The Piehead News

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:10:47 GMT

JRuby certainly combines two worlds, neither of which I want to live in.

Videogame Idea (variation)

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:43:00 GMT

You all know about the Western Computer-based RPG, and all of its tropes. You are a party (or possibly a lone adventurer) questing the rid the world of an ancient evil.

Then there are games like Dungeon Keeper where you play the bad-ass boss monster at the bottom of a dungeon, and have to keep those pesky adventurers away from the goods.

The though-in-the-shower for today was "Dungeon Keeper meets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (are dead)".

You play a small party of low-level henchmen. You contract out your dungeon protection services to whoever is paying. You don't particularly like your job, or have done much thinking about the moral implications, but it you're good at it and it puts food on the table, so it's a thing to do.

(And of course no matter how far you get in the game, the bosses never give a damn about you, or even remember your names, really.)

Magic Mouse note

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:46:29 GMT

It's quite possible, almost easy, to mis-trigger a left click when you're going for a right click. Much, much harder to do that with physically separate buttons.

Magic Mouse note

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:29:46 GMT

I'm liking the Magic Mouse more and more for driving my 15" MBP; less so for driving the 2x 24" LCDs hooked up to the Mac Pro at work. Apple and I have disagree on what the top speed of a mouse should be. Windows and I have an understanding in this matter.

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:08:37 GMT

SMDbot = "Social Media Douchebot", those Twitter accounts that follow you if you mention "marketing" or "acai berry".

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:22:15 GMT

You turn your back for a second and then pow yet another damn JavaScript library crawls out of the woodwork.

New toy

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:42:34 GMT

I got a Magic Mouse yesterday. Tried it on my MBP (10.6). Now trying it on my Mac Pro at work (10.5, with 2x 24" screens.)

Question: Why doesn't Apple let you really crank up the tracking and sensitivity (without writing defaults on the command line or using 3rd party software)?

Just some negativity.

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:48:36 GMT

There's a new Git GUI for OS X in the works: http://macendeavor.com/gity

But it's closed-source, for-pay, so my interest level dropped pretty far, pretty fast. For all I know, it will be great, but this takes me back into the area of being uncomfortable tying my productivity as a developer even more to proprietary tools.

If there's a bug, can I fix it? No, there's no source.
If I want a new feature can I add it? No, there's no source, and it will be prioritized by a separate team with separate goals (goal #1 being "add features that make us more money".)

I dunno. Maybe I should get on the ball of writing for-pay tools for developers. Us OS X-using types sure do like our shiny, and sure are willing to pay for it. Except then I'll have to listen to users (like me) bitch and moan all day. I certainly wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of my bug reports.

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:33:19 GMT

Dragon Age: Origins

Decide how to handle complex issues like murder, genocide, betrayal, and the possession/sacrificing of children without the security of a good/bad slider to tell you what to do

I don't have a lot of interest in exploring moral choices in videogames for the obvious reason: most videogame "writing" is shit, made even shittier by shitty voice acting.

So for instance, I liked "Fallout 3", but every time a character opened its mouth I had the urge to cram a rocket into it.

I haven't tried "Dragon Age", though, so if it's actually non-shit in the story department, let me know.

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:18:56 GMT

Using Graphics Card Memory as Swap

It's funny because try using actual video card features (ie, the GPU) under Linux.

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:03:55 GMT

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:06:14 GMT

Some times code is complex because the time hasn't been taken to simplify it.

Some times code is complex because it is complex. But there may yet be better abstractions that can simplify the interface.

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:06:31 GMT

Marco: Why hasn't Vista sold well?

But what common tasks in 2009 can’t be accomplished by a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 PC with Windows XP SP2 and a cable internet connection — the average technology of 2004? Not much that regular people actually do.

In fact, my home PC is a 3GHz P4, from 2004, with a "reasonable" video card (7600GT). It was running XP/SP3, though it's running Windows 7 now (for no good reason.) I ran Vista on it for about a week before the Windows 7 RC1.

The only things you need a better PC for are:
* Actual multimedia production, for some definition of "actual".
* Running AAA games newer than Half-Life 2 EP1 at good settings.

I played through Fallout 3 on it, and it was good enough for me even if the render distance was way too shallow.

If I bought a new computer at this point, I'd probably just get a higher end iMac and run BootCamp.

Update: I should mention that Flash runs like a dog, and many Flash-based games aren't very optimized anyway, so for instance playing Flash-based online (or "indie") games on older hardware can get pretty damn dicey.

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:42:57 GMT

Mr Urbaniak explains: "Yeah, the Brock story runs forward from after the Season 3 finale to the present and the Venture family story runs backwards from the present to after Season 3 finale. Crazy kids."

Uh...

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:44:45 GMT

I'm pretty sure that Register.com wants me to keep my contact info. up-to-date so they can continue to give me "courtesy calls" at random times of day and send me junk mail.

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:09:09 GMT

Looks like MSDN got a redes--ah fuck who cares.

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:38:53 GMT

Watched "Spaced".

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:07:54 GMT

I've definitely increased my comfort level with Git in the last couple weeks, though for good or for evil remains to be seen.

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:43:38 GMT

James Avery:

We all write software for a living why do developers bitch more about paying for software than most things?

Because we all thing that given a little time then we could just "write that ourselves" for "free".

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:12:38 GMT

I used to think writing code was very prone to getting derailed by interruption. It is. But it's worse, much worse, for writing documentation.

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:06:01 GMT

I know I haven't been doing any development on Windows for a while but damn does TortoiseSVN seem wonky after living in TextMate + a UNIX-like command line.

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:35:51 GMT

A dual-quad Mac Pro is a great way to find make-based software that doesn't support parallel builds; even better, sometimes it will "just happen" to compile fine using only 2 cores.

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:16:06 GMT

I'm a developer, and here are some things I don't care about.

I'm not actively using .NET for anything, so I don't really care about what's going on in the Microsoft/.NET world. That includes .NET 4 and Visual Studio 10, for instance. (If in the future I end up doing .NET again, I suppose I will start caring again in a hurry.)

I haven't used Java since college (which is probably related to being hired by Microsoft out of college.) Because I don't use Java, I don't have any investment in the JVM, which means I don't have a lot of interest in better languages that happen to target the JVM (such as Scala and Clojure.) Or interest in non-Java languages that have a JVM implementation (JRuby, JPython.)

I prefer Python to Ruby (and Django to Rails), and the only Ruby I'm doing is for some side-project stuff, not for work. Not caring about Rails means also not caring about a pretty sizable swath of over "mostly Rails related" infrastructure.

Not caring about these three things (.NET, Java and the JVM, Ruby) seems to have me not caring about a pretty large chunk of what's going on out there (in the "I haz a jorb" market.)

So what should I be caring about?

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:26:21 GMT

No matter how much Firefox messes with their bookmark interface, it still feels like half-finished alpha code. Is the bookmarks UI even something that needed much attention?

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 19:25:50 GMT

Watched The Great Escape.