links for 2009-05-23

  • In January 1977, the French Situationist Guy Debord founded the company "Strategic and Historical Games." This company had an immediate goal: to produce the "Kriegspiel," a "game of war" that Debord had already designed in his head years before. Inspired by the military theory of Carl von Clausewitz and the European campaigns of Napoleon, Debord's game is a chess-variant played by two opposing players on a game board of 500 squares arranged in rows of 20 by 25 squares.
    (tags: games war game)
Published
Categorized as Awareness

links for 2009-05-22

Published
Categorized as Awareness

links for 2009-05-15

  • DataIO is a web service that allows you to store data. It then allows you to query for the data in many different ways. This website also hopes to eventually be a tutorial for the different graphing libraries on the web.
  • The BuildBot is a system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects to validate code changes. By automatically rebuilding and testing the tree each time something has changed, build problems are pinpointed quickly, before other developers are inconvenienced by the failure.
Published
Categorized as Awareness

Six Reasons I Develop for Android

I wrote these up quickly for a friend who needed some bullet points for a proposal, and so I thought I’d just share them here, as well. Please comment with your own experiences with Android #WINs and #FAILs.

  • Development SDK is free, open-source and officially supported for Windows, Linux and Mac OS (iPhone is Mac OS only basically)
  • Java is the foundation for Android development vs. Objective-C on iPhone: many more Java developers and more affordable; ALSO a number of existing open-source Java libraries can run on Android, specifically Apache Commons client library code
  • Android devices have removable batteries and SIM cards and can be unlocked for use on other networks w/o breaking the law
  • Android devices have Micro SD based storage that can be easily removed; good for both application data distribution and security reasons
  • Android hardware supports a true digital compass (your software knows which direction your user is facing, not just GPS lat/lon), as well as (at least with G1 device) auto-focus 3 megapixel camera capable of barcode, fingerprint and human iris scanning
  • Finally, custom version of the Android OS can be built that are purpose-built, stripped down and customized for certain applications