I'm not going to post any more game development or Big Villain news on my personal blog anymore. I've got a new one devoted only to that subject at http://www.madgameslab.com. Since I'm doing a little work on the game every day or every other day I'm already up to five or six entries on the blog. If you have any interest in my game or in PBBG development in general, go check it out!
We had to say goodbye today to somebody who had been a family member since shortly after Alan was born. Since we had to put him to sleep because cancer was killing him, I felt like telling the story of how Wellington came to be my cat.
My then mother-in-law Mia Martin had come to visit the apartment my ex-wife and I were in at the time. Corina opened the door to let her in and before we knew what had happened a gangly little American Shorthair kitten raced through the door. I was leaning back on the sofa with my legs out in front of me and he went straight up my legs and my torso until he stood on my chest nose to nose with me. He sniffed my face thoroughly and purred very very loudly. In fact, that was the distinguishing characteristic for Wellington in those days, his purr. You could hear it from ten feet away and although I don’t think he was quite as loud at 15 as he was at four months, he still managed a pretty loud purr last week.
Mia told us that he was just hanging around outside the door of our apartment and she had thought maybe we knew who he was. We didn’t know and when we asked around no-one ever admitted to being missing one kitten, so he became ours (well, mine really). It was always easy to remember how old he was, the vet said he was approximately four months old and Alan had just turned four months old.
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I’ll save you details of his death other than to say that he didn’t suffer, he just decided it was time to die and we put him to sleep before he did start suffering.
Wellington, we love you.
The contest to create a complete PBBG in two months has concluded and unfortunately Big Villain is just not ready yet. It’s a shame it wasn’t ready in time, but after about a month I was already getting pretty doubtful. It’s just too big a game for me to complete by myself in that timeframe with all the other stuff I have to do in my life. Nevertheless I’ve had a ton of fun working on it and absolutely nothing is going to stop me from completing it. I was working on the design of the site just last night to try and get it to something that doesn’t make your eyes bleed when you look at it. Hopefully by next week I’ll have accomplished that.
Anyway, some people did finish their games in the allotted time. Here are the final entries (though I’m not sure you can get into all of them yet, I think some authors were only planning on letting in the judges at this point):
I’m planning to take a look at each one I can and see what others were able to accomplish since October 11th when the contest started. I’m alternately impressed and disappointed with what I myself was able to accomplish in the same period of time. I figure I’ve got at least another six weeks or so of part time work before I’ll be ready for a beta of my game.
The Browser-Based Game Zone is holding a game contest. If you build a PBBG between now and December 11th, 2008 you could win a lot of promotion on various sites around the web. Because I already have one designed that I really need to get serious about, I've decided to enter the game Big Villain (designed by myself and Darin Clark) into the contest.
If you follow my blog for any reason at all, you know that I started rewriting a series of tutorials on building a PBBG from PHP into Ruby on Rails. I've been posting those tutorials over at the BuildingBrowsergames.com website and hopefully they will be helpful to others. For me it has been helpful because it forced me to improve my Ruby on Rails skills and the fact that I'm nearly done (I did an outline of the last few entries it would take me to catch up with Luke the other day) gives me a boost because it reinforces the idea that I can start a project and finish it.
Part of what I'm fighting here is my own nature. I design something I think is going to be fun to build and interesting to use (or play in this case). Then, I procrastinate... a lot. After all, if I never built it, I can still imagine how great it is, but if I build it and people don't think it's fun or I can't get enough people to come to make it a success, that's failure. And failure is completely different from never having tried. Eventually I come up with some other super cool new idea and I can abandon the old one in the name of pursuing the "better idea".
So by saying, "I'm joining, I'm going to compete too," I'm hoping that it will serve as motivation for me to not only start this seriously but finish it as well. I've got a deadline that I've got to meet and I've said publicly that I'm going to meet it. OK, enough self revelation, what's the game?
You play as a mad scientist trying to take over the world. You gather parts for your world domination schemes, build lairs, hire minions and secret agents and launch operation after operation to build up your evil empire or defeat your opponents. None of this is ever taken very seriously though. When you first start out, your secret lair is your Mom's basement. You can install death traps in your lair like sharks with friggin' laser beams and you can secretly control quasi-legal companies like the RIAA and an inkjet ink manufacturer. The parts to world domination schemes are as varied as duct tape and a George Foreman Grill.
If I do it right, it'll be a fun game to play with a healthy dose of the ridiculous.
When I started playing games, it was an exciting time. I started with the old Basic Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) set that had the blue dragon on the cover and graduated to Advanced D&D but quickly resold the books because I didn't like the ruleset. After that I tried a lot of different role playing games (RPGs) like Top Secret, Tunnels and Trolls, etc. though the one I usually played was a space role-playing game called Traveller.
Anyway, back to the excitement factor. D&D was well established in a hurry, after all, it had kicked off the whole genre. But it wasn't completely unstoppable back then. New RPGs seemed to be rolling out on a weekly basis, microgames like those from Metagaming and Steve Jackson games were giving you fun boardgame and wargame experiences without being very expensive and they were easy to take to school or a friend's house. Then there were cool magazines (Space Gamer, Dragon, The Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society, etc.), miniatures, dice, and other products. If you took a whole month off from going to the store, by the time you went back it almost seemed like everything had changed. By contrast computer games were pretty much pathetic, lacking the massively multiplayer, gorgeous graphics, and huge elaborate environments that characterize the whole genre today.
Today computer games are cool and, at least to me, it seems the years have not been kind to boardgames, RPGs, and card games. After all, Hasbro has managed to purchase Avalon Hill and Wizards of the Coast (which had in turn purchased TSR to get Dungeons and Dragons). That means that when they aren't tending to the new version of Mr. Potato Head or G.I. Joe, they're thinking about Diplomacy, Dungeons and Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering. To me, that doesn't seem like a good thing.
But lately I've started to realize that I don't see the whole picture. Because one thing you never saw in the early 1980's was the word "free". Even if you did take the time to create a RPG or a game yourself, how would you distribute such a thing? Who would you give it to outside of your direct circle of friends and how would anyone else ever hear of it? A few simple RPGs and games made their way into the previously mentioned game magazines as supplements but then, buying a magazine isn't exactly "free" is it?
But today... Today is different. Now there's a whole category of games known as "print and play". In fact, the fabrication machine for many parts of a game has managed to sneak into our homes without many of us being aware of it at all. It disguises itself in the form of the color ink jet printer you likely have sitting no more than a few feet from you right this minute. If I send you a PDF file, that inkjet printer sitting beside you is practically a game manufacturing site. It will make boards, chits and other pieces, rules, reference cards, etc. and the whole thing will look better than the game materials we got with small games in the 80's or even the last few years. Here are some examples to make my point:
Typical "microgames" of the early 80's. The Car Wars is a premium example of the genre because it features a plastic box with enough room for dice and full color counters.
A typical inexpensive game of the late 90's early 2000's. No dice, no tokens, just cards and map pieces printed on the same cardstock you can buy cheaply for your own printed games.
Examples of recent "print and play" games Valor and Victory and Zombie In My Pocket. Note that the pieces and cards are all full color as is the V&V manual.
If you're the kind of person who isn't inclined to print out a lot of stuff and assemble it, then at least rulebooks can be sent to a print-on-demand publisher like Lulu.com and they'll print out a bound copy that is indistinguishable from a commercially produced book. Thus, for an RPG rules set you're already on par with what commercial game companies can produce in terms of quality. The only advantage they have anymore is the cost of goods (e.g. a book comparable to the full-color 224 page Dungeons and Dragons 4th ed Dungeon Masters Guide that sells for $24 at Amazon would be about $50 through Lulu, or $9 for a black and white only edition).
So both microgames and RPGs should see an influx of new games and new ideas from individuals who create and distribute everything online. For board games though, there's more to it. There are the pieces, dice, and often unique parts just for a given game. Until I can give you a file of information and have you manufacture a file of plastic pieces from a replicator on your desk or send you to a commercial site that fabricate them on demand, the amount of competitive pressure individuals can exert on Milton Bradley, Wizards of the Coast, and WizKids is limited.
Still, that's not to say that there aren't people trying to do more sophisticated game materials. Hour of Glory can be purchased as a boxed game or you can buy it as a PDF for about a 1/3rd of the price. It has good reviews and looks to be a fun game. You're just expected to do more printing and more mounting, cutting, etc. than you would have to do normally for a little microgame. And if you're a miniatures fan, you can buy paper miniatures and complete environments like towns or dungeons in PDF form. You supply the paper, the printer, and the time to assemble it.
I've never owned a computer made by Apple in my life. I haven't spent more than a few minutes playing with them since 1987 when I was acting as tech support for the Macs we had at Rice. Nevertheless, I have now dumped Windows in favor of Mac OS X.
I bought a 24" 2.0Ghz iMac and I'm damn glad I did. I now have FreeBSD (i.e. Unix) under the hood rather than something "kinda like" an operating system and I've got a great looking and easy to use front end on top of it. Back in October of 2001 I said I would make my switch from Windows to Linux by October of 2006. Well, I was a year late and I had the wrong operating system. However, I did use Linux for an entire year from mid 2003-2004 in my first experiment with it. I learned that there was stuff I missed though, stuff that I became more dependent upon in later years rather than less.
I like to take photos and there's just not a lot of mediocre photo software on Linux, much less good photo software. Also, I got my first iPod and became rather used to iTunes as my preferred software to deal with that. So I could have stayed on Windows, gone to Linux but given up software I wanted, or a third choice which was what I chose. The Mac offered all the software I was interested in and a better operating system. It also had the advantage of being very very well supported for Ruby on Rails and Java, better supported on Ruby on Rails than Windows is in fact.
After having used it for several weeks now, I can see that I clearly made the right choice.
Booyah!
I got to see Aimee Mann a while back so I'll have ticked a couple of my must-see artists from my list. Also on the list: The Decemberists, Radiohead, Nellie McKay, and The White Stripes.
Flying birthday gifts are the best birthday gifts. That thing hovering in front of me in the picture is the new Picoo Z micro helicopter. It's an indoor only helicopter (any breeze would take it out completely) that is available online and from retailers like Radio Shack and Toys R Us if you are lucky enough to find one. Rockelle bought this one for me and for the first day or so I didn't think it was ever going to do more than go up and down in place, but after reading a little bit more about how to adjust it at the Micro Helis forum at RCGroups.com I got it balanced and now you can fly it around and have some real fun.
Like the micro RC cars from a couple of years ago, the remote control unit doubles as the charger for the helicopter. The Picoo Z can only run about 4-7 minutes on a charge which takes 20 minutes or so but you can still get in a lot of flying in a few days with that. This inexpensive, incredibly lightweight little heli costs under $40 (including controller). You supply the rechargeable batteries and you're set to have lots of fun. Everybody who sees this wants to grab the controls and have a shot at it. Many RC people have purchased several and one popular thing seems to be cutting the foam off of them and altering the appearance of the copter in some way. Lots of the mods appear over at the PicooZtoolbox (Note: If you can't reach it at first, wait a couple of hours and try again, it appears this site is running off someone's home machine).
Although these are very durable, I have to confess that I have gone through two of the three included tail rotors and there is at present no US supplier for replacement parts. If you live in Germany you're in luck, but here, not so much. So be reasonably careful with it and it'll last for a lot of flying.
Rockelle has wanted some way to play her music, all of which resides on her machine in iTunes, anywhere in the house and ideally out into the back yard when needed. In the past I had looked at solutions like the Squeezebox and Sonos. Sonos was very very expensive, and not really portable (which means we might have to deploy two or three across the house and moving outside would be impractical). Squeezebox was less expensive but like Sonos it seemed to be designed to be attached to an already existing sound system to piggyback on its amplifier and speakers. Again, that reduced portability and meant Rockelle couldn't just take it anywhere she happened to be.
Then she spotted the Saitek A250 in a catalog and had me look into it. The reviews seemed solid and it was just over $100, a fantastic price compared to the other things we had looked at.
We've had it for many months now and I can tell you that Rockelle still raves about it. It's trivially easy to connect to your PC because all it has on that end is a little USB dongle. No drivers have to be installed because it tells Windows that it is nothing more than some Bluetooth speakers and a remote Bluetooth keyboard. Windows already knows how to handle both of those so you don't install anything and it works with anything that outputs sound, including websites that play music like Pandora as well as programs like iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc.
It's small, light weight, and thus very portable. Since it includes its own wireless broadcast device you don't have to have setup a wireless network for it to work. It has it's own speakers and amplifier built in. It works off of wall current with the provided power cord and also for a lengthy period off of four AA batteries (we often use rechargables so it can go outside with us when we eat al fresco :)
Sound is excellent and with programs that understand commands to go to the next song or previous song via keyboard commands, you can control them remotely. For example, when iTunes is playing you can hit "next" on the Saitek and it sends the same keyboard command for "next" that you see on those multimedia keyboards back to the machine. iTunes happily moves to the next song in the playlist.
"Hi, my name is John, and I'm addicted to news." It's true, I used Netscape's old portal because they allowed you to pull RSS feeds and put them in boxes that were of the same status as blocks of information they supplied. After Netscape lost interest in that, I wrote my first RSS aggregator HotSheet because I wanted to pull a dozen or more feeds and get them in one "stream of news". Now it's about five years down the road from the earliest RSS stuff I can remember and RSS feeds are available for just about every website that updates regularly. Many people get them automatically with their weblogs simply because the tools they use (WordPress, Blogger, etc.) create them by default. So I monitor a large number of weblogs and other news sites via RSS and occassionally people ask me for a complete list of everything I subscribe to. So now you are going to see the depth of my addiction...
I roughly divide these up into the following categories: Comics, Java, Podcasting, Weblogs, and Misc. I'm using JetBrains Omea Reader 2.0 to read them right now but I'm not really enamoured with it. It's just better than several others I've tried. How's that for an endorsement :)
Here's the complete list of everything I'm subscribed to as well as an OPML file containing all the URLs to subscribe to the various RSS feeds:
Is it any wonder I want to create next generation applications that filter down this mess to something you can actually read? Some channels barely have any traffic at all, others have a dozen or more per day. As an aggregate I'd guess there is more than a hundred items per day from them at the moment and it's slow because of the holidays. If you add a feed like JavaBlogs to this mix you can figure on several hundred more just from it because it aggregates more than 1500 weblogs together itself.
I really love to take photos. I'm not terribly good at it, but I'm not terribly bad either. I do take a lot of photos when I get the opportunity though so that helps me get a good one every now and then. I try to share some of the best photos I take. If you look on the front page of JohnMunsch.com you'll see a link that says "My Pictures" and it will take you to stock.xchng where I give away as many as anybody wants to take.
My photos have literally been downloaded thousands of times at this point and I hope they will be downloaded many thousands more. I've gotten emails telling me that they went into web designs, t-shirts, the cover of a book of poetry and short stories, and even an advertising flyer. Those were only the ones people took the time to tell me about.
My friend Don Thorp takes photos too and he's a much better photographer than I am. Here's a really cool one of his photos:
He hasn't put his photos on stock.xchng or iStockPhoto or anyplace else, they just sit on his website and still people find them and ask to use them. So far I think this particular photo was used for an illustration in a childrens book and is in a Korean biology book.
Total amount of money I've made so far from putting some photos up for money on iStockPhoto: Less than $2 (US). Total amount of satisfaction I've gotten from handing out almost 3,000 photos on stock.xchng: Way way way more.
Look around and ask yourself if you don't have something that is worth sharing too.
| I will see my children's children and, if I'm very lucky, their children too. Cool! |  |
Ever since the announcement that Sony would have a cool new e-book reader that used e-paper to handle the screen (thus making it both more readble and giving it a long battery life at the same time) I was ready. Sign me up, I want one! The dottocomu: First look at the Sony EBR-1000 Librie eBook reader has temporarily changed my mind.
The fact that you can't easily dump material from Project Gutenberg, websites, programming documentation, etc. pretty much kills its usability for me today. But! There is a tomorrow for this device because it is running on Linux and Sony has made available their modified sources for the device. Assuming someone is sufficiently motivated, the inability to read much more readily available formats (i.e. TXT, PDF, HTML) may not be a problem for long.
About 16 months ago I resolved that I was going to start reading (and listening to audio books) in order to broaden what I'm exposed to beyond simply endless technical materials and news. The result is that I'm pretty much on target for my goal of one book per month ever since then. The first few months were actually a really slow start so if you had been able to see this list eight months ago you would have figured I wasn't going to make it. But I've caught up and I've discovered both some great and some not so great reading along the way.
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When I was a kid, magic was probably my favorite thing in the world. I used to do magic tricks all the time and any time I could go to a new or different library that was the section I headed straight for. My budget for buying tricks, books, and materials to make things was pretty much non-existent (after all, I had to buy comics somehow too) so I tended to focus on tricks which could be done with cards, string, paper, etc. That plus a few props I had purchased gave me enough to put on many many shows for friends and family. BTW, to all the friends and family who didn't want to watch a little kid give them a magic show, I apologize now :) |
| These days I have all the money I could have ever wanted as a kid to build up magic stuff but I'm not going to. I found a book that I've wanted for about 20+ years at a magic shop in New Orleans called Sideshow (it's owned by the magician and sitcom actor Harry Anderson). They included the first volume of Tarbell's eight volume encyclopedias on magic together with some simple stuff for tricks. Most of it is junk but I'm sure I'll use some of it. Mainly I just wanted to get my hands on the book. I've still got my two favorite books on magic that I wore to pieces when I was a kid. Maybe someday soon my wife will catch me in front of the mirror again practicing my tricks... | |
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I took a week long vacation with my sweetheart in New Orleans, LA last week. We've been back a few days but have mainly concentrated on resting up from the best vacation either of us have ever had.
I was pushing hard the last couple of days before I left to finish up FourColor so I could put the program and its source out there. It just didn't make sense to put out a new program just before I was going to be gone for a week and I wouldn't be able to help anybody interested in it. So, I've got a bug that absolutely must be fixed and two small features I'd like to add before the first release but if it looks like the features will hold it up at all I'll just release as soon as I fix the bug. |
Last night my machine died and would not boot back up. It performed its usual booting rituals and the part where it did the drive roll call was pretty scary.
"Hard Drive 1! <crickets chirp.....> CD RW Drive! <Present!> Hard Drive 2! <Present!>"
Given that the hard drive has almost everything on it and a goodly portion is not backed up, I'm very glad that I've been able to move it to another machine and get it to behave enough that I think I'll be able to get the data backed up.
So take a minute or two and go backup something important to you to a CD or another hard drive. You'll be glad you did if something happens.
I killed Jonathan Meyer (ed. note: the link won't work if you don't run Freenet) of #115 1142 Mesa Alta Ave, Dallas Texas. His driver's license says that he's 5'8", 164 lbs, brown hair, brown eyes with a restriction for corrective lenses. He has a AAA card, 3 credit cards, a Blockbuster membership, and I'd relay his SSN but I respect his privacy, even post mortum. The report in the Dallas Observer said that the victum was stabbed 15 times. He was actually stabbed 17 times: 4 times in the stomach, 2 times in the neck, 5 times in the back below the rib cage, 2 times in the back in the rib cage, 1 time in the left leg, and 3 times in the pelvic region.
So begins a brand new webpage just recently added to Freenet. Before you become too terribly alarmed, if you open up the HTML for the page and look at it you'll notice that the comments explain that it is not true but that it is there to make a point.
The point in this case is not that people will likely go absolutely nuts anytime something like this happens (esp. if it involves the murder of a child) but that the we really have no way of knowing whether or not any system in our lives is really anonymous anymore. Can I go somewhere and say things that are actually illegal in some places (speech in my country is generally free but there are definite limits even here) without feeling like I have to look over my shoulder. While this page, which is just there to make a point, won't find that out a page which threatens the president would. After all, the Secret Service is required to investigate any threats to the president and they have often done so even when the threats were clearly made in jest. Explicit threats of harm would have to be taken seriously and investigated. If no one was arrested I guess you'd know you finally had real anonymity somewhere and for some reason, the thought that I really could say anything I liked somewhere, even if I never intended to use the ability, is comforting.
So I guess the question is, does anybody feel brave enough to risk imprisonment to find out how much anonymity we can really have?
Click through to the extended entry to read the full text that was hidden in the HTML by the page's author.
I wish a lot more people would read this: A Soldier's Viewpoint on Surviving Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Attacks
It's a sane, sensible, short discussion of the attacks terrorists would likely use and why they aren't as threatening as you might think if you just keep your head (in the highly unlikely event you ever encountered any of them). Reading this would be far more helpful than buying a roll of duct tape.
At 8:03 this morning my wife and I were woken up by what we thought was the sound of a large explosion followed immediately afterward by another smaller explosion. Since it was right at 8am I thought that it was someone doing demolition and they had to wait until a certain time before they could do it (there are lots of largely ignored rules like that for construction in Fort Worth).
I was wrong. It was the sound of pieces so the space shuttle creating sonic booms as it entered low atmosphere. It has broken up and in all likelyhood all the crew is gone, hopefully there will still be enough that doesn't burn up in order to determine what caused the tragedy so it doesn't happen again.
Twenty years ago I was in my dorm room in college. I was sick and couldn't go to class. They interrupted what I was watching to break in and tell me about what had just happened to the Challenger. This time, it happened right over me.
P.S. Small correction, it was seventeen years ago, not twenty as I reported earlier. I thought we had just passed the 20th anniversary the other day but I was wrong and didn't bother to do the math in my head like I should have.
OSNews.com was kind enough to publish my really long musing on Desktop Linux for the Home: How and Why? - OSNews.com.
Since they seem to be well read by a lot of OS people I'm hoping that at least a few will notice it and maybe take a little bit of it to heart.
I'm usually very reluctant to link to things that it seems like everybody is linking to. It makes it seem (to me at least) like I'm one of those blogs that just repeats what is read from three other people's blogs. But in this case I don't care. Read this, even if you think you know everything there is to know about peer-to-peer, piracy, the RIAA, the MPAA, etc. I'll bet that there is still stuff you could learn from OpenP2P.com: Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution. It's an excellent article by Tim O'Reilly and it should be required reading for everybody, sadly though, some of the people who most need to read it will not, and even if they did would not really "get it".
I just picked up a RioVolt SP50 MP3/CD player for $39 (after a $20 mail-in rebate). That's tough to beat with a stick and it seems like a really nice, albeit barebones, player.
I really enjoy the Rio 600 player I have now but it is memory based and with only 32MB of memory it can't store but a very few songs at a time. By contrast I can store 100+ music files on a single CD and easily carry a dozen or so CDs with me to and from work. You can do the math and figure out that I can carry a goodly portion of all the music I might want to play with me all the time.
Well, in an unexpected event, I seem to have lost the directory containing all of my programming projects for the last few years. It included literally dozens of half-fininshed pieces of software including a recent one I wrote for my wife (I haven't told her yet that I've got to rewrite it).
Surprisingly, my feelings on this are mixed. I didn't lose much from the two projects most dear to me (UberCard and HotSheet) because HotSheet now uses CVS on SourceForge as its home and I had a copy of the UberCard documents on this server. Rockelle's software can probably be rewritten in about an evening or two and it had a problem I can address from the start this time. While I'm obviously upset that this happened, it has made me look at what I've really accomplished over the course of the last few years and it occurs to me that it's all about the open source stuff. The stuff that I never shared with anybody, even as an idea, I don't care about. The stuff that I have shared something about, I want to make sure stays around and gets improved. Now I just need to follow up on what that tells me...
Did you ever see the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still? It's an fifties sci-fi film in every sense of the word fifties and, at least in my opinion, is just so-so. Though the rating on the IMDB is actually quite high.
But when I was a kid I had seen the film and just by chance in a book I read a short story one time that I suddenly realized must be what they started from when making the movie. It had the same characters and some of the same opening but they had actually changed almost everything else and very much for the worse. So, if someday you would like to read a good science fiction short story and you've got a little time, take my recommendation and read this one and try to imagine that movie in your head instead.
I posted my part of the last Exquisite Corpse I worked on last week. The finished version of that corpse is now up. Rockelle didn't like this one as much as the last one I worked on but I actually liked it better. After I did the first one and waited forever for it to appear on the website I was kind of discouraged and thought I'd probably quit after I finished the second one, now I'm inclined to try to do another just to see if I can do better.
Also on the "art" front, I finished the wedding album for my step-daughter and her husband. The design was Rockelle's but I did most of the construction of the album itself. The cover features a thick purple textured paper that was crumpled heavily (which failed miserably until Rockelle suggested wetting the paper). It features five cutouts on the cover with embossed metal decorations in the corners and their name in the center. The metal is that extremely thick foil that you can buy at art supply stores these days (it comes in colors as well as different metal types like copper, brass, pewter, gold, etc.). Rockelle antiqued it using some black paint because she worried that the embossed design wouldn't stand out enough without it.
Thanks to the current obsession with scrapbooking we were able to find a wide variety of neat looking papers where the paper came in various sizes (like 12x12 for the endpapers of the book) and different colors. We used that so we could do a flyleaf of the book that had the same design as the endpapers but all the color was bled out. I was really pleased with how that worked out.
The album itself used the simple post design you see with most photo albums and we got those and a few other small supplies online. Overall it looked more like a finished professional book than my previous attempt and I'm really looking forward to using what I learned to do more projects.
One of those projects may be this one. They encourage you to do miniature books for trading with others. I think that's really cool.
Need 340MB of storage for that camera, mp3 player, or pda? Got $99? Then you can get an IBM Microdrive in a promotion that they swear is not an April Fools joke.
On my little 1 megapixel camera this would equate to over 1000 pictures, for an MP3 player you could fit something like five hours of music on it.
I haven't been updating the site as frequently lately as I was a while back so I'm trying to get back in the habit. It helps me and who knows, maybe eventually it will help somebody else too.
Here's my piece of the last Exquisite Corpse I worked on:
I led off so I didn't have a strip of image to match up against this time.
I intend to upgrade this site to use Movable Type 2.0 shortly, I'm working on HotSheet again (I'm trying to do the big push to get to the famous version 1.0), and I've installed Mandrake Linux 8.2 on my Linux partition at home and I'm trying to use it more. I must say that it was an easy installation and has so far proven to be easy to run.
There's a cool game controller out there at an even cooler price. Run, do not walk to you your nearest CompUSA and pick up a Microsoft Sidewinder Strategic Commander, they'll charge you $30 but there's a $30 rebate on this unit so all you'll end up paying is tax + the cost of a stamp to send in the rebate. I bought one Sunday and I like it a lot.
This is kind of what I mean when I talk about there being a set of puzzle pieces out there for software development. These days you see more and more things and it just boggles my mind at the ways you could connect them. For example, if you took:
Well, one thing you could quickly build is a digital orrery that showed the relationship of the planets to one another at any given time. Or you could use the map to build a world clock or automatically find place names in news items coming over the wire and color them on a map to see world hotspots where events are happening. I've got no idea what you might come up with but the toolbox only seems to grow.
Ugh, well the results are far from what I had hoped for and I have to take a significant portion of the blame. The first exquisite corpse that I worked on is up now, here is the result.
Hopefully the next one will be better. I certainly learned some things from this one.
I spent a goodly amount of time Sunday in Linux. This is actually an event for me as I usually only run Windows, and I'm thus a little behind on my shift off of Windows. But yesterday I made up for a lot of that. I spent quite a bit of time under Linux, installed Ximian Gnome, patched patched patched, and got that about 90% working the way I want it to.
Then I tackled Java, Java Web Start, and even NetBeans. That all went very very well except that HotSheet isn't running under 1.4.0 on Linux. It dies without any exceptions being thrown and in fact it looks like it may be throwing some kind of signal at the lowest level (i.e. Java itself is crapping out while running my app). When I installed 1.3.1 and ran HotSheet under that, there were no problems. Sigh...
I couldn't talk about it before Valentines Day because I wanted it to be a surprise for Rockelle but I built a model of cupid that flaps its wings that I downloaded from this website. You print it out on a heavyweight cardstock (regular office supply stores are carrying 110 lb. (!!) cardstock these days) and then cut it out and paste it together. I won't try and make it sound simple, it wasn't, I probably spent five hours working on it in total but I wasn't working like my life depended on it that whole time.
If you are interested in more material on card models I would direct you to the awesome Card FAQ. It collects tons of information about acquiring models to make and techniques for making them.
The other thing I worked on for Valentines Day was my first book. I've done a lot of paper projects and I've thought about doing a book before but this is my first attempt to actually do one. It has stitched signatures, paper covers, endpapers, the works. I'll scan and photograph it and the really cool Valentine that Rockelle gave me and put both up on EphemeraStudios.com sometime soon. That's the site that Rockelle and I intend to use for our various art projects.
I received at least one email about the Exquisite Corpse thing because it wasn't clear exactly what was going on there. So now that the first one that I worked on is finished (though not yet posted to the website), I thought I could go ahead and show some images to explain a little.
I was the third spot in an Exquisite Corpse with four pieces. Here is the small slice from the bottom of the second part that I received (keep in mind I could not know what any of the first piece looked like or any of the second except for this small slice):
From that I created this to go with it:
So I then sliced off the bottom 15 pixels of that image and that was sent on to the last person working on our Corpse. She received this:
We'll just have to see what it all looks like when it gets put together.
Well, I received my part of an Exquisite Corpse image the other day (Tuesday I think) and I finally managed to finish it off this morning. It's a great deal harder than it seems to take a strip that is 450 pixels wide but only 15 pixels tall and create something that connects to it and expresses something. Hopefully I succeeded.
I would show you my completed part but there's always a chance the next (and last) person working on this particular image might check out my site and I don't want to spoil whatever she might think of. After the finished corpse is posted I'll show you what I received and what I made to go with it. In the meantime, check out some of the really cool ones already out there.
I think idea-a-day varies between funny, cool, offensive, stupid, and utterly impractical on various days. In fact I'd like to see a spider chart rating each idea on exactly those criteria just to see what other people think of each idea. But this idea in particular grabbed me (as I think it would many of us with weblogs):
"Compile an historical account of any given period by printing consecutive daily entries from a wide selection of published or unpublished diaries. The 1940’s, for example, might be illustrated by an account of Churchill’s day, followed by entries from individuals as diverse as Noel Coward, Anne Frank and Fred Perry for example. There could also be an appeal for extracts for public accounts of the period in order to present a truly varied record of the times." -- by David Owen
Whoa! I had never thought of that. But I would truly love it. What were people's thoughts on this day 10, 20, 100 years ago. What was FDR doing this morning or any of a number of other famous people. You could highlight a particular entry and bring it to the top or allow people to pick favorite authors who they see every day. I love this idea and I'm going to start looking for diaries in electronic format. This would be a trivial site to code up, it is just going to need to be fed mounds and mounds of data.
Although the rest of this writeup of this years Loebner AI Challenge was pretty dry, the ending made me laugh. It's a short read.
True story related to the above article: Once upon a time, years and years ago, Marvin Minsky came down here to Fort Worth to our Science and History museum. I think we had a big computer history exhibit at the time and he delivered a talk about artificial intelligence and then answered questions from the audience. After his talk I had my question all ready, "Do you consider the Turing Test a valid test of AI in a machine and if not, is there something better?" However, I was just a kid and Minsky apparently decided he would rather pick total freakin' idiots from the audience than me. The best of the lot was something about "human engrams" (or something like that) being imprinted on machines to give them emotions, personality, etc. Minsky asked the guy where he got his question from and the fellow replied, "a Star Trek episode where they did that." Uh huh....
I guess the article itself finally answers part of my question because I now know that Minsky thinks the Turing Test is stupid but I still don't know if he thinks there is something better.
It's been a week since I last posted but HotSheet has been continuing in the interim. In fact, continuing isn't really the word because the project got its first two contributions from developers other than me and there are three more assigned to features right now!
Since HotSheet is moving along rapidly towards the end of the tunnel I find myself thinking forward to what my next project should be. Part of me wants to do something quick to get another tool that I could really use and part of me wants to work on a game. Just the other day I was telling this guy that I had lost a lot of my interest in game development websites because building one helps you learn how to build websites, it doesn't move you along to building actual games. It's been more than four years since I started on my first one and I don't feel like I'm any farther down the path of building games.
So, if you are reading this, tell me which of the following I should do next:
It may not look like I'm doing much but this evening I've upgraded to a new version of Cygwin (a necessity because I hope to start using CVS on SourceForge to handle all my version control), took screenshots of HotSheet on Linux and integrated them into the project page, I'm working on a new release of HotSheet (0.61 alpha) and I'm trying to steal a few moments to work on a project for Rockelle.
There are not enough hours in the day to do all that I want to do...
Here are those promised panoramas to show off the software I mentioned the other day. Keep in mind that these are basically the first two attempted panoramas I've ever shot with the camera, it was the first real outing for a brand new digital camera, and my first shot at using the software. Nevertheless the results aren't half bad. That tells you what somebody who really was serious at shooting a great panorama with a good camera could produce.
Here's the room we stayed in at a bed and breakfast in Granbury, TX (The Pomegranate House):
and here is one side of the Granbury town square. It has a heavy duty tilt to it because I was sitting on a bench perpendicular to the street when I took it and I took half the pictures basically in front of me and the other half tilted back and twisted over the bench:
Each panorama was originally four separate images and in each you can see some slight discontinuities in the final panorama (the sky on one and the ceiling on the other show some small problems). But a little cleanup work with a paint program would probably fix both images right up. I just wanted to show what could be done with without retouching. In each case all I had to do was mark about four points in the area where one image overlapped the one next to it. Those four points were identified in both images and then the software was told to generate the final results with just two menu commands. After that the results were cropped and that's it, no touch up was necessary to get to this result.
Geez, I need help. I have created a list of all the projects that I would like to do (or just reap the benefits of) and it's got more than 15 different things on it.
Here's just some of my wish list:
A killer form of Logo should be just like this:
GameDev.net has celebrated its two year anniversary on the web. Cheers all around that it is stronger than ever and is sporting a new look thanks primarily to Dave Astle. The thing that was brought home to me when I thought about GDN celebrating its two year anniversary is that we put the website up just after Rockelle arrived in May of that year. My time with her is what has made these last two years the best of my life and I'm afraid that thinking about that anniversary completely overshadows the success of any website. "kisses to my wonderful wife"
I've gotten back in touch with Brian Gilstrap, he's an old friend from when I attended Rice. Both of us were in the same residential college and both of us were Comp. Sci. majors. It's nice to hear from somebody you haven't heard from in more than a decade and it reminds me how important it is that I go back and get in contact with some of the other old friends I miss.
There's lots of HotSheet related stuff. The most important thing is that I contacted the lead on the Headlines project. It's another Java based news retriever and his project has managed to do what I haven't, recruit people who want to work on it. He indicated that he liked what he saw on HotSheet and that he would be interested in working together going forward. Let's hope that we can find ways to build some nifty stuff going forward from here.
I'm absolutely desparate to get HotSheet tested on Mac OS X. As far as I can tell Mac users don't seem to have Java Web Start support on OS X yet. So the only way to run any program like HotSheet would be to install OpenJNLP. The JNLP file is what specifies how to download, install, run, and update Java software off the web and Java Web Start is actually Sun's reference implementation of software to use it. OpenJNLP is an open source version of the same thing which claims to support OS X. I'm looking for a volunteer to get OpenJNLP installed and working and then get that same individual to try out HotSheet. It is very important to me that the software I write under Java be cross-platform and the three biggest platforms out there for end users are going to be Windows, Mac, and Linux for the forseeable future. I've been fighting with a Linux installation on a home machine for two days now just so I'll have a test machine for my software on that platform.
There's a new version of the BrowserLauncher class that Eric Albert wrote. I currently use it in HotSheet and I actually like it more than the browser launching capabilities that Java Web Start offers because JWS always launches a new browser for every link you give it and Eric's class doesn't. In the short term I'm just going to incorporate the new version. In the long term I'm going to set it up so that HotSheet users can select which implementation they use to launch a browser and make Eric's the default.
Whoops, a few days ago I incorrectly stated that Gameboy Advance would be released July 13th when the correct date was of course June 13th. The premiere of the new Dr. Who audio episode will be on July 13th as stated.
Today was an odd "finding" day for me. First I found an old friend on the net. I spotted an article over on Java World which had a familiar name and when I pursued it I verified that it was a friend I had attended Rice with from '83-'87.
Then a little later I found another Java project on SourceForge which is designed to download news off of sites around the web. Sound familiar? :) It sure does, so I emailed one of the principals to see if there is any chance we can work together on one tool or at least find ways to share some of our work so we both end up with better software.
My big achievements of the last couple of days are: getting news up on JM.com and writing an FAQ for GameDev.net. It's hard to believe but GameDev.net is about to turn two years old and we have never put together an FAQ. But on the plus side all the mail that we've received over the last couple of years has burned into our brains what the frequently asked questions really are so we can put them into the new document. Don't bother looking for it now, the website is undergoing a big makeover that is currently about halfway done. You'll see the FAQ when the new site debuts.
Didn't accomplish a lot this weekend. Kind of took it easy and did a few things that needed doing and got a little entertainment. My wife and I saw Moulin Rouge on Saturday and rented Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Sunday. To tell the truth, I really enjoyed Moulin Rouge a great deal more.
I did manage to add the twenty or so additional items to my resources page I've been saying I was going to add. Now I need to get regular newsfeeds on here and it will have most of the features I've been saying it would have. I'm going to start off by using the Meerkat feeds provided by O'Reilly and then segue to feeds generated using a tool of my own (the tool will be a slightly modified version of one of the examples provided with the source code for HotSheet).
It's been a few days without an update. That's largely because I've been starting at my new job. Things are going well so far and I'm hoping to increase the frequency of updates back to normal level on Monday.
In sad news, Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame has died. I actually got to see Mr. Adams in person about 15 years ago when he did a book signing for So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish at a bookstore near Rice. People lined up wearing their bathrobes (how original :) and hundreds must have come for the signing. Mr. Adams was wearing a sweater that had the cover of So Long... knitted into it. He said a lady fan had made it for him and given it to him at another signing.
Oh, I forgot to mention this. I'm also trying to learn more about visual programming and visual languages. I already had some ideas for doing something with a visual system for laying out a process but a friend of mine is also pushing me along that track because it is relevant to something he wants for some software of his own.
Anyway, the incredibly frustrating thing about this is actually trying to find out anything about it. Every time you go to a web page of somebody who researches this area you can get a laundry list of interesting papers that have been written on the topic but no links to those papers. Everything is just a citation to where it appeared in some IEEE journal or something that I might have access to if I was a professor at a well stocked university. As it stands today though, once you are out of school, getting access to the various research papers in a field is a real hassle. I was really pleased to see that a lot of researchers recently began signing a petition that said that they would only publish their papers in the various journals if the copyright fell back to them after a period so they could make their papers readily available via some form of online publishing. Hopefully the mess that exists today won't persist into the future.
I accepted a position at PDX today (exactly one month after being laid off in the Vast Solutions closure). Not only am I once again gainfully employed, the new job is located in Fort Worth rather than Dallas (as V.Cities and Vast both were) so I'm cutting an hour and a half to two hours off of my daily drive!!! I figure I'll get back at least eight hours a week of time I spent in the car before.
No new entries here since Monday because I've been concentrating on job finding. I did find time today to fix a few bugs in HotSheet so it will continue marching toward a state where I can be really proud of it and where it serves my daily news gathering needs. If you've already installed it, then you'll get a notice telling you there is a new version when you run it and you will be automatically updated the next time you run. Java WebStart is a wonderful thing :)
Job hunt continues. Had to take C++ and Java tests to prove that I really do know something about the languages. Apparently more than ten years of having people pay you to do something is no longer credible evidence. Sigh... I got a 92 on the Java test that TeckChek gives but I only took their C++ test yesterday so I don't have scores yet on it. I'm expecting that they will be good.
On the plus side, I've learned that I'm much closer to Java certification than I realized. I was able to go through a certification book and get 80-90% on the self-test questions at the end of the chapters. Also, I can go over to the online tests at JavaRanch and do the same so I guess I'll be looking into that sometime soon. Neither Don nor I think it makes sense to rush out and take the test this minute just to say we are certified though.
Moving on...
After about a week long hiatus, I'm back working on HotSheet. It now draws and doesn't look so darn strange. Why? Because if you want a Java program to look like it really is all normal Swing then you want to make sure that you use Swing colors, borders, etc. wherever you have to do your own drawing (e.g. HotSheet has to use a custom ListCellRenderer for the list of items found). You use the Swing UIManager class to retrieve these borders, colors, etc. but you have to know what the names are for the items so you can retrieve them. I've never seen any list at all from Sun but I found a list on the web that gives them all and proved to be very useful.
Mark your calendars for the 25th. That's when Sun will be having a webcast about JXTA, their peer-to-peer infrastructure that they are pushing for Java. Will it be cool? I have no idea. But Sun has given me enough cool stuff that I'm willing to at least listen to what they are planning to see if I could use it to build something individuals or businesses need.
Looking for a job has got to be one of the least fun things on Earth.
P.S. Updated my resume based on numerous comments that said I didn't highlight my many years of C++ experience enough in the old version. The new version says more about which tools were used to build different projects that I've worked on.
For the second time in less than nine months the "dot-com" I've been working for has run out of money and closed...
I know what you are saying, "How could you let that happen John? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Right?" Yup, that's what I thought when I took the job at Vast Solutions.
Then, in the end, when a planned merger failed to go through the board had the place shutdown faster than you could say startup/shutdown.
I worked on the weblog tool some Wed. night and hopefully I'll get more done this weekend.
I installed Java on Linux for the first time today and I had a little trouble but got it working successfully with both the Java Plug-in for Netscape and Java WebStart. At least in my mind, Java is clearly the way to develop and distribute code. When somebody can click once on your webpage and they get a complete application downloaded, installed, and running; that kicks ass! If you should ever update the program, the update will also be automatically downloaded and installed to update the user. Oh, and your code will run without changes on Windows (all modern flavors), Linux, Solaris, and OS X when it ships. Java is a godsend.
Since I did an example program using Java WebStart once before I'll try to package it up and put up an example program with a link here just to show it in action with something that I actually wrote myself.
P.S. I forgot to add Netscape Sidebars as a potential publishing format for the weblog output when I was making the lists below.
Creating for the web can be boiled down to three elements coming together for any given web page.
These come together in a staggering array of combinations and different forms but most of them boil down to just these three things. Sometimes the content is combined directly with its format, for example most people type text for pages and mingle HTML formatting tags directly into that text. Then they publish the result by copying the resulting files or FTP them to an HTTP server that is the final destination people connect to.
In other cases people start with XML or databases or who knows what else, combine it with XSL or JSP or ASP or some other formatting technology, and then they send the end result directly to the end user from the web server. In those cases the pages are built on the fly and every user who visits may see a different page than the last one to visit.
What I want now is a web logging tool that lets you edit data of a variety of different types. The initial type would be a simple one that I'm already quite familiar with (i.e. news/logs). The data would be stored for the user, combined with one or more format templates, and then published using one or more different publishing mechanisms.
So after thinking about the different parts and how they combine I've arrived at the following mix of parts that I think make up a good minimal system.
Content
Format(s)
Publishing Method(s)
And some ideas for a more fully fleshed out system.
Content
Format(s)
Publishing Method(s)
Down and out for two straight days sick. I'm still feeling terrible but at least I can get in front of a computer to do some much needed work.
Although I didn't get the two things done over the weekend that I had hoped to (i.e. combine an XML and XSL file and FTP the result via Java) I did get several things accomplished. I learned a great deal more about Blogger and got my own weblog moved into its permanent home at JohnMunsch.com. I also started moving my wife's site on paper ephemera into its home at EphemeraStudios.com. It's beyond rough at the moment but eventually it should turn into a cool site where you can download digital versions (at printable resolutions) of paper ephemera.
Lastly, I realized that an old project of mine to build a multiplayer card table where people could play various collectable card games (CCGs) is actually quite a bit easier now with RMI and all the things I've learned about Java than it ever would have been with C++ or Visual Basic and DirectX on Windows. Plus the final result will actually run on a variety of platforms. While it's neat to realize that some of the old stumbling blocks are actually reduced using Java I can't allow myself to get distracted. I need to stick with the weblog project until I get at least some results out.
Still working on the weblogging idea and I think the best way to tackle it is as follows. Write some code that takes an XML representation of the news data that ZWNews uses now and combine it with an XSLT stylesheet to format the news items into HTML. After that is working then I need to be able to FTP the resulting file to a specific filename on a specified server. Once I'm at that point I'll have the basics working for the back half of a weblogging tool and it will be time to start building the classes to manage the news items and the supporting methods for a user interface.
For the XSL part of the code I just recently finished an article I throught was really good (Rescuing XSLT from Niche Status) and I purchased a book on XSLT that looks quite good (XSLT: Working with XML and HTML).
Ultimately anybody who wants to succeed is going to have to offer features unavailable with the existing services (especially the most popular one, Blogger) and an easy method to convert their existing weblogs and templates so they can migrate to your tool without a lot of pain. In order to do that I'm going to use myself as a guinea pig and test out using an XML based template for Blogger so all of my log entries end up exported not as HTML but instead as XML. Then the generate page could be pulled as a URL from our weblog tool and all the news entries automatically imported. So basically the first two steps up above (XML + XSL and copying the result via FTP) is my goal for this weekend. We'll see how far I get.
Competitor for ZWNews. Not crazy about the Perl technology but I'm going to glean what I can from looking it over.
Web logging is currently fascinating me. You see, I believe that there is a hidden connection between all of the following things and I need to figure out what it is:
RSS, AvantGo, ZWNews, OPML, weblogs, Java, XML-RPC
How can I connect some of these fun pieces to generate somthing useful to me and to others? My initial take of the pieces I've found is something like this.
Blogger is both neat and popular. However, the company that put it together is, for all intents and purposes, out of business. The servers will keep working for the forseeable future but there won't be any significant improvements to the software because there are no engineers to work on it.
Radio Userland offers a downloadable software interface to do some similar things and many things that are more powerful than what Blogger can do, but it is far too complicated and user unfriendly.
ZWNews 5 is the software that I wrote over the course of a couple of years to create a weblog system that was web based and could be used by a collection of administrators at a particular website. It works well, it's popular with those who have it installed but we've not managed to sell nearly as many licenses for it as I would like. However, developing it taught me a lot about building weblogging software and I think it's about time to develop a new generation of it.
I'm currently playing with Blogger because of two things:
I'm also playing with Radio Userland because I want to see what their version of end-user publishing looks like. My initial take is that it looks damn confusing. I've played with it a while and it has some nifty features but unless it is made 100% simpler most users would stay far far away from it.
