September 2006 Archives

My stack of reading books is so out of control it is overwhelming. On the stack, or in progress:

• The Pragmatic Programmer
• Rules of Play
• Design Patterns
• Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming

These are just the non-fiction, programming books on the stack. I’m not sure when i’ll get to the last one, its pretty heavy (figuratively and literally). The Pragmatic Programmer is excellent, and i’d recommend it to anyone that programs.

With the change of the seasons comes a new wave of TV shows. Unfortunately, it seems that there are quite a few that are worth watching. Right now we are trying to keep up with:

• New this season
  • Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip - what can i say, i really like Arron Sorkin.
  • Smith - Go Ray go!
  • Jerico - this is likely the first on the chopping block, i just wanted to watch it because of the nuclear holocaust angle.
• Returning Series
  • CSI - starting watching last season and got kind of hooked. Once you can except that in the world of this show, the CSI guys are the ones that actually do all of the work, the show is quite fun.
  • Stargate:Atlantis
  • Battlestar Galactica

That’s just way too much TV for me.

While i’ve been busy with real work, i’ve managend to work on the multi-player server and client libraries for ThirdPlaceGames. Its really the flash/client side that i’ve been working the most on lately, trying to come up with an extensible class systems that will allow me to add new games easily. This is always much harder then you’d think. However, and i realize that i’ve said this many times before, i feel like i finally have something i can build on. Having already done a couple of prototypes (a multi-player asteroids - multi-player twitch games are just not a great fit for Flash, although this might change with flash 9/AS3 (improved VM speed, binary sockets, …), i’ve got a feel for the kind of things i need the client side to be able to handle. Once i’ve got one more prototype done (a tic-tac-toe game), i’ll move back to working on the server. I’ve rebuilt the server quite a few times now, but each time it slowly gets closer to a place that i can stop working on the framework, and just work on the game code. I should probably also put up a site for TPG, so i have a place to show off all my hard work!

I’ve finally started down the path of getting up-to-speed with the newest version of Flash’s actionscript - 3.0. You can get the beta version of the AS3 compiler/Flash 9 IDE from the Adobe Labs site.

Reading through the Programming ActionScript 3.0 Live docs tonight. A lot to absorb! I’m sure it won’t stick till i get a chance to use it to actually build something. Not sure what that something might be yet… Anyway, its quite interesting the changes they have made to the language and the player. I’m pretty excited about how the new programming model will work! The work i’ve been doing recently has been illuminating for me, really allowing me the chance to get some experience building larger, more complex apps. This has been accomplished using an approach similar to that of Arp, but with differences. These mostly have to do with the fact that the app isn’t a client/server Rich Internet Application, but more of a typical flash media site. Still, using a very structured approach has paid off! Ease of handling changes, some quite radical, has been the biggest boon, but also in debugging and general understanding of the project as a whole.

I love that feeling, when you have the ah ha moment, and things become clearer.

Things are still well in the Quigley Yule household. Ciara and i are still exercising, although Ciara has been doing better then i lately. Work is a bit crazy now, with a release date coming up soon. I didn’t have any work for after this gig, but there are a couple of things floating around which would see me though the winter.

I’ve managed to produce a working client and server for a multiplayer asteroids shootemup, without the asteroids. It is a prototype, and it makes clear the isses involved when doing real-time twitch games in flash (TCP/IP and Strings as the protocol make communication slow). I’m now working on a turn-based game prototype, loosely in the rogue-like category.

Also have been, once again, searching for solutions to my photo management needs. Two interesting tools i’ve found are PixVue, which is an explorer extension, and PhotoMesa which implements a zooming interface. Both are free, and have the agreeable property that all (most) meta-data is stored in the photo itself. The more time i spend thinking about photo-metadata, the more i become convinced that having the data in the photo, rather then in a 3rd party DB, is the way to go. Unfortunately there are no libraries in python which make writing exif, iptc and xmp data easy, if at all.

Oh, and i’m one step closer to writing my own photo management tool, as i’ve finally gotten tasty installed and running!

Lastly, once again, i promise that i’ll think about getting some photos up soon. Really.