The first, over at InfoQ, is a talk given by one of the Linden Labs guys about the architecture of Second Life. The other is at Ars Technica and looks at some of the numbers surrounding the business of gaming.

InfoQ are one of my favourite tech information sites anyway and the signal to noise ratio there is normally pretty high, they’ve got 3 great new presentations out today:

• in Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep, Dave Thomas talks about the problems of treating developers as interchangeable cogs (or fungible resources, as the project management crowd would say). Some great ideas for bringing new team members up to speed quickly (about 18 minutes in);
• in The Top 10 Ways to Botch Enterprise Java Scalability and Reliability, Cameron Purdy of Oracle talks about scaling Java. Obviously it’s not an impartial view but his points are good ones and it’s an interesting talk;
• in Domain-Driven Design in an Evolving Architecture, Mat Wall and Nik Silver talk about their experiences applying DDD at the Guardian’s web site, it covers why they selected DDD as a method as well as the benefits that they feel it brought. I’ve heard them talk about this before, on SE Radio, and to be honest, it worked better in that format I thought - the written version here needs to be edited down to about half it’s current length;
• finally, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock talks about the benefits of, and problems of conducting, architectural reviews. I’ve listened to some of this before as Rebecca did an interview with SE Radio a while back, but this is good for people who haven’t heard her talk before.

Apparently Michael Tsai doesn’t like the data detectors feature in Leopard. Personally I love it. For those of you who don’t know, data detectors is a feature that adds smart links to chunks of text based on what it thinks the text describes. For example, one feature that I use all the time in Mail is the detector that turns any date or time into a link allowing you to add it to iCal as an event. The really neat thing about it is how it can scan the entire post to come up with information to fill in about the event — even looking at different regions of text scattered throughout a mail.

It’s pretty neat and is exactly the type of thing that Wil Shipley is talking about here when he mentions adding features to your apps that constantly surprise users in a good way (I’ve seen designers from BMW talk about the same thing in the context of styling their car interiors).

That site gets worse and worse. I can live with the fact that corporate IT departments can behave like petit-Hilters with their ridiculous password policies, but now SF has started to do the same. For fuck’s sake, just let me pick a password and keep it, it’s not like the world is going to end if somebody gets my SF login details.

Hmmm, I need to something about the site layout if I’m going to include images like that.

I’ve just been looking at getting a copy of the newly released Cocoa Programming 3rd Edition (tip o’ the hat to Scott Stevenson) and, as the link from there is to the U.S. Amazon site I saw the price there,

then going to my local U.K. based Amazon page to place an order and,

well, what the fuck is that all about exactly? Check out the conversion rates…

Wednesday, May 21, 2008 28.79 British Pound = 57.526 US Dollar 28.79 US Dollar (USD) = 14.991 British Pound (GBP) Interbank rate +/- 2%

That’s getting on for sixty bucks! almost twice the price of the US site. That’s just fucking ridiculous.

You’ve got to love this!

Windows XP, which I’m forced to use at work at the moment, normally treats Zip files as though they were folders, letting you view their contents in explorer. Unfortunately there are a number of problems with this feature: it can kill the performance of Java based apps which work on the files (a Java bug), and it can mangle any files in the Zips with long names or long paths (a Windows bug). All is not lost however, to disable this behaviour simple open up a command prompt and run the following command: regsvr32 /u %windir%\system32\zipfldr.dll And, should you want to restore the original settings, just run the same command without the ‘u’ switch.

From the pages of Variety magazine: Antigua threatens to allow piracy.