Game Developer's Conference Is Now Huge

This is fascinating: in a time where the common wisdom is that "big" industry conferences have met their doom, the Game Developer's Conference has just announced that they are doubling the size of their floor space (i.e.: making money from people spending tens of thousands of dollars in setting …

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Test Drive Unlimited With A Steering Wheel

The slow boat from Amazon finally brought my copy of Test Drive Unlimited, a "massive multiuser online racing game" set on the island of Oahu. At first, I was slightly disappointed, since while the layout of the streets is based on reality, the scenery isn't. So it's not like you're …

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Pete Wright Ends Relationship With MS to Embrace Ruby on Rails

Pete Wright, whose TabletPC Sudoku program was "shot in the head" by Microsoft's surprise release of their own version (join the group, Pete!), has ended his long relationship with MS consulting in order to fully embrace a job working with Ruby on Rails. His post is obviously cathartic, but he …

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Presentations from Lang.NET 2006

I greatly regret having missed this conference, but personal issues trumped my travel plans. Videos (audio over PPT) of many presentations are now available. I haven't watched them myself yet, but word is that Cory Doctorow's presentation on SecondLife was a standout.

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Why Johnny Can't Code

The most-excellent SF author David Brin has an article on Salon called "Why Johnny Can't Code" (you have to sit through a commercial to gain access). In it, he laments the approachability of dear-old "line oriented" BASIC, by which, I think he means that era of BASIC when every line …

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Review: Dragon Book, 2nd Edition

\<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321486811/thinkinginnet-20"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Compilers: Principles, Techniques, & Tools 2nd Ed. by Aho, Lam, Sethi, & Ullman is the perfect book for two niches: people writing C compilers for embedded processors and CS students running the gantlet of compiler courses …

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Microsoft DSL Tools: Rosetta Stone Needed (Calc Anyone?)

Twenty minutes ago I was throwing up my hands in despair at the C# code being generated by ANTLR and, turning to my blogreader, saw that Microsoft has released the documentation for their DSL (Domain-Specific Language) tools. Boy, is that a frustrating set of Web pages.

I'm all for revisiting …

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Free Dog!

"Dog The Bounty Hunter" Duane Chapman, his son Leland (who we see around town), and Tim ("Youngblood") have been arrested and are facing extradition to Mexico. They are charged with kidnapping (bounty hunting being illegal in Mexico) a man who's now serving a 124-year sentence for rape. I wonder if …

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