| Monday, September 29, 2008 |
  portable stuff everywhere | 
Posted - 9/29/2008 8:45:03 PM | I got a couple of bumps from people interested in getting my games on an iPhone and/or helping me get there. Looks like it'll require an iPhone SDK subscription ($99) an OSX update on my little Mac Mini ($129) and an iPod touch for device testing ($229). Unfortunately I already wrote a paycheck from The Code Zone, so I'm gonna have to wait until I get some more available cash before I can buy the bits necessary. Figure I'll be able to get all this stuff sometimes in October. I'll keep you posted.
Most annoying thing is that the plan is pretty locked up. Basically everything's a ground-up rewrite. Even if there was another way to get apps on the phone, Apple won't let you use 'em.
I'll also take a close look at Android games. Android development is cheaper (specifically free), so that'll be on the horizon too. Android's gotta catch on first, so I have a little elbow-room there.
Next is my zillion-dollar idea. Backup hard drives with automated software and such are handy but they have one big problem, and that's that they're usually at the same location as the machine they're backing up. My idea is for a little self-contained backup box (i.e. a little tiny Linux motherboard hooked up to a hard drive) with wifi, and you can set the unit to sleep 23 hours a day and wake up just long enough to copy the changed files from yesterday.
And the housing is weatherproof and the whole unit works on 120 volts or 12 volts. That way you could stick it in a toolshed in your backyard or in the trunk of your car or in your neighbor's garage or anywhere else with electricity and will be safe if your house burns or floods or whatever.
And the drive encrypts everything so nobody will have your data if it gets stolen.
| |
| Monday, September 22, 2008 |
| Three things | |
Posted - 9/22/2008 1:21:08 PM | First off, I'm back from Austin. I believe the coverage is going to appear on the site tomorrow and Thursday. I need to forward my notes and pictures to Drew, and the ball will start rolling on that.
Second, I found a really excellent list here on lifehacker. Basically they have a weekly "hive five" segment where they posit a question like "what's the best FTP software", then people nominate entries and vote on 'em. They then post the top-5 vote getters. This week they posted a "best of" retrospective of stuff from the past several weeks. So if you're looking for some best-of-breed software that's (mostly) free, look no further.
Third, I find that the most galling part of the economic near-meltdown of the past week isn't that I'm ultimately being billed several thousand dollars to fix bad (and sometimes criminal) decisions made by people who won't end up paying a nickel. The most galling part is that I'm apparently expected to feel grateful to the people raiding my wallet for their belated foresight in avoiding the crash.
In times like these, I like to analogize. And my favorite business to analogize is McDonald's because their business model is simple (they exchange food for money) and they're ubiquitous. Here's the best, albeit still convoluted, analogy I can come up with.
While sitting in McDonald's today, the manager approached me, telling me that his friend two tables over dropped his meal on the floor, and that I won't be allowed to leave the restaurant until I pay to replace his meal along with a tip to cover the cost of cleanup. Pointing out that I had nothing to do with the accident avails me nothing, and I'm informed that if I don't pay for the meal that they'll call the police and have me arrested for disorderly conduct. Weighing the circumstances, I pull out my wallet and pay for the meal and the tip. The meal is replaced. The tip ends up going to the friend to cover the mental anguish he experienced when he dropped his meal.
The situation now resolved, I make a hasty exit from the restaurant. As I exit, the manager shouts "hey, don't I get a 'thank you' for solving the problem?".
I reply with a two-word phrase that's similar to 'thank you' but starts with a different word. The only place where the analogy falls apart is that I'd clearly never do business with that McDonald's (or maybe any other) again, which isn't exactly an option I have available to me regarding the US economy.
I guess that's the downfall of analogies. They simplify the model, but they're rarely perfect.
| |
| Wednesday, September 17, 2008 |
| Welcome to day three | |
Posted - 9/17/2008 11:26:03 AM | Day three of the Austin GDC and everybody's tired. One fact of life of trade shows is that the last day is the one where everyone's tired and whiny about the grind. Everybody in the expo hall will be ready to break down and leave even though the thing opened yesterday afternoon.
Myself, I got to bed early and I'm fresh as a daisy. Unfortunately there's really nothing I have to see this afternoon, so I'm likely going to do one more go-round of the expo floor looking for free pens, then I'll be on my way back to D/FW.
I went to a google-sponsored seminar on interfacing with YouTube. Seems like a fairly easy thing to do, although save for a few people like the Spore group, not many are taking enough advantage of it. Myself, I'm always up for someone who's willing to donate a big pile of bandwidth to me for free, so I'll have to figure out some way to leverage it. Suffice it to say, YouTube is more than happy to donate a big pile of video bandwidth to you for your game project, so figure out a way to leverage it.
There are also API's to interface with the comment and rating system. Not sure how useful that is given that 98% of YouTube comments seem to be written by people missing a chromosome or two. To me, that'd be like having free and ready access to everything ever written by David Icke -- an interesting concept, but ultimately just a big pile of stupid.
We'll see. Coverage gets posted RSN, so you can hook yourself to the YouTube developer community and make that judgement yourself.
| |
| Tuesday, September 16, 2008 |
| Hey, I'm in Austin | |
Posted - 9/16/2008 6:44:16 PM | Lessee, it's about day two-and-a-half in sunny Austin. We went to see the nonexistent bats under the Austin bridge, which was cool. And by "cool", I mean "the food at the restaurant was cool where we could eat and wait for the bats to not arrive". I'm sure Drew has more details. Today he's going to take me to see the frozen bigfoot. And tomorrow maybe Piltdown Man.
I did an all-day seminar sponsored by Sun (not all Java thankfully) about various open-source thingies that'd be useful for game developers. I also went to "Hardcore Games for Casual Audiences" which was quite a bit better than its horrid title would suggest.
And I attended a couple of Flash seminars. I think tomorrow will be a seminar on how to build YouTube support in your games (which sounds rather cool). After that, I'm not really sure what I'll be doing. I might just head home.
Loads of cute trade-show goodies for the critter. I'll post pictures I'm sure. I also got myself wrapped up in some kind of new Indie Game Developer portal thingy which actually sounds rather good. I hope the gamedev people don't get jealous.
I'll keep you posted.
| |
| Saturday, September 13, 2008 |
| Good cheap wifi deal | |
Posted - 9/13/2008 11:13:08 AM | Starbucks now has free wifi, but you have to know how to get it.
Actually it's not 100% free but it is really cheap and since Starbucks' are everywhere, it's a good thing to have when you're on the go.
Basically you need to have a Starbucks account that's linked to an AT&T account. And the account needs to have "activity" in the past 30 days. Here's how to do it.
1. Next time you're in Starbucks, buy yourself a gift card. I don't know if the minimum is $5 or $10. You don't need to buy anything with it. You just need to get the card and put a balance on it.
2. Take the card home and go to starbucks.com. Set up a starbucks.com account and register your card with your account. Once you do this, you'll see a button that'll send you to AT&T's site where you set up a wifi account.
3. Next time you're in Starbucks, you should be able to connect to their hotspot and log in using the ID you set up with AT&T.
The catch is that you need to have "activity" on the card in the past 30 days to get the access. Activity counts as a purchase or a recharge of the card. Even if you bought a dollar's worth of cookies in the past 30 days, you still get wifi access.
This is a good deal and it's something I recommend, especially if you travel. Some hotels still have below-par internet access, and this is a good way to get readily-available internet access at a very good price. I've connected at my local Starbucks plenty of times, and the access speed is consistently excellent.
| |
| Monday, September 8, 2008 |
| Two things | |
Posted - 9/8/2008 9:17:39 AM | First thing, I sat down at my desk this morning to find my ICQ account 102% inaccessible. Password wouldn't work. Password recovery didn't recognize my email. Either my account was stolen or it's been banned or it's just disappeared from the system. Why someone would want to steal a throwaway account with four friends on it, I have no idea, but ICQ has definitely been a spam-trap lately.
On a related note, I'm hoping Digsby comes up with some kind of challenge-response plugin. Trillian had one, and it worked brilliantly. If an unsolicited user messaged me, they'd get an auto-response along the line of "Prove that you're a human by sending me the number 123". If they did it, then their messages would go through and I could whitelist 'em so they wouldn't get challenged again. It was absurdly simple and it filtered out 100% of bots.
Anyway, my new ICQ number is now 454167184 if you wanna add me.
Second, I must add a couple of follow-ups to my Google Chrome points below. . .
1. Chrome loves cores. I ran it on my single core Athlon-64 machine downstairs and it wasn't nearly as snappy. Running it on the four-core machine upstairs, it was handily faster than Firefox. On a single core, it was about the same or even marginally slower than Firefox. Its little "one process per page" scheme I mentioned below definitely gives it a multi-core boost.
2. Chrome loves Vista. It's definitely designed to merge seamlessly with the Vista look.
3. Chrome does have its own task manager. Right-click on any empty space on the titlebar and you'll get a menu item for the task manager where you can kill tabs more easily and cleanly than with the Windows task manager. In addition, the Chrome task manager shows off the traffic on each tab, which is pretty cool.
| |
| Thursday, September 4, 2008 |
| Bug FYI | |
Posted - 9/4/2008 10:26:14 AM | Not sure if this applies to anyone here, but it applied to me. If you are using SWX as your client-server layer for Flash, your communication will completely break under the soon-to-be-released Flash Player 10.
The bug appears to be security-related. I haven't investigated it enough to see if it's a genuine bug in FP10 or if it's just a side-effect of tightened security. I tend to think the latter, but the upshot is that FP10 is now in release-candidate stage and it's not known if this problem will propagate to the actual release. And since new Flash releases get download numbers that kick sand in the face of that "world record download" that FF3 boasts, it's best to err on the side of caution and fix the bug soon.
That's the bad news. The good news is that fixing the bug server-side is trivial and involves commenting out one line of PHP on your server code. Here's a blog-post with the fix.
http://www.swapdepths.nl/2008/09/04/swx-and-fp10/
I just tried this on thecodezone.com, and it works just fine. Again, I'm not sure what that line actually did, but removing it fixes FP10 and appears not to break earlier players, so it's a good fix.
And I guess apologies in advance if you're an early-adopter of Flash players and you found my daily puzzles broken. Thankfully the bug only happened with my low-bandwidth (in relative terms) daily puzzles and not in the "play n share" versions that are now filling up every cheapo Flash game portal on the intertubes.
| |
| Tuesday, September 2, 2008 |
| Google Chrome - First Impressions | |
Posted - 9/2/2008 7:38:40 PM | Since I make money by putting stuff on the web, I like to make sure that my stuff works on the web. Duh.
And whenever a new browser hits the scene, I like to make sure that my content doesn't royally honk it up. Hence I'm a browser early-adopter. Thus far I'm happy to confirm that my site and games work on everything. A couple of things aren't centered properly on IE8 Beta1, but I'm not gonna risk fixing it and potentially breaking another browser elsewhere until I'm certain that the problem is gonna persist into the actual release.
On that note, I just got to playing around with Google Chrome, and here are my first impressions. . .
1. Wow. This is the nicest beta-anything I've ever installed. It's very solid and shows my content perfectly. I was a bit worried because Safari on Windows had some ugly plugin keyboard and mouse problems, but I figured those bugs were more related to Apple's shoehorning the Mac UI into Windows than the engine itself.
2. The tab motif works quite well and is very clean. Tabs can be torn off into separate windows or re-merged with others by just dragging.
3. If you use it on XP, you still get Vista-ish corner widgets. Dunno if that bothers you.
4. If you bring up the Windows task manager, you'll see that "chrome.exe" gets N plus 1 process entries where N is the number of tabs you have open. Apparently each tab is a separate Windows process, which is smart because that means that a buggy page or plugin won't freeze the whole browser (hello Firefox). Just for kicks, I killed one of the chrome.exe processes. The tab didn't close, but it turned black and displayed a "oooh, something horrible happened" message in the killed tab. It would be very nice if the processes could show the name of the tab ("chrome.exe - yahoo.com") and would quietly close the tab if I killed the tab's process in the task manager. That way it'd be easy to kill off badly-behaving pages without taking down the whole browser -- a big problem with Firefox.
5. I presume a plugin model is forthcoming. This ain't gonna supplant Firefox for me until it has a form-filler and a way to synchronize bookmarks.
6. I don't like the bookmark model. Bookmarks require their own toolbar. I'd much rather have a little bookmark button so I could save that vertical space.
7. Very few customization options. No real way to define helper apps for file-types, ala Firefox. With Firefox, I can easily tell it which player to run when I click on an MP3 because I have 3-4 apps that can play MP3 files.
8. Rendering pages looks great. Another complaint about Safari on Windows is that it used its own LCD type-sharpener rather than ClearType, so text just looked a little "off" compared to Firefox and IE. Page rendering is at least as nice as Firefox.
9. I got 65 on Acid3. Others are reporting numbers in the 70's if you leave the test running for a long time (apparently some of the Acid3 tests are very time-consuming). Webkit-based Safari brags that it's getting 100, so I'm not sure what's not yet wired up right. 65 is quite good, so I'm not complaining.
All in all, it's a very impressive first effort. It's not all there yet, but what is there is 100% solid. I can recommend it.
| |
|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S | | 1 | | 3 | | 5 | 6 | 7 | | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | | 14 | 15 | | | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | | 30 | | | | |
OPTIONS
Track this Journal
ARCHIVES
October, 2009
September, 2009
August, 2009
July, 2009
June, 2009
May, 2009
April, 2009
March, 2009
February, 2009
January, 2009
December, 2008
November, 2008
October, 2008
September, 2008
August, 2008
July, 2008
June, 2008
May, 2008
April, 2008
March, 2008
February, 2008
January, 2008
December, 2007
November, 2007
October, 2007
September, 2007
August, 2007
July, 2007
June, 2007
May, 2007
April, 2007
March, 2007
February, 2007
January, 2007
December, 2006
November, 2006
October, 2006
September, 2006
August, 2006
July, 2006
June, 2006
May, 2006
April, 2006
March, 2006
February, 2006
January, 2006
December, 2005
November, 2005
October, 2005
September, 2005
August, 2005
July, 2005
June, 2005
May, 2005
April, 2005
March, 2005
February, 2005
January, 2005
December, 2004
November, 2004
October, 2004
September, 2004
August, 2004
July, 2004
June, 2004
May, 2004
April, 2004
March, 2004
February, 2004
January, 2004
December, 2003
November, 2003
October, 2003
September, 2003
August, 2003
July, 2003
June, 2003
May, 2003
April, 2003
March, 2003
February, 2003
January, 2003
December, 2002
November, 2002
October, 2002
September, 2002
August, 2002
July, 2002
June, 2002
May, 2002
April, 2002
March, 2002
February, 2002
January, 2002
December, 2001
November, 2001
October, 2001
September, 2001
August, 2001
July, 2001
June, 2001
May, 2001
April, 2001
March, 2001
February, 2001
January, 2001
December, 2000
November, 2000
October, 2000
September, 2000
August, 2000
July, 2000
June, 2000
May, 2000
April, 2000
March, 2000
February, 2000
January, 2000
December, 1999
November, 1999
October, 1999
September, 1999
August, 1999
July, 1999
June, 1999
May, 1999
April, 1999
March, 1999
February, 1999
January, 1999
December, 1998
November, 1998
October, 1998
September, 1998
August, 1998
July, 1998
June, 1998
May, 1998
April, 1998
March, 1998
|
