I'm thrilled that Microsoft is opening up game development to non-professionals. I believe that the destruction of a steady path from enthusiast to power-user to programmer was one of the great tragedies of the 1990s. But the idea that XNA will be "YouTube of video games," conflates "point videocamera at …

That tail must be l-o-o-o-n-g indeed...

BTW, so here I am in the 99.96 percentile and my AdSense revenue is enough to buy a few lattes per month. Blogging is a marketing cost, not a direct income generator.

This code applies a BackgroundFunction to elements of an IEnumerable using the ThreadPool. If you don't know what that means, it's probably not of interest to you:

::: {style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; BACKGROUND: white; COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: Courier New"} [   10]{style="COLOR: #2b91af"}     [delegate]{style="COLOR: blue"} [void]{style="COLOR: blue"} [BackgroundFunction …

Ten years ago today I quit Miller Freeman, where I was an Editorial Director of the Software Development Unit (that is, a publishing unit that produced magazines on developing software) in order to launch 1711 Software, a company developing middleware for what would become known as massive multiuser role-playing-games.

Yes …

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to access the entirety of a blog post within my LiveWriter plugin. It's easy enough to embed an hReview in a post, but it's a harder matter to actually create a template. As far as I can tell, I can only edit the contents …

::: {#3FBB6C13-79A0-40b8-8A3A-160DEA9C52F3:02883555-b267-4c2f-90d4-6f77fe9f7526 .wlWriterEditableSmartContent contenteditable="false" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline; float: none;"} ::: {.hreview} 8/14/2006 10:48:27 AM by [[Larry O'Brien]{.fn}]{.reviewer .vcard}

::: {.item .fn} LiveWriter API :::

[]{.type style="display: none;"}

????? I take back my criticism. It is easy to write a plugin. (N.B …

I downloaded Windows Live Writer last night. It's definitely superior to writing in a browser window and setup -- generally a challenge with offline blog editors -- was okay (it didn't quite diagnose that I used dasBlog, but once I chose it manually, it worked out well. And configuring the FTP upload …

Microsoft has announced (well, not announced, but Gamasutra just spilled the beans) XNA Game Studio Express,  a free product which will allow independents and studios to write games for the XBox 360. It will actually cost \$99 to be able to deploy your games to the 360.

Oh, hey and …

Test.  Image upload working?

::: {.hreview} [0.2]{.version style="display: none;"}

Tufte's "Beautiful Evidence" Looks Great, Lacks Filling

Aug 13, 2006 by [Larry O'Brien]{.reviewer .fn} "Beautiful Evidence," by Edward Tufte

????? There's a sad irony in this book: Tufte is the guru of information density but his latest book contributes little to his previous …