Breakout

In relation to the release of Firefox 3.0, someone at work mentioned that we have screencasts too, and I was happy to see one where Theo shows off Luc Berthelet's version of Breakout. Theo scrolls through the code on the screencast, so by judicious pausing you can probably copy it, but I wish I could find the notebook somewhere, for, you know, research purposes.

In a serendipitous connection, Wikipedia tipped me off that in the past month or so Luc has broken out of his position at Electronic Arts to start Tir Nua, something in the virtual world line of goods. One of his new employees that he brought with him is a name familiar around my workplace, former Wolfram Research employee Sarah Flannery. I remember hearing Sarah give a talk last fall about the webMathematica-based Wiki she'd worked up for Sims Online players, and how she'd tackled the runaway inflation in the Sims Online economy (all sources and no sinks).

People like Luc and Sarah are fun users for Wolfram employees like me who consider themselves mainline software designers and like to see Mathematica applied more like a regular programming language in areas very different from what you might typically expect.