Bloxorz

Unfortunately, the Scala course at Coursera is over. It was really an excellent experience and I am desperately waiting for part two. The lectures were a bit on the slow side (luckily the player featured nice high-speed playback), but the assignments were rather challenging. As far as I know, the course material will stay available indefinitely, so if you missed the course, you can still sign up and watch the videos or download the exercises just for fun.

Due to the official code of honour, I am not allowed to discuss any actual code here, but the last assignment is still worth mentioning: Based on the concept of lazy data structures, we were asked to find a generic solution to the Bloxorz game. When I initially read the assignment, I doubted that this would be possible within a reasonable amount of time. But the exercises were so well crafted, that they guided us in a step-by-step fashion – in the end, I managed to get the maximal score within less than two hours.

Inspired by the addictive block-rolling, I was recently playing around with CSS3. I really have no 3D experience whatsoever, but here’s my quick shot at some basic transformations (webkit only; put focus on cube and press left/right arrows):