Ninite lets you construct a custom installation package containing different software of your choice. This package then installs all of the applications in one go, using their default settings — it also tries to skip any toolbar installations and other annoyances automatically.

Automatix was a dangerous abomination, code-wise, but its concept was noble. Ninite seems to be striving for something similar (albeit saner) on Windows. If you’re lazy, and you don’t mind trusting a third party too much, you should give it a try.

Epic Games just released the Unreal Development Kit, a fully-featured SDK based on the award-winning Unreal 3 engine that powers a wide range of today’s most popular games; and it’s free for educational and non-commercial use — wow!

There are some rather heavy licensing fees once you start making money from your game — $0 (zero) up-front, and a 0% royalty on you or your company’s first $5,000 (US) in UDK related revenue, and a 25% royalty on UDK related revenue above $5,000 (US) — though, if you take into consideration that you can upgrade to the real Unreal engine licensing and skip the royalty fees once you reach fame and fortune, the Unreal Development Kit remains extremely attractive for any kind of game development.

Have a look at the list of features and the showcase, or just skip everything and grab it!

“MIT 6.00 — Introduction to Computer Science and Programming” is one of the best introductions to programming I’ve seen, and I guess I shouldn’t expect less from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 24 video recordings of Computer Science lectures (totalling roughly 20 hours) by Professors Eric Grimson and John Guttag, current and former heads of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. The course focuses on, quite simply, teaching you how to think like a programmer and solve problems computationally. Historically, LISP was the language of choice for Computer Science introductions at MIT, but was since replaced by every imperative programmer’s new darling, Python.

To quote the overview given in the first video, the course revolves around:

• Computational thinking
• Understanding code
• Understanding abilities and limits
• Mapping problems into computation

I highly recommend watching this if you’re new to programming, a hobby programmer, or even if you’re pretty well-versed — I’m sure there are nuggets of useful information inthere for everyone. Give Lecture 1 a look; if you like it, I’ve embedded the entire course after the jump, but it can also be found on the official course website, along with assignments, exams and solutions.

Lecture 1: Goals of the course; what is computation; introduction to data types, operators, and variables

Lecture 2: Operators and operands; statements; branching, conditionals, and iteration

Lecture 3: Common code patterns: iterative programs

Lecture 4: Decomposition and abstraction through functions; introduction to recursion

Lecture 5: Floating point numbers, successive refinement, finding roots

Lecture 6: Bisection methods, Newton/Raphson, introduction to lists

Lecture 7: Lists and mutability, dictionaries, pseudocode, introduction to efficiency

Lecture 8: Complexity; log, linear, quadratic, exponential algorithms

Lecture 9: Binary search, bubble and selection sorts

Lecture 10: Divide and conquer methods, merge sort, exceptions

Lecture 11: Testing and debugging

Lecture 12: More about debugging, knapsack problem, introduction to dynamic programming

Lecture 13: Dynamic programming: overlapping subproblems, optimal substructure

Lecture 14: Analysis of knapsack problem, introduction to object-oriented programming

Lecture 15: Abstract data types, classes and methods

Lecture 16: Encapsulation, inheritance, shadowing

Lecture 17: Computational models: random walk simulation

Lecture 18: Presenting simulation results, Pylab, plotting

Lecture 19: Biased random walks, distributions

Lecture 20: Monte Carlo simulations, estimating pi

Lecture 21: Validating simulation results, curve fitting, linear regression

Lecture 22: Normal, uniform, and exponential distributions; misuse of statistics

Lecture 23: Stock market simulation

Lecture 24: Course overview; what do computer scientists do?

Thank you, MIT, for making your courses open like this.

For more information, see the course website. You can find more OpenCourseWare on the OpenCourseWare website.

I have 10 spare Google Wave invites which I’m handing out. Write a comment indicating you want one and make sure the email address entered in the email field is correct and I’ll send one your way! First come, first serve!

All out of invites — thanks for playing!

The HBO television series “The Wire” is so authentic that Harvard sociology students will soon be able to score credits by watching it:

At a panel last night, stars of the HBO hit series joined Harvard professors in discussing the applications of the show—which depicts the struggles of urban life in Baltimore—in understanding and combating real urban social issues.

“‘The Wire’ has done more to enhance our understanding of the systemic urban inequality that constrains the lives of the poor than any published study”, Sociology Professor William J. Wilson said.

So it seems Google has opened a new office in Kirkland, with an interesting cantina:

What's that in the back?

There’s a clock on the other side, yet I never seem to be able to tell the time.

Shortly after arriving in London recently, it dawned on me why there were 182,155 personal injury road accidents in Britain in 2007:

I also made an interesting observation in a pub named The Pack Horse Inn:

“Mor” is Danish, Swedish and Norwegian for “Mom”. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

There are more pictures (Picasa).

Haha, this is great. FeynTube is a Greasemonkey script that does something amazing: it makes reading YouTube comments worthwhile by replacing them all with quotes from Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman.

FeynTube is a small Greasemonkey script that transforms the atrocity that YouTube comments are into reasonable and smart quotes that are actually readable without causing unexpected damage to your enjoyment, mind, temper and any vital organs (because with YouTube comments, you never know). (Greasemonkey, in turn, is a very nice Firefox extension that allows you to customize webpages.)
FeynTube achieves this accomplishment by doing the only conceivable thing: removing all YouTube comments (from your display, unfortunately they’re still on the servers) and replacing them with actual quotes from famous Nobel Prize physicist and elaborate skirt chaser Richard Feynman.

I wrote it because I actually like watching videos on YouTube, but, despite better knowledge, sometimes just couldn’t restrain myself from scrolling down and reading some of the comments–with horrible consequences. So I wrote this small script. Now, everytime I scroll down to the comment section, I can read something worthwile.

Small Worlds is the twisted, Braid-like Prince of Persia remake I never knew I wanted to play. It’s completed in roughly 15 minutes, but they are worth more than the 4-6 hours you usually spend per contemporary run-at-the-mill let’s-do-everything video game.

One of the worlds in Small Worlds

It is literally what it says it is; a game containing small worlds that you explore — with a delightfully twisted ending, too. Simple, beautiful. Play it.