Grammerjack

I just tried creating an avatar on Microsoft's new Xbox dashboard. As you can see (at least when the Microsoft server isn't being hammered) on the left, they provide a URL for displaying your current Avatar on a web page. The character creation system is not too bad. In some ways it's more flexible than Nintendo's Mii (for example more hair styles and clothing), but in other ways it's more limited (less control over facial feature placement). My avatar looks better on the Xbox than it does here -- they should consider sharpening the image. For example, the T-shirt my avatar is wearing has a thin-lined Xbox symbol. I think they do a good job of avoiding the Uncanny Valley effect. I look forward to seeing how avatars end up being used in the Xbox world. In othe Xbox-related news I'm enjoying playing Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Bolts with my son. All we have right now is the demo, but it's great fun for anyone who likes building things. It's replaced Cloning C...

I'm a big fan of CPU architectures. Here's a conversation between David Moon formerly of Symbolics Lisp Machines and Cliff Click Jr. of Azule Systems. They discuss details of both the Lisp Machine architecture and Azule's massively multi-core Java machine. http://blogs.azulsystems.com/cliff/2008/11/a-brief-conversation-with-david-moon.html The claim (from both Symbolics and Azule) is that adding just a few instructions to an ordinary RISC instruction set can make GC much faster. With so much code being run in Java these days I wonder if we'll see similar types of instructions added to mainstream architectures.