I must say that my music taste is quite diverse and I listen to anything from Trance to Enya.
I usually listen to what ever music I am in the mood for, but there are just certain types of music that puts you in the ultimate coding trance. Repetitive tunes seems to be my "coding trance" taste.

Enya,
State of Trance,
Paramore

What is yours?

Over at Joystiq they have a review of the "Mind Control" game controller and from the sounds of it, it just doesn't work well at all. I am in agreement with Rick, that using names like Jedi and Yoda, they are really fooling people into believing that they also can be a young Luke or Vader.

All I can say is, awesome box :)

and an awesome looking headset. although, you won't be catching me walking around with a $300.00 headband that doesn't work :P

I MAED A GAME W1TH ZOMB1ES!!!!, What a classic title, but it doesn't matter how you spell it, the game's author is making a lot of money and who can argue against that.



I think it's brilliant, mindless fun and only costing $1.00.
Enjoy the demo!

Since the beginning of time (the days I started programming), I have always been fascinated by the demoscene world (http://www.scene.org/). If you aren't familiar with the Assemblee competition, have a look at http://www.tigsource.com/features/assemblee/. These guys and gals have some pretty awesome games and you should definitely try them out and vote for your favourite!

I am routing for Backworld! Bunnies are awesome!

Looking through my list of tweets this morning, I discovered that Mr. Hanselman had a look at the Image Lazy Loading Plugin.

"Lazy loader is a jQuery plugin written in JavaScript. It delays loading of images in (long) web pages. Images outside of viewport (visible part of web page) wont be loaded before user scrolls to them. This is opposite of image preloading."

That's pretty awesome don't you think? definitely worth the while to go and check out. Don't you just think JQuery plugins are awesome and easy to use?

Moving on...
If you haven't heard...Mass Effect 2 is hitting the shelves today!

http://www.NerdDinner.com
Organizing the world's nerds and helping them eat in packs!

I am quite curious if anything is happening in the east of South Africa with regards to Nerd Dinner's. The community is surfing too much here.

What is the community in Durban doing?

From http://developer.nvidia.com/object/optix-beta.html

"NVIDIA® OptiX™ ray tracing engine Beta

Note: For the latest news about OptiX or other applicaiton acceleration engines, subscribe to ourDeveloper RSS feed or follow nvidiadeveloper on Twitter.

Beta 1 for OptiX 2 Now Available

Beta for version 2 of the NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine is now publicly available to all software developers. Version 2 will eventually be providing newly optimized support for NVIDIA's upcoming "Fermi" GPU architecture. As a precursor to this support, the Beta broadens support to include currently available NVIDIA GeForce GPUs.

Beta System Requirements:

Graphics Hardware:

• OptiX supports most CUDA-capable GPUs, but is only fully functional and supported on NVIDIA's GT200 GPU architecture. Earlier NVIDIA GPU architectures will operate to the extent their CUDA cores and memory permit, but cannot be used in multiple GPU configurations and will deliver substantially less performance per CUDA core when compared to GT200. 
  
• If you find an issue with OptiX, please verify it is reproducible on GT200 hardware, as only fixes on current GPUs can be verified, and issues limited to older hardware will not be addressed. Products based on NVIDIA's GT200 architecture are:
  • Quadro FX 5800, Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX 3800, Quadro CX
  • Quadro Plex 2200 D2, Quadro Plex 2200 S4
  • Tesla S1070, Tesla M1060, Tesla C1060, Tesla RS
  • GeForce GTX 260, GTX 260 Cre 216, GTX 275, GTX 280, GTX 285, GTX 295"

The .NET Micro Framework let's you code with C# and run it on embedded hardware. This is really cool as it brings the .NET world and a familiar set of libraries to the developers.



http://www.microsoft.com/netmf/default.mspx

From the Microsoft .NET Micro Framework site
"The .NET Micro Framework is an innovative development and execution environment for resource-constrained devices.
It brings the same modern computing models that have proven to increase productivity on the desktop to small, intelligent devices.
In solutions where small devices are integrated with other devices and even the cloud, you can now use the same programming skills and code throughout the solution.
Its fully integrated Visual Studio experience brings a reliable and productive development system to the embedded world."

After spending countless hours playing Geometry Wars on the Xbox 360, I decided that it was time that I tried to replicate what I saw.
The game is just absolutely beautiful, here is a screenshot of Geometry Wars - Retro Evolved.


Here is my incomplete attempt


Download the source code here

The first Global Game Jam of 2010 is coming up in approx. 13 days. There is one happening in Cape Town on the 29th of January 2010 running up to the 31st of January 2010.

Enter your teams and let's show them what ZA's got!
http://www.afrigraph.org/global-game-jam-2010

Reading today's GameDev.net Daily I read 2 items that interest me.

Kodu Game Lab comes to the PC. This is really fantastic news! People that don't have an Xbox 360 now has the power to let Kodu strut his/her stuff :)
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/microsofts_simple_gamemaking_software_kodu_comes_pc



Have you ever wondered what goes on inside the brain of Microsoft's Project Natal? Read the scoop right here!
http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-01/exclusive-inside-microsofts-project-natal