Although I haven’t been writing much about programming and computers lately, I have still been reading.

XForms is another thing, like Mono, that I found out about quite a while ago that has recently resurfaced as possibly useful. XForms is a whole rethink about how information should be collected and sent of the web. The keyword here is information. HTML forms don’t really send information, they send data. There is no real structure to what is sent - all you have is name/value pairs (although depending on the capabilities of the server you can at least send variable length arrays with the foo[] naming convention).

XForms improves on this by separating forms into different parts, primarily models and user interface (well technically what I’m referring to as models is split into abstract models and instances but that’s like talking about classes and objects). The models are just chunks of XML that are sent to the page. The user interface (essentially just input tags like the HTML equivalents) modifies this XML and then sends it back.

The structuring of the data may well be enough to warrant the adoption of XForms, but it’s a little better than that. When I say the XML (or more correctly the model) is modified by the user interface, the modifications are held in memory by the client (probably a browser) and any references to the model should change accordingly. This allows some stuff that would usually require clever AJAX, complete calls to the server or at least just plain JavaScript can be done fairly trivially.

There are a lot more possibilities, this really is just the tip of the iceberg. To find out more, search for XForms :P

There is a problem though, support in browsers. You can get a plugin for IE6 that handles XForms but requires the page include the plugin. You can get an extension for Firefox that handles it “natively”. Neither work that well and when I tried it neither worked properly with a page intended for the other (IE obviously couldn’t use a page without the plugin and the plugin stopped the XForms working for Firefox). But the same was true (if not worse) for JavaScript when it first came out.

A few years ago Microsoft released the .NET platform. It was supposed to be an open standard that anyone could implement although in reality only Microsoft did. That’s all changed now as Mono is gaining momentum.

Mono is a cross-platform implementation of .NET complete with a execution environment (JIT compiler, garbage collector and so on) as well compilers for C# and VB.net. There are sections of it that a largely complete but all the important stuff is there.

The best thing about Mono is that it has stimulated development of .NET tools by people who normally wouldn’t touch Microsoft if they could avoid - specifically lots of open source developers. This includes the creation of some brand new programming languages such as Boo and Nemerle.

Normally a programming language with very few users is useless - libraries won’t exist and you’ll have to do lots from scratch and things are generally bad. However since every CIL language can use and extend features written (and compiled) in any other, this problem goes away. You can take a C# class and extend it in Boo and then put it in an ASP.NET page written in VB.NET.

An important part of Mono for cross platform use is the development of GTK#, a managed version of GTK that allows you to write cross platform windows applications with essentially a native look and feel. Mono Project

I just thought I’d say a little about the company I now work for, mainly because they’re bigger than I thought. Well not bigger as such but more successful, a bigger player perhaps.

Distinctive Developments is a leading developer of games for mobile phones. I really should emphasise the leading part since one of their games, 3D Pool was actually nominated for a BAFTA (I didn’t even know they had a game section). They’ve also done titles with top licences including the FIFA series on mobile phones as well as Shrek 2: Puss In Boots and Madagascar. There are two problems with this personally though - firstly I myself don’t care for mobile phones games and secondly most of their games are sports based, which I’m also not especially bothered about…

I did something I haven’t done for years recently: I bought Official PlayStation Magazine UK for the demo disk. No particular reason except now having a job I’m not so worried about the price of a magazine…

I was glad I did. It has two demos of games that look really cool (and they’re already out).

The first is Fahrenheit (although it was renamed before the launch - search GameSpot for Fahrenheit and it comes up). You control a guy who has just done a murder and you have to (basically) escape from the police. But it is so much more than that. Firstly, the genre is closest to point-and-click adventure à la Broken Sword, except it’s in 3D - you just move near objects and push the right analog stick in different directions to do different context-sensitive actions. Another point is the emphasis on story - you get to see things that are happening elsewhere that you wouldn’t normally know about (like the cop approaching the door of the men’s room where you committed the murder) if it is good for drama. Finally you get to control most of the important characters throughout the game (although not in the demo).

The second one is Shadow of the Colossus, a third person action adventure. All you have to do is go through the game killing these huge Colossi (they look like something out of Lord of the Rings - large walking bear type things. I mean large - they start out about the size of a house and get bigger). And that is literally all you have to do. No piddly bad guys in between, just the Colossi. The game gets away with this apparent simplicity with two (related) features: Firstly how you kill them is not that obvious. It generally involves climbing up them somehow and stabbing them but there’s usually more to it. Secondly the platform aspect of the game is amazing. The most important part is the “grip” feature. Basically you can hang on things (think Prince of Persia) and while hanging you can jump around and hang on other things. This is how you climb the Colossi. The physics engine for this is close to perfect. As the things move around trying to swipe at you your character swings around, ends up hanging with just one arm (so you have to wait for him to get his bearings and grab with both - all the while you’re grip strength lessens) and all sorts of cinematic type sequences occur. On the demo I managed to get all the way up to its head, got throw off and ended up hanging off its nose…

So go out and by them… I think I will.

Just as an update, the interview I had before had an odd outcome. It was a success but they didn’t have a position for me. In the meantime I got another interview with somewhere else.

Within three hours of the end of the interview I got an email offering me the job :D

It gets better: the following morning (less than 24 hours later) the original place call me and offer me that job too :D I took the second one.

Sorry to seem obsessed :P

My opinion of learning a language with the Michel Thomas CDs has improved - as well as the “Complete Course” 8 hour sets you can get the “Advanced Course”, an additional 5 hours designed for people who have done the first 8. Although I think he only does it for French and German…

13 hours of material. Considering the density this begins to rival Pimsleur’s 50 hours (only available for Spanish and German).

He also seems to have lead an amazing life, albeit slightly less amazing than he claimed. But still. Go read about him on Wikipedia.

Version 1.0 Gold of Galactic Horde went live today. Top new feature would be the Universal War. I think it’s top because I helped write it :)

Although I think Universal War is a bit of a strange name - makes it sound like a war that is compatible with everyone or something…

I picked up Michel Thomas’s 8 hour German course from the library today. And it’s cool. It might even be better than Pimsleur. The learning idea is basically the same as Pimsleur with no writing and no memorizing but the format of the audio itself is different.

Firstly in Pimsleur I’m guessing they use voice actors reading out a script for both the English and foreign speech. In this Michel himself talks. Also this is not scripted word for word at all. I’m assuming he has notes of some sort to keep him on track and there may be judicious editing that we don’t hear, but basically everything is presented as is.

This is an important factor considering exactly how the lessons are presented - as a private lesson with Michel and two students new to the language. The benefits of this are you hear the sorts of mistakes people make (ranging from slight pronunciation problems to missing out a word to saying something completely different or nonsensical). It also makes it quite funny since (in the German at least) one student is clearly doing better than the other).

It loses out in ease of use though. Pimsleur comes with built in pauses, with Michel you have to pause it yourself. It does mean though that 8 hours of Michel is denser than 8 hours of Pimsleur.

One final not is he has a slightly unorthodox order of teaching but one that makes sense in some ways. For example the (almost) first thing he teaches is “Do you want…” (“Wollen Sie”) which is normally left until quite far along because of the complication of modal verbs and their effect on word order. There are at least two advantages to this: first it gets the students used to the whole verb-at-the-end-of-a-sentence idea and secondly he focuses on words that are similar in English and German, and most modal verbs are (muss - must; kann - can).

Overall it’s cheaper than Pimsleur, £70 in bookshops. Another glaring advantage is that I have actually seen it in bookshops, even W. H. Smiths. My usually suggestion applies hear though, get it from a library. Most libraries will order books from other libraries for a nominal fee (my local library charges £2.50 but they had it in themselves anyway).

The final drawback is it is only available in four languages: German, Spanish, Italian and French. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if versions starting from something other than English are available (French -> Spanish for instance).

Oooh, Feedburner have put my new Item Age feed flare unit thingy on their 101 Flare Ideas for a Better Tomorrow page (#10).

It lets you display the age of an item in a Feedburner feed in a nice human format (17 minutes old, 4 days old) etc. It’s really dead simple but I figured Feed Flare might be useful and it was good idea to practice before writing something really cool.

You can see it in action in my feed.

Ooh, I checked another site of mine and suddenly noticed it had a PR of 4, instead of none.