mrclay.org

(Written July 2007)
The digital dark ages is already a reality for a lot of people who grew up with hosted e-mail services like Compuserve and AOL. A lot of those users had no choice but to accept the loss of all their received and sent e-mail when they unsubscribed, the service went under, or their [...]

Miško Hevery gave several presentations at Google last year that are worth checking out, I think even if you’re familiar with Dependency Injections and unit testing. They cover the ways that global state can sneak into applications, how undeclared dependencies make classes harder to test and reuse, and how DI in general eases a lot [...]

Luis von Ahn creates simple games that have people solve problems that computers can’t (Google video). Every time you play a game of Taboo, the hinter generates associations between words and the guesser, by guessing the correct word, is verifying the quality of those associations. By isolating players via the web and collecting their responses, [...]

This game is all about scale. Think “The Sims” from the molecular level to the galactic with everything in between. At least watch long enough to see your animal doin’ it (soft jazz with sax helps set the mood). As a programmer, this thing makes my greatest accomplishments feel like Pong.

I’ve been hearing great things about source control for awhile so I dug in and installed Subversion using this new tutorial. While you can interact with the svn server from the command-line, the TortoiseSVN Windows shell extension makes managing imports, updates and commits as simple as a right click.
My first project contains all the files [...]

I was telling a friend about the Free Network Project the other day, which I’d read about a few years ago. I still haven’t tried it, but after refreshing my knowledge on it, here’s a little overview.
A primer
“Freenet” is basically a completely decentralized and anonymous peer-to-peer internet. It has files, websites, hyperlinks, etc. but all [...]

I recently got a del.icio.us account and am quite happily moved in.

Another Google toy: A 3D interface to the planet. Like Picassa, they bought this one, too. Formerly known as Keyhole.

Sort of… Remember DOS? and .BAT files? You can write a PHP program that, to the browser that downloads it, looks and tastes [1] like a batch file with whatever code you want [2] in there.