Marty Stepp

I love to play emulators; it’s a great way to relive classic games on one’s PC. But I sit down to play them a few times a year, and by then I have inevitably forgotten which emulator program is the best for each system. Many web sites give links to various emulators, but not many cut to the chase and actually tell you which emulator program is the best one to use for each given console. To help myself remember, and possibly to help others in the future, here is my list of which emulator works the best for each system.

(NOTE: Emulators require game ROM images to play, and please DO NOT contact me or post here asking about how to find ROMs. In many cases it is illegal to possess these ROMs, and I do not know how to acquire them nor would I share such information here. Thank you.)

• NES: FCE Ultra
• SNES: ZSNES
• N64: Project64
• Game Boy / Game Boy Advance: VisualBoy Advance
• DS: NO$GBA or iDeaS
• Genesis: Gens
• Playstation: ePSXe (with Pete’s GPU plugins)
• arcade: MAME
• DOS PC: DOSBox
• other: ScummVM (plays old LucasArts graphic adventure games)

Enjoy!

The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

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Doing With Images Makes Symbols, Alan Kay

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-533537336174204822

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Growing a Language, Guy Steele

Available on Google video at
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415

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Sorting Out Sorting (Google video or YouTube)

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3970523862559774879

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David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization

http://www.ted.com/talk/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html

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The Demo
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

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Intel’s interviews on parallelism

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/teach-parallel/

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Interviews of Computer Science educators

http://cs.southwestern.edu/CEOHP/index.html

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Revolution OS

This is a movie about Linux, Free Software, and the Open Source
movement. Lots of discussions with Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman,
Eric Raymond, and more.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409#

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The Code – by Hannu Puttonen

http://www.code.linux.fi/
http://watchdocumentary.com/watch/the-code-video_08d275f82.html

This is a 60 minute move about Linux. About 10 minutes of it are in
Finnish or Swedish with no English translation/subtitles. Lots of clips
of Stallman, Torvalds, Raymond, etc.

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And finally for a good two minute laugh about hardware …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAG39jKi0lI

I am reading about Java MVC web frameworks. There are a lot of them, but I am focusing on Spring vs. Struts because those two seem to be the most popular. I don’t want to use one of those new ones that use a weird dialect of Java such as Grails, Groovy, etc. I want legit Java here.

From what I am reading, Struts was created by Apache back in 2000. It is considered kind of the “grand-daddy” of all other Java web frameworks. It was very useful and good at the time, but people eventually felt it didn’t age well and was too rigid and had some design flaws. They re-did a lot of it and called it Struts 2.0, and that’s now the more commonly used version. It is still one of the top 2 or 3 frameworks. From what I am reading, it is much better than 1.0 and is a reasonable choice, but it is still kind of rigid and it gets a fair amount of its popularity from older web devs who learned Struts 1.0 and don’t want to re-learn a new (possibly better) framework.

Spring was created by some guys in around 2005-06 as a response to what they perceived as flaws in Struts and other frameworks. They put it out and wrote a book about how to use it, which sold a bunch of copies. Both frameworks are under active development (both released a new minor upgrade version in the last few days). Spring is currently on v3.x.

Some features people like in Spring are that it integrates better with POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects), which apparently Struts isn’t as good at (it prefers Java Beans, which I’ve never really understood the point of). Also Spring is designed to work well with the Hibernate ORM framework, which I also really want to learn. I’m reading that people are saying that it’s easier to write testing code against Spring based on its design (can’t really find details about exactly why this is so). Also Spring has some things called “dependency injection” and “aspect-oriented design” which are apparently good but sound like douche buzzwords to me.

There aren’t a ton of great pages comparing them, but here’s one where most of the commenters strongly advocate for Spring. They say it is simpler and less rigid and easier to understand and so on.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/353359/struts-or-spring-mvc-or-struts-spring

Here is a site listing 12 major benefits of Spring over Struts:

http://lijinjoseji.wordpress.com/2006/11/10/12-benefits-of-spring-mvc-over-struts/

Conclusion: It seems like Spring is the way to go…?