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May 6, 2010

Flash is not a Right

What Gripes about Apple tell us about Computational Literacy

I've been watching reactions to Apple's controversial decision to prohibit the publication of iPhone applications created in environments other than Apple's own. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C ...

February 19, 2010

Pascal Spoken Here

Learning about Learning Programming from the Apple ][

Among the many, many things we talk about when we discuss curriculum for the Computational Media degree is how to make learning programming facile and appealing all throughout a student's career. Many sub-problems arise, for example, how can one help students learn new languages and environments after they've become familiar ...

February 17, 2010

Chicken's Revenge

Hacking Freeway

Today in my Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes class we talked about disassembling binaries and doing graphical hacks. These are the simplest kind of ROM hacks to do, as they only require changes to data in the disassembly, which is usually relatively easy to find and identify. My in-class example ...

May 19, 2009

Teaching Computing with... Computers?

The NSF Prefers Strings, Crayons

After an unintentional hiatus, last week I resumed following Georgia Tech CS colleague Mark Guzdial's Amazon blog. His latest salvo is a thought-provoking piece called Using computing to teach computing (Hint: Don't use the "P" word). The post centers around a question Mark posed to Jeannette Wing, Director of the ...

April 9, 2009

Atari VCS Programming in Xcode, Revisited

I've finally updated my Xcode Tools for Atari VCS Development, such that syntax coloring works in Xcode 3.1. Apple keeps changing the specifications for it, so every version I have to figure out how it works again and retool. This is just a pointer post for those of you who ...

January 11, 2009

Units and Objects

Two notes apropos of Graham Harman

Along with several others, contemporary philosopher Graham Harman has been instrumental in rekindling the thirsty brush of philosophy, igniting a new and exciting fire in this tired old field. It has become known as Speculative Realism. Harman's work has become tremendously influential in my recent thinking, despite my not (yet) ...

October 29, 2007

Chumby and the Rhetoric of Openness

Small, cute, insidious

Note: Chumby representative Andrew "Bunnie" Huang has replied to this thread, and I have in turn replied to his response with more questions. I encourage you to read through all the comments for more detail. Finally, I should point out that I am not an attorney and nothing herein should ...

September 2, 2007

Atari Games Ahoy

Updated courses and Atari student games

In between sessions of Bioshock, this Labor Day weekend I've been updating this website. Of special note, I've added some of my courses over on the teaching section of the site. I haven't included every class I've ever taught, but rather the ones I thought would be most useful or ...

July 16, 2007

On the iPhone: The Anxiety of Openness

The openness of web applications demonstrates the real treachery of the iPhone's closed platform

This is the first in a series of short editorials on the iPhone, which I'll be writing occasionally. Now that the geekqueues of iDay have come and gone, perhaps we can start talking more seriously about the device without all the fanboy ardor. For some of us who have not ...

June 28, 2007

Atari VCS Programming in Xcode

Software that makes it easier to make Atari games on your Mac

Download forMac OS X Leopard, Xcode 3.1 60 kb - Mac OS X 10.5 Download forMac OS X Leopard, Xcode 3.0 56 kb - Mac OS X 10.5 Download forMac OS X Tiger 69 kb - Mac OS X 10.4 Don't you wish programming Atari VCS games on OS ...

June 25, 2007

Intellivision Homebrew Contest

Texas Instruments engineer announces a competition on the venerable 1979 game platform

If you browse this site a bit, you'll see that I'm a big fan of the Atari VCS, a fervent enough one that I've programmed and written about the machine. Aaron Lanterman, a Georgia Tech Electrical and Computer Engineering colleague of mine, recently told me about Joe Zbiciak, a friend ...