Psychologist Philip Zimbardo (of the ’71 Stanford Prison Experiment) has some pretty crazy ideas, but I think he’s on to something with his talk at TED 2009 (6:34). He suggests that the way we cope with temptation (and eventually our overall success in life) is tightly linked to a personal trait that we don’t give…
Read moreRecently I was working with a database where certain tables were reporting page overflow errors. I subsequently learned a bit about how Microsoft SQL Server works, and this is my attempt to write it down. SQL Server has a page size of 8KB. In simple terms, that’s about eight thousand characters of text. For a…
Read moreI recently read three excellent books: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. In each case, this was my first exposure to the author’s work, and in each case I was thoroughly impressed. Each author has a powerful…
Read moreI recently heard about Gunchocomp through a blog post by Emily Short. Guncho is an extension of the Inform 7 interactive fiction platform that allows the user to create multiplayer/MUD experiences. Not much has been done with multi-user interactive fiction yet, so this competition sounds like a great opportunity to try something new. I’ve never…
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