I played the BioShock demo this morning. I absolutely loved it. Set in an art-deco-styled, underwater world, the game manages to add interesting twists on top of a pretty solid FPS game. The scripted moments where you have to escape danger (or dive right into it) are perfectly done. Nothing feels faked or set up.
The Metacritic reviews are outstanding.
- YouTube - Epuron - Interesting Commercial - Good commercial. A bit long but worth it at the end.
- You Arent Gonna Need It - Good advice for programmers.
- Home Is Where the Heath Is / A Bay Area pottery tradition continues under new ownership - Went here this week. I have my heart set on some mugs.
- brad's life - Ubuntu, xorg disappointment
- Trends in Japan » Tokyo Summerland wave pool manages to fit in some water - Be sure and watch the attached video.
- Bad Copywriter. Bad! at Binary Bonsai - The United States' new hurl-the-bullet-and-shell-rifle is not one of their better ideas.
Jonathan
That Bioshock game looks to be the greatest FPS of the year; in a world of sequels (halo3, cod4), it's refreshing to have something so interesting and beautiful.
saturday
august, 18 2007
usernameguy
I find "You Aren't Gonna Need It" a double-edged sword - because that rationale can also be used to postpone stuff you're pretty sure you need.
The trick with it - and what makes a good programmer - is the ability to suss out what you actually are gonna need. Like, there's plenty of stuff that's hazy, and that you should ignore, and plenty more stuff where you're saying to yourself "this should work out great!", but it doesn't. But what about the stuff you're pretty sure you want? And how sure are you of that, anyhow?
monday
august, 20 2007
usernameguy
I guess I didn't explain the other edge to the sword.
The other edge is, you get lazy and short-sided. "I could spin off another class for that, but this class is only 5000 lines long...I don't need it." Cut-and-paste your code. You don't *need* to factor.
That's the other big trick with programming: balancing forward movement with what my colleagues used to call "entropy reduction".
monday
august, 20 2007
Andre Torrez
Oh I think it's obvious when you *should* use YAGNI and when you shouldn't, it's simply something to consider when adding...oh say profiles to an app that doesn't need profiles. wink, wink.
monday
august, 20 2007
usernameguy
Heh. Well said...
monday
august, 20 2007