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Rule #78 of being a web developer: do not piss off your designer.

via buttonz75.wordpress.com

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Aw…

The bus stop, in front of the Benrath Senior Centre in the western city of Düsseldorf, is an exact replica of a standard stop, with one small difference: buses never stop there.

The idea emerged after the centre was forced to rely on police to retrieve patients who wanted to return to their homes and families but had forgotten that in many cases neither existed any longer.

"If we can’t find them then we have to alert the police,” said Benrath's director Richard Neureither. “It can be particularly dangerous if this happens in winter and they spend the night out in the cold.”

Without powers to detain patients, he said, Benrath had been forced to look for other solutions.

“We cannot and must not run after people and lock them up,” said Mr Neureither.

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As soon as I'm back from holiday, I'm buying this game. It sounds incredible.

“Maybe try it while crouching?”

“Use the pipe in the back.”

“All my progress has been lost.”

“Starship Mario can now advance!”

“Dammit, I was just trying to reposition myself.”

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Sure, it's easy, and very short, but it's also gorgeous and quite entertaining. Great if you want to kill ten minutes. Exactly like I shouldn't be doing. Back to packing I go. Eurgh.

Easy Joe is charming little Flash game where you solve puzzles by clicking on objects in the correct order, progressing from one screen to the next until you reach the conclusion of Joe's adventure. The neon-style colour scheme makes it extremely easy to differentiate clickable objects on the screen, and most of the puzzles can be figured out with just a bit of trial and error.

True to its name, the entire game can be completed in about fifteen minutes or less.

I got my job (starting in August) through Stack Overflow Careers. If you are a programmer and you don't have your CV up on this awesome(r) site, you're doing it wrong.

Careers has always been close to our heart, but we haven’t always been able to give it the attention we wanted to give it. No longer! We now have a dedicated development team and a dedicated sales team working tirelessly to make Careers the best place on the internet for programmers to find great jobs and for employers to find great programmers.

The sales team has been busy. As of this writing we have 351 jobs listed:

Earlier today it was 347 and by the time you read this it may well be more. Contrast that with only 74 jobs back in January!

The dev team has been busy too. We rolled out some changes yesterday:

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If you've played Deus Ex, you'll really appreciate this homage to its excellent endings. If you haven't, well, don't read it—it'll spoil the game. Instead, you should probably go play it, seeing as it's one of the best games ever.

Well I’ll be, I’m mentioned on Jaunty RPS Tribute Blog PCGamer.com. They’ve posted up a feature about the endings of the original Deus Ex, which apparently I contributed to. For someone who doesn’t drink or take drugs, I have a really shocking amount of my past that I can’t remember. But wow, do I sound smart and interesting and handsome. It’s a lovely feature, going through the three possible endings (and one rather silly extra one), and their consequences in Deus Ex 2. You’re allowed to read it if you want. And then share with the class which ending you picked, and why. Show your working.

Ned, even your beard is badass. And I don't just say that because mine's looking very similar right about now.

wearedevo:

I’m a fucking STAAAAARK.

That needs to be made a thing. Also: yeeeeeeees!

*** I originally wrote this article for Another Castle. As it doesn't look like it's going to be published, I thought I'd throw it up here. Eventually, I will get commenting working on this blog, but for now, if you want to let me know what you can think, just tweet me at @SamirTalwar or email me at samir@euphoricllama.com. I hope you enjoy it. ***

I'm behind on rent, my friends are driving me crazy, I can't get a girlfriend and my final year dissertation is due in less than a week. I'm reaching epic levels of stress and just want to get all this shit done so I can do what normal people do and get a job that *doesn't* involve trekking to the fourth floor of the library at eleven o'clock in the friggin' night. I want a decent sleep pattern, I want a steady income and I want a flying car. So how am I spending this last week before it's all over? Am I bashing out words at a furious pace, trying to sum up the last nine months of work in a manner that my supervisor will actually read instead of trying to phrase his questions in such a way that he doesn't really need to bother?

Nope. I'm playing Pokémon HeartGold.

Gaming is a funny thing. Some of us use it to socialise, some of us experiment with a strange, accepted form of multiple personality disorder, and some of us just like to act out our violent tendencies in a way that only cripples the *ego* of that 14-year-old tosser on Xbox Live. Me, I play games to escape. Sure, I'll gladly jump on Modern Warfare 2 or Left 4 Dead 2 for the odd game of "watch the sucky n00b try and shoot straight" (I like to entertain people), but most of the time, gaming is a solitary experience. There's something far more satisfying to me about immersing myself in a story and letting myself become the character they've designed for me, in a world where I'm the most important thing alive. I have no idea why, but Pokémon is perfect.

What is it about university that makes us more childlike as we go on? In the first year, I started watching cartoons again. Second year, I skived off my job to play Halo at a friend's. Come third year, I started devolving into teenager-like arguments with the other guys on my project. Now it's my fourth year, my phone ringtone is from Tom and Jerry and the most important thing in my life is levelling up my sodding Magikarp so he'll stop being the second-most useless creature in my life (after my flatmate).

It probably helps that HeartGold is actually a very, very good game. It's partially the nostalgia talking as my memory wanders back to a simpler time, where my GameBoy Color was the height of technology, but for a ten-year old game, it's aged incredibly well. It probably helps that this new version many, many noticeable improvements from Gold, but I think the core gameplay mechanic is just as addictive as ever. I've broken out my DS for the first time in over a year, totalling up over ten hours in just the past few days, and even though I'm about to fail my degree, I don't regret one moment of it.

See, Apple, you can do things right. Now keep going. :-D

Matt Drance:

While explicit approval from Apple is still required, these new terms seem to acknowledge that there’s a difference between an app that happens to have non-compiled code, and a meta-platform. It’s a step that should allow for many new possibilities.

This hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as Apple’s change to the advertising analytics guidelines, but it might be just as big a deal. In addition to allowing the use scripting engines in games — many of which are already in the store, in apparent contradiction of the previous blanket ban on interpreted code — I’m pretty sure this is going allow some apps that had previously been rejected to be published.

 ★ 

Corollary: this also works when you want to break something you just made. Especially if that something is made with code.

Another good way to solve any problem is to give it to Raf.