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I can look over someone's code and tell if they are a slumming math guy. In other words, the guy who has a PhD in some esoteric math field, but now, for some reason, has to demean himself to coding for a living. Here are a few clues I see in the code:

• You use i, j, k, l as variable names, liberally.
• Your objects have no clear separation of responsibility.
• You pass way too much between functions as member variables, globals and so on.

Spore is one of those legendary games that looks great in the demos takes forever to get into production. A portion of it, the creature creator is out as a demo. I'm downloading it now for Mac and will let you know what it's like.

My SitePoint article went live last week! Nobody bothered to mention it, but that's ok.

This 280 slides site is amazing. It's impressive what they have done using cross platform JS. I know personally how much of a pain in the butt this stuff can be. But when I tried this out first on Safari it worked without a hitch. Though the CSS load caused some of the borders to come up a little slowly. That's to be expected though, they can't do anything about that.

I'll be interested to see where Microsoft goes with IronRuby. We tend to think of Microsoft as this big monolithic entity, but it's really not. There are disparate groups, many of which are doing some very cool things. IronPython and IronRuby are examples of that. I'm not quite sure what the strategic direction is, but I think it's neat all the same.

O'Reilly is hosting a Flex cookbook cook-off with tickets to MAX as a grand prize. Have some fun. Put up a couple of recipes.

The Craigslist desktop is a cool use of Adobe's AIR. It keeps all of your searches around so that you can run them again to see what's new. I find the user interface a little too 'transitiony', but otherwise I like the app and I'll continue to use it as I need to move offices.

Check this out. The video tag from HTML 5 written using Flash. Nice job guys!

I finished my third book for the year today. My sixth (or seventh) book overall depending on how you count. The book is called 'Building Media Sites' and it's a continuation of an article that I wrote for the O'Reilly Network that has been getting a lot of attention since it was first published.

I won the Flex article writing contest that SitePoint hosted. I've never won a content like this before. It's really exciting. I wanted to get that 3D configurators article out there and this was a cool way to do it. I can't wait to see it published.