Tag: programming

Google Docs API

Instead of delivering just 1 or 2 new types of reports, or a new visual map mashup, we decided to deliver a platform on which anyone, not just Google, could build the next best thing. We even invited a few developers to try this with us, and they join us in this launch by featuring just a few of their creations, like Panorama’s pivot table, or Viewpath’s Gantt Chart, or InfoSoft’s Funnel Charts — all great tools for the student and enterprise user alike. We also built a few early gadgets ourselves which you might find useful.

opendoc / DDE 2.0

Robot programming models

a model that deals with the inherent complexity of concurrency, and the coordination or orchestration of what’s going on. This was the whole reason for choosing the CCR and DSS pieces for robotics. This was actually an advanced programming model designed not for robotics per se, but as a general purpose programming model. We put it into the robotics SDK as a way to test this out, but now we’re seeing that people are lifting the hood on the engine inside this SDK and finding other uses for it. We have people who are using it to build trading systems, who are doing large data-set scientific modeling, the folks at MySpace are using it to manage their server farms.

need to check our the MSR robotics SDK

Soul of The Sims

This is the prototype for the soul of The Sims, which Will Wright wrote on January 23, 1997. I had just started working at the Maxis Core Technology Group on “Project X” aka “Dollhouse”, and Will Wright brought this code in one morning, to demonstrate his design for the motives, feedback loop and failure conditions of the simulated people. While going through old papers, I ran across this print-out that I had saved, so I scanned it and cleaned the images up, and got permission from Will to publish it. This code is a interesting example of game design, programming and prototyping techniques. The Sims code has certainly changed a lot since Will wrote this original prototype code. For example, there is no longer any “stress” motive. And the game doesn’t store motives in global variables, of course. My hope is that this code will give you a glimpse of how Will Wright designs games, and what was going on in his head at the time!

Git is the next Unix

With git, we’ve invented a new world where revision history, checksums, and branches don’t make your filesystem slower: they make it faster. They don’t make your data bigger: they make it smaller. They don’t risk your data integrity; they guarantee integrity. They don’t centralize your data in a big database; they distribute it peer to peer.