Andy Wingo asks the question no one wants to ask: is Gnome development past the point of useful returns?¹ It’s a poignant question too, as so much care and attention is poured into these huge projects. Where are desktop systems going next? Should Gnome be looking further ahead?

1. Or KDE for that matter? ↩

Dr. Alan Kay talks about the Meaning of “Object-Oriented Programming”. His summary:

OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I’m not aware of them.

Here’s a short article about a machine learning project written in pygame. It’s an interesting approach with some intriguing possibilities (yes, I’m tempted).

A Javascript/browser game. It’s possible, and expect to see more of it in the future.

Get With the Program, a NYTimes article about the various tools authors are using today to create their universes. I’ve always seen a great potential for better (narrower?) writing tools, this confirms that there are still a few unexplored possibilities.

[stars: 4] Zelda: Twilight Princess (GameCube). A brilliant installment in the Zelda series, well worth its 50+ hours of casual-gamer play. The art style is more like a standard Japanese RPG, and the story slightly longer than Wind Waker. The game is true to the Zelda franchise, compelling from front to back. The bosses, though, seemed easier than previous generations, and the secrets (and secret missions) were somehow less interesting.

Cygwin in Putty, locally. Makes it possible to replace cmd.exe with Putty.

A really good overview of the “Button” element, including cross-platform goodness.

A good example of what’s possible with HTML, JavaScript and SVG. So many possibilities!

A very complete set of CSS layouts, cross-browser and well organized.