Backseat Playground is a research project that developed a GPS-based game for kids. It seems more like a (great) storytelling system more than a game. Basically, it uses the GPS and location-awareness to introduce game elements, e.g., when it sees that you're driving over a bridge, it presents you …

\<a href="http://www.knowing.net/images/ComputersoftheAncientGeeks_74BC/image05.png"" atomicselection="true">Scientists have reverse engineered the Antikythera Mechanism, a sophisticated analog computer that was known to have calculated lunar phases and a luni-solar calendar. Newly reported is that it additionally calculated lunar and solar eclipses! Additionally, it may have …

Damien Guard has done some work on a great looking monospaced font. He hasn't finished it yet, so be sure to post about it so that he gets a whole bunch of technorattention for the project and is shamed into finishing it. (via Brad Wilson)

Julie Lerman parsed from an email of mine that I :

• am "kinda nervous" about Tina's first mammogram since her mastectomy,
• was "scared" by the 12' tiger shark I saw while diving the other day, and
• am "terrified" of installing a new hard drive

Apparently, I've got an inverter on my …

Microsoft has posted version 1.1.13.8 (whatever the heck that means) of their F# compiler, which gives me an excuse to discuss the book Practical OCaml by Joshua Smith.

Practical OCaml is a new release from APress. My favorite technical book of last year was Practical Common Lisp …

This post is attempting to measure the speed with which a blog post can propagate across the blogosphere. Feel free to link to it.

Here's a good pattern to use when you have a domain object that combines non-varying and time-varying data. Perrin's modified the original pattern to use generics: a good choice. (Why is it a good choice? Because objects that combine these two types of data are usually conceived of in a …

If you're looking for the perfect Christmas gift for a geek and your budget is around \$1800, this reproduction of the kit that started it all would be perfect.

A few days ago was launched the biggest, most experienced, development tools company to be created since the dot-com era. A company that's explicitly turning away from managerial buzzwords in order to concentrate on language implementations, libraries, and tool-chains that will cross platforms. The company includes people who developed some …

There was a short piece on the news last night about a \$540M travel reservation system developed to aid the Department of Defense manage their travel costs (in peacetime). Apparently, it doesn't work (doesn't deliver low fares) and even if it did work, it would take 20 years of projected …