making apps, making webs.

This is for the beta release, and most(I think all) of these bugs have been reported in the bug tracker. (Note the bug tracker is currently reporting errors... so I can not link to bugs). I do like a lot of things about the release... these are mainly things I don't like. So please don't take this as a bad view of Ubuntu 9.10 overall... just some criticism. Hibernation seems to not work correctly all the time(for me)... when I close the lid, and open it later it does not seem restore properly. It shows the screen, but does not respond to input on the keyboard/trackpad. Then after a bit the screen goes black. Then I need to press the power button, and then the login box comes back up - and I can log in again. This has worked for the last two ubuntu releases, so it's annoying. Booting seems slower... and is actually slower(timed it) for me. Perhaps I need to install from scratch for it to be faster or something. Pete Shinners has some benchmarks on his blog of ubuntu ...

More robots are reading websites than humans - so should we be designing the websites for robots? Thanks to the search engine wars, most visitors to most websites are by robots. But has anyone asked what these robots enjoy? There's often a divide in artists between introverted, and extroverted artists. "Fuck you - I make art for myself and not for others." OR "I make art for people to enjoy, I'm not so selfish and self indulgent that I just make art for myself". So I decided to interview a few robots to find out what some of their favourite websites are. But where to find a robot to ask questions of? I had to look no further than an internet enabled fridge. So with my notebook in hand I pull a chair up to the fridge and ask it some questions. I open with a flurry of questions, trying to provoke a response. "Do you have any favourite websites?" I ask. No answer. Obviously this robot does not know english. I give it another ten minutes of que...

Tonk Tanks is a really small, and fun game. All game play is on one screen, and the controls are simple. You have arrow keys to move your tank around, and a button to shoot the other tanks. It's like one of those old atari 2600 tank games, but a more modern version. Once you die, you teleport to a different respawn positions around the map. The game is quite playable single player - but the author is working on a networked multiplayer version. Another nice addition would be multiplayer on one machine - especially with joysticks or mice support (since keyboards are evil ). The tank AI seems different and varied enough, that I have not worked it out from playing it ten times or so. Usually my games only last about five minutes before I move onto something else. It's one of those games I can play for little while when I want a short break. Tonk Tanks works well on linux, windows and Mac (and probably other platforms supported by python+pygame). There's a windows .exe...