Dec 30 2006
Nancy and I have begun exploring game development for the Nintendo DS. We found that most of the material available online wasn’t of the greatest quality. So we set up nds-homebrew.net to be a repository of the useful information we find, as well as being home to a blog tracking our efforts and progress.
The blog is there now, and more structured information will follow.
Tags: ds games nintendoDec 29 2006
Dec 24 2006
Dec 22 2006
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I’ve started reading the 2nd edition of “The Ruby Way” by Hal Fulton. So far it’s been good. I’ve been popping it open somewhat randomly so far, but plan to take a more structured look at it shortly. I enjoyed the overview of OO as applied to Ruby as well as the section on Rubyisms and idioms. This is a big book, and looks very comprehensive. I’m looking forward to working through it. One thing I have noticed… and I don’t know Hal so I’m not sure… is that there are comments regarding programming language issues that seem to indicate a lack of familiarity/awareness of Rubys grand-daddies: LISP & Smalltalk. Comments like “in more recent languages such as Java, memory is reclaimed…” Both LISP and Smalltalk had garbage collection. In fact that’s where the majority of GC research was done. This however is a minor quibble. This is a book about Ruby, and a good one at that. |
Dec 21 2006
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This was an excellent read. It was a nice, not-quite-so-well-known tale of Apple’s early days. The writing/style seemed genuine and authentic. Granted, Woz did a LOT of the inovative, groundbreaking work in the personal computer industry, but he sounds almost braggy at times in the book. Sure.. he created the first breakout game, wrote the first videogame (breakout on the Apple 1), and almost singlehandedly designed what is arguably THE earthshattering invention of the 20th century (at least as far as computing is concerned)… the Apple ][. Highly recomended, this is a great read. |
Dec 21 2006
We celebrate Yule (winter solstice) rather than Christmas, so we do our gift giving 4 days before most of you.
This has been a very Nintendo-heavy season. It’s hard to say what’s the coolest: the 1-up mushroom T, the DS homebrew hardware, or what….
But I think it’s between the Opera DS browser and the gold stylus and Magnetica.
In fact, I’m writing this post using my DS. How cool is that!
Dec 10 2006
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TextMate Power Editing for the Mac James Edward Gray II |
I’ve read a couple of the beta versions of this book from the Pragmatic Press. It’s good. If you are using TextMate, you should have this book. The current documentation for TextMate is pretty lame. This book does an admirable job of filling that void.
The writing style is easy to read, and is quite information dense. Content goes from basic cursor movement all the way to custom language support. It’s a good read, and packed with valuable and useful information.
That said, while I’m impressed with the book, I’ve become less and less impressed with TextMate itself. It’s a wonderful text editor and a sweet Mac app, and will long have a place on my dock. But for serious programming, it doesn’t cut it. I’ve gone back to “old faithful”… my constant companion from from way back.. GNU Emacs. If you’re doing serious programming, there’s nothing like Emacs.
Tags: books emacs reviews textmate
