For you Maccers out there, here are some mac Ports of Andy Nobles excellent remakes.

Alternatively why not check out Retrospec for more goodies…

I was out with the kids picking Conkers at the weekend. Our garden has 3 large Horse Chestnut trees on the edge of it. This is generally a great thing, as I love conkers and it does depress me that more children don’t play it nowdays, (Actually, I think it might just be a southern thing, as children “up north” still seem to play it.) however the problem with all these trees is that the garden gets absolutley flooded with them at this time of year as they start to fall. Looking at the trees at the weekend and it seems there is a good crop… which means plenty of tidying up.

The kids love just finding them on the floor, but we also tend to knock some down just to keep the traddition going.

Anyway, Victoria had noticed a large one on one of the trees recently. You could see it from our kitchen and it looked a beaut! Well, we got the bugger down and it was the size of a tennis ball! And nestled inside was 4 conkers!!!

I was reading an interesting article about Stackless, and implementation of python than implementas micro-tasks or tasklets, more to the point it’s about Sylphis3D Game Engine use of it.

Anyway, reading the comments I find it amazing how may people don’t get the concept of micro-threads, tasklets, or just plain tasks. This system has actually been around for a very long time in games development.

The first time I came across it was in the early 90’s when I was new coder at SCi. I spent a fascinating time discussing the concept with ‘Kat’ as he explained how it was used in SWIV.

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If you look at my list of blogs that I link to, you will notice 3 of them… A Caverna Obscura , John August, and Struggling Author. The latter two I read regularly while the former I would like to read… but I don’t understand any of it!

Anyway, while reading Struggling Author today, someone used the word Schadenfreude in a comment. Not being a man lucky enough to have a large vocab, I thought, I think I know what the word means, but I’ll look it up anyway… so it did.

When I’d finished, I changed channels and starting reading John Augusts latest post, and lo an behold, there in the text… Schadenfreude! Now that might not mean much to you, you may use the word every day, but I found it a bit coincedental.

I’ve been having a hard time with my work on The Midnight Engine I get so little done nowdays and I’ve started to get disheartened by it. Anyway after a plea for help from the rest of the midnight commuity I think I may be ready to get on it again… watch this space…