Keymaster is a simple (100 LoC or so) micro-library for defining and dispatching keyboard shortcuts. It has no dependencies on any libraries so you can just drop it in your app and it will work, cross-browser.

Thinking of using this on the website.

(via the ever awesome kottke.org)

Sony has revealed that Vita development kits will cost just €1900 plus VAT, making the upcoming portable a viable proposition to smaller studios.

I really want the Vita to succeed, as it has many things going for it: attractive hardware, especially the addition of a second analogue stick; a competitive price point, helping it to compete with Apple’s and Nintendo’s offerings; and a cheap devkit with which to entice indie developers.

So what we do on the consoles, where we have this tight control, is we say, OK, you’re going 60FPS, it’s v-syncing, there are no tear lines. But if you miss by a tiny little bit, we’ll let it tear at the top of the screen and we adjust the resolutions dynamically to let it catch back up.

It’s a really novel idea, and one that id managed to convince vendors to implement:

We were able to convince all of the vendors to go ahead and implement that extension on Windows, so we’re now able to do that at 60FPS as long as you’ve got the horsepower. But if you get a hiccup, where it slows down a little bit, it reverts to tearing, which is exactly what we want for gameplay reasons.

You just have to love how id always strives to push graphical boundaries as far as possible.

Website optimization company Strangeloop has built SPDY into its flagship product Site Optimizer, software that sits in between a website and its users, and adjusts the site’s code to make pages load more quickly.

Mainstream adoption may prove difficult for Google; the protocol requires changes to both browsers and server software. Currently, the only browser to support SPDY is Google Chrome.

Pros

• The freedom to choose either C# or Visual Basic as a programming language
• The simultaneous use of Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2010 makes it easy to work on UI design independently of underlying application logic
• Two-way data bindings
• Automatic memory management
• Every single Windows Phone 7 handset adheres to a set of baseline requirements
• Windows Azure

Cons

• Known issues with the SDK, e.g. IsolatedStorage.ApplicationSettings
• APIs yet to be implemented, e.g. CivicAddressResolver.ResolveAddress
• No proper multitasking on handsets
• The Windows Phone emulator: no support for GPS, multi-touch gestures on normal displays etc.

The disadvantages are relatively minor and will likely be addressed in the Mango update. With my limited five-day experience, I’d say Microsoft is off to en encouraging start with its mobile phone initiative.

This system acts as a regular expression generator. Instead of trying to build the regular expression, you start off with the string that you want to search. You paste this into the site, click submit and the site finds recognisable patterns in your string. You then select the patterns that you are interested in and it writes a fully fledged program that extracts those patterns from that string.

A time-saver if ever I saw one.

The AlgoRyhmics YouTube channel has a few more algorithms such as shell sort. [via Neatorama]

As always, www.maxpagels.com/shortcodes.txt lists all of the shortcodes offered by the plugin, sorted by version.

As always, look at the text file located at www.maxpagels.com/shortcodes.txt for all available shortcodes.

It is funny how people think that the important thing about exceptions is handling them. That is not the important thing about exceptions. In a well-written application there’s a ratio of ten to one, in my opinion, of try finally to try catch. Or in C#, using statements, which are like try finally.

The very first thing that puzzled me is that contrary to “regular” classes in Java, generic elements don’t really have superclasses to speak of. Consider the following example:

Object obj;
String str = "Hello";
obj = str;

Naturally, a String has Object as it’s highest superclass. Thus, it’s legal to assign a String to an Object — obviously, one can only call the methods of the Object class after such an operation.

Now consider this example:

ArrayList<Object> listOne;
ArrayList<String> listTwo = new ArrayList<String>();
listOne = listTwo;
listOne.add(new Integer(1));
String str = listTwo.get(0);

In this example, we attempt to assign a list of Strings to a variable with the type “list of Objects”. If this would work, we could add another type of object (say, an Integer) to the list. After this, listTwo doesn’t just contain Strings anymore, which leads to trouble on the last line of our code. Thankfully, Java doesn’t allow this to happen — line 2 3 in our example will give us an error if we attempt to compile the code.

The best quick explanation of generics/superclasses in Java that I’ve found is in a book called Generics in the Java Programming Language (PDF link), written by Gilad Bracha:

For example, if the department of motor vehicles supplies a list of drivers to the census bureau, this seems reasonable. We think that a List<Driver> is a List<Person>, assuming that Driver is a subtype of Person. In fact, what is being passed is a copy of the registry of drivers. Otherwise, the census bureau could add new people who are not drivers into the list, corrupting the DMV’s records.

The book is a comprehensive Java generics resource, and discusses even the most advanced concepts in a highly understandable form. Don’t forget to read The Tapir’s Tale blog post or Angela Lanker’s website, either.

(via Mr.doob’s blog)