6/5/2005
Moving day
Howdy, I've moved my blog over to here. I'm over there for the moment while I get the whole Mac/python thing going in a way I like it (I was having trouble getting bzero and the mac to play along). So until then, check out the new site.
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5/29/2005
Begun, the Mac war has.
Well, I decided to get a Mac mini. Or Mini Mac. I've been running it full time at home for about 3 weeks now. So far I think I'm digging it. ;) Its different than the Mandrade/Linux system I was running before. Not to say that one is better than the other. Just different, just like how they advise you to think.
Except for the temperature/noise of the hardware. In that area the mini wins hands down. It is sooooo quite and runs sooooo much cooler than the ol' Athlon. They are at about the same clock speed, but the mini seems so much more responsive. (Ok, the mini's bus is going faster than the Athlon, and there's also the whole CISC vs RISC thing, but I'll get into that more later.)
Except for the temperature/noise of the hardware. In that area the mini wins hands down. It is sooooo quite and runs sooooo much cooler than the ol' Athlon. They are at about the same clock speed, but the mini seems so much more responsive. (Ok, the mini's bus is going faster than the Athlon, and there's also the whole CISC vs RISC thing, but I'll get into that more later.)
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3/18/2005
Reading and Reviewing
I've been doing a lot of reading here lately. When I was a kid I used to read a ton of books. But once I got into high school I really slowed down. By the time I got out of college, the only thing I seemed to read where programming related books. (aka nerd material)
But in the last year or two I've really started to dive back into reading fiction. And so far I have to say I'm really enjoying it. Even the worst thing I've read in the last year or so is still better than 90% of what's on TV.
I've been focusing on a lot of sci-fi and post-apocalyptic books. I'm hoping to draw inspiration from them in my quest to create a cool game like Wasteland. It dawned on me that I should write down my thoughts about these books as I read them so that way I can keep them straight. And I thought that since I'm writing a review of these books, why not publish them?
So that's what I'm doing. My wife and I are putting together a site to review books (and other stuff). So if you are interested, please feel free to drop by ad check them out.
But in the last year or two I've really started to dive back into reading fiction. And so far I have to say I'm really enjoying it. Even the worst thing I've read in the last year or so is still better than 90% of what's on TV.
I've been focusing on a lot of sci-fi and post-apocalyptic books. I'm hoping to draw inspiration from them in my quest to create a cool game like Wasteland. It dawned on me that I should write down my thoughts about these books as I read them so that way I can keep them straight. And I thought that since I'm writing a review of these books, why not publish them?
So that's what I'm doing. My wife and I are putting together a site to review books (and other stuff). So if you are interested, please feel free to drop by ad check them out.
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3/16/2005
Sad news - Billy "Wicked" Wilson
A few weeks ago I wondered that Billy Wilson was up to. I used to read VoodooExtreme every day way back when and he always cracked me up. His pimp-talk was classic and always gave me some new phrase to use. I still use the phrase "nyquil-vodka smoothie" from time to time.
And Billy also started doing interviews with developers which were always a hoot. Especially with folks like Brian Hook who kinda became a regular on the site. I learned a lot and was always, *always* entertained by these posts.
But eventually problems cropped up on the website and Billy left. After that the site was never the same. Billy started a new site GamingGroove, but it took a long time to take off, so I didn't look at it for a long time. It kinda dropped off my radar, which is sad, I think the world can always use a laugh in the form of some good old fashioned pimp talk.
Sadly, Billy passed away on Monday March 14, 2005. I'm seriously bummed out by this, the internet is now a little less fun without him here. R.I.P. Billy.
And Billy also started doing interviews with developers which were always a hoot. Especially with folks like Brian Hook who kinda became a regular on the site. I learned a lot and was always, *always* entertained by these posts.
But eventually problems cropped up on the website and Billy left. After that the site was never the same. Billy started a new site GamingGroove, but it took a long time to take off, so I didn't look at it for a long time. It kinda dropped off my radar, which is sad, I think the world can always use a laugh in the form of some good old fashioned pimp talk.
Sadly, Billy passed away on Monday March 14, 2005. I'm seriously bummed out by this, the internet is now a little less fun without him here. R.I.P. Billy.
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3/9/2005
Well isn't that nice to know!
From MSNBC comes a story about another break in at a consumer data warehouse comes this choice quote:
Well that's good to know! I'd hate to think that this breach of
sensitive information could cause any inconvenience to the company and
its bottom line.
Using misappropriated passwords and identification from legitimate
customers, intruders got access to personal information on as many as
32,000 U.S. citizens in a database owned by LexisNexis, the company's
corporate parent said Wednesday.
...
The company played down the effect of the security breach on its
profits, reaffirming its target of higher earnings and at least 5
percent growth in revenues excluding acquisitions.
Well that's good to know! I'd hate to think that this breach of
sensitive information could cause any inconvenience to the company and
its bottom line.
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3/8/2005
A nice little quickie
Along the lines of doing any amount of coding in any amount of time you have, I wanted to share this little nigget. I'm sure everyone who's been using python for more than 10 minutes knows this, but I find it so useful.
Say you want to test something out like an HTML parser. Instead of hammering th sever 5 million times while you figure out what data you want to pull of the page, save the page to you local machine. Then in the directory where you saved the HTML file start up python (from the command line) and type in:
This will start a small webserver on port 8000 (so you url would be http://localhost:8000) and then you can get to the page that way. I did this with the Beautiful Soup stuff a while ago and it worked liked a champ.
Say you want to test something out like an HTML parser. Instead of hammering th sever 5 million times while you figure out what data you want to pull of the page, save the page to you local machine. Then in the directory where you saved the HTML file start up python (from the command line) and type in:
import SimpleHTTPServer
SimpleHTTPServer.test()
This will start a small webserver on port 8000 (so you url would be http://localhost:8000) and then you can get to the page that way. I did this with the Beautiful Soup stuff a while ago and it worked liked a champ.
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3/6/2005
15 minutes
On Slashdot the comments on the articles tend to get pretty religious and pretty tangential very fast. I usually take them with a grain of salt. However I read a comment the other day that really caught my eye.
I don't even remember what article it was written in/about, but a poster made a comment that every day or every week you (the coder) should dedicate at least 15 to 30 minutes to your own personal project. Now, he wasn't talking about doing this at work or even all in one sitting. It was ment as a "don't stop workingon you project or else they will get stale" comment.
Several other posters responded positively to this, saying that basically any forward progress was good progress.
I have to agree with this line of thought. In fact it has even inspired me to start back to working on my little python RPG engine. So this week I've spent a little bit of time creating a python Tkinter app to help me build the script for the game engine. That's one area where I really needed to do some work. So instead of plowing through the code and getting stuck/discouraged, I took a different approach (working on a necessary tool) with the hope that moving forward in the direction will give me the kick in the ass I need to get going again.
Now if only I can do the same thing with the math class I'm taking...
I don't even remember what article it was written in/about, but a poster made a comment that every day or every week you (the coder) should dedicate at least 15 to 30 minutes to your own personal project. Now, he wasn't talking about doing this at work or even all in one sitting. It was ment as a "don't stop workingon you project or else they will get stale" comment.
Several other posters responded positively to this, saying that basically any forward progress was good progress.
I have to agree with this line of thought. In fact it has even inspired me to start back to working on my little python RPG engine. So this week I've spent a little bit of time creating a python Tkinter app to help me build the script for the game engine. That's one area where I really needed to do some work. So instead of plowing through the code and getting stuck/discouraged, I took a different approach (working on a necessary tool) with the hope that moving forward in the direction will give me the kick in the ass I need to get going again.
Now if only I can do the same thing with the math class I'm taking...
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2/21/2005
Beautiful Soup
Recently I found myself wanting to scrape a couple of web pages to get the content off of them. I did some searching and came across Beautiful Soup which is a very handly HTML/XML parser. Very basic, yet did exactly what I needed it to. I highly recommend it if you want to do some HTML scraping with python. Soup is good!
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2/19/2005
Its funny, when I wrote my last entry I thought to myself "Ya know, this is an interesting idea, but what are the applications of this?". (I try to ask myself that question whenever I am looking at some new idea or technology.) A few days after I posted the entry Slashdot posted an article talking about how a group of researching are using Google to derive th meaning of words (and how they are related to each other).
That's pretty cool. If Google is always running around the internet collecting links and seeing how the links relate to each other, then finding the "Google Distance" between two links is probably a pretty good way of seeing how they are related. Kinda wish I had thought of that. ;)
While searching for that article I stumbled across another article that talks about how someone else saw an opportunity to fill his blog with content to help increase his Google ads click-through by using Google's news alert system. That's just too cool.
Also, I got a Gmail account today. It looks pretty interesting, but for the time being its going to be my "experimental" account. I've been learing about how gmail and Google Maps work recently, so this will be fun to play around with.
That's pretty cool. If Google is always running around the internet collecting links and seeing how the links relate to each other, then finding the "Google Distance" between two links is probably a pretty good way of seeing how they are related. Kinda wish I had thought of that. ;)
While searching for that article I stumbled across another article that talks about how someone else saw an opportunity to fill his blog with content to help increase his Google ads click-through by using Google's news alert system. That's just too cool.
Also, I got a Gmail account today. It looks pretty interesting, but for the time being its going to be my "experimental" account. I've been learing about how gmail and Google Maps work recently, so this will be fun to play around with.
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1/11/2005
Search engines and networks of links
Search engines are a neat thing to play with. I know, how dorky does that sound? But think about it for a second... I used to think that they were all pretty much the same in that they would all reference the same pages. Obviously engines like Google (and a9) have some big advantages over other engines (like yahoo, and excite), but they don't seem to have a monopoly.
This blog seems to get run over by the search engine spiders fairly often (at least judging by the topics that people were searching for when they hit this page). So every now and then I kinda ego surf google and see what comes up. The other day I was very surprised when I saw (ranked pretty high up) a response I gave on the Pygame mailing list. I was literally seeing this on google 2 days after I sent the email to the mailing list. (And it wasn't anything earth shattering in the email, I was just asking a question.)
Then a few days ago I wrote a blog entry about getting a webcam to work with my Mandrake 10.1 system. Within a few days I had already had a hit from a webpage with someone looking for that info.
So today during a lull I decided to run my name through a few different search engines and see what came up. I was very surprised. Tek-Tips is a nice site that has a lot of forums about various IT topics. Years ago I answered a few questions and now all of the search engines show links to that. Odd, seeing how the content is old (perhaps the pages are dynamic and that "hides" the age of the content), but interesting.
The going to Yahoo and doing the same search I see my slashdot info. I thought that was odd that it would show up here inside of yahoo, but not google. Just to make things even more interesting I went to excite and found that it had spidered Rent-A-Coder and found my profile there! Again, no other site had done that.
So the main conclusion I'm pulling from all of this is A)Not all engines index the same pages. and B)There is some interesting network stuff that can be done with these engines.
Now when I say network, I'm referring to the mathematical kind, not the computer kind. I always thought that the engines were already doing some type of network building (for example persons A and B talk about oranges. But A and B don't link to each other, but since they have oranges in common I'll include them both in a query set for oranges). I've been thinking that my wife's (hi Katie!) beading website would be picked up by some engine just because it was mentioned in my blog roll and because of its relationship to the topic of beads. But that hasn't happened so far. Perhaps its a time thing (the spiders just haven't gone over it yet), but at any rate now that I have mentioned it here I'm sure it will get hit soon.
And that will be an interesting thing to see. It will be cool to see the topology that forms between Katie's site, my links, and other sites about beads and beaded jewelry. I'm sure some PHD candidate out there has already done this, but I think it would be neat to see a program that could go to the engines, search on a topic, collate all of the results, and then present the strongest results as a network. That network could then be used for a lot of things, a starting point for new searches on a related topic for example.
Hmmm.... But I should stay focused on completing my main project (my game engine). :)
This blog seems to get run over by the search engine spiders fairly often (at least judging by the topics that people were searching for when they hit this page). So every now and then I kinda ego surf google and see what comes up. The other day I was very surprised when I saw (ranked pretty high up) a response I gave on the Pygame mailing list. I was literally seeing this on google 2 days after I sent the email to the mailing list. (And it wasn't anything earth shattering in the email, I was just asking a question.)
Then a few days ago I wrote a blog entry about getting a webcam to work with my Mandrake 10.1 system. Within a few days I had already had a hit from a webpage with someone looking for that info.
So today during a lull I decided to run my name through a few different search engines and see what came up. I was very surprised. Tek-Tips is a nice site that has a lot of forums about various IT topics. Years ago I answered a few questions and now all of the search engines show links to that. Odd, seeing how the content is old (perhaps the pages are dynamic and that "hides" the age of the content), but interesting.
The going to Yahoo and doing the same search I see my slashdot info. I thought that was odd that it would show up here inside of yahoo, but not google. Just to make things even more interesting I went to excite and found that it had spidered Rent-A-Coder and found my profile there! Again, no other site had done that.
So the main conclusion I'm pulling from all of this is A)Not all engines index the same pages. and B)There is some interesting network stuff that can be done with these engines.
Now when I say network, I'm referring to the mathematical kind, not the computer kind. I always thought that the engines were already doing some type of network building (for example persons A and B talk about oranges. But A and B don't link to each other, but since they have oranges in common I'll include them both in a query set for oranges). I've been thinking that my wife's (hi Katie!) beading website would be picked up by some engine just because it was mentioned in my blog roll and because of its relationship to the topic of beads. But that hasn't happened so far. Perhaps its a time thing (the spiders just haven't gone over it yet), but at any rate now that I have mentioned it here I'm sure it will get hit soon.
And that will be an interesting thing to see. It will be cool to see the topology that forms between Katie's site, my links, and other sites about beads and beaded jewelry. I'm sure some PHD candidate out there has already done this, but I think it would be neat to see a program that could go to the engines, search on a topic, collate all of the results, and then present the strongest results as a network. That network could then be used for a lot of things, a starting point for new searches on a related topic for example.
Hmmm.... But I should stay focused on completing my main project (my game engine). :)
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1/9/2005
Episodic Gaming
Well, after a rough start I finally finished Metal Arms: Glitch in the system. I have to say I really enjoyed the game to despite my rantings at the begining. While I was slogging my way towards the end I kept having a thought occur to me over and over:
"This game is too long"
When the game came out it was priced at $49 at most places. The game has 42 levels, so that works out to about a dollar a level. Which sounds like a good deal until you realize that people might get distracted half way through the game and put it down for a while (or forever). As a busy grown up, I find this happens to me more often than I like to admit. I simply don't have the time I did when I was a teenager (or in college) to sit and play games all day.
My feeling is that if this game was broken up into at least 2 or 3 parts it would have been a better experince. By making the games smaller, they could have sold them for a cheaper price (like $19 for example). Then more people would have tried the game out. Sure, not every person who buys episode 1 will buy 2 and 3, but I think it is better to have more sales at a lower price than few sales at a high price. (I was going to talk for a minute about the crazy pricing of games, and how they drop like rocks after a few weeks of release, but that is a topic for another time.)
Plus I think the idea of short gaming and story cycles is an idea whose time has come. Now that everybody and their uncle can connect their game to the internet, it would seem putting the hooks into an engine that will allow it to download (for a nominal fee of course) new content (mostly I'm thinking of new stories and maps utilizing existing graphics and sounds) to allow the end user to "continue the experince".
But that's just my opinion. Personally I'm going to try and work episodes into the games I'm working on, I think it would be a neat way to build a community with the players. Plus it gives the opportunity to reuse the core engine which would be nice.
"This game is too long"
When the game came out it was priced at $49 at most places. The game has 42 levels, so that works out to about a dollar a level. Which sounds like a good deal until you realize that people might get distracted half way through the game and put it down for a while (or forever). As a busy grown up, I find this happens to me more often than I like to admit. I simply don't have the time I did when I was a teenager (or in college) to sit and play games all day.
My feeling is that if this game was broken up into at least 2 or 3 parts it would have been a better experince. By making the games smaller, they could have sold them for a cheaper price (like $19 for example). Then more people would have tried the game out. Sure, not every person who buys episode 1 will buy 2 and 3, but I think it is better to have more sales at a lower price than few sales at a high price. (I was going to talk for a minute about the crazy pricing of games, and how they drop like rocks after a few weeks of release, but that is a topic for another time.)
Plus I think the idea of short gaming and story cycles is an idea whose time has come. Now that everybody and their uncle can connect their game to the internet, it would seem putting the hooks into an engine that will allow it to download (for a nominal fee of course) new content (mostly I'm thinking of new stories and maps utilizing existing graphics and sounds) to allow the end user to "continue the experince".
But that's just my opinion. Personally I'm going to try and work episodes into the games I'm working on, I think it would be a neat way to build a community with the players. Plus it gives the opportunity to reuse the core engine which would be nice.
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