Web of Games

Only 22 years late!

What it was like to work on a Nintendo DS launch title.

The Galaksija computer was a craze in 1980s Yugoslavia, inspiring thousands of people to build versions in their own homes. The idea behind them was simple – to make technology available to everyone.

Right on my birthday, Ars Technica posts a long, detailed history of Flash from its humble beginnings to its relatively recent demise, complete with testimonies from key people. And you know... Steve Jobs may have been a jerk and the bane of good engineering, but in that infamous essay he only echoed the concerns of industry at large. Flash wasn't just proprietary, insecure and a resource hog. It was such a mess that even after key components were open-sourced, and the rest extensively documented, 3rd-party clones just couldn't come close to playing anything but the simplest animations properly. Successful preservation efforts leverage the official player, not open source implementations. No, Flash was terrible engineering even by IT's abysmal standards. And frankly? Its much vaunted ease of use was never apparent to me. Even as an authoring tool, Flash sucked. There, I said it.

Wait, what? I guess the layoffs shouldn't surprise anyone after the previous announcement, though having them come without warning just a day later is ugly. But how in the world do you blame the ongoing health crisis for the woes of an internet company that does everything online by definition?! Your business should be booming right now! You know, from all the people stuck at home with not much to do.

Things are different in the Philippines (via micro.blog).

Yet another one? Seriouly? There really is no end to it.

I didn't mention it last time, but the big change was partly prompted (and enabled) by a new version of the software powering this linklog. Four days ago, I wasn't yet started; now it's working well enough to let me migrate the data and even add back some of the links I had removed, this time in the right place. In the interest of historical accuracy, it's going to be just those articles published starting September 2018, when this section was created. The rest will remain in the archive where they belong.

Just in case somebody's actually watching this space: as of this writing, older links will move to the archive section, and this one will become more of a staging ground for the main blog. Hopefully that will make both more interesting and useful for everyone.

It was an international sensation. It made an appearance in Fallout. It helped create the field of cybersecurity. But where did it come from?