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. =)

It's a dangerous business, going out your front door...

Java EE bad. Cobol great!

Quotes from Ars, on a study of bad coding practices in applications:

Java-EE applications [...] had the most problems on average, while Cobol and SAP's ABAP had the fewest.

So Cobol code is of higher quality than Java-EE.

Java EE's technical debt was pegged at $5.42 per line of code while Cobol impressed with a score of $1.26.

Cobol code is also cheaper to maintain.

Java was not the worst in terms of security, as .NET posted the worst security score and Cobol the best.

And more secure...

Time to brush up on our Cobol skills people! :-)

Make Install: AXR

This is a project I would like to see succeed: AXR, "The web done right". The following description comes from the site:

AXR stands for Arbitrary XML Rendering. Its aim is to provide a better alternative to HTML+CSS. It uses XML for the content and HSS for the design and simple behavior of the interface. HSS is a language based on CSS, but offers many more advanced features, such as object orientation, rule nesting, expressions, references to other objects, modularization (code reuse), etc.

It's still in its infancy, being mostly about getting a spec out. There is a prototype, but I dislike its license: GPL. This will kill adoption by commercial browsers.

Also, it would be nice if this was set up as a library for use in many different kinds of applications; not just browsers.  Something like this would be really cool for creating rich content applications.

Anyway, go take a look, and tell me what you think.