"in other words: Please ensure that there is absolutely no way for your customer to know whether we are showing the form or you are. In fact, please train your customer to give their “Verified by Visa” password to anyone who asks for it." Eesh. I knew I never licked VBV, but this just proves, accutely, *why* I don't like it.

"Today I gave a two week's notice of my intent to resign. The letter was written in frosting on a full sheet size cake. The cake was delicious and it was well received."

"I would be very interested in seeing a BSD game that introduced some moral ambiguity, or unexpected and painful consequences. I'd love to see a game where you start off with balls in full swing, then slowly start to realize that–mother*ucker–you're on the wrong side." Bill Harris gave up on Killzone 2. I'm mainly linking to this just because of the coinage of "BSD" as a genre, which is perfect.

"Sometimes, it’s worth joining the dots between a few things you find." If in doubt, make a story out of nice things you saw. In this case: a quick exploration of the fantastical in design. With lots of pictures!

Probably the most comprehensive page on Pob I've found, with, most importantly, pictures of Rod Campbell both drawing mechanisms and opening boxes. Which is the bit I always want to refer to, but never can find pics of. Until now!

"The web is about sharing … and people will share with the tools they’re given. If username and password are front and centre, then they’re the tools people will use. There’s so much usability dogma about reducing the sign-up process and throwing people into use that important details – such as explaining what all the cogs and levers do – are forgotten, or assumed as knowledge." This is excellent, and all true, and I do not know how to solve this. But Chris' comments – that this is not stupid, this is how people are – are all spot on.

"How finished an artefact is is an important indicator of its relationship to the world: not just an indication of where it is in its lifecycle, but also one that explains how it should be understood, and that opens a dialogue between the observer and the artefact." Me, on Pulse Laser, talking about unfinished states as conversation tools, amongst other things.

"Virgil is singing arms and a man". I must admit, I prefer "the man", but this is lovely nontheless.

"I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK." Analysing tempo fluctuation on a variety of popular recordings to find out who uses a click track; as you might have guessed, Ringo and John Bonham didn't.

Finally, a decent video of Abel. Ignore the first round, where he gets hammered, and concentrate on the second two: he negates Sagat's ranged game by getting in close, throwing in some careful EX scissor kicks, and massive abuse of linking a juggle into the aerial grab throw.

Some nice tips in here, mainly about blocking access to things and security.

David Hobby goes to Cern, and has a ball. Also: takes some nice portraits.

Useful tutorial on building Pagination, that goes beyond the Pagination library and points out what you need to be doing with the Model, too.

Bandcamp add an automatic way to generate one-time use download codes for music – so bands can promote singles and the like. And then: they add automatic Moo Minicard generation to the mix. Bloody brilliant, and definitely The Right Way To Do Things.

"where dreams become heart attacks" – photographs of revolting, calorie-drenched food "experiments".

"Unlike other screenshot services, we are able to process a large number of capturing jobs in parallel and in realtime, making it the fastest service that we know of." Ooh. That could be useful.

"This article provides a simple positive model for preventing XSS using output escaping/encoding properly. While there are a huge number of XSS attack vectors, following a few simple rules can completely defend against this serious attack." Pretty comprehensive, and some clear guidelines if, like me, you're unsure where to start when protecting against XSS.

"Kodu is a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone. The programming environment runs on the Xbox, allowing rapid design iteration using only a game controller for input." Which is interesting. I know it's only a research project, but it'd be lovely to play with some time.

"Whiskey Media provides fully structured data APIs for the following: Giant Bomb (games) Comic Vine (comics) Anime Vice (anime/manga)". This is a really good page for both explaining what you can and can't do, and explaining what the damn thing is. Wonder how good the data is?

"Have you ever wanted to sink your hooks into a gaming database full of release dates, artwork, games, platforms, and other sorts of related data? I'm going to guess that, for the bulk of you, the answer's probably no. But if you're out there wondering what to do next with your developer-savvy smarts, you've got another big source to pull data from. The Giant Bomb API is now available for non-commercial use." Giant Bomb really are doing some pretty interesting stuff, alongside their more traditional content.

"Customers seem to respond better to the Sims than all the adventure games ever made combined together. Then there are Bejeweled and Peggle and other game games. Who needs a stink’n story? I prefer making interactive stories." The writer of "Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble", interviewed on RPS, drops an interesting one.

"The baseline grid. Oh yes, the baseline grid. Let's be honest this is the sort of thing you know you need to know about. And you do know about, you know, sort of. But. Do you really know about it? Of course you do if you work on a magazine or a newspaper, but when was the last time you used one? I almost re-taught myself how to use a baseline grid. I certainly re-read all about it and it pretty much saved my life." Ben, on the details of The Paper. Good stuff in here.

"This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a start. In each of these you’ll find other resources to help you dig deeper." Which, right now, is what I need. For a former front-end-dev, I'm a bit behind the curve.

"So we’ve progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that’s encrypted– really more just obfuscated– to an executable that doesn’t even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads." Fascinating interview with a smart guy, who at one point in his life, did some bad (if not entirely unethical) work.

"I do think that during the coming years we will continue to try to bridge the gap between simulated musicianship and real musicianship. That said, the path there is not obvious: As the interactivity moves closer to real instrumental performance, the complexity/difficulty explodes rapidly. The challenge is to move along this axis in sufficiently tiny increments, so that the experience remains accessible and compelling for many millions of people. It’s a hard, hard problem. But that’s part of what makes it fun to work on." There is loads in this interview that is awesome; it was hard to choose a quotation. Rigopulos is super-smart.

"On June 17th, every year, the family goes through a private ritual: we photograph ourselves to stop, for a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by." Perfectly executed.

"The Bop It commands are called out in different tones. These tones differ from version to version as well. In Bop It Blast, distinct tones are employed by both male and female speakers." I did not know that.

"A couple of other examples of this kind of thing we like, are the bookish experimentations of B.S. Johnson, whose second novel Alberto Angelo contains both stream-of-conciousness marginalia, and cut-through pages enabling the reader to see ahead – possibly the most radical act I know in experimental books." Yes! And which I bang on about interminably. I love this stuff.

Jaw-droppling good. More on this soon, but in a nutshell: you have about a week, and it's incredible. Do not ignore the queues inside it, either: they are all for excellent things.

"My crystal ball tells me you will hear music – great classic rock tunes – and you will believe, truly believe, that you are playing that music on your toy guitar. And you will feel, truly feel, that you are cool. A hero of the guitar." Lovely.

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties."

"XP is adapted to a context where motivation is expensive and change is cheap. Interaction design (at least how Cooper explains it) is adapted to a context where motivation is cheap and change is expensive. It should be obvious that contexts of both kinds can exist in the world: there are situations where it's easy to return to previous decisions and modify them (software, for one), and there are other situations where it's not (e.g. buildings, dams)."

Freddie25 plays the Wind Waker theme, on a selection of instruments, as a Christmas treat for you. It's delightful, and the bit when the nine-part vocals come in is lovely. Proper good, this.

"..some tweets were destined for fail." – or, at least, not for public consumption. Oh dear.

"AlterEgo is a Ruby implementation of the State pattern as described by the Gang of Four. It differs from other Ruby state machine libraries in that it focuses on providing polymorphic behavior based on object state. In effect, it makes it easy to give an object different “personalities” depending on the state it is in." Oh, that could be really handy.

Oh gosh this is brilliant.

"Simply stick your finger in the hole and a virtual representation appears on the screen. Then you can use your virtual finger to play all kinds of cool mini games… from swinging a panda to having a karate fight with a tiny little man." Um, wow. Although I'm always afraid of putting appendages in boxes I can't see inside, though.

I think they're wrong, you know. It's not theatre; it's protocol. Maybe people aren't used to the protocol; if yours is the first app they encounter, they'll think that it's OK to show what passwords are – and perhaps that it's OK to write them down elsewhere in plaintext. Applications have a degree of responsibility for users' interactions across the internet, and quirky and cute as this may be, it's just not the place to demonstrate your shining personality.

The Brian Dettmer is beautiful. Also: didn't realise the heart/cube cogs were paper, not wood.

"…it's another little example of the way the ipod/iphone is such an attention-demanding device. It doesn't orient to you, it orients to itself." Yes. This is a problem.

"The US auto industry is on the verge of imploding. People are losing their homes to foreclosure. And, on the off chance that you had the nerve to try to buy something, credit is almost impossible to come by. It is against that backdrop that I would like to talk about working for free. Why? Because I think it is one of the fastest ways to make yourself a better photographer, whether you are a pro or an amateur."

"To the extent that the web is becoming truly ubiquitous, and involves increasingly multimodal paradigms of interaction, it seems appropriate to define a Web standard for representing emotion-related states, which can provide the required functionality." No, it does not seem appropriate. It seems bonkers.

Hey, I've been in that relationship too! These made me laugh a lot.

"bill. francis. louis – look here. help." Ah, the fun of the farm. It's all coming back to me now.

"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.

"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.

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.

"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.

"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.

"So we decided to treat Availabot as a world probe: it was decided that we would take Availabot through to the position of being factory ready, and in the process learn as much as possible about the processes of manufacture, and how to develop these kind of complex products with so many moving parts." And, best news of all: Availabot will be coming to market. Excellent.

"…this leads up to a discussion of two things: the OAuth protocol which aims, amongst other laudable goals, to help safeguard users’ passwords, and the distinctly unnerving trend which Jeremy Keith has christened the password anti-pattern, which really doesn’t." A clear, articulate explanation of the issues around authentication.

In 2000, a group of seventh-graders were asked to draw what they thought scientists looked like and describe their pictures. Then, after visting Fermilab, they were asked to repeat the exercise. Some of the quotations are genuinely excellent, cf "Some people think that (scientists) are just some genius nerds in white coats, but they are actually people who are trying to live up to their dreams and learn more." Aren't we all?

"At GDC 2006 Sony’s Lead Programmer – Tim Moss had talk titled “God of War: How the Left and Right Brain Learned to Love One Another”. I read it, remembered mainly that it was interesting they had used Maya as main tool and kinda forgot about it. Only recently I’ve found out that recording from this session has been made available (for free) as well. You can download it here. Combined together they’re really interesting and I recommend everyone to spend few minutes and listen to it while reading slides." Some interesting stuff – God of War pre-scripts a lot of things that other people might want to do in real time, and as such, makes some stuff simpler, and makes controlling the players' experience easier.

A detailed look at various techniques for greebling Lego models.

"To me, these bizarre sequences represent adaptations of classical Brechtian stagecraft to video games. The way we interact with a game is different than the way we interact with a staged fiction, and by manipulating the tools specific to game-interaction– the interface and the mission-delivery system– Kojima delivers that sense of alienating weirdness that's the hallmark of the Verfremdungseffekt." I like Pliskin's commentary here – the absurdity of Arsenal Gear was great, and much preferable to the boss-rush that followed it.

"The dissertation builds on available sociological approaches to understanding everyday life in the networked city to show that emergent technologies reshape our experiences of spatiality, temporality and embodiment. It contributes to methodological innovation through the use of data bricolage and research blogging 1, which are presented through experimental and recombinant textual strategies; and it contributes to the field of science and technology studies by bringing together actor-network theory with the sociology of expectations in order to empirically evaluate an area of cutting-edge design." Anne Galloway's PhD thesis, now online.

A remake of "You Have To Burn The Rope", in the style of an Intellivision game. They've changed an important play mechanic and given the game an entertaining twist ending. Fun.