This is almost a must read about URL-shorteners, or in other words, what we do to the internet right now:

“The humble hyperlink, thanks to pervasive URL shortening, can now be wielded as a weapon. The internet is the house that PageRank built, and it’s all predicated on hyperlinks. Once you start making every link your special flavor of “shortened” link, framing the target content — heck, maybe wrapping it in a few ads for good measure — you’ve completely turned that system on its head.”

The rise of Twitter and URL-shorteners, that are connected to them as a completely new, I want to say “private owned”, layer to the internet, that makes the DNS and php-serverbased URL structure almost obsolete in a special sense.

Just read the whole article on codinghorror. Hot reading of the day:

“What’s aggravating to me is that the current situation is completely accidental. If Twitter had provided a sane way to link a single word, none of these weaselly URL shortening clones would have reared their ugly heads at all. (…) Every tiny URL is another baby step towards destroying the web as we know it. Which is exactly what you’d want to do if you’re attempting to build a business on top of the ruins.”

At the beginning was… text-mode!

A screener from the probably very first incarnation of Tetris.

You are almost 25 years now, but still such a beauty. As you turn 25 on the 6th June 2009 (Reuters says this is the possible official date), we do not want to talk about what million selling beast you are still today, like all the other media do. No, we want you to dig everything possible out of your mystic and gameplay specialities. Check this post for all about tetris gameplay.

Alexey Pajitnov almost made no bucks with Tetris itself, because it was a little bit of Sovjet vs. the rest of the world thing, due problems with licencing and people acting strange. But Alexey also said, that he made some other games as well at that time in 1984. At least he looks happy, and making games is not only about bucks, right?

25 Years later…

…thousands of Tetris-copies and -variants were made. And some of them are real jewels. I most recently found a one- or two-player variant called Inverted. You drop blocks from top and bottom and have to keep the “colors” consistent. It’s fresh and highly recommended!

Inverted: A random Tetris variant from 2009.

Update: Thanks Jordan. There is a tetris-documentary online, made by the BBC in 2006, called “From Russia with Love”. See the first part here.

For the rest head over to this YouTube-playlist from GameDocumentaries.

“Us Now” is an interesting full length documentary about computer-based social technologies, trust, bottom-up and self-organisation. Finally “wisdom of the crowd” appears and all connected to the question, if we all together could govern? The leading question of the movie is: “In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?”

“New technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organisation. This project brings together leading practitioners and thinkers in this field and asks them to determine the opportunity for government.”

Daniel A. Becker – Random Walk of the number Pi

Daniel A. Becker works freelance, got high-awarded prices and finally published his diploma-thesis he made at the FH Mainz in Germany. The thesis Random Walk is a deep exploration of the phenomena “random”. The interplay of random and order: Order claims, that random do not exist or has no significance. We all know, that this isn’t true. On the other side even pure random generates patterns and systems – although it claims, that it is patternless by default.

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Shamus Young explored the beauty of code by building a “Pixel City”. In ten iterations he build the steps, to create a unique city at night.

Procedural content part 1: sort of windows-texture.

Finished Procedural content: say what?
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Cactus is as always very, very charming. (via)

Rrola – Ameisen (32 bytes, MS DOS, 2007)

Well, Goto80 curated some sort of demo-showcase, dedicated to visuals with less than 256 bytes of space (less than a SMS-message). He says about it:

HELLO DID YOU KNOW? People make visuals that are smaller than an SMS (256 bytes). Since they are not recorded video, they can be changed any way you wish. It is maybe the opposite to all the things that everybody loves to hate: software updates, über-consumption, compatibility, inefficiency, recording, the illusion of the universal computer, and so on. (…) To me these are ideal examples of wo-man-machine interaction, where media materialism meets software magic. Stop recording!

Totally agreed. Read more at Chipflip.

Social Demo’ing on Twitter?

Oh, if we are already on this topic. Did you know, that Twitter features less than 140 characters? It – at least in theory – should be possible without a problem, to use this fancy web-thingy in order to exchange full demos and have this fast updates and community thing also going on. If found some mysterious first approach like this, at the twitter-account of emoc.

Update: Found an interesting article on the birth of the 160 character limit at SMS-text messages.