Julia

The Julia programming language seems really interesting. Julia has a combination of cool features: multimethods, coroutines, macros, meta-programming, generics, distributed computing (with cloud-computing in mind), etc.

She can even call Fortran code. What ever was wrong with Cobol as a target ? :-)

Make install: Rasp's game

Rasp is working on a 2D isometric roguelike using Slick, a Java 2D game library. And he's blogging about it. It's still in the early stages, but the graphics look good. His approach to lighting, with colour blending, makes for some nice screenshots. And he shows you how it's done.

Go check it out. And if you know of other programmer blogs please let me know!

Being a geek dad...

Is watching my two-and-a-half year old daughter using an iPad like she's never done anything else in her life. Now, to be clear, I didn't buy the iPad for her. I originally bought it for my wife. But it's my daughter who seems to get the most out of it. And it's not just simple games either (Toca Boca games are superb by the way); she starts up and changes apps like it's the most natural thing to do.

My own first encounters with technology were goofing around on an Apple II clone, getting it to print something to the screen. Followed by a Game Boy (the original one) when I was ten or so. My little girl has exponentially more power under her fingertips, and she uses it without thinking twice about it. To me that's just amazing. It shows not only how far computers have come in power, but also in accessability.

It also makes me wonder what she could be doing in another year's time...

ScummVM

There's in an excellent article over at Ars Technica which tells the story of ScummVM. Great read about a fun open source project.

Ludum Dares have some nice side effects

For instance, you get to watch Notch create a 2.5D dungeon crawler in just two days time!


Update: Here are links to recordings of the full livestream. The very first part starts here.

Stop weird machines

Related gotcha which takes some time to get your head around: code is data and data is code.

In space...

...no one can hear you scream.


As a fan of Alien, I'm looking forward to (what looks like) this new installment by Ridley Scott. Fun fact: the Alien franchise is as old as I am. =)