Silverlight Pong
A couple months back I finally got around to purchasing some web hosting, and while I'm yet to build a nice, full site, I figured I'd show off a little project I made in Silverlight/C#.
I present: Pong in Silverlight
Update: I have now updated the game to work with the recently released Silverlight 2.
One for Jeremy
Sex and the semicolon at the Boston Globe.
Nevertheless, the semicolon has been suffering. Paul Collins, in a recent Slate article, cited a study showing "a stunning drop in semicolon usage between the 18th and 19th centuries, from 68.1 semicolons per thousand words to just 17.7."
You'd think a victory like that would satisfy the anti-semicolon crowd. But no, they keep worrying that those girly, prissy, hermaphroditic punctuation marks will somehow infect their sturdy prose. [...]
I am unashamedly a fan of the poor, under-utilised semicolon -- mostly just because I think it looks cool.
[via Arts & Letters Daily]
19th Century Advertising, An Electric Car, Conway’s Law, and Why Gustavo Duartes Love Programming
Gustavo Duartes expresses why he's Lucky to be a Programmer:
Few things are better than spending time in a creative haze, consumed by ideas, watching your work come to life, going to bed eager to wake up quickly and go try things out. I am not suggesting that excessive hours are needed or even advisable; a sane schedule is a must except for occasional binges. The point is that programming is an intense creative pleasure, a perfect mixture of puzzles, writing, and craftsmanship.
Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic writes about the Chevrolet Volt, a new electric car from General Motors
With the Chevy Volt, General Motors—battered, struggling for profitability, fed up with being eclipsed by Toyota and the Prius—is out to reinvent the automobile, and itself.
Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the Mirroring Hypothesis: a rather dryly-titled (aren't they all, though?) paper taking a look at Conway's Law, and empirically testing it on similar open source and proprietary software development efforts.
And finally, straight from 1898, Claude C. Hopkins's book Scientific Advertising was recently brought to my attention. I'm yet to fully read it, but seems like a very thorough write-up of the foundations of advertising, and being written in 1898, can at times paint quite a picture of life back in that time. [Another PDF version here.]