Well worth reading: What Makes Us Happy? The Atlantic (June 2009)  Bamboozling Ourselves – A seven part series of blog entries over at the New York Times about the art forger Han van Meegeren. He produced paintings in the style of Vermeer during the second world war and sold them to Nazis all the way up to Hermann Göring.

There are lots of nifty conferences out there for software developers, JavaOne, Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, Google I/O, etc. One of the best things about them is that many of them no longer treat all of the learning sessions and panel discussions held there as though they were treasure to be buried. Far more developers don’t get to attend these than do so sharing what the experts teach at the conference benefits everybody (including those who paid to go). Here’s a link to the video of all of the sessions from Google’s recent Google I/O conference. There are sessions there on AJAX, Android, OpenSocial, GWT, and lots more. Soak up all you can.

Google Gears was Google’s last attempt to make progress towards putting much more sophisticated applications into the browser. It gave the browser a local cache to hold files (HTML, CSS, images, etc.) and a database to soup up the client side capabilities of JavaScript code. With it you can make an offline version of your web application that can work without the Internet being available. Then they built on that by shipping their own browser (Chrome) which compiles JavaScript code to make more complicated applications feasible. Oh, and they made sure that Google Gears comes bundled with Chrome too. That’s a start at being able to make more sophisticated web applications in an operating system independent way, but their latest move is more than a shot across Microsoft’s bow, it’s more of broadside volley of cannon fire aimed directly at them. They’ve come up with a plugin architecture called Native Client. With it you can run code at nearly native speeds within a browser because most of the code is actually running right on the chip. No emulators, no virtual machines or interpreters (ala. Java, JavaScript, and Flash), just raw code running hell bent for leather with some code around it that checks it before running it to make sure it can’t do bad things and some other code the monitors it all the time it is running. To demonstrate they’ve ported Quake to Native Client as well as some other high performance applications and they’ve started asking people to test it on various operating systems and browsers. In fact they’ve even gone so far as to offer bounties people can earn for figuring out any way to exploit the system (i.e. to let people download something that should be safe but because of a Native Client flaw it can infect or damage their system in some way). Once they’ve got the kinks ironed out, I’m willing to bet money you’ll be seeing this bundled with a future version of Chrome.

An interesting article on building multi-processor machines based on the low power CPUs used in the newer netbook machines and flash memory. High performance but very low energy consumption compared to the kind of machines used by say Google or Facebook.

The documentary filmmaker who made BBS: The Documentary a few years ago about the BBS culture is making a new documentary about classic adventure games like Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, etc. It’s called Get Lamp and after I heard about it a long time ago I periodically remembered to go to its website only to find that nothing had happened. I figured that it was a promising project that would never get finished. But just recently the author started up a blog called Taking Inventory to say, “Hey, my project really isn’t dead. Look, I’m working actively on it!” Some of the recent postings show some awesome photos of the research material Jason Scott has gleaned for this documentary including tons of material about Infocom and even scans of an original manual for Zork on the PDP-11. If the topic interests you, start tracking the RSS feed for this blog. I look forward to seeing the final product.

The contest to create a complete PBBG in two months has concluded and unfortunately Big Villain is just not ready yet. It’s a shame it wasn’t ready in time, but after about a month I was already getting pretty doubtful. It’s just too big a game for me to complete by myself in that timeframe with all the other stuff I have to do in my life. Nevertheless I’ve had a ton of fun working on it and absolutely nothing is going to stop me from completing it. I was working on the design of the site just last night to try and get it to something that doesn’t make your eyes bleed when you look at it. Hopefully by next week I’ll have accomplished that. Anyway, some people did finish their games in the allotted time. Here are the final entries (though I’m not sure you can get into all of them yet, I think some authors were only planning on letting in the judges at this point): http://www.moonstone-rpg.com/ http://www.tygras.com/ http://www.piratesglory.com/ http://www.cubiclebattles.com/ http://www.npcrpg.info/ http://www.mageduels.net76.net/ http://www.iron-empire.com/ http://www.eternobeads.com/heroGame I’m planning to take a look at each one I can and see what others were able to accomplish since October 11th when the contest started. I’m alternately impressed and disappointed with what I myself was able to accomplish in the same period of time. I figure I’ve got at least another six weeks or so of part time work before I’ll be ready for a beta of my game.

We had to say goodbye today to somebody who had been a family member since shortly after Alan was born. Since we had to put him to sleep because cancer was killing him, I felt like telling the story of how Wellington came to be my cat. My then mother-in-law Mia Martin had come to visit the apartment my ex-wife and I were in at the time. Corina opened the door to let her in and before we knew what had happened a gangly little American Shorthair kitten raced through the door. I was leaning back on the sofa with my legs out in front of me and he went straight up my legs and my torso until he stood on my chest nose to nose with me. He sniffed my face thoroughly and purred very very loudly. In fact, that was the distinguishing characteristic for Wellington in those days, his purr. You could hear it from ten feet away and although I don’t think he was quite as loud at 15 as he was at four months, he still managed a pretty loud purr last week. Mia told us that he was just hanging around outside the door of our apartment and she had thought maybe we knew who he was. We didn’t know and when we asked around no-one ever admitted to being missing one kitten, so he became ours (well, mine really). It was always easy to remember how old he was, the vet said he was approximately four months old and Alan had just turned four months old. I’ll save you details of his death other than to say that he didn’t suffer, he just decided it was time to die and we put him to sleep before he did start suffering. Wellington, we love you.

I use Passenger to drive my Ruby on Rails projects I run at home on my Mac. I used to use Mongrel as my server, in fact that’s what LOL runs on today. But I’ve had such good experiences with Passenger that I’m planning to switch LOL to it as well as using it for Big Villain when it’s ready. Phusion is holding a fund raiser prior to releasing the next version of Passenger and trying to raise $14K. Given the amount of work it represents and the level of importance that it is rising to as a server in the Rails world, I think that if you do Ruby on Rails development you should give at minimum a few dollars to support its continued development. I made my contribution and I’ve both Twittered and blogged about the fund raiser as well and I hope you will too.