So, yeah, a few days ago, Opera made a formal complaint to the EU about how Internet Explorer hurts the internet. And frankly, I agree!

I’ve done my fair share of web development, and I must say, anyone that does it as a career, has my respect. If you write proper xhtml and css, you know it will work and validate properly in Opera. You know theres a greater than 95% chance it’ll work in Firefox. For IE6 and IE7, you better sacrifice a newborn goat or two.

That is unacceptable. Period. Thanks to Microsoft, web developers now suffer from ulcers, premature baldness, and any manner of symptoms related to stress. I consider the very wacky and often unusable interfaces out there to be one of those.

Web developers should set up a class action suit against Microsoft, for creating a product that causes such health issues. I’m not joking. They have a valid claim against Microsoft, and the ensuing PR mess would actually spur some action. Maybe they might even conform wholly to CSS 1.0!

Microsoft pledged to follow the standards ( way back in 1998), and has not even come close since! They have been convicted, repeatedly, of monopolistic actions. And, their product, IE6 and IE7 come standard with Windows, which is on 90% of the computers out there. Therefore, the web developer cannot avoid the horror of IE.

Therefore, they have a case.

In the spirit of the season, I made my own christmas carol, listing some seriously cool gadgets.

In no particular order:

Twelve phidgets a fidgeting,

Eleven curiously strong magnets,

Ten little einsteins solving the universe,

Nine faucet lights shining their way

Eight cores in a mac pro,

Seven usb rocket launchers a-launching

Six sci-fi books by Peter F. Hamilton,

Five issues of make magazine

Four nintendo wii remotes

Three nintendo ds’s with stylus’,

Two t-equalizer shirts,

and one ipod touch in a box!

If you have anything similar, post it, send me a link, anything!

Ah, Assassin’s Creed. I wonder if anyone else remembers feeling excited for this game? It certainly looked awesome. Innovative per-npc AI, good graphics, intriguing story, interesting gameplay. And I do remember that simply awesome promo video with the Lonely Souls song in the background. I was hyped for the game.

Who wasn’t? Why, even Ctrl-Alt-Del featured AC, and expressed excitement. Penny-arcade, Kotaku, many others were all excited for AC. Why, for a week, the promo video was one of the most-watched on gametrailers.com.

There was a very large marketing push for this game, and it ended up… not exactly meeting expectations. Why, one could even go so far as to say it was a bad game. But, this whole fiasco does remind me of one key fact with games: the heavier the advertising, the worse the game will be.

Just think about every game you’ve seen, where there were banner ads, videos on tv and the internet(where applicable), even print ads! Now, tell me if that game was any good.

There are of course, a few exceptions, namely any game made by Nintendo, Blizzard, or Bioware, and games that have already proven popular across the ocean(either Europe or Japan).

But, it seems, that when a game is felt not to be… blockbuster calibre, the executives decide to ‘cover their ass’, and push the marketing. Of course, that just pushes up the expenditures related to said game. And they even put pressure onto the reviewers(as detailed here).

The end result are a lot of broken hopes and failed expectations, and yet another broken game, pushed out before it was ready, wasting people’s time, money and effort. Is it any wonder that gamers are becoming so jaded about advertised games?

I recently stumbled across a most awesome blog, called NicheGeek. As a self-professed geek, the site’s goal appeals to me. “I am an avid ‘niche collector’.” Dmitri tells us. I’ve heard of collecting swatches, barbies, antique cars, even stamps. But niches? Its an interesting task collecting what are ideas and facts.

In essence, he is collecting and sharing interesting ideas. Again, I like this. The whole idea is that he experiments with different adsense topics, writing about them, and then sharing the results. In fact, it sounds pretty fun. He gets to write on some pretty crazy topics, from 10 totally stupid online business ideas that made someone rich, to a guest post about truth vs manufactured bullshit. That sounds like a very fun job; maybe it goes beyond a job, to a career, thats beneficial, helps people out. As a final word, check out how to rent a midget online!

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A new installment in my ever-popular series.

Todays installment will concern one of the best performance enhancing tricks in python: list comprehensions.

Most beginning pythonistas will produce code like this:

lst=[]
for i in range(0, 10):
     lst.append(i**2)

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