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“Sketching is not only practical but essential. It is the quickest, most accessible way to find out if a space, a vista, a progression can work and also to communicate it to others.”
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“Why did we look up for blessing – instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon.” Ursula Le Guin’s 1983 commencement address at Mills College.
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“Making backup software that people can’t wait to try, and which, once activated, just automatically kicks in and does its thing on a regular schedule, is like making people want to go ahead and sign up for life insurance.”
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“The big labels want music to equal money, but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory…” A thoughtful post by DJ Rupture about the death of Oink from an artist’s perspective
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[this is good]. In fact, this is _very_ good and pretty much essential reading. I need to re-read; there were lots of lovely quotations that I wanted to jot down.
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“These are books that we like or that have influenced us. We hope you’ll find our remarks useful.” Very comprehensive – probably too much so – but some interesting titles I wasn’t aware of amid the sea of more obvious choices.
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A nice, quite easy-on-the-eye theme for TextMate. Works equally well with Ruby, HTML, PHP (from what I’ve tested) and separates markup and templating languages visually pretty well.
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“In a nutshell, this JavaScript adjusts the line-height of a container (such as a div) in proportion to it’s width, relative to the font size.” Nicely implemented typographic jQuery plugin
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Think helps you to selectively focus on one application at once. Not sure I’d use it all the time, but it works pretty well.
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Like Pyro for Basecamp: a product-specific client as a browser.
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“GreaseKit is successor of Creammonkey. This software adds Greasemonkey-like user scripting to Safari, Mailplane, Diet Pibb.app and all WebKit applications.” Looks good.
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“Sup is a console-based email client for people with a lot of email. It supports tagging, very fast full-text search, automatic contact- list management, custom code insertion via a hook system, and more.” It’s a bit like Mutt-meets-Gmail.
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Mailtrap helps you test ActionMailer: “Yesterday I mocked up the simplest, dumbest, Ruby SMTP server you can imagine. It speaks just enough SMTP to allow ActionMailer to make a connection and send it a message.”
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Rex Sorgatz on his essay in Wired, where he suggests that “gaming has become the prevailing narrative of our time.”
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“Why would I ever want to use Facebook as the UI for blogs? One simple reason: people as tags, tags as people.”
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“A man with only a PictoChat session has to convince the authorities that a major international incident is unfolding. Spies, diplomats, terrorists, SAS-style rescues. And a DS in almost every shot.” Any way you look at it: genius!
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“Dear Lazyweb, and also a certain you-know-who-you-are who should certainly know better by now, I am here to tell you about backups. It’s very simple.”
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Vitruvius is most famous for asserting in his book De architectura that a structure must exhibit the three qualities of firmitas, utilitas, venustas – that is, it must be strong or durable, useful, and beautiful.
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“SOAP Client is a free Cocoa-based developer tool for Mac OS X Tiger that allows you access and debug WSDL & SOAP-based Web Services from the comfort of your desktop.” Yuck, but might be useful.
Short notice: London Gamer Geeks pub quiz
24 October 2007
As part of the London Games Festival Fringe (and yes, the “Fringe” is important), the London Gamer Geeks are running a pub quiz in their monthly meeting slot.
Given that James, Dan and my good self are your hosts for the evening, this blogpost is my short notice announcement for the event. Anyone’s welcome – the quiz itself kicks off at half seven, but we’ll be at the pub from about half six. Early arrival strongly recommended if you want a table.
Details are at upcoming, if you’re interested. And, as if you needed any more reasons to attend… let it be known that there will be cake.
Here’s hoping for a good turn-out!
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Nicolas Nova on how to integrate pervasive gaming into the environment a little better.
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Forgotten how wonderful(ly dreadful) this collection of interaction cock-ups from Lotus Notes was. Bits of it are just painful.
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“If you want someone to fail, you want them to fail fast, before they spend a lot of money… [Miyamoto] would just say, ‘Find the fun, and I’ll be back in three months to take a look at what you have.'” Good advice.
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Bundle for TextMate that lets it edit (and use) the Taskpapers file format. Nice, simple. Might be effective, but there’s always that problem of distribution… so I might still be in Backpack for time being…
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“The default RSpec syntax is good, but it can’t be everything to everyone. If you’re not writing matchers, you’re missing out on the full potential of RSpec.”
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Simon does a nice big tutorial on writing bookmarklets. Which happens to be exactly what I need right now…
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“…I think the trick of Portal is that the AI NPC is really the player. The NPC addresses the PC in the same patronizing tone I address characters I control when they… slide off the platform I tried to land them on.”
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“It’s amazing how deeply embedded in our collective consciousness is the notion of the lethally impersonal corporation with a dead marketing voice.”
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“Lotus Notes, an application whose awkward integration of multiple feature sets I’ve only ever heard spoken about with violent disgust, promotes itself as freakish software. This is a campaign that can only make sense in the … world of enterprise soft
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“it’s the high price tags that invariably command a squadron of Suits whipping out their Powerpoint presentations and flying all over the place. That’s expensive, and customers are tired of it.”