Pretty sure I got an ulcer after watching Meet the Feebles. But seriously, all the best wishes for him, I'm sure most geeks here have watched the LotR movies multiple times (I'm at 20+ for the Fellowship alone) and have high hopes for The Hobbit. Especially since it'll be a two-parter, we need him in good health.

Get well soon!

The company that ran this promotion (Consumer Watchdog) has been using Google Analytics. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/09/03/businessinsider-anti-google-privacy-group-consumer-watchdog-is-tracking-your-clicks-with-google-analytics-2010-9.DTL Hypocrite, much?

It's actually the audio tag: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html

That was a fun contest. I entered a game called Onslaught!, check it out :)

I posted an article a while back about a DHTML engine I put on GitHub. I included an example game called Bombada that's also on GitHub. Note: the engine isn't "HTML5" per se (which is becoming more of a buzzword than makes sense) and I've moved on to a canvas engine (which will someday also be open source).

Even better, there was recently a game development contest on Boing Boing which saw 9 pretty cool entires. Ours was called Onslaught! and was written in JavaScript using canvas (though it does fall back to flash for audio).

I've got some substantial experience writing games in JavaScript and HTML5. To me, the biggest hurdle right now is audio. Somebody mentioned the inability to go fullscreen, and while I've seen that handled by the video tag, to me it's not as big a problem as the audio tag being basically unusable for gaming purposes.

Just open up the same API you are using internally and that should reduce the overhead of the API dramatically. I think much of the time the primary problem is that the developers don't have a proper API themselves so they have to build one from scratch.

A good pattern to adopt is: build an API and become your first client, to ensure the API is feature-rich. Twitter did this really well and it's helped to propel their business.

... of visiting the link and the very FIRST thing on the page (very top) is a banner ad, followed by a scrolling Motorola ad, a giant LREC on the right and a popup in the corner.

Holy crap too many ads.

That is absolutely the way to go, is just tell the kid "did you know you can make your own games on the computer?" The kid will likely fall mostly into one of three categories:

1. Disinterested.

2. Is blown away by the thought of making his/her own games and obsesses nonstop on programming of various kinds for probably their entire life. This might sound like an exaggeration, but the video game industry actually has a reputation for having these die-hard developers who work insane hours and love every minute of it (unless they're with a big dumb corporation).

3. Somewhat interested, looks into it, finds that it's really difficult and quits relatively early. Maybe the kid will even put a few demos together or something, but game programming is hard. There are few branches of software more difficult to develop. Most kids will fall into this category, I'd bet. But the good news is, this person may have a chance to still be really interested in programming and go on to have a great career writing other types of software.

It sounds like #3 would be just fine with this person, and I think it's a really common trait. I'm a programmer myself and many of the other devs I've talked to got into it by putting together a little game in QBASIC or whatnot.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cocoia/4172250707/

I agree with you. As a developer, here are some of the things I cannot tolerate about iPhone/iPad/etc. as compared to my MacBook:

- No root access.
- Locked down "developer rights" (I have to pay Apple $100/year just to make apps for *my* own device).
- App store only gallery for apps (I cannot put my app on my own website, for example).
- Many others like limited APIs and restrictions on what I can use to develop apps.

So other developers scoff at you and claim that if Apple starts implementing these types of things for Macbooks, that developers will switch over to Linux, no big deal. But keep this in mind: we developers are outnumbered by a vast amount. Web developers grudgingly have to support Internet Explorer because it's the most used browser, and likewise we'll have to support Mac if it becomes this huge monster like iPhone has, whether we want to or not. That makes getting away from Apple and Macs difficult.

http://github.com/spinkham/skipfish

... if you're not prepared to be Slashdotted. What did you think was going to happen?

Internet Explorer is fastest only on Facebook and Yahoo!'s websites (both very popular websites and partners of Microsoft)? This is probably just a coincidence, but I've heard rumors before of MS inserting special code for, say, the Acid3 Test. Probably just paranoia ...

I did some freelance work for about $4k last Xmas and it ended up costing me $1,500 in taxes. That's higher than the tax on my salary. Plus getting insurance without the help from a corporation and its shared discount is unbelievably expensive.

I've been using that for a while now, it's great! I'm often googling for web development results, and I always always X w3schools.com (old, outdated into). I think Sark666 is saying it would be nice to remove results from entire domains. I'd love that too, because then I could just click once and be done with it.

Most of the US nerds like me probably have infinite data plans on their mobile devices, spending ~$80/month.