I present: Pong in Silverlight

Update: I have now updated the game to work with the recently released Silverlight 2.

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]

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.]

[via GamePolitics.com]

I'm beached as!

My wife tells me a story about switching operating systems on her computer. In the middle, I have to go help our son with something, then forget to come back.

"Do you want to hear the end of the story or not?" she asks.

"Well...is there a payoff?"

"Fuck you."

It would have been a lot easier to have kept my mouth closed and listened to her. It reminds me of an issue I raised with Blanton: Why make waves? "Ninety percent of the time I love my wife," I told him. "And 10 percent of the time I hate her. Why should I hurt her feelings that 10 percent of the time? Why not just wait until that phase passes and I return to the true feeling, which is that I love her?"

Blanton's response: "Because you're a manipulative, lying son of a bitch."

(via Jeff Atwood)

[This post had been sitting in draft for damn-near 4 months now. God knows why it took me so long to get around to publishing it; I figure it's time now.]

I knew that Google Code Search existed, but rarely use it, so this is a great feature to, at the very least, remind people that Code Search exists.

ksubi's new site has hit the streets.

"a juxtaposition of complexity and simplicity, it manifests a non-directional and straightforward search engine design format"

I've been working on this site for a little while now, and I am so totally stoked to see it go live.

So, check it out!

First, head over and see the making of their Armadale, Melbourne store, made out of cardboard. Then, check out their trip across the US with an 8-foot hand sculpture. Finally, be sure not to miss their Magnum Opus (NSFW).

Once you've done all of that -- and browsed through their other stuff -- go buy something!

http://www.ksubi.com