Back from a fun vacation to Florida…pics to come. I spent very little time online, so I’m catching up on all that’s been going on. Also, I did take a bit of time to write out some blogpost drafts (longhand, no less…I actually prefer drafting that way), so I should have some more posts up soon.

For now, back to bed. Vacations are exhausting!! *grin*

Sweet mother of bagladies! Andy Baio at waxy.org has dumped a huge background post and online link to early builds of Milliways, the sequel to Infocom’s amazing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game. H2G2 (as fans know it) was perhaps my favorite of the many Infocom games my high school roommate and I played….to excess. We played H2G2 until our eyes bled. We played H2G2 some weekends where we didn’t leave our room. Literally. Our RA was pissed…until we showed him the friggin’ babelfish puzzle.

Why, oh why was this not finished!!! ARRRRRGGHHH…

Thanks to BoingBoing for the link!

UPDATE: Ah, yummy drama in the comments at waxy. Long, long thread…love it!

Hurrah for Silicon Alley Insider: Time For Bank CEOs Like Wachovia’s Ken Thompson To Step Down — If CEOs get rewarded when companies like Washington Mutual, Citigroup (C), Wachovia, UBS, Merrill Lynch (MER), Morgan Stanley, GE (GE), Bear Stearns (BSC), et al, gamble and win–and, boy, do they get rewarded–then they should get punished when the same gambles lose.

Short, sweet, and to the point.

I enjoy reading Play This Thing, a indie game review/recommendation site, and a recent post was particularly interesting: Gimme Friction Baby. Kinda engrossing…I like it!

Very, very cool. I love software jujitsu, and this is it big-time. Google hasn’t yet made their accounts part of the OpenID framework, but someone’s gone and built an OpenID provider with Google App Engine! This makes Google accounts usable as OpenID logins now, via this site. Sweet. Way to leverage!

Thanks to Chris Messina for the tweet!

Finally getting around to implementing linkback functionality for my links…for links in new posts, I’ll test pingback, stop there if it works, and try trackback if pingback isn’t enabled. Thanks to Teli Adlam for a very clear tutorial on linkback (esp. ettiquette), and an URL to test against without being considered evil. Also to Mathieu Fenniak and Matt Croydon for the pingback and trackback libraries I’m using, respectively.

I’ll make my home-grown script available once…well, it’s completely working. *grin* Also a good opportunity to resurrect my source repository, in which I’m now using mercurial rather than subversion. Distributed version control rocks, folks. I’ll never go back to anything else (where I have a choice). I love me some subversion, don’t get me wrong…but mercurial makes version control even better.

Cool…it’s official; Flickr is now for video sharing as well! I like the model…it’s for pros only (helps with the bit o’ cash flow, and Flickr Pro is actually totally worth $25 a year), and 90 seconds or less — which captures probably 75%+ of what I’d want to share anyway. Plus, I have blip.tv for long form. Actually, this should help me move casual sharing material OFF of blip…those guys should actually be pleased with Flickr’s move. IMO, it helps blip.tv to focus on what they’re good at (shows and long-form works). Flickr’s done a good job thinking this through, at least at first glance.

So, without further ado; here’s my good buddy Harry from work, helping me demo…

I like Silicon Alley Insider’s take on Google App Engine, and I agree. The implementation is distinctly different than AWS; it’s more designed to allow quick, scalable, lightweight application development leveraging Google’s infrastructure. It imposes constraints on the developer, but in turn really gives them a leg up, making things like authentication, interop with other Google components, etc. almost transparent. Definitely more of a direct Facebook competitor than a AWS one (though at least indirectly, it does compete with any cloud-based system).

Don’t get me wrong…I think App Engine is a Very Big Deal. I do, however, agree with SAI that the initial blogosphere focus was on the wrong comparisons. Thanks to Silicon Alley Insider for some cogent analysis here. The article is definitely worth giving a twice-over.

Just a quick note (it’s a hectic week)…I am very interested in Google App Engine, and I think it’s a intriguing addition to the big name cloud computing services like Amazon’s AWS suite and Microsoft’s SQL Server Data Services. Google’s entry here slants a little differently; it is less decoupled than AWS…more take-the-whole-thing approach than the S3, SQS, EC2 etc. options that Amazon provides for various tasks. So you have to like Google’s choices…luckily, they picked Python, with a side of Django, so I’m in good shape. Basically my web development platform choices, sucked up into the Googleplex, and backed by BigTable and GFS. Hell yeah!

So….I’m on the waiting list, and planning on downloading the SDK while I wait. I’m in the process of building a new Django-backed app right now, and I may very well port this thing over, and see how she flies…

Just trying out the embedded video clips from Fora.TV. This is the video of the Nassim Nicholas Taleb presentation that I mentioned a few days back:

Let me know if this works ok, and what you think. Great, GREAT presentation…