James Bennett has posted a very informative defense of Python 3, in reaction to my more negative article.

I learned things from it, as from many of the comments on my post. I even agree with most of what he says, but it hasn’t really changed my opinion, because it seems like we’re not talking about the same things.… MORE

Python 3.0 is finally out. I like Python (though it and Ruby are always competing for my affections), and I’m always a sucker for new features in any language, but I’m having trouble getting excited about this. Despite the longtime code-name “Python 3000”, it doesn’t seem very futuristic; and it introduces a lot of compatibility problems. In fact, after reading the docs, I can’t come up with any good reasons to install or use the new version. Am I missing something?… MORE

My plea for more iPhone board games is really getting results! Now there’s a Go game with an AI, so I can get my butt spanked in privacy without the humiliation of losing to an actual human (such as my son).

iGo is pretty good, for $2.99. It supports board sizes from 7×7 to 19×9, and several levels of AI strength in addition to a customizable handicap. There’s even Undo, so I can back-pedal on my lamest moves and try again.… MORE

• A great iPhone board game that isn’t Attax!
• Can you and your friends survive an hour on a tiny sinking cardboard submarine that’s running out of air and vodka?
• New developments with the coolest deck of cards no one’s heard of!
• And the return of Rogue, last seen (by me) on a VAX 11/750!… MORE

I like board games, and I’d like to play some against my iPhone. There are quite a few board games available from the App Store, and even if it’s understandable why most of those play chess or checkers (which I dislike), most of the rest are still repeating the same few lesser-known games, like Ataxx. These are great games, but do we need five implementations of each?

On the assumption that these developers just haven’t heard of the wealth of abstract boardgames out there for the implementing, I’ve put together some bookmarks to websites describing literally hundreds of them. Bon appetit! (Even if you’re not a game developer, most of these games are easy to play with boards you either have already or can print out.)… MORE

I haven’t used Chrome yet, though I know people who work on it, and it looks like a good browser with some good new ideas. But I’m unsure of the benefits of one of its main talking points: that what web applications really need is to have less browser “chrome” around them. As I put it in an IM to Julian Missig yesterday:

I think the problem isn’t that the browser chrome has too much [UI], it’s that the apps inside have too little.

Too little what? What are the web apps lacking? Since you ask:… MORE

Chris Lattner writes :

Until there is more real documentation, this is a basic idea of Blocks: it is closures for C. It lets you pass around units of computation that can be executed later. For example […]

FYI, I ended up taking the position at Google. I started two weeks ago, and it’s been quite exciting, despite (or because of) the “drinking from a fire-hose” aspect of learning my way around the big G.

I’m on the Google Sites team. I’ve been interested in wikis for years, and now I get to actually work on one. (Although Sites, née JotSpot, is not a typical wiki.)

I could write a lot about my experience of … MORE

‘Prince McLean’, writing for AppleInsider:

Data transaction security in MobileMe’s web apps is based upon authenticated handling of JSON data exchanges between the self contained JavaScript client apps and Apple’s cloud, rather than the SSL web page encryption used by HTTPS. […] If Apple applied SSL encryption in the browser, it would only slow down every data exchange without really improving security, and instead only provide pundits with a false sense of security that distracts from real security threats.

It’s pretty clear to me from this description that (a) McLean doesn’t know much about data security or HTTP, and (b) the system he’s describing would be patently insecure. And unfortunately, the actual system is just as insecure as I was afraid it was.… MORE