In no particular order, some things I read and thought worth blogging about for some reason. I may start doing this as a regular thing - as opposed to twittering everything. Sometimes these will be links put here as aide memoire to come back to rather than as bookmarks.

Easter Egg

Fun little easter egg from google. Don't Blink!

• https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=blink+tag

Modern Open GL

Many moons ago I wrote (in SML) a tree growth simulator that allowed you to define an L-System in a custom DSL. which then modelled a tree's growth in a voxel space, based on contents of the voxels. Finally itspat out drawing instructions as another custom DSL to drive a renderer. The renderer used Open GL (written in C), and was my first real usage of Open GL. Fun it was too. Since then Open GL has changed somewhat, and I've heard good recommendations for these next two links.

First of all a set of tutorials:

• http://duriansoftware.com/joe/An-intro-to-modern-OpenGL.-Table-of-Contents.html

Slides from University of Texas - interesting in that it also covers the evolution of OpenGL rapidly:

• http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~fussell/courses/cs384g/lectures/lectureXX-OpenGL.pdf

Kids' coding challenges

• http://peertopeerchallenge.org/

Launched by Young Rewired State - this is a collection of coding challenges for kids. Essentially a collection of projects which can give some direction to learning coding. After all, coding is a means to an end, so this provides a collection of "ends" to head towards.

It's worth noting that this is actually a competition and everything and that there will be awards and everything at Buckingham Palace.

The actual challenges though look suitable for everyone from 8-80 who likes having a bit of fun.

• http://peertopeerchallenge.org/challenges/

Take a look have a go. Help a kid you know have a go.

What would Travolta Call you?

Not everyone watches the Oscars ceremony these days, especially given the timezone difference and the fact its a PITA to find. However, when people goof up, it goes round the internet at lightspeed, and this happened this week with John Travolta calling Idina Menzel by the name Adele Dazeem. Very silly goof. Anway, Slate were quick off the mark with this silly little web page that simply asks you to enter your name and tells you what John Travolta (or Jan Thozomas as we like to call him) would call you.

• http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/low_concept/2014/03/john_travolta_called_idina_menzel_adele_dazeem_what_s_your_travolta_name.html

Me ? I'm Marcel Speerce.

If you missed the sillyness, the above also has a link to the video

8 Reasons why Programmeers make the best ...

Fun little observations from Emma Mulqueeny - best known for founding and running Young Rewired State.

• http://mulqueeny.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/8-reasons-why-programmers-make-the-best-boyfriendsgirlfriends/

TED Playlist on Creativity

I've included this because it looks interesting, but I've not watched the videos yet. As I say, a playlist on creativity.

• http://www.ted.com/playlists/11/the_creative_spark

General

• http://time.com/12786/the-new-barbie-meet-the-doll-with-an-average-womans-proportions/ - Someone decided to find out average women's proportions, and make a model based on it. (This was after making a 3D model online which was well recieved) It's an interesting thing.

• http://timkastelle.org/blog/2014/03/you-should-start-a-blog-right-now/ - Bunch of reasons as to why you should blog and what you should blog about.

• The BBC News website soft launched the responsive design version of their website, and there was a discussion on hackernews regarding it. Quite an interesting discussion. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7346176

• Interesting web/JavaScript based diagramming system - http://www.gojs.net/latest/learn/index.html

Programming Related

The following 3 links looked interesting this week for various reasons as they popped past the websites I poll periodically.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_programming - This is a general term for system that perform computation when things happen. The simplest type that many people are familiar with is spreadsheets - change numbers formulas update, the numbers change. However it also applies to lots of other domains.

• http://cppquiz.org/ - I use C++ an awful lot at work at the moment, and it's one of those languages that gets more and more complex every year, and lots of edge cases making developer lives harder. For me to only sane way to use it is to define a subset you're going to use and still with that. In order to understand why someone would reach that conclusion, take a look at this quiz. This probably also explains why python remains my favourite language!

• https://gist.github.com/hrldcpr/2012250 - Clever trick in python using defaultdicts.

Recent Blog Posts

A little known fact about the BBC News website is that the first 4 paragraphs and title of the news story used to be used in the creation of CEEFAX pages. In that spirit, I've started making my (except this sort) posts such that you can get the gist of them from the introduction - which may be up to 4 paragraphs long. (My paragraphs are longer than BBC News's though and I don't have an editor :-)

Recent posts:

• Changing Communications - http://www.sparkslabs.com/michael/blog/2014/02/26/changing-communications Short version - switched away from twitter back to blogging when using my real name, with good reasons.

• Guild - Pipelinable Actors - http://www.sparkslabs.com/michael/blog/2014/03/07/guild---pipelinable-actors-with-late-binding Guild is a python library for creating thread based applications. Guild actors have late bindable methods to allow pipelining and lots of the fun stuff that Kamaelia used to have, but with the pleasantness of Actor style syntactic sugar.

Enjoy!