I have officially given up on Blogger

This entire blog has now migrated to http://greenhamsam.posterous.com. Viva la Posterous!

How designers, developers and project managers see each other

Via @robstokes

All I want for Christamas is a teacup pig

I mean, just look at them.

 

 

 

Zombie vs. baby

 

Google + users are nearly all male

http://mashable.com/2011/07/14/google-plus-male/

 

Interesting titbit from Mashable.

 

“SocialStatistics, a third-party site that gathers data from select profiles, pegs the percentage of male users at 86.8%, while FindPeopleOnPlus, which curates information from about a million users, says men constitute 73.7% of Google+.”

Cut the Rope - Android App Review

Originally published on www.girlguides.co.za

• Casual game for Android or iOS
• Physics-based puzzle game
• Adorable and addictive

You know sometimes you start playing a game that leads you to tell friends you can’t come out tonight because you have some horrible incurable disease (when actually you just really, really need to get to the next level)? Well, this is one of those games.

Cut the Rope has been an obsession of mine for months. Until very recently, it was an Apple-only app, and the reason I would sneak off with the office iPad and hide in the corner, making strange “om nom nom” noises. Thankfully, it’s now been released for Android, so this strange behaviour of mine can now cease.

The premise of the game is quite simple: you have a pet frog-monster thing. But it’s adorable. And it eats candy. So far, it seems like the game was designed by a 5 year old, I know. But essentially, below the cute bubbly graphics, it’s a very clever puzzle game that requires you to get candy to the frog by manipulating it through a series of tools (mainly rope and bubbles) to get to the frog, collecting stars along the way for additional points.

The physics of the engine are quite advanced and the game feels very accurate and tactile. It’sbeautifully responsive and snappy to play, and the silly graphics make you fall in love with it. It’s the perfect game for people who have an oral fixation, because that little frog makes the most satisfying “GHOUM” noise when it bites into its candy. I dare you not to “om nom nom” along with that damn cartoon frog. I dare you.

The animation of the frog is great. He’s responsive to your movements as you play, following the path of the candy with his eyes and opening his mouth in expectation whenever you get close to him. He even manages a look of painfully sincere disappointment if you miss. Maybe it’s just me, and maybe I love food too much, but I feel an emotional connection to that frog.

The game is a good balance between rational pre-planning and fast-paced timing: even if you’ve planned out your route perfectly, you still have to cut the rope at exactly the right moment or lose the momentum of your swing. This keeps you highly engaged. I found I was happy to replay levels over and over again to improve on my score. There are also hundreds of levels, so you can (and will) play for hours.

Downsides? The game doesn’t make use of the accelerometer, although instinct still has you tilting your phone all over the place (and no doubt looking like a chop as you do so). It also has a high propensity to cause you to make funny faces to mirror your frog. I know that it’s not just me who does this. I have watched someone else playing the game and they did exactly the same thing. I have PROOF! Proof, I tell you! *twitch, mumble…*

It’s a very addictive game. Try it; that little animated frog might steal your heart like it stole mine.

Turn ons

• Mentally challenging
• Adorable
• Very satisfying to play

Turn offs

• You look stupid playing it
• You will develop a deep hatred for spiders, that will rival only your hatred of green pigs who steal eggs

Price: Just under R7 from the Android Marketplace

(Apparently, you can download it for free from m.getjar.com (click ‘quick download’ at the bottom of the page and type in 75206), but I couldn’t get this to work on my phone)

 

Browser wars

Via @http://alt-tab.org/

 

Hair

 

I have no idea who this guy is, but his hair is amazing.

 

via http://72dotsperinch.blogspot.com/2008_11_01_archive.html

Disturbance

For the third time since moving to Johannesburg, I was awoken last night at 4am to the sound of gunshots right outside my window. My flat is directly opposite a large public park, and a river, and I believe that people are taken there from nearby Alexandra township to be murdered. The worst was the accompanying sound of a French man screaming, over and over again, “Comment? Comment? Comment?” (“How? How? How?”).

 

Ah, Johannesburg.

Nixon in China

I watched a filmed version of the Met's Nixon in China last night by the incomparable John Adams. It's an incredible work, and fascinating how good a subject for opera modern politics makes.

Enjoy a yummy clip above - that's the sublime Kathleen Kim singing 'I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung', my favourite bit.

Bittereinder - Not Another SA Rap Outfit

Bittereinder, definitely one of the SA bands I'm most excited about right now. Check out 'Tale of 3 Cities' - probably their most accessible - but the whole album is worthwhile.

Unfortunately, too many people seem to be immediately jumping onto the 'they're the new Parow/Die Antwoord. They really aren't - they're serious and considered rather than ironic.

Between these guys and Spoek Mathambo, I'm seriously excited about SA music at the moment.

HTC Wildfire - First Impressions

Originally published on GirlGuides

I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do justice to this review, folks. Seriously, the phone could be a hand-me-down Windows 7 phone with all the buttons missing and I would still think it was space-age technology, as long as it doesn’t advertise its top feature as ‘FM Radio’. (Yup. Some people still think that ‘FM Radio’ is a feature worth advertising.)

Here it is, out of the box and in my hand. In fact, it’s unlikely to ever leave my hand again. I give little squeals of pleasure every time I stroke its lovely shiny screen. People in the office think I’m cracking up.

So, stay tuned as I take my first happy steps into smartphonedom and experience the joys and sorrows of touchscreens, autocorrect and app stores for the very first time. I may even get around to listing the features of the HTC Wildfire along the way.

It's Me, on ZA Tech Show!

Big excitement for me... I was a guest on ZA Tech Show last week. This has always been one of those big dreams and it feels *friggen super*.

http://zatech.co.za/podcasts/episode-149/

Supa Strikas... and Tron?

The cover of 'Supa Strikas!' caught my eye this week. Notice the Tron-esque rival team? Awesome genre-bending.

Supa Strikas could really be a great comic book, were it not for the uncomfortable product placements... and the vague sense that it's actually written by white guys trying to be hip.

Jonathan Franzen on Depression

Does any modern author write depression as well as Franzen? I love this quote from How to be Alone - his collection of essays.

"Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it."

Why I'm Not Ready to Abandon my RSS Reader for Twitter

Ah, Twitter. The maniacal, THC-twitchy jabbering voice in the corner of my screen. Snippets of friends telling me a million-bajillion snippets of interesting information throughout the day and night. Yes, I'm addicted. I can't get enough. But I am not - despite the repeated urgings of my favourite tech blogs - going to let it replace my RSS reader anytime soon. Here's why.

• Twitter is noisy - Yes, it's easy to unfollow people who are uninteresting, but there's still just too much stuff to keep up with. If you have a bit of an OCD disorder about information, like me, you like to take time to carefully go through things you want to read, mark them as read, and file them if they're interesting. There's just too much on Twitter to give you any sense of control, and too much of it is about other people's breakfasts.
  
• Twitter is an echo chamber - The power of the RT is incredible, but it does mean that you're exposed to the same articles and memes over and over again. More than that, everyone is too similar on Twitter, which means that you'll hear the same opinions voiced all the time. There just aren't enough conservative pro-lifers on Twitter (or corporate whores, or Julius Malemas) for debates to ever get very interesting.
  
• Twitter is too geeky - Building on this, everyone on Twitter (pretty much de facto) is a geek. Much as I love geeks (and am a geek) this limits the conversation to what matters to a very skewed, niche community. When Apple makes an announcement about a minor employee sneezing, it causes a tidal wave on Twitter. When a Nobel-winning author releases a new novel, barely a ripple. If you have interests that fall outside of the geek realm, you'll need an RSS reader to keep up with the times.
  
• RSS is quiet time - Maybe I'm just a bit antisocial, but I like the fact that going through my RSS reader is totally solitary and private. I can share articles if I want to, but I can also choose to keep some stuff in reserve for interesting dinner party conversation that everyone won't already have heard on Twitter.
  
• Twitter doesn't cater for your (odd) interests - It's difficult to find people to follow on Twitter if you have very eclectic/eccentric interests, but it's easy to find that blog on medieval cartography or (ehem) Victorian pornographic knitting, if that's your thing.
  
• Twitter is a democracy - Which is awesome, but sometimes you don't want to judge the truth by popular opinion. When it comes to matters like hardcore science, I'd much rather read one or two journals that I trust than try to distinguish the truth from the memes in the Twittersphere.

I still believe there's a space for the RSS reader in the Twitterized world, regardless of what popular opinion (mainly voiced through Twitter) is saying.

Community, Identity, Stability

I've just finished reading Brave New World - and I'm struck by how complex a piece of science fiction it is. Usually touted as 'Dystopian Fiction', it somehow evades such a simple reading. Although many aspects of Huxley's imagined future world - the eugenics, mindlessness, infant conditioning - are typical components of visions of a nightmare future, the whole is much more morally ambiguous.

Totally misleading, but very amusing, cover from one of the early printings

Brave New World is often held up as the antithesis to Orwell's 1984, since Orwell imagines a future dominated by Spartan state control whilst Huxley imagines a future dominated by pleasure. This isn't entirely accurate. The characters in Brave New World live absolutely according to their whims; disappointment, social rejection and lacking are unknown. But those very whims are pre-conditioned into them as young children - so that people become the agents of their own control. What's complex, is that this leads to a future of total happiness and stability for everyone. How can we feel that people are oppressed by being forced to be happy?

Isn't there something in living dangerously?"
"There's a great deal in it," the Controller replied. "Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time."
"What?" questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.
"It's one of the conditions of perfect health. That's why we've made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory."
"V.P.S.?"
"Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenalin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences."
"But I like the inconveniences."
"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

Historical sources indicate that Huxley was very aware of his own ambivalence towards the Brave New World he had imagined. Before World War II, he had written publicly in favour of eugenics as a solution to class wars, economic collapse and the 'deterioration' of the human spirit. Funnily, he was much more troubled by his first visit to America where he first witnessed the pleasure-driven, consumer lifestyle of the US 1920s. This strange combination between an idea he was repulsed by and an idea he thought could be the saviour of humanity seems to be the reason for the novel's shifting moral ambiguity.

The Savage, raised in a reserve outside of this new society, seeing through the readers' eyes, is horrified by the infantilism, godlessness and hypersexuality of this world. But at the same time, the reader can't help but be aware of the fact that the Savage's community is shown as barbaric, frightful and equally morally corrupt (with a religious self-righteousness only too familiar). The situation becomes impossible for the Savage - unable to reconcile his desires and his guilt - he ends his life.

It's an unsettling novel with no clear conclusion (unless, perhaps, Huxley's final utopian work, Island, is seen as the resolution to Brave New World's problems). It remains as challenging and relevant in 2011 as it was in 1932.