These are my links for November 3rd through November 4th:

• The igraph library for complex network research
  "igraph is a free software package for creating and manipulating undirected and directed graphs. It includes implementations for classic graph theory problems like minimum spanning trees and network flow, and also implements algorithms for some recent network analysis methods, like community structure search." Oh, that could be very handy
  (tags: ruby visualization networkanalysis graphing socialgraph programming opensource )
• Baconnaise
  "We’re just two regular guys who love grilling and football on Sunday afternoons, eating until we can’t get off the couch and of course, the taste of great bacon. And it’s our dream to make everything taste like bacon.", as the about page says. There are no words.
  (tags: baconnaise food bacon speechless )
• Monkeys & Robots » Blog Archive » Code to scape CNN.com election results
  "My election party tomorrow will feature DMX controlled RGB LED lighting. The color of the house should reflect the electoral balance. The color will start purple, and drift toward either red or blue, depending on who’s winning." Awesome.
  (tags: hacking making scraping electronics hardware politics election )
• EA makes Red Alert 3 CD key blooper News // PC /// Eurogamer – Games Reviews, News and More
  '"There is currently a work-around that may allow you to bypass this issue. Since you have the first 19 characters of the code already, you can basically try guessing the last character," explains the EA customer support site, helpfully.' DRMLOLZ. You cannot make this up.
  (tags: drm fail ea redalert3 cdkey games drmlols )
• Does this return your row?
  Singles ad written as an SQL query.
  (tags: sql humour singles craigslist dorky )
• Gamer's Radical Realization: I Prefer Playing With Myself
  "Maybe this could eventually become an entire category of entertainment: You're dropped into a huge, lush, gorgeous, sprawling world, and all you do is just sort of … wander around. We could even give it a name. Radical singleplayer: The game of solitude."
  (tags: games play singleplayer multiplayer mmo massive clivethomson social antisocial loneliness solitude )

• Littlebigplanet: LittleBigPlanet As A Shmup
  "Japanese PSN member RRR30000 has managed to recreate classic shoot-em up gameplay within the game, using a spaceship sticker and massive amounts of free time." Just. Incredible. The enemies-on-sticks have a vast amount of charm, too. I don't think I can escape buying the PS3 this demands, sadly.
  (tags: games lbp littlebigplanet gradius shmup creativity wow ugc ingenuity )
• bastwood.com
  "The original page, which sadly has since then disappered from the face of the earth, was all about this hidden "demon face" in one of Aphex Twin's tracks, #2 (the long formula) on "Windowlicker". This face was supposed to be viewable with a spectrograph program, so I decided to try it myself." Some fun – and somewhat impressive – decoding of hidden imagery on IDM cds. The Venetian Snares cats are particiuarly great.
  (tags: sound processing audio music idm imagery spectrograph spectrographic crazy )
• BBC NEWS | UK | Councils ban use of Latin terms
  Well, as long as they ban every other imported phrase. Stupid as this is, I think the comment that it's "the linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing" is a bit of an absurd, and somewhat insensitive, overstatement.
  (tags: words language localgovernment absurd latin english )
• EA's Inferno to get big screen adaptation News // None /// Eurogamer – Games Reviews, News and More
  "Dante's Inferno, the poem, explores the Christian afterlife, as Dante traipses through nine circles of Hell to get to Purgatory and eventually Heaven. EA will apparently interpret this as fighting supernatural baddies." Oh bloody hell.
  (tags: ea games licensing dante inferno literature uhoh )

• World of Warcraft polled on Obama and McCain : The Metaverse Journal – Australia’s Virtual World News Service
  "Obama polled 62% across the whole Azeroth population, with McCain been favoured by Alliance whilst Obama is the pick of the Horde." Oh. That *is* interesting.
  (tags: politics wow democracy survey mmo games election america mmorpg worldofwarcraft )

• An Ode To Criterion Box Art // WellMedicated
  Some really beautiful in-house design from Criterion here.
  (tags: design packaging film movies dvd criterion lovely )
• 2D Boy: I love you, 2D Boy! » Blog Archive » Mac Version of World of Goo Releasing this Week
  "We’re just topping it off with the last few drops of smooth liquid goo, but the Mac version of World of Goo is running beautifully, and should be out this week!" Very excited.
  (tags: worldofgoo games play independent mac )
• chewing pixels » Best Thing I Saw Today #35: D.V.D.
  "Japan-o-glitch + Interactive Flash graphics = D.V.D. (x OMG)." Wow.
  (tags: music animation video )

• Steven Poole: Working for the Man
  "On this definition, obediently following a game’s narrative or challenge-reward structure is nothing but work. Only when the player does something that isn’t mandated by the system can she be said to be playing." Some good writing from Steven Poole on games and chores.
  (tags: work games writing play ethics mechanics )
• Lost Garden: The Princess Rescuing Application: Slides
  "My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications." Some really good insight, presented in a very clear manner. DanC is, as usual, on fire. Need to digest this slowly, but it certainly overlaps with a lot of my thinking.
  (tags: games design play application interaction web userexperience )
• GameSetWatch – Opinion: On Far Cry 2's 'Slow Burn'
  "…the game tries to define a set of rules and an environment in which memorable experiences are likely to happen, and simply lets the player loose in its world — a fascinating prospect." This captures a lot of the great things about FC2 well, and in an even-handed manner. The lack of handholding is jarring, but the possibilities it opens up are wonderful. For a tense, hectic, genre, it's interesting to see an entry that's by turns soothing and surreal, amidst the malaria, bushfires, and wholesale slaughter.
  (tags: games story narrative play emergence openworld farcry2 )
• YouTube – Drawing With Water: Making the Art for ALAN'S WAR
  Just like magic. Lovely.
  (tags: drawing illustration ink water comicbook graphicnovel )
• Breaking Video: The Simpsons Spoof The Mad Men Intro – Parodies – Videogum
  Spot-on, as you'd expect.
  (tags: humour simpsons madmen pastiche tv )

• matt.west.co.tt » Blog Archive » JSSpeccy: A ZX Spectrum emulator in Javascript
  "I’m really typecasting myself here. If there were an international “Person most likely to write a Spectrum emulator in Javascript” award, I’d have taken it for the last five years running. So here it is – probably the most stereotypical project I’ll ever come up with." Blimey.
  (tags: mattwestcott spectrum emulation programming javascript woah )
• faker
  "Faker, a port of Data::Faker from Perl, is used to easily generate fake data: names, addresses, phone numbers, etc."
  (tags: tool testing data ruby gem programming rails )
• Game Design Advance » The Designer’s Dilemma: The Freedom to Fail
  "Losing is an opportunity that individuals deserve, and allowing the state to sweep in and save you from the consequences of your own actions robs you of a certain kind of agency." Fantastic article about the difference between win/lose and quit/finish. Lots of good stuff in here – a must-read.
  (tags: games communism design play success reagan )

• Fraser Speirs – Two Macs: Fail.
  "An experiment I’ve been running for more than two years now is over: running two Macs is more hassle than it’s worth. I write not to praise synchronisation technology, but to bury it." Roughly what I'd always guessed, but Fraser is careful and detailed, and makes some sensible points. I just hope Aperture doesn't chug as much on the new MBPs as it did on the old ones, for his sake.
  (tags: sync syncrhonization mac hardware computers computing fraserspeirs )
• Coffee houses and civil liberty « Derivadow.com
  "Yes people use the Internet to do bad thing, and quite possibly Twitter is one of those services that bad people use. But they also plan bad things in coffee house but for the last 300 odd years we’ve realised that trying to legislate against coffee houses is a bad thing for society." I recently finished Markman Ellis' book on coffee houses, and so Tom's post had a special kind of relevance.
  (tags: security intelligence spying coffeehouse )
• Battle of the CSS Frameworks | Capsize Designs
  A neat summary of what's available out there; I use Blueprint for prototyping, but it's interesting to see what else is available – particularly the more stripped-down frameworks.
  (tags: css design code web layout framework prototyping )
• Acclaimed Colombian Institution Has 4,800 Books and 10 Legs – NYTimes.com
  "A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia." Awesome.
  (tags: books library colombia southamerica travelling )
• Flaming Lips frontman's double-neck 'Guitar Hero guitar' – Joystiq
  "Flaming Lips vocalist-guitarist Wayne Coyne brought with him what he dubbed the 'Guitar Hero guitar,' an Epiphone double-neck with the lower, six-string neck replaced by a five-button variant and wired to an oscillator. '[It's] because a lot of kids out there think this is actually the way you play guitar…'" Awesome.
  (tags: guitarhero waynecoyne guitar instrument hacking flaminglips )

• Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Lessons Learned while Building an iPhone Site
  "Developing this site was very different from any other project I’ve worked on; there seems to be a new set of frontend rules for developing high-end mobile sites. A lot of the current best practices get thrown out the window in the quest for minimum page weight and fastest load times over slow celluar connections. Here are a few of the lessons we learned (sometimes painfully) while developing this site." Really excellent article from code.flickr on building their new mobile/iPhone site.
  (tags: none)
• Tactical Assassin Substratum | GameKrunch
  Jolly good (and nasty) stick-figure assasination game; involves a lot of patience, but nicely executed.
  (tags: none)
• Joyce Walks because somewhere sometimes it's always bloomsday
  "Joyce Walks is a psychogeographical art project which generates walking maps for any city in the world based on remapping routes from Ulysses allowing users to create a mashup of their own walk to be shared with other users both on the Joyce Walks site and as embeddable maps on any site."
  (tags: none)

• GPSTagr: geotag flickr photos using GPS
  Welcome to GPSTagr. Our service allows you to geotag your flickr photos using a track file from a GPS device in 3 easy steps.
  (tags: none)
• uplog » » Coding a Networked Bike
  "We’ve just finished a project for Yahoo called purple pedals (a.k.a. the yBike). In a nutshell, it’s a bike that takes pictures and uploads them to flickr in real time."
  (tags: none)
• IF Competition: General Reflections and Favorites « Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction
  "This year, I have no apologies about any of my top five. Here’s my list of the cream of the crop…" Emily Short on this year's IF competition entrants.
  (tags: none)
• geotag-lightroom-plugin – Google Code
  "This project installs menu items into the Adobe Lightroom interface that allows photos to be tagged with geographic information through the Lightroom interface."
  (tags: none)
• Huffduffer
  "# Find links to audio files on the Web. # Huffduff the links—add them to your podcast. # Subscribe to podcasts of other found sounds." It's like delicious for audio, but it spits out a podcast. Some really lovely work from Jeremy.
  (tags: web application webapp hfdf podcast filtering social aggregation )
• T=Machine » Cultural differences: game developers vs web developers
  Adam's a smart guy and all, but god, most of this just really rubs me the wrong way. He's correct about business (or rather, he's correct about many of the things I hate about Web Entrepreneurship at the moment); I don't really think his views on product design ring true, though.
  (tags: design web games industry comparison development product )
• Trends in Japan – CScout Japan Blog » Bandai RPG Pedometers animate your steps
  "Bandai will soon be releasing two new hybrid pedometer games to keep you entertained while racking up the miles as you go about your life. … [The] idea is to set personal goals of exercise and achieve them in a fun way."
  (tags: games ubicomp pedometer talkingshoe rpg design interaction )
• jordanmechner.com » Blog Archive » October 20, 1985
  Jordan Mechner is serialising – and backdating – his journals from making the original Prince Of Persia. This post is a corker, if only for one of the early videos of Mechner's brother running and jumping. If you've played the original game, you'll understand what I mean the second you see the video.
  (tags: animation video jordanmechner princeofpersia )
• The Sands of Time: Crafting a Video Game Story – Jordan Mechner
  "In this chapter I'll try to shed some light on the creative and technical decision-making processes that went into crafting the story and narrative elements of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (POP for short). The team's approach was practical, not literary; our challenge was to find the right story for a mass-market action video game." Jordan Mechner on writing Sands of Time; well-crafted, and very pragmatic.
  (tags: writing jordanmechner games script princeofpersia pop popsot )
• The Unfinished Swan
  "The Unfinished Swan is a first-person painting game set in an entirely white world. Players can splatter paint to help them find their way through an unusual garden." Beautiful.
  (tags: xna games monochrome blackandwhite 3d npr nonphotorealistic abstract surreal stylised )