24 October 06 - 09:03Sorry, Sony.

Not buying a PS3 now. I had thought about it, but that was before you ruined my favourite importer with your bullshit legal attacks.

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20 October 06 - 11:26How much does Iraq cost?

Check out how much Iraq costs.

Right now, almost $336bn. This could buy several space shuttles, billions upon billions of kilograms of food, or a functioning American educational and healthcare system.

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10 October 06 - 08:52Why Software Sucks Vol. 1: Contracting

I figured it'd be about time to talk about this.

My school has recently rolled out a brand new accounting/registration system developed by PeopleSoft. The only problem is: it cost a couple dozen million dollars more than was expected. I attended an Agile roundtable during the summer, wherein one of the project managers dispensed her complaints over the entire ordeal. It seems it was her first time contracting software, and that everyone was very happy with the software, but the scope creep cost her a lot of damn money. She wanted to know if Agile or outsourcing was the solution.

Ignoring the fact that the university in question has one of the finest software engineering departments in all of Canada, let's go over the mistakes she enumerated during the course of the project. (more)

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05 October 06 - 20:13ArgoUML

If some of you are doing some hardkore software engineering and you don't want to put aside your Mac and money for expensive tools that are junk (like QuickUML) you'll want to look into ArgoUML -- it's small, free, portable and seems to do everything anyone ever needed.

It's also really snappy for a Java app, though that might just be because of the Intel OS X implementation of the JVM.

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05 October 06 - 09:02Bush countdown clock

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04 October 06 - 15:36Congratulations to Dillon...

...for winning the Experimental Gameplay contest with his brilliant piece of microcode, String Theory. It's a classic, and no doubt not to be diluted by the inevitable clones the Japanese game industry is racing to create at this very moment.

It's "nearly flawless" and "kickass," say Red Octane -- and you really shouldn't debate with those sons of bitches.

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03 October 06 - 20:17Do you realize we're floating in http?

One of the things I've been meaning to get into with my games is HTTP transport.

Why? I have a whole suite of Xbox Live-y action to get up to once I have http transport -- friends lists, the ability for me to see what people have been playing and how much, global highscore lists. (more)

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03 October 06 - 20:12Ruminations on a Patch service

So my newest game, Glow, has been doing gangbusters lately, but I've had to release two patches to the game. My usual method is just to release a new installer and then trust people to "live with it". Unfortunately, this is bad for Mac users (17MB download every few weeks to fix minor content bugs, usually not even involving OS X?) so I've been looking into updated package management and patch systems.

Those of you who know me well can be assured that this won't end very nicely. (more)

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03 October 06 - 20:01Welcome to the blog.

So I've started this new blog to try and see if people would be interested in a more human perspective as opposed to my more clinical GDNet Journal. (more)

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