Michel Vuijlsteke's weblog

No-Hook Nation: Why Is It So Hard to Find a Place to Hang Our Stuff? – Karen Loew – The Atlantic
When planning rooms, designers often overlook or choose to omit the simple amenity that would keep coats, purses, and laptop bags from ending up on the floor. Why?

Gamasutra – Features – 1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond
This paper explains the design architecture, implementation, and some of the lessons learned creating the multiplayer (networking) code for the Age of Empires 1 & 2 games; and discusses the current and future networking approaches used by Ensemble Studios in its game engines.

Brian Phillips on Olympic rhythmic gymnastics – Grantland
There is, in the contrast between the poise and seriousness of the athletes and the princessy kitsch of the setting, something really kind of dark and wonderful. Just imagine it: devoting your life, mercilessly and with absolute commitment, to the task of dancing with little twirly clubs to a synth-folk soundtrack while wearing a spangled bathing suit designed to look like ladybug wings. Imagine doing that as well as it can humanly be done, being the person who embodies that accomplishment. I'm not making fun of anyone; I find it strangely noble.

Ask H&FJ: Four Ways to Mix Fonts
Is there a way to know what fonts will work together? Building a palette is an intuitive process, but expanding a typographic duet to three, four, or even five voices can be daunting. Here are four tips for navigating the typographic ocean, all built around H&FJ's Highly Scientific First Principle of Combining Fonts: keep one thing consistent, and let one thing vary.

In Which We Step Inside Your Closet – Home – This Recording
Things You Might Read on a Fashion Blog – Haha I’m texting on my iPhone in all of these photos, such a dork – I wore this to brunch on Saturday morning, we ate pancakes, I never want to eat anything else omg

Gamasutra – News – In-depth: Is it time for a text game revival?
In a market where books and games are close rivals for the most popular category on app stores, what happens when today's new gamers are hungry for something more than word puzzles?

Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools

RUDI: Bookshelf: Classics: Christopher Alexander: A city is not a tree part 1
It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful.

Calming Manatee

Glueslabs
One last thing: If I could trouble someone out there to do me a small favor, I’d like you to contact the manager of my apartment building. Or I guess you could call the Seattle PD. It doesn’t matter. I just don’t want to sit in here too long without being discovered and I’d like for my cats to be rescued.

IBNIZ
IBNIZ is a virtual machine designed for extremely compact low-level audiovisual programs. The leading design goal is usefulness as a platform for demoscene productions, glitch art and similar projects. Mainsteam software engineering aspects are considered totally irrelevant. IBNIZ stands for Ideally Bare Numeric Impression giZmo. The name also refers to Gottfried Leibniz, the 17th-century polymath who, among all, invented binary arithmetic, built the first four-operation calculating machine, and believed that the world was designed with the principle that a minimal set of rules should yield a maximal diversity.

Fringe. Division. | MetaFilter
There are three episodes left for season four (teaser for 4×20, "Worlds Apart") and if Fox doesn't give Fringe a possible thirteen-episode fifth-season renewal, they have shot two different endings for season four.

Games Criticism is OK » Medium Difficulty
It seems that games and the people who play them are growing up at the same time. While there is still a seedy, immature underbelly of niche gaming (one that reveals itself in incidents like the inflammatory hailstorm of verbal abuse against Bioware writer Jennifer Hepler), there is also every indication that there is a generation of “gamers” who are able to examine, and understand, the medium that they love. There is no doubt IGN will still throw cringe-inducing taglines into their RSS, and that mainstream videogame news coverage (FOX News, etc) will demonize video games in order to drive ratings. These monolithic structures are, at this point, as inevitable as they are unfortunate. However, something exciting has happened in their shadow; out of the dankness of that ground a generation of darn good writers has taken root and started to grow.

Games Don’t Need Citizen Kane, They Need Roger Ebert » Medium Difficulty
There’s been a lot of talk as to when video games are going to have “the Citizen Kane of videogames,” some sort of overwhelming magnum opus that makes non-gamers respect the medium. I have a more pressing and reasonable goal – when will we get our “Roger Ebert” of video game criticism? As Dave Thier recently put it, the people who write game reviews seem to be less “game critics” than they are “game enthusiasts.” They love games, and they want games to be great. They’re exceptionally optimistic about the future of video games. They’re eagerly anticipating the day that video games are the predominant form of media, eclipsing television and movies.

Rock-Paper-Scissors: You vs. the Computer – NYTimes.com
Computers mimic human reasoning by building on simple rules and statistical averages. Test your strategy against the computer in this rock-paper-scissors game illustrating basic artificial intelligence. Choose from two different modes: novice, where the computer learns to play from scratch, and veteran, where the computer pits over 200,000 rounds of previous experience against you.

Sustainable Pleasure – Sex Toy Recycling
find out how sex toy recycling works

Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and _why: The disappearance of one of the world’s most beloved computer programmers. – Slate Magazine
What happened when one of the world’s most unusual, and beloved, computer programmers disappeared.

The Inside Story of How John Carter Was Doomed by Its First Trailer via reddit.com
Because the Barsoom books were so influential to cinema's greatest sci-fi auteurs, just about everything in it had already been plundered and reused by other hits. And as a result, the more that was revealed of John Carter, the more derivative it looked, even if its source had originated these ideas. Look at what George Lucas took from Burroughs for his Star Wars movies alone: In his movies, the Sith are evil Jedis; in the world of John Carter, the Sith are evil insects. Star Wars had Princess Leia; John Carter has Princess Dejah. Leia’s infamous bikini in Return of the Jedi? Worn by Princess Dejah first. That flying skiff she’s standing on next to Jabba the Hutt? Carter again. Even those banthas in the Star Wars were culled from the John Carter books, which are populated with similar-looking beasts of burden called banths. Looking beyond Lucas, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry famously pillaged the books, as did James Cameron, who in numerous interviews called Avatar “almost an Edgar Rice Burroughs kind of adventure.”

The Santorum Strategy | Truthout
Liberals tend to underestimate the importance of public discourse and its effect on the brains of our citizens. All thought is physical. You think with your brain. You have no alternative. Brain circuitry strengthens with repeated activation. And language, far from being neutral, activates complex brain circuitry that is rooted in conservative and liberal moral systems. Conservative language, even when argued against, activates and strengthens conservative brain circuitry. This is extremely important for so-called "independents," who actually have both conservative and liberal moral systems in their brains and can shift back and forth. The more they hear conservative language over the next eight months, the more their conservative brain circuitry will be strengthened.

Les Femmes de l’Avenir – 1902 | La boite verte
Cette série de cartes imaginant l’avenir des femmes dans différentes professions a été éditée par l’imprimerie A. Bergeret de Nancy en 1902.

There is something really wrong with modern programmers. Very wrong indeed.
Increasingly, projects are websites.  You don’t have to be a power programmer; you can cut-n-paste Javascript and run node.js and then you go get mongoDB or Redis as a backend and you’re thinking you’re scalable!  Get with the movement!

2012_SDTVx264r.nfo
The SD x264 TV Releasing Standards 2012 (2012-02-22)

Dangerous Minds | Just how beautiful was Karen Carpenter’s voice? Listen to her isolated vocal tracks and find out
Karen Carpenter’s voice takes me to that happy safe place when I was young and everything seemed possible.

"…now I am the Jew here, I am the boss." | MetaFilter
Afghan Jewry may date back 2700 years. Today, there is but one: Zablon Simintov. Zablon, of Turkmen-Afghan descent, is a carpet trader and the caretaker of the only synagogue in Kabul. Zablon had a feud with Ishaq Levin, the second-to-last Jew of Afghanistan.

Least Helpful
Daily Dispatches from the Internet's Worst Reviewers

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages via reddit.com
1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

Cyberlocker Ecosystem Shocked As Big Players Take Drastic Action | TorrentFreak
While the shutdown last week of Megaupload and the arrest of its founder and management team was certainly dramatic, a situation of perhaps even greater gravity is beginning to emerge.

Loper OS » Why Skin-Deep Correctness — Isn’t, and Foundations Matter.
All you will ever get from Apple is a “Worse Is Better“, taxidermic imitation of orthogonal persistence.

The Quest of the Historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer
The Quest of the Historical Jesus. A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede.

Radiofy – Converteer playlists van op de radio naar Spotify-playlists
Radiofy laat u toe om doorheen de playlists van de VRT-radiozenders te bladeren en de muziek ook meteen te beluisteren via Spotify en/of YouTube.

Dirty Signs – I Want to Eat Your Lesbian Vagina – YouTube
Dirty Signs with Kristin! Today, we've got one for the ladies with the phrase, "I want to eat your lesbian vagina." Have a great night!

Bfxr. Make sound effects for your games.
Bfxr is an elaboration of the glorious Sfxr, the program of choice for many people looking to make sound effects for computer games.

Battlestar’s "Daybreak:" The worst ending in the history of on-screen science fiction | Brad Ideas
Battlestar Galactica attracted a lot of fans and a lot of kudos during its run, and engendered this sub blog about it. Here, in my final post on the ending, I present the case that its final hour was the worst ending in the history of science fiction on the screen. This is a condemnation of course, but also praise, because my message is not simply that the ending was poor, but that the show rose so high that it was able to fall so very far. I mean it was the most disappointing ending ever.

asada’s memorandum (The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light)
Of course, the premise of this guess may be wrong. Regardless of whether this hypothesis is correct or incorrect, the fact that his work is wonderful and appeals to many people does not change a bit. Still, it is enjoyable to imagine and see his works thinking that we share his eyes.

The Hard Way Is Easier — Learn Python The Hard Way, 2nd Edition
This simple book is meant to get you started in programming. The title says it's the hard way to learn to write code; but it's actually not. It's only the "hard" way because it's the way people used to teach things.

Omnes Viae: Itinerarium Romanum
A route planner with all main roads and cities of the Roman Empire. Based on an ancient Roman map of which a copy survived that is now known as the 'Tabula Peutingeriana'.

On Fallout: We had a time travel [setting] with dinosaurs for a while
Matt Barton's Matt Chat started as a series of discussions on classic video games from Elite to System Shock 2. It now features interviews with the likes of Chris Avellone (Planescape Torment), Tim Cain (Fallout pt.1, pt.2); Arcanum, Brian Fargo (The Fall of Interplay, Waste land and Fallout, Bard's Tale and Wizardry), John Romero (Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake and the infamous Daikatana) and Al Lowe (Leasure Suite Larry pt.1 and pt.2).

AF Fine Tuning: What it is. How to do it.
About a year ago I heard about AF fine tuning for the first time and passed over it without much interest. I had never experienced any of the issues that proponents of it kept recounting in forums, so I thought I was safe ignoring it. Well, after assembling a good range of glass and having not too long ago upgraded to a Nikon D7000, I started to notice that sometimes things were a bit…off.

Why Code Readability Matters » the Void
Lately my colleagues have been commenting on my relentless notes on code styling in our internal code-reviews. Evidently I’ve been paying more and more attention to what could rightly be called cosmetics. Sure there are bad conventions and, well, better ones. Admittedly, coding conventions are just that, conventions. No matter how much we debate tabs vs. spaces and how much we search for truth, they remain subjective and very much a personal preference. Yet, one can’t deny that there are some better conventions that do in fact improve the overall quality of the code.