Weekly Concerns: 1/60000th of an Ash
Welcome to another "Weekly Concerns". This is a post-a-week series of interesting links, relevant to programming and programmers. You can check out previous Weekly Concerns posts in the archive.
- If you are having trouble understanding how SQL joins work, check out this diagram on SQL joins for a useful visualization.
- Sometimes it's hard keeping up with security issues with all the software you have installed on your computer(s). I've been using the (free) Secunia PSI (Personal Software Inspector) for years--it keeps me up-to-date on the latest security exploits and can automatically update your software for you.
- TwitchPlaysPokemon - an experiment to "crowdsource" gameplay. Imagine 60,000+ people using the same controller. This is interesting for its entertainment value, of course, but also a study of emergence. A critic of emergence might point to this as a failure. But I think it demonstrates that emergence might not work if there aren't any real constraints. If each user was limited to maybe one command (per hour, maybe), or there was some sort of majority vote on each command, or some constraint like that, I think the resultant gameplay would be much more interesting. As it stands now, it's probably not any different from just randomly hitting buttons. EDIT: As of today, there is a "democracy/anarchy" feature that allows users to introduce constraints, which appears to be making the game run much smoother.
- Maybe RSS is going out of style, but I still use it every day. If you wish a web site had an RSS feed, but it doesn't, you might want to check out Feed43 (Feed for Free). It's a scraping tool that I use from time to time when nothing else is available. And remember that Cross Cutting Concerns has an RSS feed.
- More Pete on Software, as he continues his blog series on PostSharp. This time he explores the automated design patterns feature for background threading that comes with the full commercial version of PostSharp.
If you have an interesting link that you'd like to see in Weekly Concerns, leave a comment or contact me.
