Well slap me silly !

Once Upon a Time at the Office

We catch them bugs faster than our shadow !

Kinect

You've probably all heard of the Kinect and the fact that it only took about three hours after release before someone got it running on Linux. A lot more has been done in the mean time, and creativeapplications.net has a nice writeup of it.

As an aside, it turns out that one of the blogs I read, dadhacker, is actually written by one of the Kinect developers. It's just too bad he can't tell any behind-the-scenes tales. Ah well...

And, of course, there is also Johnny Chung Lee who has been working on Kinect. If you have seen any footage of a Wiimote being used for a cheap multi-touch screen, that was probably Johnny. He's even featured on TED.

Update: There is some more fun stuff over at Ars Technica.

Ico

Ars Technica has a really nice article on one of my all time favourite games: Ico.

If you've never played this game then seeing some screenshots or reading about how beautiful it was will probably not mean much to you. But I don't know of anyone who has played Ico who didn't step away without some sort of emotional experience, without some real connection to this game.

The article says this is a game you should play alone. I understand, but I don't really agree. I played through this game with a good friend, and whether you're playing or simply watching, it's a great experience either way.

Real-time Path Traced Minecraft

Like the rest of the internet I too am playing Minecraft these days. It's fun, but for me there's too much mining and too little building. For me, it could be a bit more Dwarf Fortressy...

Anyway, back to the geekiness which Minecraft seems to generate in huge amounts: here is a guy who set up a real-time path traced Minecraft.

Ze Frank says you're ok

The absolute best part is at the end; but you're a fool if you don't watch this in full.

Koopa 1up

If you're a Koopa developer the following should cheer your day: I reworked Koopa's build system so that you can compile everything from a simple 'ant clean all'. Up until now I have been relying on Eclipse and the ANTLR IDE to compile everything for me (minus a few tasks which I did automate). This made it hard for new developers to get going (yes, there actually are a few brave souls who gave it a try). The new system should take away that problem.

Look for the updated system in subversion on sourceforge.