Monthly Archives: May 2009

URL Alphabet

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When FireFox 3.0 (or was it 2.0 even?) added the new location bar, I was initially not so happy with it. But I got used to it pretty quickly and now it saves me a lot of typing when I want to visit my favourite sites. Typing one letter is usually enough. I thought I’d write down the whole English alphabet and what the location bar shows first for each letter. I think this sums up my current interests pretty nicely. Except some sites in this list are not really my favourite, they just happen to start with an uncommon letter.

Update: Oh man, I’m so behind the times. Seems that this was a meme in 2006.

A is for http://adventuregamers.com/

B is for http://www.box2d.org/forum/

C is for http://city24.ee/ (real estate portal)

D is for http://dzone.com/

E is for http://eurogamer.net/

F is for http://frictionalgames.com/forum/ (still checking every now and then to see if someone solved the mystery)

G is for http://google.com/ (surprise!)

H is for http://hansa.ee/ (although they are now SwedBank, I still use the old URL out of habit)

I is for http://www.idlethumbs.net/ (in it’s current incarnation an awesome video game podcast by Chris Remo, Jake Rodkin, Nick Breckon and occasionally Steve Gaynor)

J is for http://jazz.net/

K is for http://kv.ee/ (real estate portal)

L is for http://localhost:8080/ :)

L is also for http://listofdomainnamespointingtoidlethumbsdotnet.info/

M is for http://mail.google.com/

N is for http://news.google.com/

O is for http://www.offworld.com/

P is for http://planeteclipse.org/ (and some other planets follow)

Q is for http://www.infoq.com/

R is for http://rockpapershotgun.com/ (the best of PC-focused games journalism)

S is for http://scala-lang.org/

T is for http://twitter.com/

U is for … wow. Nothing interesting for U

V is for https://villane.wordpress.com/wp-admin/

W is for http://wired.com/

X is for http://xkcd.com/

Y is for http://youtube.com/ (another big surprise!)

Z is for http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation (awesome video game reviews by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw)

What’s your URL alphabet?

ScalaBox2D Physics Engine source available

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The source code for my Scala port of Box2D is now available at GitHub. There is not much support or documentation at the moment. For now, use only if you already know Box2D or really need a physics engine written in Scala :) More documentation and better user experience will be coming in the future.

I am working on the performance, but currently it is about two times slower than JBox2D (which you can also use from Scala).

Get the source code here. And a little information on how to build and run the testbed is available on the Wiki.

Eclipse finally defaults to UTF-8? In my dreams

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Do my eyes deceive me? How the hell did this happen:

Eclipse defaults to UTF-8?

Eclipse defaults to UTF-8?

This happens in an Eclipse Galileo milestone (3.5M6), I can’t remember which exact package I downloaded, because I required some unusual combination of plug-ins.

If it was truly the case that UTF-8 is now the default, it would be awesome, because often programmers forget to change the default setting when creating a new workspace and end up committing something in an encoding specific to their machine. Which is guaranteed to cause pain at some point.

Unfortunately I think this is probably just a bug, because I downloaded another 3.5M6 package and it still defaulted to my region-and-operating-system-specific encoding. And even if I create a new workspace with this instance of Eclipse, it will also default to the other encoding. I wonder what exactly could have caused this instance to default to UTF-8 for a particular workspace…