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Tag Archives: Happiness

FAQoverflow Has Launched!

I’m very happy to announce that FAQoverflow has launched! Yay! Please take a look, by visiting www.faqoverflow.com, and please help to spread the word in whichever way you can. FAQoverflow is the coffee table book version of the StackOverflow (SO) family of Q&A sites. It contains great answers to questions about everything, and is ideal [...]

Zarch

My three favourite games of all time are Exile, The Sentinel and Zarch. Zarch is the name of a game on the Acorn Archimedes; I played the Amiga port, which was called Virus. In fact, Zarch itself was a full-fledged version of an Archimedes demo called Lander. David Braben (yes, he who, along with Ian [...]

Exile

My three favourite games of all time are Exile, The Sentinel and Zarch. Exile is an “arcade adventure” (a now defunct term; these days you’d call it an “exploration platformer”) that features realistic physics and AI, and which has a large map that was mostly procedurally generated (but then touched-up by hand). How could I [...]

FAQoverflow

StackOverflow is a Q&A website for professional programmers. Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood developed the concept as a direct competitor to Expert Sex Cha… errr, Experts Exchange, and I now find that answers on StackOverflow are often in the top few results when I search Google for geeky, programmer-type stuff. They’re doing some good things; [...]

LIMBO

I’m not in the business of reviewing games, or even caring whether anyone else likes the same games that I do. Having said that, I wanted to share my thoughts on LIMBO, the new XBLA title by PlayDead, which is precisely the kind of game I want to be making. I had my RROD’d XBOX [...]

Movie Science: My Theory of Inception

HERE BE SPOILERS I loved Inception, and I’m convinced that, unlike many movies that leave questions unanswered, there exists a single correct explanation of what happened (I reckon Nolan does know the answer, and will have placed enough evidence throughout the movie to allow others to find it). Here’s my theory. I plan to re-watch [...]

Amazing First Week

I sent out an email to a bunch of friends and family on Monday morning announcing the fact that I’ve resigned my job to focus on personal projects for the remainer of 2010. The response was overwhelming; I received many emails and phone calls, all very supportive, and some offering help. I’ve achieved the following [...]

The Great Productivity Experiment

2010 was to be my year of “no unfinished project”. I tried really hard to work 10 hours a week on “Postal Worker”, but slotting in two hours of development time between 9am and 1am each weeknight resulted in burnout (we have a new baby in the house, and I just couldn’t continue to burn [...]

Charcoal

For dinner tonight: 15 fresh clams, 15 fresh tiger prawns and a 750g silver perch, stuffed with spring onions and coriander. All cooked on a disposable charcoal barbeque and eaten with Thai “seafood sauce”, a delicious combination of green chilli, coriander, garlic and palm sugar. Smelled like Bangkok in our tiny back courtyard. Total cost: [...]

Deployment

Right happy with my new job this week… got some serious stuff done in four days, including a pretty comprehensive deployment script. And who can turn their nose up at free Nandos lunches, beer distribution while you work, and an empty office at 5pm every day?