Interesting Links Twittered and Otherwise May 11th 2009

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I’ve decided I really like to do weekly wrap ups of interesting links. Initially it started as a way of sharing with people who don’t follow me on Twitter as well as to give some additional “link love” to some sites I really appreciate. Now it also helps me stay organized and since there is no 140 character limitation on blogging I can add some information to help people know if they really want to follow the link. Hopefully some of you are finding these links useful and perhaps (in my ideal world) interesting as well.

I recently found the Temple of VB web site. The site’s description is:

Visual Basic is an amazing programming language, combining power and usability into one fantastic package. As a regular blogger on the VB team blog page, I frequently post VB applications and code snippets there. This resource page will collect those applications so that you can download them easily to your machine. I tend to focus on game programming as a good way to introduce VB coding concepts to people, and so you'll card games, maze games, and so forth here, all of which leverage various aspects of VB coding.

I’m still working my way through it but so far it looks very cool and very helpful. There is a lot there!

The Discovery Education site is running a Young Scientist Challenge contest for students. What is it about?

Do you have what it takes to be America's Top Young Scientist? Discovery Education and 3M are looking for a few great students to inspire us with their enthusiasm for science, so show us what you've got! Create a short (1-2 min.) video about one of this year's scientific topics and YOU could win a trip to New York City to compete in the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge finals.

Looking for a way to help explain how floating-point numbers are represented in binary? Check out this post called  Converting Floating-Point Numbers to Binary Strings in C on the Exploring Binary blog.

Bill Buxton, Microsoft Research Principal Scientist, has a very interesting article on engineering and design where he “calls for engineers and user-experience designers to learn to appreciate one another.”

Students can win a Casio Exlim EX-Z80 digital camera in May by joining the conversation on Microphone – Microsoft’s community site for students on Facebook.

Are you involved with a non-government organization (NGO)? I just found out about www.Microsoft.com/NGO for support of non-governmental organizations. Check it out.