I like wikipedia, it has its fault – many of them – but on the whole it’s more accurate than not.
One game I like to play with it is to use the random article facility to find an entry that I personally find interesting within five ‘moves’.
Here’s a few typical sessions:
Move 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgrimmar
I occasionally play World of Warcraft, so that’s a hit on the first go.
New game move 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_in_Singapore
Nope, not interested in that.
Move 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_%28album%29
Not a fan of Asia (the band), so another click.
Move 3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Ohlde
Basketball? No thanks.
Move 4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangramanjeshwar
A small town in India, not my cup of tea.
Move 5: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Brooke
Not particularly interested in Irish authors, either. So this game was a bust.
Last game for today move 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauritius_at_the_2004_Summer_Olympics
Erm, nope.
Move 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Southpaw
Baseball this time, next!
Move 3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Cort
19th century Flemish author? Non!
Move 4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass_Labs
High-end audio equipment, now I find that interesting.
I could play this game all night, but I won’t.
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boredom May 9th, 2007
I’ve been following what was WPF/E for a while now, and I have been expecting some kind of CLR implementation to be added to it. But holy shit, Microsoft didn’t just put in some half-hearted brains-kicked-out CLR for basic programmability, they put in the entire bloody thing – and threw in most of the .net framework API with it – and have called it Silverlight.
A lot of people are creaming their jeans over this, out there in blog land (I refuse to use the word ‘blogosphere’, because, frankly, it makes me want to hurt people in interesting ways), and I can understand why – Microsoft have got it right on the money.
Of course, Adobe (nee Macromedia) got there first with Flash, and by more than a few months. Flash has been synonymous with web-based interactivity for years now, and it does it very well, is ubiquitous and has a large developer network behind it – and yet, even though I’m currently writing a heavily interactive web application, I don’t want to learn it.
Call me a lazy programmer (and I am) but I just don’t want to leave the happy confines of Visual Studio when I’m coding, and I don’t want to learn yet another language. In the brief forays into playing with Flash to fix something, I was dropped into an unfamiliar world of timelines and Actionscript that I really didn’t want to be in.
But with Silverlight, Microsoft will let me write everything within Visual Studio (with journeys into Blend to work on the UI side of things, but that is what designers are for), code everything in good ol’ C# and do all the debugging in VS too.
Don’t underestimate the power of being able to work in Visual Studio, it is by far the most productive coding environment I have ever used, the framework helps rather than hinders (they learned from the mish-mash that is the Java library, and the OO abortion that is MFC), and in the ‘Orcas’ release they’re adding language features like Linq that aren’t just syntactic sugar, but real productivity boosts (I’m lazy, remember, I don’t want to spend my time writing crufty code to do all the boring things).
So, is Silverlight a flash killer, and have Microsoft ‘rebooted the web‘? Well, no and no. Flash is pretty much entrenched and I’m sure Adobe will have something up its sleeve, plus all those Mac-heads in designerland won’t be moving to Windows-only developer tools any time soon.
But I’ll soon be able to write lovely interactive websites, that I don’t have to sell my soul to the JavaScript devil to do, in a language and with tools I’m already familiar with – and that, in itself, makes it worth the price of admission.
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silverlight May 5th, 2007