Published 11 monthes and 2 weeks ago
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Received a few days ago the preliminary program for this year’s LuccaGames, one of the major yearly events in Italy regarding games and comics.
This year’s higlights seem to be some more space dedicated to videogames, a stable area devoted to LARP, the celebration of Star Wars 30th anniversary and some events related to german style games.
The fair is happening, as usual, around Halloween, precisely from 1st to 4th of November. Seems like a good opportunity to make a reality check on state of the art games.
hmmm… I wonder if there’ll be anything SL-related…
Update: just added the event on upcoming, may come useful…
Published 11 monthes and 3 weeks ago
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Yesterday, browsing through TUAW I stumbled upon moodswings, a plugin for QuickSilver that allows for simultaneous update of your status message through different chat system and web services (as of this version: Adium, iChat, Skype, Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook). It also incorporates some parsing magic to embed extra infos as your latest played track in iTunes or local weather. Sweet, we all love semantic sugar.
So I eagerly downloaded the thing and tried it… just to found out that the solution is not there, yet… or not so easy anyway: even with all the overlapping of communities that we are subject to, even with all the fuss and stress and tension toward DRY, still the affordance expressed by each and every of these tools is fairly different. The way I use twitter is far from the way I update my status on facebook (where also the implicit syntax is different), and then also on Skype it seem to me more natural to state my location and general availability rather than the microserendipities that I twitter about (oh, and speaking of Skype… have a look at the latest beta for Mac, AddressBook integration is -starting to be- sweet). Even Jaiku, that at first sight could seem just a perfect overlap on Twitter’s behaviour, moves in subtly different ways by the mean of commentability and the availability of channels.
In the end I think moodswing is an excellent starting point, but the next step must be the ability to differentiate the output on each channel, giving each one the right emphasys: in my case that would be location on Skype, mid-term focus on facebook, solipsistic haikus on twitter and so on.
Oh, and please, let’s add Plazes support :)
Published 11 monthes and 4 weeks ago
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Today I was feeling like writing on the other blog. It’s been a while: six months and a week. There is the place for code. This is the place for life. But for today let’s keep the door open.
Inspiration comes from the less suspected sources… so here’s how an enigma can turn into a media…
Here’s the story, and you can also have a look at the photoset.
Hat tip: Boing Boing!
For the first time in at least two months, the project that’s keeping me out of blogread/writing is bugless… I reckon a new wave will hit soon, but at least I can take a breath and blog a “heartbeat”.
Among the lessons learned in this period: managing self-expectations, how difficult is to KISS, coding is a good martial art and can teach you a lot (but details and bugs are still über-annoying, and you don’t get fit in the end), proper QA requires a lot of resources,
Other patterns that I’m currently trying to merge with my style include: behaviour driven approach (or design aestethics), scalable/trackable/atomic actions (or structural aestethics) and functional aestethics.
In case of development, these concepts map to, among others: rspec, capistrano, unobtrusive javascript
oh and agile, of course. It’s always nice to embrace agile things… make you feel lighter, slimmer, cooler. So for you agile-wannabes, here’s a video with an interesting intro quote:
In this presentation, we discuss how to keep that productivity while reducing the risk that chaos often brings. We examine key agile practices, that when applied judiciously to Ruby, retain the amazing productivity, improve the quality of the code, and still let the programmers have fun
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