After downloading the gigantic Whidbey Preview (available at MSDN Subscriber Downloads) and attempting to install it on my sacrificial machine, I reliably get a problem while installing .NET Framework 2.0: "RegSvcs.exe triggers "Memory at 0x00143cb0 tried to write to 0x00143cb0. The memory could not be 'written.'" This happens whether I use the main installer or try to install the framework from its subdirectory. YMMV, of course.

IronPython doesn't (yet?) use lightweight code generation, a forthcoming facility in the Whidbey CLR, but Joel Pobar shows "Hello, World" using LCG.

Jim Hugunin has posted a paper on IronPython, a fast Python implementation for .NET. This has triggered a cascade of posts.

The money quote: "[A]s I carried out my experiments I found the CLR to be a surprisingly good target for dynamic languages...."

More: "High system performance is the end result of hundreds of small decisions rather than a single large one. Much of IronPython's performance comes from careful consideration of performance in each design choice...."

Essentially, instead of "just" getting the semantics of the language right, Hugunin strove to use native CLR facilities whenever appropriate and provided alternate "fast-paths" for common situations (such as for function calls with a fixed number of arguments) while providing for the more general solution with slower code.

While compiler writing is the rocket-science of computer programming (although game programming comes close...) Hugunin's tactics don't seem unreasonably burdensome.

No, not really. That's just April 1st shorthand for my point.

Peter suggests an interactive drawing tutor as a great application for the TabletPC, a more dignified concept than my "Draw Draw Revolution" game. He suggests text and a voice-over, simple animation, some way of evaluating the learner's input, etc...

I was struck by the thought that there's no commodity tutorial-building software. There's Authorware, but Macromedia doesn't even put that on the front page of their Website anymore and it costs $3000. Meanwhile, we live in PowerPoint Nation. The last time I looked at Authorware (admittedly, probably 3 years ago) it seemed little more than PowerPoint with test-building tools. My adventures in educational software led to my conviction that evaluation is a very significant part of education (a pretty amazing conversion for someone who spent untold hours giving and attending professional conferences: when was the last time you took a test at a seminar?). Of course, one can build a tutorial in HTML or Flash or PowerPoint or C# or assembly language, but what I'm getting at is that surely there's a market for software dedicated to tutorial design.

And here's the thing: it has to be designed by great teachers and built by great programmers.

P.J. Plauger was awarded Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award. He richly deserves it. There's his tremendous contribution to the C and C++ standardization projects, but I personally feel that his Programming on Purpose column for Computer Language was simply the best programming column ever written. It's the reason that I fell in love with that magazine, which I went on to join and eventually edit.

So Programming on Purpose is responsible for much of my career. But here's how I stack up to Plauger: a couple of months ago, when I was in Hawaii for the ECMA C# and C++/CLI standards meetings, I mentioned at lunch that there was a chance that my code might have booked the flights of the attendees. Plauger nodded and mentioned another item that was in the news: "Our software just landed on Mars." Point, set, and match to Dr. Plauger.

Someone's posted the whole of June, 1938's Action Comics #1 (including the first funnybook appearance of Superman) to the web as a series of medium-resolution scans. Link (Thanks, Eyes Spies and Lies!)) via [Boing Boing]

 

 

 

 

BZ Media, the clever folk who publish SD Times, have just announced a new conference dedicated to embedded software development. Sayeth the release: "The Embedded Software Development Conference (ESDC) is the only independent, cross-platform conference completely focused on the educational needs of embedded, mobile and wireless developers. The event will include more than 40 individual conference sessions and full-day tutorials covering applications development using Java 2 Micro Edition, Windows CE, Embedded Linux, Palm OS, BREW, VxWorks and other high-level embedded operating systems."

Hey, they're looking for speakers! I wonder if I could convince them that the Tablet PC is an embedded device...

I uninstalled XPSP2, uninstalled the Lonestar alpha, reinstalled XPSP2 and my TIP came back. Amusingly, I found this by Googling a discussion board from a few months ago where the person asking the question was breaking NDA and a Microsoft representative was very politely, but very insistently, posting "This isn't the appropriate forum for discussing this," while the problem was being discussed by others on the board.

Which raises the question: Do alpha / beta NDAs make sense anymore? Certainly there's a period when products / features must remain "stealthy" but with betas becoming very marketing-oriented and even "technology previews" such as the PDC bits becoming available, does commercial sotware really benefit from the NDA until product release?

Today, during my 692nd hour SCUBA diving, my life was jeopardized by a computer malfunction. I was trying out a new piece of equipment, an air-integrated diving computer, that replaces a "conventional" dive computer (used to track safety relating to "the bends") and two analog devices: the depth gauge and the pressure gauge that tells you how much air is left in the tank. One minute I was enjoying the beautiful metridiums of Monterey Bay, the next I was looking at my computer and thinking "That's not a correct reading," and the next I was looking at that empty grayness that only a dead LCD can achieve. I no longer had any instruments for determining the only thing that really matters: how long you have to safely reach the surface.

Sure, I didn't need a computer to tell me that I was in about 45 of water, that I had at least 30 minutes of air left in the tank, and that getting to the surface would take about 10 minutes, the majority of which would be hanging 15 feet below the surface in an almost-certainly-unneeded precaution against the bends. So, while it's accurate to say my computer put my life in jeopardy, it didn't endanger me. I knew I wasn't in danger. And, because I ignored the fact that I knew all those good things, signaled my buddy that I'd had a malfunction (a signal that involves the middle finger), and called the dive, surfaced, and had a hell of a long surface swim back to the shore, I stayed out of danger (an amazing percentage of dive accidents happen because the first problem is ignored...).

Here's my point: computers suck. They're unreliable, expensive, difficult to use, incomprehensible when functioning, and utterly useless when they fail. I've never had a pressure gauge fail on me. I've never had a depth gauge fail on me. Such things happen with analog gauges, but I wager the rate of computer failures to analog failures is hundreds if not thousands to one. Every time someone talks about lack of innovation or "Where are computers going?" we should keep this in mind: computers are nothing, nothing, compared to what they should, and will, become.

We are marking notches into clay tablets and wondering if innovation in writing is dead. Virtually the entire history of computers lies before us: we exist in a footnote between Alan Turing and God-Knows-Who. Today's hardware is crap. Today's software is crap. Today's tools to build software are crap. Let's change that.

Do I have to say anything more to explain my Tablet PC game idea?

For those who haven't been in an arcade for the past few years, "Dance Dance Revolution" is one of the greatest games of all time. You have to move your feet in synchrony with directional arrows on the screen. Simple to describe, doesn't look hard, is hard.

At the Game Developer's Conference, Sony was demoing what I'm sure they're not going to call "Flail Flail Revolution," in which you point a Webcam at yourself and must move your hands into the air in synchrony to screen sectors flashing on your computer.

So my idea is that you must match pen strokes flashed on your screen, building up a line drawing over time. It ain't art, but DDR ain't dancin' either.

Given Yahoo's infrastructure, this is very clever. But I don't think Yahoo Groups yet provides an RSS feed. But surely that's only a matter of time.

P.S. Phipps clarifies that he didn't call OS opponents Luddites or, if he did, he didn't mean it in the popular sense of "anti-technology zealot" but in a more refined way. I've asked if he has a link to his argument (I'm a big fan of argument by historical analogy. You can be wrong, of course, but history does place certain constraints on hyperbole.)

So there are games for the tablet. The problem is that the majority of them have something to do with words and writing. Granted, since ink is the big thing, it makes sense, but how many Scrabble and crossword clones can you have? Let's see something innovative.

For example, Toshiba's M200 has the built-in accelerometers, right? So why not a version of Microsoft Plus! Labyrinth where you control the board by physically moving the tablet? How about strategy games that take advantage of pen and ink? Tablet users don't necessarily need something flashy that runs at 60 fps. Just a nice polished game that really makes use of tablet features. via [Tabula PC]

I agree that a first-person shooter isn't the route to go. You want something real-time, but with pen strokes about the screen controlling the level. I bet the guys at Pop Cap could dream up something.

"...a couple of grad students at USC's business school who hate their tablets...it's gotten so laptop-friendly there, that people with tablets never use the inking feature...." .... will the Tablet PC only succeed in a convertible form, sheepishly masquerading as a "laptop with benefits"?... via [Tabula PC]

According to Microsoft's Andrew Dixon, with whom I spoke on Tuesday, right now both slates and convertibles are selling equally well / poorly, but the slates are clearly going into vertical markets (medical, insurance) while the general market is going for the convertibles. As the general market outstrips the vertical early adopters, the majority of machines with Tablet technology will undoubtedly be convertibles. That's okay with me. My next Tablet will be a convertible but I bow to no one in my fanaticism for the technology.

There's very little compelling ink-based software today. Essentially, OneNote, MindManager (which we just gave a Jolt Award to), and ArtRage. Much, much more is needed. Some is already in the pipeline (xThink MathJournal, for instance, is no secret), some has hopefully been spurred closer to reality by the $100K contest, and much is waiting in the heads of entrepreneurial software developers watching the market develop. It only takes 2 programs to make a platform: one killer app and one killer game. Neither has shipped for the Tablet PC.

Oh man, where are my editors when I need them? I just sent an email that said that a polite conversation was "markedly gentile." Bwahahahahahaha... I blame Mobile, Alabama. (I once pronounced the word "sublime" as "suh-bleem" and was teased by a friend who said "Why in the world would you think it was pronounced that way?" It took me months to think of a common two-syllable word ending in -ime that is pronounced "-eem.")

I just received a press release titled "Why Open Source Can't Meet Mass-Market Demands," from a group called the Institute for Policy Innovation which identifies itself as "a non-partisan, public-policy organization." (It's easy to determine that the IPI was founded by Dick Armey and is primarily a pro-free-trade group, I guess free trade can be argued to be non-partisan.) At first I was confused, because if you really believe in the free market, Open Source is a perfectly legitimate thing: people should be able to charge as much or as little for their work as they want. You have to make second- and third-order arguments to decry the economics of OS (perhaps OS implicitly drives down the perceived value of all programming, thus distorting the trade-offs associated with offshore programming, which in turn might suck the air out of high-value, entrepreneurial programming in the United States).

Then I realized that this was about government procurement: the IPI release is intended to introduce Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt into state and federal bureaucrats. Clearly, someone paid for this: I assume either Microsoft or the Software Publishing Association. I sent an email to IPI asking who paid for the initiative. I'll let you know what they say (if anything).

Correction: I misidentified the IPI as the "Institute for Policy Information" in an earlier post.

On ActiveX control install prompts:

there are a few things I love about the work we did here.  You can now say “Do not install this control and never ask me again.”

Yes! Now I never need to see a prompt for “Install Gator (click here for more information about this fantastic progra...” again. via [KC on Exchange and Outlook]

All my machines already have popup blockers, firewalls as appropriate, and antivirus software. But this "never ask again" feature will make me install XPSP2 on all my machines immediately. (Oh, I installed it on one of my laptops last weekend -- went fine.)

The Game Developer's Conference is, without a question, the best programmer's tradeshow going. There's no other show that touches it in terms of technical depth -- introductory-level lectures at the GDC are what other shows would label advanced, and advanced-level lectures are the GDC are generally only comprehensible by excellent programmers already working in that particular area. I've heard much more pragmatic and correct things about one of the few areas where I know a thing or two (AI) than I did at the last AAAI meeting I attended!

Some sartorial observations: although a cut above most programming trade shows most attendees are still wearing t-shirts and jeans (but, like me, a black t-shirt and clean jeans) but there's definitely more hair color and piercing than you get at, say, the PDC. There's one fellow sporting a shaved head and a black duster a la Neo; perhaps a fan-boy, perhaps one of the coders of the Burly Brawl. There are a few guys in full metrosexual bloom: I really enjoyed the contrast between one guy in a Euro-cut suit standing beside a more-than-usually shabby guy with a comb-over. I glanced at their badges -- the metrosexual had a show pass, the shlub was a speaker.

I was the founding Editor of Game Developer Magazine 11 years ago and we bought the GDC tradeshow almost immediately. It's a bittersweet memory for me, because the magazine was actually the idea of an intern, Sander Antoniades, who deserved better rewards: we couldn't give him a full-time editorial position right away, so he switched divisions, and then left the company.