Koopa 2000+

It's been a little over a year since Koopa got its 1000th download, and now the counter has gone well past 2000. Yay!

Thanks again to everyone who downloaded Koopa and tried it out. And especially thanks to all the amazing contributors who actually helped Koopa grow!

Game of Blocks

Prepare to be blown away by another of the web's incredible creations:

Id Code Reviews

Ever wondered about the ins and outs of Id's 3D game engines ? Then Fabien Sanglard's website is a small treasure trove of knowledge waiting for you. There are code reviews for all of the engines they've open sourced, all documented with nice code snippets, easy diagrams, and even some historical context. Just wonderful!

Failure to predict...

This question on Stack Overflow has an excellent explanation of branch prediction as well as an example of the slowdown you can get when it fails.

Beam me up!

When it comes to projects involving existing software/platforms people never want to walk from one version to the next. Instead they keep looking for a transporter beam which instantly displaces them to where they want to be... Sorry to have to be the one to tell you, but we just barely learned to walk.

Holy Leaping Seconds, Googleman!

Here is an interesting post from the Google blog on how they handle leap seconds: Time, technology and leaping seconds. To spoil the surprise: their NTP servers basically spread the extra second over the course of the day rather than dealing with a jump in time in the back-end software.