I thought this wonderful little wordplay from the Lua mailing list deserved some more visiblity:

Person A: IMO python is by far the better language for "first programming language" than Lua.
Person B: If you're going to make an audacious assertion, please back it up with justification :)
Person C: Justification changes the syntax.

Unfortunately, you need to have a fair bit of knowledge on computer programming languages to appreciate it.

As of today (September 20th 2009), corsix.org has moved server. It used to be hosted over at www.ecwhost.com, who I was very happy with up until recently, whereas now it is hosted on its own virtual private server. While I was moving server, I also updated Drupal (the software which runs this site) to the latest available version.

Hopefully, you won't notice any visible differences from this change. If you do, then leave a comment or drop me email at [email protected] (or, if my new DNS servers are also failing to serve MX records, [email protected]).

For the past two months or so, one of my side projects has been writing an open source clone of Theme Hospital. I recall Theme Hospital as being one of the great classic games I had when I was younger, and it's sad to watch it slowly become harder and harder to play on modern operating systems, with modern hardware, and with modern conveniences (like 3-button mice, screen resolutions larger than 640x480, and so on). A game like Theme Hospital really deserves a decent open source clone, and so I thought I'd have a stab at making one.

You can find downloads, source code, an issue tracker, etc. over at Google Code if you're interested.

Recently I undertook a hunt for a certificate authority which would issue Windows Authenticate code signing certificates to private individuals. There are lots of certificate authorities which issue code signing certificates, but almost all of them only issue them to businesses / organisations. Despite that bleak outlook, I believe that I've found a CA which does issue code signing certificates to individuals: Trustwave SSL.

Unfortunately, their certificates come at the rather expensive price of ~200 GBP per year. This is a shame, as I can't really justify £200 per year for something which I don't strictly need. Had they been asking for something closer to GoDaddy's ~120 GBP per year, I might well have purchased one, but students can only stretch so far.

If you happen to be in the market for a Windows code signing certificate for an individual, then Trustwave might be able to help you. If you do try and get one, or find another CA which issues them to individuals, then let me know (via comments or email).

As some of you may know, this summer I've been participating in the Google Summer of Code, creating ribbon controls for wxWidgets.

First of all, some Windows screenshots showing how things "collapse" as the ribbon width decreases:

In the above screenshot, the width is so small that some of the panels have "minimised", at which point the user can expand them when they want to use them:

At even smaller resolutions, scroll buttons are used:

The above screenshots contain the wxRibbonToolBar (on the left-most panel) and wxRibbonButtonBar (on the middle two panels). The other interesting widget is wxRibbonGallery (on the right two panels):

All of the ribbon controls are custom painted, allowing the colour scheme to be radically changed at runtime:

As well as mere colour changes, the entire art provider can be changed. All of the above screenshots are using the MSW art provider, which is based on the art style used in Microsoft Office. An alternative to that is the AUI art provider, which is based on the art style of wxAUI:

Like the MSW provider, the AUI provider can also adopt other colour schemes:

While the preferred state is to have the ribbon at the top of the window, it can also be positioned on the left:

One of wxWidget's strengths is in being cross platform. As such, a batch of screenshots wouldn't be complete without some Linux screenshots:

The MSW art style can still be used on Linux, as shown: