The Dev Arcade

Dev
Nice. Fedora may let you cross compile for linux and windows.
Nice commentary on REST.
For anyone who ever wanted to build a wordpress theme but didn’t know how to start.
Awesome image editor in a browser.  They even have a public API.

Tech
Honda’s Robotic Leg.
Letting the blind see by hearing is a pretty wild idea.
Not quite the Flying Car we’re all dreaming of, but quite cool just the same.
Good night Phoenix Lander.
First photographs of an extra-solar planet.
Mac user tries out Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex for a couple of days. Very detailed report.

For all that Amazon.com does, and the sheer size of their audience, you’d think they would be very careful about the design decisions that go into their website.  I’ve used Amazon rarely over the past three years, but lately more often, and I found that parts of their site design — especially their login — make no sense to me.

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Dev
Interesting angle on monetizing online video.
Steve Ballmer says Microsoft may use WebKit. Its a nice thought but don’t count on it.

Tech
New coating improves efficiency of solar cells. Seriously, buy stock in Solar! This stuff is going to take off.
Searching for extra dimensions with a black hole simulator. I’m cool with this as long as the scientist in charge is not Dr. Hans Reinhardt.

Even after years of application development experience there are still those times where you realize you’ve done something monumenally noobish and the only recourse your left is to face-palm, admit the mistake, and refactor.  I’ll share this story in the hopes that it will help someone avoid a similar snafu.

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Tech

Looks like software patents are about to be curbed.
Can Open Source Hardware Work? Wired’s Clive Thompson explores the possibilities.
Google Earth released for the iPhone. I’m especially interested in the off-line mode.
Netflix is finally offering streaming movies for the Mac later this year, via Silverlight.
Wait, what? Our brains are fuzzy you say?
First application of color e-paper is released. This reminds me of the Gameboy Color.

Code

An argument against using Subversion for versioning.  I’m a fan myself, but Andreas makes some good points.
What does a programmer do when her processing rendered artwork is ripped off by a designer?
Some interesting bits about how TraceMonkey works.
Kestrels.  News to me.
Custom fonts courtesy of javascript and the canvas tag.
Thoughts about HTML5 Websockets

Games

The Rain-slick Precipice of Darnkess Ep 2 doesn’t look half bad.  Gotta love Tycho and Gabe.

One of the things I’ve always thought was missing from Flash was access to a browser’s cookies. I can understand the argument that cookie access is unnecessary for sites that are primarily flash based.  After all Flash’s Local Shared Objects make persisting data across sessions or page views fairly painless.  However for hybrid sites where the server passes information to the browser via cookies a developer must jump through a few hoops to get any important data sent from the server via a cookie into Flash.

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Algorithms for Programmers [PDF]

Slow week, eh?