Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Thursday, 1st May 2008

Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming. Scarily detailed online book on games programming, including 2D and 3D graphics, AI, multiplayer network code, indoor and outdoor rendering, character animation and much more. UPDATE: Removed the original link, which appeared to be a pirated copy.

# 12:26 am / algorithms, games, programming

It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

Joel Spolsky

# 9:03 am / groove, joel-spolsky, livemesh, rayozzie, windowslivemesh

Adobe and Industry Leaders Establish Open Screen Project (via) Talk about burying the lede... the real story is that Adobe are going to drop the license restriction that prevents other people from implementing SWF players. They’re also publishing the AMF and Flash Cast protocols and removing licensing fees for Flash Player on devices.

# 9:43 am / adobe, amf, flash, flashcast, swf

Load Balancer Update. WordPress.com has switched from Pound to nginx for load balancing, resulting in a significant drop in CPU usage. I’ve been using nginx on my little VPS for over a year now with no complaints, nice to know it scales up as well as down.

# 10:06 am / load-balancing, nginx, pound, wordpress, wordpresscom

so-you-wanna-see-an-image (via) WordPress.com use Amazon S3 to store images (presumably to save having to create a massive scalable redundant filesystem themselves) but the images are served via a load balanced memcached / varnishd caching system that they control.

# 10:13 am / amazon-s3, caching, memcached, s3, varnishd, wordpresscom

jQuery style chaining with the Django ORM

Django’s ORM is, in my opinion, the unsung gem of the framework. For the subset of SQL that’s used in most web applications it’s very hard to beat. It’s a beautiful piece of API design, and I tip my hat to the people who designed and built it.

[... 820 words]

Consumption is also about choice. Tom Armitage’s thoughtful response to Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 talk on television as “cognitive surplus”.

# 1:01 pm / clay-shirky, cognitivesurplus, consumption, tom-armitage, tv

SourceForge Allows OpenID Logins. Excellent—SourceForge is the kind of site that I log in to infrequently enough to always forget my password (and indeed username) making OpenID a great fit.

# 1:05 pm / openid, sourceforge

2008 » May

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