This usually just means you have to properly internationalise software and that Open Source licenses are completely null and void as they are only written in English... but it becomes much more fun when you realise that advertising - despite containing no literal meaning whatsoever - also counts as "text". Meaningless catch phrases, and shallow one-liners are not exempt!

How do you translate drivel into drivel? Here's one example:

Some smart people (jeez, I hope it was people) thought the Windows Phone needed a sincere and poignant statement to emphasise the beauty and meaning inherent in their life-changing product: Put people first.. Ermmmm, okay. Will do.

Now, nobody needs to be told that advertisement is dangerous and will actively make you stupider if you accidentally read it - but here's the nice part: this particular piece of nonsense is written in English. Which is completely unacceptable in France thanks to loi toubon.

So somebody else gets paid to take this meaningless phrase and turn it into French nonsense.

And the result? "Soyez au cœur des contacts"... Be at the heart of (your) contacts. Ah, it's beauuutiful! I'd like to see this in some kind of translation loop... would it reach an equilibrium? Or would it create a sentence so banal as to instantly hebetate any who read it?

Toubon Law is great fun - though somehow the movie biz are kind of exempt from it... Rather than translating the movie titles from English to French, they can translate them from English to weirder English as long as they awkwardly work in the words sex or sexy. Peculiar loophole, that.

Up and down to scroll the page up and down. The top-most visible link on the page will be highlighted for your navigating pleasure. Left and right to move between links, FIRE to visit. It's just that simple!

The gamepad API is verrry experimental at the moment - it's only available in special builds of Firefox and Chrome (Chrome Canary)... but it's comin' to a browser near you soon!

I also map the "select" button to back, and "start" button to forward, just for fun. It's only for Firefox at the moment (thanks to some weirdness in the Chrome implementation) and it's hardcoded to the Retrolink controller - you need to tweak the IDs in the script to match yours... but hey, works on my machine!

Konami code not included.

Notch coded Prelude of the Chambered for the Lundum Dare #21 game competition over 48 hours of August 19th-22nd 2011. I think most of it is here - and I've started annotating some of the good bits. Started. I'll fill out this post as I go...

It's well worth a study if you've got a couple of days to spare!

Part 1: The setup (3h 15m)

And so the game begins - on Saturday the 20th of August, some time in the afternoon...

Part 1 direct link (on YouTube - text in fullscreen is readable, but only just!)

• Sketches out some possible ideas in notepad
• Sets up Eclipse and his paint program
• Creates blank Java project and Swing component
• Creates display frame and boiler plate stuff
• (0:27) Sets up main loop "tick" and game screen
• Draws some random pixels with clipping
• Pixels with perspective
• (1:14) Maps a roof and floor texture
• Adds up-down camera movement
• Adds a wall-as-some-pixels
• Spends ages getting wall to work properly
• Conquers the wall maths!
• (2:19) Adds wall texture
• Adds spinning camera
• Tweets progress...
• Adds input handler
• Creates player and binds camera to the keys
• Adds "z" movement
• Make random cube generation for testing
• (3:09)Adds player/wall collision detection
• Fix rendering direction: "Let's flip the Y. Y not?"
• Realises the video stream for 3 hours costs $4000. Changes vendors.

Part 2: Adding engine features (2h 00m)

Part 2 direct link

• Re-sets up video streaming crap
• Adds sprite class
• Sprite drawing and clipping
• Renders sprite textures
• (0:28) Adds dynamic colouring (greys coloured at render time)
• Dynamic colouring for floor and sprites
• Switches to 16x16 sprites (double res!)
• Messes around with walls and floors designs
• Tests screen sizes and scaling
• (1:00) Tests performance and lots-of-sprites
• Tweaks the shading a bit
• Added dithering
• Added a "post-process" step for rendering tweaks
• Added per-block colouring
• Added per-level floor and roof colouring
• (1:35) Drew a custom font
• Created a font renderer

Part 2b: "Getting so tired now" (2h 00)

Part 2b direct link

• Snack time!
• Created a "level" png file
• Added level loader from png
• Added cache for loaded levels
• Started crashing everything with texture bug
• (0:24) Spawn a player from a colour on png
• Fixed rendering directions (things were rendered mirrored)
• Tested adding sprites via pixels on png
• Started adding game design elements (iron bars)
• (0:44) Made blocking sprites: first room!
• Interactable blocks: push-button wall
• Fixed artwork manager
• Created "switch" block class
• Added particle-like smashing to block
• (1:20) Minecraft-esque smash-a-thon
• Bit of level design
• Add popup message system
• "Freedom is temporary and unsatisfying"
• Add "Click to focus" when screen unfocused

Part 2c: The end of day one (0h 40m)

Part 2c direct link

• Refactored/cleaned up "blocks with entities" handling
• Added boulder entity
• Added entity collision detection
• Added rolling boulders
• Added floor holes
• Off to bed

Part 3: Early the next day (1h 13m)

After a smashing first day of fierce programming, we now rejoin the action on Sunday morning, 8am.
Part 3a direct link

• Good morning!
• Added chest block
• Draw some pick up items
• Made game panel GUI (life and pickups)
• Rendered currently held item
• Added water texture
• (1:04) Added head bobbing when moving

{Footage missing: adding using pickup items}

Part 3b (0h 37m)

Part 3b direct link

Part 4: A plan comes together (2h 00m)

14 hours: 8 parts.
Part 4a direct link

• Adds a torch entity
• Creating a dynamic lighting system
• Bails on lighting system and removes added code

Part 4: The rest...

• Part 4b (2h 00m)
• Part 4c (2h 00m)
• Part 4d (2h 00m)
• Part 4e (2h 00m)
• Part 4f (2h 00m)
• Part 4g (2h 00m)

Part 4h: I will go to sleep now (0h 43m)

The final part... Part 4h direct link

The End

Well well well... what a rollercoaster ride that was... highs, lows, chicken, dub step: we had it all, and at the end of the day the game was the real winner. That's all from us here at Lundum Dare #21, until next time - happy coding.

This Saturday, however, SpeedRabbit pizza gave us reason to smile. Perhaps looking to cash in on the lucrative "overweight programmer" market, they have developed the all-new IE8Explorer pizza!

Crème fraîche, mozzarella chedder, reblochon cheese, blue cheese, goat's cheese, capsicum and tomatoes. That's IE8Explorer. That's a lot of cheese. But we knew it must be good to bare the name of such a high quality web browser.

Excitedly we ordered one.

My co-worker asked if would be possible to upgrade to the IE9 Beta pizza, but the SpeedRabbit employee had no idea what we were talking about. He must be running Windows XP.

The parallels between the pizza and the browser are many. Both look and feel horrible and make you a bit sick after trying them. Both are equally bad at rendering HTML5, though the pizza seemed a bit more stable.

Feel free to continue drawing parallels in the comments.

Oh no! My msie.rom file is infected with Trojan.MacOSX.ChinaTalk!

Thankfully this helpful overly-animated web site (click the image to admire their beautiful work) was friendly enough to tell me that there is such a thing as the "Apple Security Center" (remind to me write to those guys and let them know they've got a truly dreadful logo) and that it has uncovered 46 viruses (28 on my computer, 2 in my documents. 46.) lurking on my lappy!

Apparently it "needs to be treat as soon as possible", so I'll wrap up this post before the viruses make my computer look any more like Windows 7.

That's right! Better ads in Gmail! BETTER! Better than before! It seems hard to imagine that they could have squeezed a bit more awesome out of the advertising medium, but whatever they are planning it's sure to turn your world upside down. I've been too nervous to click the "learn more" button yet, so we'll have more details as they come to hand.

UPDATE 1: Ohh! I clicked the link. Here is the screen grab of the youtube that explains this awesome new development in the advertising world... Too nervous to click it though!

Not again you Apple monsters! Last time it was multi touch that you decided to take from us, this time it's geolocation. Upgrading my iPhone 3GS to iOS4.3 caused a mobile web app I'm working on to start throwing errors. Danged if I can figure out why. Here's what I know so far...

Calling navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition in mobile safari works fine - returning a normal position object. However, when added to the home screen and run as fullscreen app (using the apple-mobile-web-app-capable meta tag) it would not ask for permission to access geo features, but immediately fail returning the error:

Permission error; The operation couldn't be completed. (kCLErrorDomain error 1.)

Looks like a permission error to my professional eye. But why? Dunno. I made this test app, called "Geoful". If you could have a go and report back I'd be most grateful.

Here's some reports so far. Seems to follow no logic, which makes for exciting bug hunting...

Device  Firmware  Browser  Fullscreen
-------------------------------------
   4      4.3      works     works
   4      4.3      failz     works
  3GS    4.2.0     works     works
  3GS    4.2.1     works     works
  3GS     4.3      works     failz
  3GS     4.3      failz     works
  3GS     4.3      works     failz
 iPad1    4.3      works     works

Update 1: If it failz for you in teh web browser, try turning on "location services" in preferences for Sarari.

Update 2: Ok, here's the deal: if it's failing for you, got to Preferences -> General -> Reset -> Reset Location Warnings.
The next time you run the app it will requests permission and works as expected.

Interestingly, if I now say "no" when asked for permission the error returned is not the same one as I was getting earlier:

Permission error; User denied Geolocation

A bit more helpful than the old message I think you'll agree! I'm also not sure exactly where my app got "disallowed" - but it seems like the update to 4.3 defaulted it to "no permission". Though I'm not going to rule out "stupid user error", so I won't put this in the bug category jussst yet.

The idea is, you're at a party and take a photo - and everyone there "gets it" - so it's like a photo album of the event without having to do any manual sharing or organising.

I like the concept, but mostly because I thought of it. Ok, no, I didn't think of it: but some time ago I spent a bit of effort trying to convince some fellow nerds to implement something similar. Sure, it was focused on chat instead of photos - but had a photo-sharing aspect. Like a geo-located chat room: a real life Habbo where you could extend or shrink the circle you were interested in, "elastically".

Now, this post is not about pulling a "those guys stole my idea!" line... But the timing of Color made me giggle: the day before it was released I posted this query to Hacker News:

Who executed an idea you had years ago?

Who has an old notebook filled with detailed scribblings about a "short-message sharing service", or a "location-based check-in site" that you sketched out then left to gather dust? Was your idea better in any way?

I was hoping to hear a bunch of sob stories of forgotten ideas transformed into piles of gold. Little did I know, the next day I'd have my very own! I guess this means I better get cracking on my other idea - record everything you ever do ever and send it to random people, but not to your friends. I call it your "inverse social graph" and am looking for seed funding:

(No investments under $500,000, thanks)

Because your default search engine requests results as you’re typing in the address bar, it may be logging your text as search terms. The specifics of the logging behavior depend on your default search engine. For example, if you use Bing as your default search engine, the text you type in the address bar is sent to Bing (just as it is when you search on www.bing.com), and Bing's logging policies will apply.

At Google, we keep search logs to improve our services, strengthen security, and help prevent fraud and abuse.

Lucky you're not using that evil Bing search engine then, isn't it? Of course, if you don't actually want your searching to be logged, sold, and etched into your Google DNA database table then you should probably mosey-on-over to DuckDuckGo...

Now, I'm not going to win any awards for understanding the importance of some good link bait, but I'll also never look at a "title" form field the same again...

Hacking Mac applications
Source: Hacker News (my favoured non-slashdot tech site)
Votes: 5 up votes
Page views: 17 unique page views.
Result: Sinks immediately into oblivion.

Ok, that was a dismal failure. But I put a good few hours in writing that thing up, so I thought I'd try again. The problem, I realised, was the drab title. Time to spice it up a bit.

Fine alcohol, and reverse engineering Mac applications
Source: Reddit (my favoured lurking tech site)
Votes: 137 votes
Page views: 3,075 unique page views.
Result: Goes to the front page.

Then to prove the point, just a few days later on Hacker News is this article...

I Can Crack Your App With Just A Shell (And How To Stop Me)
Source: Hacker News
Votes: 200 up votes
Result: Straight to the front page.

Identical content, much better title (Not that the author was copying my content: if fact, he was actually copying his own content from 4 years earlier - I think he just realised it was relevant again and re-released it!).

Conclusion: I really have to start hating marketing less.