Netscape for web developers
article on 
can use
If you develop web sites these days you need to make sure you can support at least IE and
Eolas, plug-ins and stupidity
Internet Explorer (and possibly every other browser including
“Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document”
The result is
If you have automatic Windows update, you’ll get it on April 11th as a critical update.
Wikipedia article.
Baekdal article
XForms
programming and
foo[] naming convention).
XForms improves on this by separating forms into different parts, primarily models and user interface (well technically what I’m referring to as models is split into abstract models and instances but that’s like talking about classes and objects). The models are just chunks of
The structuring of the data may well be enough to warrant the adoption of XForms, but it’s a little better than that. When I say the XML (or more correctly the model) is modified by the user interface, the modifications are held in memory by the client (probably a browser) and any references to the model should change accordingly. This allows some stuff that would usually require clever
There are a lot more possibilities, this really is just the tip of the iceberg. To find out more, search for XForms 
There is a problem though, support in browsers. You can get a plugin for IE6 that handles XForms but requires the page include the plugin. You can get an extension for
Got Mono?
Microsoft released the
Mono is a cross-platform implementation of .NET complete with a execution environment (
The best thing about Mono is that it has stimulated development of .NET tools by people who normally wouldn’t touch Microsoft if they could avoid – specifically lots of open source developers. This includes the creation of some brand new programming languages such as
Normally a programming language with very few users is useless – libraries won’t exist and you’ll have to do lots from scratch and things are generally bad. However since every
An important part of Mono for cross platform use is the development of
Mono Project]]>
Distinctive Developments
Distinctive Developments is a leading developer of games for mobile phones. I really should emphasise the leading part since one of their games, 3D Pool was actually nominated for a BAFTA (I didn’t even know they had a game section).
They’ve also done titles with top licences including the FIFA series on mobile phones as well as Shrek 2: Puss In Boots and Madagascar.
There are two problems with this personally though – firstly I myself don’t care for mobile phones games and secondly most of their games are sports based, which I’m also not especially bothered about…
A couple of PS2 gems?
I was glad I did.
It has two demos of games that look really cool (and they're already out).
The first is Fahrenheit (although it was renamed before the launch - search GameSpot for Fahrenheit and it comes up). You control a guy who has just done a murder and you have to (basically) escape from the police. But it is so much more than that. Firstly, the genre is closest to point-and-click adventure ala Broken Sword, except it's in 3D - you just move near objects and push the right analog stick in different directions to do different context-sensitive actions. Another point is the emphasis on story - you get to see things that are happening elsewhere that you wouldn't normally know about (like the cop approaching the door of the men's room where you committed the murder) if it is good for drama. Finally you get to control most of the important characters throughout the game (although not in the demo).
The second one is Shadow of the Colossus, a third person action adventure. All you have to do is go through the game killing these huge Colossi (they look like something out of Lord of the Rings - large walking bear type things. I mean large - they start out about the size of a house and get bigger). And that is literally all you have to do. No piddly bad guys in between, just the Colossi. The game gets away with this apparent simplicity with two (related) features: Firstly how you kill them is not that obvious. It generally involves climbing up them somehow and stabbing them but there's usually more to it. Secondly the platform aspect of the game is amazing. The most important part is the "grip" feature. Basically you can hang on things (think Prince of Persia) and while hanging you can jump around and hang on other things. This is how you climb the Colossi. The physics engine for this is close to perfect. As the things move around trying to swipe at you your character swings around, ends up hanging with just one arm (so you have to wait for him to get his bearings and grab with both - all the while you're grip strength lessens) and all sorts of cinematic type sequences occur. On the demo I managed to get all the way up to its head, got throw off and ended up hanging off its nose...
So go out and by them... I think I will :)
Another interview
Filed under: PHP, Personal, Programming, Technology, Web Programming
Within three hours of the end of the interview I got an email offering me the job :D
It gets better: the following morning (less than 24 hours later) the original place call me and offer me that job too :D
I took the second one.