Here’s a link to the video of all of the sessions from Google’s recent Google I/O conference. There are sessions there on AJAX, Android, OpenSocial, GWT, and lots more. Soak up all you can.

What Makes Us Happy? The Atlantic (June 2009) 

Bamboozling Ourselves – A seven part series of blog entries over at the New York Times about the art forger Han van Meegeren. He produced paintings in the style of Vermeer during the second world war and sold them to Nazis all the way up to Hermann Göring.

I've already seen the first two because I bought them when they came out on DVD, but I hadn't gotten the third one yet. You can watch all three for free!

That’s a start at being able to make more sophisticated web applications in an operating system independent way, but their latest move is more than a shot across Microsoft’s bow, it’s more of broadside volley of cannon fire aimed directly at them.

They’ve come up with a plugin architecture called Native Client. With it you can run code at nearly native speeds within a browser because most of the code is actually running right on the chip. No emulators, no virtual machines or interpreters (ala. Java, JavaScript, and Flash), just raw code running hell bent for leather with some code around it that checks it before running it to make sure it can’t do bad things and some other code the monitors it all the time it is running. To demonstrate they’ve ported Quake to Native Client as well as some other high performance applications and they’ve started asking people to test it on various operating systems and browsers. In fact they’ve even gone so far as to offer bounties people can earn for figuring out any way to exploit the system (i.e. to let people download something that should be safe but because of a Native Client flaw it can infect or damage their system in some way).

Once they’ve got the kinks ironed out, I’m willing to bet money you’ll be seeing this bundled with a future version of Chrome.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has an unlikely title and was based on a movie that I had actually seen and it was only OK. So forgive me that everybody praising it didn't get me to watch it while it was still on. But then Firefly got the same kind of praise and so did the movie Serenity (based on Firefly). Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog was the latest Whedon thing and was much loved last year. But even before Dr. Horrible came out, I had already decided that I should give Buffy another shot. Maybe it would be good. Surely it had to be better than Smallville, which appeared to be composed of beautiful people and the same two or three plots recycled over and over again for seven seasons.

Buffy wasn't just good, it was some of the best TV I've had the pleasure to see in the last couple of decades. Whedon does great dialog and great characters and is very good at changing the world around them. The characters themselves don't live in stasis either. They grow, they change, they get older, they learn from their mistakes. From just about any dimension you want to approach it, it's good story telling.

That's why I'm here to tell you that you have a show you need to watch. It's called Dollhouse and it's his new show on Fox. There are 13 episodes in this season and we want to see all of them aired and have it picked up for next season. Fox stuck it on Fridays at eight which is a horrible timeslot. But you don't care, we've got Hulu, Tivo, and iTunes to fix that.

This one is the pilot, it's a little rough around the edges. That's OK, wait until you see the second one. It's very good indeed and is starting to show what we can expect:

OK, now you've watched them both and you're interested. You think, I'll have to watch that next one. Do that. Set your Tivo or watch it live. Buy it from iTunes or steal it off the freaking Internet if that's how you roll. But tell other people about it. Get them to watch. Then we're all happier.

Phusion is holding a fund raiser prior to releasing the next version of Passenger and trying to raise $14K. Given the amount of work it represents and the level of importance that it is rising to as a server in the Rails world, I think that if you do Ruby on Rails development you should give at minimum a few dollars to support its continued development. I made my contribution and I’ve both Twittered and blogged about the fund raiser as well and I hope you will too.

We had to say goodbye today to somebody who had been a family member since shortly after Alan was born. Since we had to put him to sleep because cancer was killing him, I felt like telling the story of how Wellington came to be my cat.

My then mother-in-law Mia Martin had come to visit the apartment my ex-wife and I were in at the time. Corina opened the door to let her in and before we knew what had happened a gangly little American Shorthair kitten raced through the door. I was leaning back on the sofa with my legs out in front of me and he went straight up my legs and my torso until he stood on my chest nose to nose with me. He sniffed my face thoroughly and purred very very loudly. In fact, that was the distinguishing characteristic for Wellington in those days, his purr. You could hear it from ten feet away and although I don’t think he was quite as loud at 15 as he was at four months, he still managed a pretty loud purr last week.

Mia told us that he was just hanging around outside the door of our apartment and she had thought maybe we knew who he was. We didn’t know and when we asked around no-one ever admitted to being missing one kitten, so he became ours (well, mine really). It was always easy to remember how old he was, the vet said he was approximately four months old and Alan had just turned four months old.

I’ll save you details of his death other than to say that he didn’t suffer, he just decided it was time to die and we put him to sleep before he did start suffering.

Wellington, we love you.

First install the Ruby gem for Twitter4r:

sudo gem install twitter4r

or on Windows:

gem install -–version 1.1.1 json

gem install twitter4r

Then you can access it with a little chunk of code as simple as this:

require('rubygems')
gem('twitter4r', '0.3.0')
require('time')
require('twitter')

client = Twitter::Client.new(:login => 'your Twitter username', :password => 'your Twitter password')
timeline = client.timeline_for(:me) 

timeline.each do |status|
  puts status.user.screen_name, status.text
end

When I ran that, out popped the last 20 tweets I had done.

But if you're still fairly new to the Mac, there's a good chance that there's excellent free software that you might not yet have downloaded and installed (or which you might like to bundle up as a gift for another new Mac owner). The Apple Blog put together a disk image plus lists of excellent software you could download and use to make a bundle of your own. I can definitely get behind some of their recommendations including VirtualBox (which just recently was upgraded to version 2.1 and handles running Ubuntu very nicely for me), Growl, HandBrake, Transmission, Adium, Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.

One app they missed though was Celestia. They do recommend Stellarium, but for me, the latest version of Celestia and its ability to take you on a high speed trip to anywhere in or out of our solar system is just amazing. Moving out to just outside the orbit of Ganymede and watching the inner moons zip back and forth around Jupiter when I speed up the simulation is just haunting.

Anyway, some people did finish their games in the allotted time. Here are the final entries (though I’m not sure you can get into all of them yet, I think some authors were only planning on letting in the judges at this point):

• http://www.moonstone-rpg.com/
• http://www.tygras.com/
• http://www.piratesglory.com/
• http://www.cubiclebattles.com/
• http://www.npcrpg.info/
• http://www.mageduels.net76.net/
• http://www.iron-empire.com/
• http://www.eternobeads.com/heroGame

I’m planning to take a look at each one I can and see what others were able to accomplish since October 11th when the contest started. I’m alternately impressed and disappointed with what I myself was able to accomplish in the same period of time. I figure I’ve got at least another six weeks or so of part time work before I’ll be ready for a beta of my game.

But just recently the author started up a blog called Taking Inventory to say, “Hey, my project really isn’t dead. Look, I’m working actively on it!” Some of the recent postings show some awesome photos of the research material Jason Scott has gleaned for this documentary including tons of material about Infocom and even scans of an original manual for Zork on the PDP-11.

If the topic interests you, start tracking the RSS feed for this blog. I look forward to seeing the final product.