Ian Schreiber's ten week course notes. Lots to get stuck into here.

"The (for now) final end product seems incredibly obvious. And popular.

Yet it took decades of iterative innovation, from some of the cleverest minds in the field, to make something so apparently simple yet powerful.

And every step was astonishing." This is great stuff from Francis.

"So, as some of you may know, the old shrine got re-activated as a working shrine a few days ago, and the Church classroom cleared away for meditation and contemplation, led by Fa Zang (Rinpoche), the guy in the buddhist monk robe who has been doing a lot of sewing in the craft area recently." I love mailing lists. And this is a remarkable post.

"Using vim is like talking to your editor in ‘verb modifier object’ sentences, turned into acronyms." Which is a good way of thinking of it.

"Calepin reads Markdown-formatted, plain-text files stored in your Dropbox and converts them into blog posts for you." Which is pretty clever.

"The recent generation of young turks is doubtless having fun with data scrawling but at some point it will pass people by unless there is a purpose or utility to it. They've got the engagement sorted. These things are mostly usable. What they are not is useful.

That is where people like Few come in. They work in analytics – using data for decision making. They are ideal real-life mentors, solving real life problems. They can point the way to thinking of these apps as tools for whatever outcomes." Max is right – it's a great blog. Good spot.

Ooh – a local luthier. My electric is in need of a set-up, so good to know there's someone local who comes recommended.

"Both within the academy and within tech startups, we’ve been hearing some similar questions lately: Where can I find a good data scientist? What do I need to learn to become a data scientist? Or more succinctly: What is data science?" Great starting point; looking forward to more from the blog.

"When someone with a bad case fails to finish a book, they don’t start a new one; they go into a holding pattern, crippled by guilt over their failure and unable to let go and start over. All reading stops. People have confessed to me that it’s been months since they last picked up a book, because they still haven’t finished the last one." Yup. We really don't have to finish this book, sometimes.

MarsEdit 3 is out; the headline feature is the WYSIWYG mode, but for me, the headline features are syntax-highlighting, support for WordPress Pages, and integration with Lightroom's library. Sadly, it's 10.6 only, and my knackered MBP is 10.5… but it's an upgrade I'll be making asap.

Blimey, ReBirth, entirely ported to iPhone and on the App Store. Looks finickity, but it was loads of fun, and for $7… I might end up with that.

"Fortunately, for the first time in my life, I know the way forward. The way forward lies in my having the courage that I did not know I had a decade ago to bid farewell to those tragically comforting habits. I need to walk on hot coals and sleep on a bed of nails. I need to chew on broken glass. I need to drink paint. This post has gotten long enough and I am still afraid to come to the point, but what I really need more than anything is to write these words;<br />
<br />
I gave notice of my resignation to Ubisoft on Monday, April 26th, 2010."

Engine Yard have a new blog about Rails, consisting of screencasts and tutorials, and it looks good. One to subscribe to.

"…let's not kid ourselves. If you sell a game that's a first-person shooter, then no matter how many RPG elements you shoe-horn into the game, the shadow that hangs over every character interaction that you have, no matter who they are, is the question in the player's mind of "What happens if I shoot this person?" And that's our own fault! We've sold the player that; we've made a contract with the player that says it's okay to kill people. Why would we then chastise them for exploring that?" Patrick Redding is brilliant. This interview, with Chris Remo on Gamasutra, is great – Remo asks some smart questions, and Redding gives some really smart answers.

"The game insists that I focus, even for mundane activities like carrying groceries, on carefully following directions delivered to me visually on-screen. The simple act of carrying groceries is subsumed by the mechanical procedure of executing a series of prompts _for no apparent reason_. This, for me, is the primary disconnect in Heavy Rain. My mechanical game-directed actions don't amplify or add meaning to the in-game behaviors they execute. They don't pull me in; they keep me out. " Hmn. I've been thinking about something similar recently. Time to fire up the blogpostmatron…

Lovely, lovely article explaining just how the PeepCode Blog works. The blog itself features unique layouts for every post. There's no CMS, no database, but what's going on under the hood is at least as clever – and the flexibility makes the beautiful and clear pages much easier to build.

"…for reasons that baffle me, my TV can only receive the four terrestrial channels, plus a grainy feed from the building’s security cameras. Easy choice."

Joe Moran (of Reading the Everday) has a blog. I did not know this. Subscribed!

A little bit of nostalgia, a little bit of fact, a few reminders of the past. Especially the old Kit-Kat wrappers.

"In the game you are rewarded for keeping your tracks together while navigating through the surreal world of an "architectural" diagram. The camera moves in continuous motion and the object is to finish the course with as many points as possible." Watch the trailer; it's astoundingly pretty. Can't wait for this one!

"On my todo list still is an evil twin of iamnear, designed to be difficult and disorientating in use, but rewarding in unexpected ways should you persevere with it. As Kevin Slavin recently said in his talk at the BLDGBLOG book launch: “a world and a life in which you are always the centre of the map… fuck that”."

"I work at a used and rare bookstore, and I buy books from people everyday. These are the personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things I find in those books." Bookmarks, dedications, receipts, adverts. Lovely.

"this is good level design." A lovely dissection of a couple of screens from Super Mario Land; detailed, spot-on, carefuly analysis from Anna Anthropy. Amazing what you can do with four types of block.

"Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to." The rest of the quotation is where the magic happens.

In which photographers, or, more likely, their assistants, upload lighting test shots. Some are striking; some are practical; some are made of awesome. Fun!

The last keffiyeh factory in Palestine is going out of business; they're all made in China now. Well done, hipsters!

Recommended by Matt Haughey.

Now that Net Yaroze has closed its doors, Edge catch up with some former Yaroze developers; they have some interesting things to say on the state of games education in particular.

"[Our heroine's] name is Marta Louise Velasquez, and she’s quite possibly the most unpleasant female lead character in the history of gaming. She’s also what makes TD2192 worth remembering." Indeed, I have many. She did not lead a happy life, I'll give Richard that.

"Critical thinking is the key to success!" Professor Layton is on Twitter. Officially. This is good.

why do it? To borrow from the site's About pages: "First, it will help you find shows that others have not only watched, but are talking about. Hopefully it'll throw up a few hidden gems. People's interest, attention and engagement with shows are more important to Shownar than viewing figures; the audience size of a documentary on BBC FOUR, for instance, will never approach that of EastEnders, but if that documentary sparks a lot of interest and comment – even discussion – we want to highlight it. And second, when you've found a show of interest, we want to assist your onward journey by generating links to related discussions elsewhere on the web. In the same way news stories are improved by linking out to the same story on other news sites, we believe shows are improved by connecting them to the wider discussion and their audience." Dan Taylor explains Shownar from the BBC's perspective

"Shownar tracks millions of blogs and Twitter plus other microblogging services, and finds people talking about BBC telly and radio. Then it datamines to see where the conversations are and what shows are surprisingly popular. You can explore the shows at Shownar itself. It’s an experimental prototype we’ve designed and built for the BBC over the last few months. We’ll learn a lot having it in the public eye, and I hope to see it as a key part of discovery and conversation scattered across BBC Online one day." Matt talks about Shownar on Pulse Laser.

"Shownar tracks the online buzz around BBC shows. It's an experimental prototype and we want your feedback." What I've been working on in the first three months at Schulze & Webb, and is now live. Exciting!