that is, rows).
Sorting Algorithms Animations : A page that provides visualizations of the operation of 8 different algorithms. What is indeed the most important thing to remember, as noted by the author, is that there is no best sorting algorithm. Quicksort may be the most frequently used (at least, I would hope so..) sorting algorithm, but others can be more effective ( depending on the set size ) or more appropriate (i.e merge sort for sorting large data sets ).
Getting to now GCC 4 : We are moving from GCC 3.2 to 4.1 soon. Code compiles over 50% faster across the board and it seems the compiler backend is able to generate much tighter code this time around. I still wish I could get my hands on icc
id Software Code Style Conventions3d engine technology of latest games : Gears of War 2 and Fable 3 indeed look gorgeous. I have to second the author's comment on Fallout 3 though. If they had implemented world shadows the lame would probably look at least a whole lot better, not that it doesn't look spectacular any way.
Tuesday, 25 November 2008 0:55 am