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revjx

149 karma · joined August 23, 2010

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revjx··on Jane Goodall has died
I saw her talk in London earlier this year. She was hilarious, eloquent, and inspiring. I found listening to her quite moving in a way I hadn't anticipated.

Remarkable woman. I feel thankful to have had the chance to just stand there and listen to her and look around at all the other rapt faces around me.

revjx··on My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website
Great job, and I didn't know cats had such a wide field of vision they could see behind them!
revjx··on Free Godot engine port for Nintendo Switch
It's not that easy, unfortunately - I'm a registered developer (for the Wii U) and to be 'enabled' for Switch development, you need to jump through a bunch of hoops including describing your previous experience with games development and so on.

The barrier for Wii U was significantly lower thanks to the 'Nintendo Web Framework', a web tech SDK that let you build games without needing to use tooling like Unity or mess around with the more complicated SDKs Nintendo provide. You didn't need prior games dev experience to get registered for that.

That said - maybe they've relaxed the criteria a bit now to give first time game devs a chance to get published on Switch.

revjx··on North Korean science fiction
There's conflicting advice on where to start with Iain M Banks' Culture novels, but I would personally start with the first - Consider Phlebas - and read the rest in order.

If you like Consider Phlebas, you'll almost certainly love the rest. It's a strange start to the series, not least because it presents the Culture as the antagonists quite explicitly, but it's good for introducing some of the technology. The series as a whole is my favourite series of books, it's remarkable.

revjx··on Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
We use GovPaas for a few things. GovPaas provides the platform which we deploy our applications onto (under the hood it's Cloud Foundry).

It is incredibly cheap for our use cases (as it turns out, unsustainably so for the team who provide it!). Our interpretation of this news is that we will need to migrate away to another platform.

revjx··on Rolling-PWN vulnerability affects all Honda vehicles
I work with Honda. I've passed the link on. Doesn't look great if you appear to be ignoring this kind of thing!
revjx··on Architecture of Consoles
Some really interesting details in here, presented in a very accessible way. I wasn't aware of how earlier consoles used (effectively) pulses of static noise to create drums, although it seems obvious now I've read that!
revjx··on Mozilla Lifeboat
Wonderful job. Great illusion of depth with just SVG and CSS. Reminds me a bit of Wind Waker.
revjx··on Refactoring Back End Engineering Hiring at Slack
Can vouch for its efficacy as an indicator for the traits you might want.

I use a small application that demonstrates some anti patterns / questionable design choices and ask candidates to talk me through their thoughts.

revjx··on Owl Feathers and Flight (2015)
Love this. Owls are fascinating. It feels very strange how light they are when they perch on you - even though I was expecting it.
revjx··on CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser
Good luck Remy, sounds fun!

Among other things, Remy and his family run an excellent front-end development conference in Brighton, UK (although I'm simplifying it a lot by calling it that) called ffconf (https://2018.ffconf.org/)

revjx··on How America lost its love for the stick shift
I live in the UK, manual cars have had adaptive cruise control here for some time.
revjx··on Fuze for Nintendo Switch: An easy-to-learn text-based programming language
Unlike the Wii U, which had a fairly accessible developer program, the Switch is still out of bounds to your average hobbyist developer. Nintendo have been pretty quiet about it too, other than instructing people to get in touch with them if they think they should have access to the Switch dev kit etc.

They've also been very quiet about whether the Nintendo Web Framework, a HTML / JS based set of APIs for the Wii U, would be available for Switch. I hope it is. Unity is great but the NWF would be great for prototyping etc.

revjx··on How a 22-Year-Old Discovered Meltdown and Spectre
I know what you mean, but I subconsciously compare his achievements and obvious talent at that age to myself when I was his age - and he's light years ahead of where I was. Hence, I find it impressive full stop, but also impressive at his age when compared to myself.
revjx··on Deloitte hit by cyber-attack revealing clients’ emails
I work for one of those companies, and you're absolutely right. Our company takes confidentiality very seriously indeed, it will be interesting to see the consequences of this.
revjx··on Microsoft phone revenue fell to $5M last quarter, from $1.4B two years ago
I had Windows phones for a few years - Windows 7 & 8. I moved to Android with a Nexus 5X, but still had fond memories of Windows phone. It was a limited but snappy little platform.

My Pixel is off for repair at the moment so I've had to revert to the Lumia 735. I've upgraded it to Windows 10. It's awful.

The UI is sluggish, apps take over 30 seconds to load in some cases (Messenger and Whatsapp being key culprits), and it just generally feels counter-intuitive to use. I'm hating every second of using it.

revjx··on Nintendo announced Switch Dev kits are $500
I share your sentiments - the Wii U has an excellent, albeit small lineup of software. I've seen it as a companion to the PS4 / Xbox rather than a competitor.
revjx··on Nintendo announced Switch Dev kits are $500
This sounds like an excellent step for Nintendo, if it's true. The Wii U & 3DS development kits are fairly expensive if you're hoping to bash out a title in your evenings / weekends. $500 would give a leg up to those people who haven't got a few grand kicking around to try stuff out on console.

I'm hoping they're also going to continue with the Nintendo Web Framework concept, because that was a pretty smart idea too - having a web technology-based execution environment alongside the Unity / Unreal / native stuff.

revjx··on Microsoft’s Surface Hub is now apparently a billion-dollar business
We have a few at work in our new building, I really love them. They're very nice to write on, very responsive and fast, and you can wheel them around - brilliant.
revjx··on Best Practices for Time Travelers (2003)
Arthur C Clarke, The City and the Stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_and_the_Stars
revjx··on Pixel Security
Not a phone, but Amazon offer an included 'no worries' warranty on their Kindle Fire Kids edition tablet - in the UK at least.

I have two reasonably destructive young children, so it's a little extra piece of mind.

revjx··on Nintendo Switch – New Video Game System [video]
You're right about the UI slowness. That is a problem for the system as a whole. When it was originally released, returning to the home screen (for example) was incredibly slow - it's marginally better since a system update, but woeful compared to the equivalent functionality on PS4 or Xbox.
revjx··on Nintendo Switch – New Video Game System [video]
It says a custom Tegra, I'd be very interested to find out more about the specifics though.
revjx··on Nintendo Switch – New Video Game System [video]
The Nintendo Shop on the Wii U is reasonable, actually. It's fairly easy to use, discoverability is decent. It's pretty basic but it's (in my opinion) their best attempt yet.

Assuming they build on what they've learn from that, I'd hope the store for this system will be even better.

My most-wanted feature for the shop is for them to stop forcing me to buy the 'classics' on every bloody Nintendo system I buy! I must own Super Mario World 3 or 4 times by now.

(Obviously they're not actually forcing me, but it would be good to have cross-platform pass for that kind of content)

revjx··on Nintendo Switch – New Video Game System [video]
I'm quite excited by this. The video was a bit lengthy but it demonstrated the concept quite well.

Glimpses of Mario, what appeared to be Skyrim, too - more third party support this time perhaps?

I'm most interested to see the price and the spec of the machine. Xbox One and PS4 seem to have become more homogenised in terms of architecture than the last generation of consoles (PS3 was especially weird), if the Switch follows suit it would hopefully encourage more third party support. Assuming the power is there.

revjx··on The Making of Lemmings
That was the only version of Lemmings I'd ever played until I tried the SNES version many years later. I discovered I'd been spoiled by the Acorn.

Anyone going to school in the UK during the 90s will probably have encountered an Acorn.

revjx··on Why Dyson's robot vacuum took 16 years, and why it's headed to Japan first
Jonny, you're RUINING THE MAGIC

Good to see other Dyson people on here.

revjx··on WebGL Terrain Flyover Demo
I got circa 17fps on a Nexus 7 tablet running Chrome, in flight mode.

Would love to try with touch control enabled. Great work.

revjx··on How Lisp is Going to Save the World
Superb. I went on to read the sample chapter, which was equally amusing and interesting. I think I'm going to order the book, despite the fact I can't really think of any practical applications for Lisp in my day job - although who knows.
revjx··on Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming's greatest hack
I used to play Multi Theft Auto a lot years ago on GTA: Vice City, which was similarly buggy but excellent fun. This just looks completely insane.

Impressive work by the developers - even though they've effectively piggy-backed onto an existing game, presumably the engine etc is closed-source and therefore their efforts are worthy of admiration.

I wonder if Multi Theft Auto is still going, I still have my Vice City disc somewhere...

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