I do a lot of online reading. Here's a sampling from my Delicious feed.
Wired: The iPhone 5 Is Completely Amazing and Utterly Boring
How can the iPhone 5 be both amazing and utterly boring? Check out this piece from Wired to find out. Not only is it a great sensational sounding headline, but the piece actually lives up to that headline. The larger point is pretty interesting to think on if you catch it in the hype.
Ryahl on Unrealized Expectations for the Secret World
For those who don't know, I've been playing through The Secret World lately. It's a game I really enjoy, but it's not without its issues like practically every MMO launched in the last couple years. Funcom, the developer, has released an earnings/shareholders report related to the game, and that report has prognosticators of the internets decrying doom-n-gloom and that the game's end is nigh. This is all premature, I think, though the concerns are based on real issues. Ryahl does a great job of getting to the heart of the issues, which really amount to Funcom, the developer, having unrealized, if not unrealistic, expectations for the game.
What makes this piece really compelling is that Ryahl is a real-life business analyst working in the gaming industry. Anyone who has an interest in tech projects or game development and analysis around why such projects succeed or fail will really enjoy this piece. I also found it interesting in terms of where MMOs are going and player/company expectations around MMOs in the future. My own take is that we're at a period of MMO evolution, where the genre as we know it now becomes transformed or even consumed by other forms, being unable to support the kind of numbers of players or subscriptions that companies are unrealistically expecting these days.
(Found via MMORPG.com's article A Complex Issue for Funcom.)
Mat Honan: How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking
This is an exceptionally sad read of one man's loss of his data. Maybe it's because I'm a dad and I feel the pain of losing pics of the kids. Or maybe it's the nagging feeling in my gut that we're all one self-righteous-19-year-old away from having this happen to each of us. I'm sure I have some friends who will sit smugly by and look down on this man for his choices in setting up accounts, and probably even rightly so in some ways. But like Alfred in the Dark Knight, I'm struck by how "Some men just want to watch the world burn."
So here I am in my little corner of the internet, saying plainly and clearly -- these people are not heroes and they're not doing anyone a favor. They should be held accountable. I wouldn't have been as nice as Mat Honan. I would have promised not to press charges, gathered all the info I could, and promptly headed to the proper authorities. I wonder if the kid was as thorough in protecting his own identity? Someone should check up on the AIM id mentioned in the article.
Turnabout being fair play and all that.
Michael E. Driscoll's "the secret guild of silicon valley"
“You have too many hipsters, you won’t scale like that. Hire some fat guys who know C++.” While the piece is full of rhetoric to get your attention, and may well offend some of us, the larger point to this piece is well articulated, i.e. "the hard work of engineering isn't glamorous."
ars technica: will the new iPad attract paper readers?
I'm reading a lot of comics on my Kindle Fire or iPad, thanks to Comixology's Comics App. In fact, I never even go in a traditional comics store anymore. Some of this could be because of where I live and the driving required to get to one, but I also genuinely really like reading comics on tablets. I am a long time comics nerd, too. I still have boxes of bagged and boarded comics stored away safely. I spent more of my child and teen years in comics shops than I care to recall. I attended comics conventions yearly. In fact, my career ambition at the age of 15 was to be a comics writer. If someone like me enjoys going to all digital comics, I don't think it's too long until more "hardcore" comics nerds come around.
This ars technica piece ends with a local comics shop guy writing off digital comics as if it will never have an impact on his brick and mortar business. Just like books and news papers, I think it's a long way off before every comics store is gone, but then, I also think it's not long before most comics stores are gone. Digital is the future of all of this sort of media and to ignore it or deride it is a mistake.
Launchpad blog: Parallelising the Unparallelisable
Parallel test runs are coming to Launchpad. Oh Happy Day! Down to 45 minutes from 6 hours is unbelievably better. My squad is continuing on Launchpad-related work for most of this year, so this change will be very much appreciated by the Orange Squad.
Douglas Rushkof: Are jobs obsolete?
While the title of his piece, and maybe even the central argument, are meant to be a bit sensational, I find myself agreeing with a lot of what Douglas Rushkof writes here. I find my self constantly yelling at the TV whenever I watch cable news. For all this talk of jobs leaving, no one wants to confront the real issue head on -- technology is to blame for certain jobs disappearing, never to come back. We need to start thinking differently about the problem and possible solutions, and Rushkof does that indeed here in this CNN post.
Jorge Castro on: Redeploying OMG!Ubuntu on to the Cloud With Juju
Jorge's does a nice walk through at his blog for porting an existing site to AWS with Juju. It's a pretty straightforward piece of "first we did this, then we did that," but it serves a good introduction as to what Juju can do. The best part is the little bit at the end about how easy it is to scale out in the cloud with juju.
James Whittaker: Why I left Google
This is a great read a friend passed me via email this morning. Whittaker worked on Google Plus a bit and goes on at length about what he sees as a bad move on Google's part to try to focus all the company's energies on G+. It's longish but worth a read.
I love his teenage daughter's astute observation that "social isn't a product" and that "social is people and the people are on Facebook." I've said this a lot about G+ lately and all my geek friends get all up in a huff about it. Yeah, yeah, I hear you -- Google has better communications tools, +1 is awesome, G+ has the better audience, and on and on. I even read one promoted G+ post from a well-known tech person that he loved posting on G+ because the commentary was so elevated compared to anywhere else on the web. Here's what most of my tech friends are ignoring -- that's because everyone is using the rest of the web and not G+. You all like this site precisely because no one but our tiny circle is using it! If the regular folks ever show up at G+ (and I'm actually skeptical that they ever will), then the conversation level on G+ will descend into the depths with the rest of the Internet. And I'd guess these awesomely innovative social tools would begin to show their warts, too.
At any rate, the post is well worth a read if your interested in social sites and the changing nature of Google's corporate focus and culture. I found this stuff fascinating this morning.
Massively on "MMObility: The rise of the browser"
I like this article's argument that the browser will dominate as the MMO game distribution platform of the future. I like it, but I don't know if I agree with it. The browser game business is booming, but so is the mobile app business. No surprise that the two are growing in parallel. And I think that's the point the article misses. Devices are changing, and so are the methods of delivery. Maybe the browser completely wins out, or maybe it just wins some piece of the pie. Only time will tell.
Glitch Developers Site
Glitch is a great browser-based 2D platformer MMO I've been watching closely, and playing in both alpha and beta as time has allowed. One of the things I like about Glitch's approach is to blend MMO gameplay with things that I love about the web. For example, there is a web resource (URL) for every object in the game. Now Glitch takes it a step further by publishing an API and a full developer site with iOS and Android SDKs. This is an MMO inviting mashups of its game. Pretty cool stuff. Actually makes me want to play the game even more.
Corey Goldberg: Taking Browser Screenshots With No Display
I've drunk the Selenium2/WebDriver kool-aid since the week I spent at Velocity Conf. The stability compared to the Selenium1/Windmill approach is reason enough, but I especially like the Python bindings. This short post shows some of the power and flexibility of the web driver bindings, and demonstrates taking screenshots via the virtual display.
Chop: Paste code snippets, add notes. Send to nerds.
I found out about this great little pastebin tool from an internal Launchpad mailing list. It really is an awesome tool. The coolest bit is that you can do inline comments on pastes. All in all, a very nice social code snippet sharing tool.
O'Reilly Radar: The iPhone, the Angry Bird and the Pink Elephant
I like the idea of the race to the bottom that the iOS app store is creating. This article explains that well and also explains why this might be bad for the mobile app store craze currently underway.
Don't Play Games With Me! Promises and Pitfalls of Gameful Design
I love this set of slides. Beautiful, inspiring, and a really nice look into the pros and cons of everything going gameful on the web. These slides are easy to follow on their own and are packed with great thinking and research on how (and how not) to make user interactions better with gameful design.
Hands On: With Wii U’s Touchscreen Controller, Nintendo Could Radically Change Games | GameLife |
Nintendo's new high-end graphics game console and controller Wii U has caught my attention. I love the idea of toggling from display on the TV to controller. And Batman Arkham City in this environment sounds amazing. I'm sensing another game console joining the over-crowded game cabinet at my house in 2012.
Superhero Hype: Grant Revealed in X-Men Destiny
I just tweeted that X-Men Destiny looks great. It was a link to this passing across my screen that caused that reaction. I really like the idea of a true character-progression driven X-Men game. If the graphics and mechanics are good, I could see this being a great game.
FavBrowser.com: WebGL running iOS RAGE
This is an impressive demo getting the iOS app RAGE running in a browser via WebGL. Be sure to click through and watch the video. It's impressive and also goes into some of the limitations of WebGL's texture rendering and particle handling.
Cory Doctorow: My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven
Cory Doctorow has glowing praise for Ubuntu on a Lenovo ThinkPad X220, which he describes as "undramatic, yet graceful."
FunctionSource: WebGL Inspector; The rich debugger you need for WebGL
Pretty cool looking Firebug-like tool for debugging WebGL. I shall have to take a closer look at this soon.
Kottke on Why Stan Lee is the Shakespeare of the 20th century
Kottke draws attention to the similarities between Shakespeare and Stan Lee via comments from Thor director Kenneth Branagh. I was a fan of Thor growing up, especially Walt Simonson's work, but I was skeptical about this movie at first. Only because it's the sort of concept that's so easy to mess up. The more I hear like this, though, the more I really, really, really want to see this film come Friday.
Massively on: Marvel Universe Online will be free-to-play, penned by Bendis
Massively has a great overview of the news from Marvel and Secret Identity Studios' live stream announcements last night concerning the new Marvel Universe MMO. I am very excited about this game. I've made no secret of my love for DCUO, but I was always a Marvel kid growing up, except for my mad Batman love. Just get my folks to cough up those long buried pics of me in superhero costumes as a kid and you'll see where my fan loyalty lies.
I'm glad to see the folks at Secret ID are trying to differentiate themselves from the superhero MMO crowd with F2P and playing as the iconic heroes themselves. Sure, I'm curious as others are about how this will work, but as Jeff Lind notes in the interview, either choice -- play as iconic heroes or as your own -- leaves questions and game design issues. But I'm glad to see someone doing a hero MMO and tackling this side for once. I guess my love for Marvel makes me more excited about playing as the heroes, too.
PS blog on: Update on PlayStation Network and Qriocity
All the cries of "when is PSN gonna be back up" have died down in this cold light of lost user info. Sony is still being extremely ambiguous about whether or not credit card info was gained. And it looks as if we'll be another week without networked PS3 games like DCUO.
Kyle Neath on Product design at GitHub
This is a great piece on how product is developed at GitHub. A nice quote: "We only hire smart people we trust to make our product better. We don't have managers dictating what to work on." Couple that with: "Aren't you hiring smart people who use your product? [...] Doesn't everyone at your company want to make your product better?" and I think you have a bit of the GitHub secret sauce.
Shantanu's Technophilic Musings on Making Kinect Work With PS3
Pretty cool to see a PS3 hooked up to a Kinect sensor. I've never been one to hack on my gaming devices, but being that I have so many now, this makes me want to cross-combine them in interesting ways like this. Maybe one day. (Via Slashdot.)
