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“It is stressful to know that something is wrong in your code, but not to know what it is or how to find it, and to have it hanging over your head day after day as you fail to make progress towards solving it. This nightmare scenario is the driver behind Ellen Ullman’s 2003 novel The Bug.”
A finished game, with smooth gameplay and polished graphics, gives little evidence of the many twists and turns along the path of development. Here, in twenty-four screenshots of level 24, I show some of the trials, mistakes, and modest triumphs from the development of Floe.
A review of the 2007 Nintendo Wii game Super Paper Mario by Intelligent Systems, directed by Ryota Kawade. “Super Paper Mario has two significant innovations. One is graphically and conceptually spectacular, and was hyped in the game’s advertising, and is somewhat of a failure. The other is subtle, little commented on, and a big success.”
A review of the BBC/HBO television drama, with particular attention to the accuracy of the depiction of the science. “If these stars on this photographic plate of the eclipse overlap with the comparison plate, Einstein’s theory is wrong and Newton’s theory holds. If there is a gap between the two images, then the sun’s gravitational field has shifted the stars’ position, and we have a new theory of gravity.”
A letter to David Howarth MP, asking him to work to defeat Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s proposal to create a government database of telephone calls and e-mails.
A review of Incandescence by Greg Egan. “In a genre dominated by fantasy dressed in a spacesuit instead of a wizard’s robe, Greg Egan stubbornly sticks to extrapolations from the physics we know. He rules out from his fiction faster-than-light travel or communication, or spaceships that couldn’t possibly be fueled by any form of energy we know. This self-denying ordinance deprives him of the props and conventions of the genre: no galaxy-spanning empires or interstellar wars for Egan.”
A review of Matter by Iain M. Banks. “The book initially appears to be about the political and military conflict between two humanoid civilizations. But a kind of pull-back reveals that this conflict is a small event taking place in a corner of a much vaster canvas, like two colonies of ants fighting over a mound of earth in a city park.”
Commentary on an extract from the television series Miracle Planet II, portraying a collision between a small planetoid and Earth, of similar scale to ones which occurred during the “late heavy bombardment” of the Hadean era (about 4 billion years ago).
It’s common and convenient to represent relational databases in the form of spreadsheets, especially using Microsoft Excel. But it’s surpisingly hard to carry out relatively simple database operations on such spreadsheets. This article explains how to implement simple selects and joins as Excel formulae.
A text adventure game set in the ancient university town of Christminster. A telegram from your brother Malcolm, a teacher at Biblioll College, draws you in to investigate the mystery of his disappearance, the history of the college, and the ambitions of the scheming Doctor Jarboe and Professor Bungay…