Wedding Ring Cipher

Boing Boing has the Wedding Ring Cipher contest winners. It is a very interesting problem to solve and an interesting cipher process.

Actually, there are two different ciphers presented.

British Isles photograph on Geograph

British Isles Geograph with a photograph every grid square!

Very pretty and quite a lot of pictures as well.

Papervision 3d game - Meta4orce

From the BBC, Meta4orce is a interactive fiction by Peter Milligan and to support the fiction, one of the aspects to this site is a Papervision based 3d game in Flash. It is essentially TowerDefense done with 3d pieces. It is still 2d gameplay.

Very nice TRON look.

Update: Actually there a lot of Papervision based games... Here's Iain Lobb's blog entry that has more information about the different games and a description of a high-level approach.

Update #2: Here's a chat with Iain.

Flash+Game related links

Again a flood of links I want to read/try out...

• gaming your way - projects is a list of some case studies of gaming your way's projects
• Also an obfuscation set of entries because one of their games got hacked and republished under another name.
• Darkness Springs: a Flash based RPG with an editor for developing new maps, quests and adventures
• FullScreen Flash gallery class which is pretty nice to whip up quick thumbnails and click for a full screen view.
• An posting about Why CacheAsBitmap can be bad
• From Senocular: SWFReader (to get out undocumented info in SWF) and effects on filesize using 3d in Flash CS4
• Gang-Of-Four design patters in AS3
• How to write efficient AS3 code. Always interesting to read the new quirks in the Flash engine.

More As3 game dev links

• EmanueleFeronato
• Mr Sun
• Tile-games Design/Dev FAQs, here and here

FREE (mostly) American Gods: by Neil Gaiman

And while I'm writing about free books, American Gods: A Novel by Neil Gaiman is definitely one you need to read. Not clear if it is all there but it is a good one with a very satisfying end.

Also his new book "the Graveyard Book" has him reading the whole book in video form over his 9-city tour.

After Sandman and American Gods, I didn't enjoy Ananzi Boys as much I wish I did. So I'm not sure if I'll dive into the Graveyard book...

Still trying to read Coraline before the movie comes out...

FREE - Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners

Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners for free to coincide with her latest book release, Pretty Monsters.

Note: two stories are missing out of this free e-book and one of them "Magic for Beginners" just brims with imagination.

She is a wonderful short story writer and I have her up with Ted Chiang, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Auster, and older Harlan Ellison stories (i.e. I have no Mouth and I Must Scream).

Fey and Poehler as Palin and Clinton

I bet Hilary is saying "Damm, it is so true."



Palin's Katie Couric interview:


VP debate:

EVE Online's server architecture

EVE Online's server model discussed here. It is a totally shared universe. No different instances of the world. Just one huge one.

It is pretty amazing feat. Don't think they give away any secrets here but it is pretty fascinating to know it is merely a "game" sitting on a wholly complex and reliable infrastructure.

Other links:
Eve Architecture 101
Stackless Python - pre-cursor to EVE's StacklessIO?
The Great War
The future of EVE - Interview

Still don't have time to play.