Jim Roepcke's weblog have browser, will travel (est. 1999)

NHL10, one thumb up, one down

I bought EA's NHL10 today. So far, I'm not liking it. The play is slower, and it seems like any time you skate near anyone from the opposing team, you lose the puck, even when they don't do anything to separate you from it.

There are some cool improvements though, like board play, so I'm hoping the game grows on me, but right now it's feeling like NHL09 may be the high water mark for the franchise, and a reminder that I should only buy the odd-year NHL games, as they seem to be better than the even-year games (with NHL94 being the obvious exception ).

PubSubHubbub plugin installed

I just installed the PubSubHubbub plugin into this site. Presumably, this means you can see updates live in Google Reader, Google Alerts, FriendFeed "and more".

If you don't know what PuSH is, check out the web site and this recent blog post for more information and background.

MonoTouch from Novell

Novell: MonoTouch

Congratulations to Novell for creating something almost relevant for the first time in years! I wonder what the runtime overhead is to load in the CLR... can't find mention of that on the site. iPhone apps run in a very memory-constrained environment, so whatever it is, it's not trivial.

I'm not a .NET/C# developer, so looking at the sample code was one of the first times I've ever looked at C# code. Is it really convention to capitalize method names? If so, why? Is this convention inherited from Visual Basic or something?

I'm sure this thing will improve, but right now there's no support for debugging, so good luck guys!

As with any bridged technology, if you want to get serious with it, you're going to have to know the underlying API and how to use it properly in its intended environment to be able to use it effectively in the bridged environment. So, what this means is quite a few Mono developers are going to be learning Objective-C soon. And hopefully they'll realize it's a heck of a lot easier than what they're using now.

MonoTouch looks like a great way to use .NET libraries (as long as they don't use the features that are disabled for MonoTouch) in an iPhone app, but I'm not sure I'd want to write an entire iPhone app in it.

Twitter’s Fail Whale on vacation

Twitter's in such bad shape right now they can't even muster up a fail whale. Isn't there a suitably-hyped new language they can rewrite their infrastructure in that will fix all this?