Took a little breather.
Also, here's what happens when you freak out a room full of Japanese ladies:
Rock on, citizens!
I just got back from the theater screening of the mid-season finale of Battlestar Galactica season 3 (i.e. episode 10 of season 3). Evidently they're screening them in a few cities across America. First of all, let me just say that I got there an hour before it started, and I was literally the 300th person in line. The writers for the show came out and were all freaked there were so many people there.
Anyhow, after the episode (best episode evar) the writing staff (minus Ron Moore and David Eick) came out and fielded a bunch of questions. Here are all the ones I could remember, paraphrased:
1. Are there any plans to do a feature-length movie? Answer: Funny you should ask that. Next question.
2. Do you know how the series will end? Answer. No. We know how season 3 ends. Ron Moore steers us in a general direction, though.
3. A general note. Ratings for the show are way down. Downloads, iTunes or otherwise are not being counted in this measure for some reason. They then asked people in the crowd (about 280 in my screening) to raise their hands if they downloaded the show, and nearly everyone did so.
4. Is it hard to kill off supporting characters? Answer: Yes. Between us all, every supporting character has hypothetically died at least four times. Every time someone proposes killing a character, someone else makes a spirited defense for that character. We're saving lives everyday!
They also talked about how the writing happens in interesting ways. For example, during season two, they knew they had the unresolved issue of what to do with the nuclear warhead that Baltar gave to Gina aboard cloud 9. So, to remind themselves, they just write "Remember the Nuke" (or a similar phrase) on their white board and just left it there.
It looks like the new OS X version will allow a mix and match with Python and Objective-C. There's now a full bridge connection Python and the Cocoa libraries: To open up the benefits of the Cocoa frameworks to a wider developer audience, Leopard embraces two other highly dynamic languages for use in building Cocoa applications: Ruby and Python. These two languages are an excellent fit for integrating with the Cocoa frameworks, and they both have high quality bridges to Objective-C. These bridges allow you to mix and match Objective-C, Ruby, and Python, allowing you to choose the best tool for the job at hand while using high level Cocoa features such as Key-Value Coding (KVC) and Key-Value Observing (KVO). so the developer can access the whole OS X gui framework from Python code. Check out the description here
Ah, crunch time over = very yes. Back to the front! Season finale of Pure Pwnage is out! Go get it!
There's a great article and discussion thread over at Good Math, Bad Math on what languages are good for mathematical calculation.
Many people commonly say that C/C++ is fewer steps away from a direct translation to assembly code, and is thus faster than a language such as OCaml or Java. GMBM shows this is not the case, though. Basically, he shows that in C/C++, you could have the following situation. You have two pointers pointing to two arrays. The compiler doesn't know if the arrays are actually two distinct arrays or not (they may point to the same thing), so the compiler must assume that they are. In languages such as Fortran and OCaml, the compiler does have this information, and so can provide serious code optimizations.
On why the cheeseburger is a well designed piece of hardware. Check it out.
Sorry for the lack of updates recently...It's serious crunch mode here at present. Will be back to normal in a couple of days.
Oh my god. Soooooooo creepy. I think Sony has arrived from another planet.
Check it out here
There are a fair number of you folks visiting here (mostly Mac users, if you were wondering) and I have a number of posts coming down the pipeline, but I want to make sure you guys get to read what you're interested in. So, please feel free to send me an email if you would like to see any AI in Games related topic covered. party on readers!
So, evidently there is this group of people who believe that, at some point in distant history, a period of 297 years was inserted into our calendar without the years actually occuring. Thus, this is actually the year 1709. Check it out at Damn Interesting.