Games Without Frontiers

Real Life Minecraft for Halloween

2011-11-02T11:32:00.002-04:00

When I asked my son what he wanted to be for Halloween this year he told me he wanted to that guy, Steve, who is the main character in the game MineCraft (http://www.minecraft.net) . He said this would be no problem as all we would have to do is cover him in boxes. We found out soon enough that this was a little harder than we thought but the result was pretty cool.

Once we got him sealed into the costume I could see walking would be a problem. This was solved by cutting joints into the boxes allowing his elbows and knees to bend. Next, the reality of dragging all these boxes along started to set in. I think we covered about 30 houses in our development but he had to stop for rest after every two or three. Resting involved slumping since the costume itself could support its own weight when he did this.

As we moved from house to house all the neighborhood kids marveled at the "cool robot costume!" Its easy to see how kids could mistake all his work for a robot instead of a cool cubic video game character. My son would keep yelling, "I am not a robot" but it was not working. I think a lot of this had to do with the way he moved in costume which you can see in the video.

Everywhere we went the parents handing out candy were just impressed that he made his own costume as there is not enough of this kind of home made effort going on anymore. Robot or not he loved being Steve the Mindcraft guy and now we have to store his creation because he is not quite ready to give it up yet.

TheSixtyOne and ITunes

2011-01-16T11:59:00.001-05:00

I like finding new music but I don't really seem to be able to use ITunes to do this. Why? Because I find the best way for me to find the things that I like is to listen to a stream of new music while I work and pick out what I like by listening to the whole song. ITunes does not create this radio station like experience since they limit you to 30-90 second clips that you have to find yourself.

Everyone talks about Pandora as the best way to find new music but I find that what is plays for me is usually something I have heard before and almost never any indy music or anything really cutting edge. This may be my fault as I am picking the starting song for my station.

What I have found is a free service called The Sixty One. The TheSixtyOne does not look like any traditional website I have come across and this may be off-putting to the new visitor. The site is actually a HTML5 music player which requires flash. It uses a unique quest based system to encourage you to learn it's features and to interact socially with artists and other users.

When you first open it, it will immediately begin exposing you to new music and artists. As you begin to experiment with the controls you can make the player produce new artists based on your mood or how adventurous you are feeling at the moment. If you like a particular artist you can get the player to dwell on that artists songs for a while before moving on.

The best part is, these are not artists who are getting much in the way of exposure on radio or ITunes. I don't know how these artists are brought to this service but they do a great job finding them. The player will try to hook you up with links to purchase what you have just heard but it often fails to do this last essential part very well. I often have to go to ITunes or Amazon myself to purchase songs but that is a small price to pay for finding new music. I wonder why Apple does not look to have better integration with this service simply to move more new music. For that matter, why don't they start streaming some of their own content in a similar manner. Radio stations were always the best way to move music in the past and ITunes does not really seem to offer us any alternative to the 30 second snippet. These two services go great together.

It is a pity that there is no SixtyOne service for the iPod itself. I would love to listen in my car. There is an IPad application with a different user interface but drawing on the same idea of discovery and streaming that the flash based website provides. It is called AWEditorium and it serves up TheSixtyOne's content on an IPad.

Apple should forget or modify their Ping service and look into bringing this type of social streaming service directly to ITunes. I would sell a lot of music but If they do they should not loose the Indy feel that the service offers now.

Could Apprenticeship Become the New Career Path into Software Engineering??

2011-01-13T13:11:00.002-05:00

Recently, my oldest son embarked on the path to become a software engineer just like dear old dad. Mind you, he has his goals set for the Game Design industry but which of my peers has not dreamed that dream at some point in their college career? I wish him luck in that very competitive industry.

What really struck me, however, was just how much more expensive it is to get a degree now a days in engineering and computer science. I think I payed about $60,000 dollars for my degree in the 80's but my son is going to end up paying something like $175,000 to $200,000 by the time he graduates. That is more than three times as much as I paid. Is he getting three times the education and just how long will it take for him to pay off his student loans? Will he still be paying off the equivalent of a house when he goes to buy his first house?

What of those kids who have the talent for computer science but can't raise the money or don't want to go into a single family home's worth of debt to get a degree just realize their dreams of being a career coder?

What about apprenticeship? I have worked with many undergraduates over the years as interns and many of them are extremely talented. Often times they pick up more career focused skills working in industry than they ever do in college. Some even stayed with the company well past their internships and had successful careers within software engineering without degrees. Could this talent be harnessed into a successful business model and provide a successful career path for these students?

Imagine if there was a startup company based on a core of experienced engineers that took on consulting work but staffed their teams with willing but inexperienced high school graduates? Built into this program was dedicated daily training for the staff as well as engagement in an active software development projects. It might even be possible to engage a local community collage for some of the training required. If a rigorous selection process were used to choose candidates you would get the energy, ideas and motivation of youth and the cost of their salary and training could be integrated into your consulting contract's cost for less than the cost of an experienced professional. Your business partner would get the assurance of the experienced staff member on the team and also the knowledge that choosing your company was almost the equivalent of providing a scholarship at the same time as meeting his or her business needs.

This approach would be both beneficial to the company and incredibly useful to jumpstart the apprentice's career. With about two years this person could use their education to enter the workspace with a resume significant enough to work in the field or use the credits the program gave them to pursue a degree if they felt that was their next step.

Admittedly, this is almost the mirror image of modern COOPerative education but if the education has been priced well beyond it's career building market value, perhaps this could be the future or even a winning business model able to educate young people and let them earn money and learn as they go while also being a profitable business.

Cell Phones, Door Locks, Near Field Communication and Space 1999 - The ComLock

2011-01-06T09:49:00.001-05:00

Star Trek may have popularized the cell phone concept but Space 1999 had most of the feature set of the IPhone figured out in 1975 with a device called the ComLock. It was amazingly prescient of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and their production team to think through what kind of mobile device would be in common use in 1999. Little did they know that the actual smart phone device they were envisioning would not come to pass until 2007 in the form of the IPhone, Android and other smart phones.

If you take a look at technical drawings of the ComLock you can see this device had it all. A two mile range capable of being boosted by using near by landing craft like a cell tower, a telephone keypad and a small black and white (CRT) display. It could connect to the Moonbase Alpha computer, accept voice commands and it even had a docking station to recharge. In the show’s continuity guide you can see the device in its cradle (I wonder what the battery life was on it with that CRT). Add to this, features like an infra-red capable camera, air pressure gaugue, geiger counter and thermometer and I would like to know where I could line up to buy one.

With all of these features that are so similar to today’s smart phones, why don’t we see the most basic feature of a ComLock on our cellphones - The ability to unlock physical doors? The ComLock device was required to get any door on Moonbase to open. You could not move freely anywhere without one.
Now imagine that you could have a house or work key that you would always have on you, if lost could be located using GPS and could be remotely deleted if stolen. Sounds pretty good, huh, yet this particular aspect of smart phone usage has not really been tapped yet.

There are some products that will let you do this now with an IPhone but they can be pretty expensive. Schlage offers their Link system which allows you to open their keypad locks via a web browser or a cell phone but they are charging $8.99 a month for this privilege but it will work with the current generation of cell phones. Another company is offering a simpler approach. Primary systems actually will put your door directly on your wireless network but they are targeting large facilities. What is so hard about producing a simple lock that can be accessed over WIFI that I can buy now at Home Depot?

Perhaps the industry is waiting for Near Field Communication, a technology that lets your phone communicate with very nearby devices simply for such things as credit card transactions. This is rumored to be the next big thing in cell phones allowing us to buy things just by waving our phone in front of a merchant’s sensor. This would at least insure that the person trying to open your home’s front door was actually in front of the door at the time.

In summary, I wonder if Steve Jobs was a space 1999 fan? For that matter, was Gerry Anderson a Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle fan since they were talking about similar hand held systems even earlier (1974) in their book, Mote in God’s Eye. If you want to get your hands on one, why not build your own? You can download a Paper Craft model of a ComLock. Either way, I think the Cell Phone will replace your keychain in the near future.

I Watched TV...

2009-09-22T21:05:00.005-04:00

I don't think I really watched TV this summer. By that I mean
I did not use a TV set. What I did do was watch re-runs on
Hulu.

The interesting thing is that I watched my first network TV show
(It was Heroes) of the fall and I was painfully re-acclimated with
commercials. I had gotten very used to Hulu's 15-60 second commercial
blocks and I found myself painfully re-sensitized to just how long
network television's commercials are.

Is this the future? I know that I am giving serious consideration
to just letting my favorite shows pass by on TV and just waiting
for them to show up on Hulu. When I talk to others they say something
similar. Such responses as, "Oh, yes. I stopped watching live tv a while
back. I just DVR everything now."

What is going to happen to Ad revenue when sponsors realize
that no one is watching TV commercials anymore? Hopefully they will
move more seriously to Hulu. When they do, will Hulu increase commercial
length? Hopefully they will see that 15-60 seconds is the magic number
that keeps my attention because I don't think I can go back to the
way things were before this summer.

Time Enough for Love

2009-05-05T22:05:00.003-04:00

I am slowly re-reading one of my favorite books, Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein. I revisit it maybe once every ten years or so it seems. It is a very quotable book and I often resist the urge to quote it but I will give into it tonight.

Being flexible was always served me well in my career so far and I expect it will serve me well in the future. Not specializing to much in one area has always let me take on new opportunities when they present themselves. To quote Lazarus Long, the main character of this novel,

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

If you never become to specialized, you won't ever get to board with what you do either.

A Distinguished Author...

2009-01-12T01:07:00.003-05:00

I was just digging through some of my old drawings and I found this one I did years ago. I was sitting in Barnes & Nobel looking at the murals on the wall of famous authors and wondered what it would be like if Homer Simpson were up there.

Well, wonder no longer as here he is.

Getting your cable TV Syndicted to You IPod (Legally!)

2008-12-14T01:13:00.002-05:00

I use a Comcast DVR to record the TV shows I watch. What
I have always wanted to be able to do is have my DVR
record what I want to watch in h.264 format and then
syndicate it as a podcast to my IPod and Apple TV. Well I
just got my wish. A product called Snapstream (http://www.snapstream.com/)
let me take an old PC I was no longer using with an ATI
video capture card in it and convert it into a DVR.

Open source solutions like this that I have looked into in the past
that allow you to turn a PC into a DVR have been rather complex
to setup and maintain but SnapStream, a .NET based product,
has a drop dead simple setup and install and a 21 day free
eval to try out (Its is not very expensive to purchase either
at around $60). Anyway, the product exposes an very nice,
web based, TV guide that allows you to pick shows to record.
If the ITunes compatibility feature is turned on, any recordings
made will be converted to h.264/mp4 as soon as the recording is
complete. They are then automatically added to a podcast
named after the series they are part of. Any metadata the
program can get from its TVGuide is also integrated into the
podcast as well. You can then use the product's web based interface
to subscribe to either the "All shows podcast" or just the one named
after the series you are recording. I may now be able to get rid of
my rented DVR!

All Good Things...

2008-09-30T10:53:00.005-04:00

As many of you may have already heard, My current employer, Ringside Networks is closing its doors on September 25th. On thinking back on the last eight months I find I can relate my experiences to a Star Trek Episode. As disturbing as this might sound, the episode in question was from Star Trek the Next Generation, the series finale episode called "All Good Things". In this episode you know that this is the cast's last performance, that a great team is saying goodbye. They might work together again in the future (because lord knows, there were sequels) but at this point, from their point of view, it was the end.

Ringside had an epic team of developers and a great mission: The creation of a social networking platform that could interconnect communities across the internet. In the short time we were around we fought great battles to gain the attention of the social networking community. We produced a product in just a few months capable of integrating private social communities with giants like Facebook and Myspace but in the end, the people we thought were our greatest allies walked away from the deal. All the stuff of any classic episode.

In the last days the team produced a final, innovative product which would allow any web page to become a social experience. SocialPass was a product that would enable any website owner to allow their users to "Ask their Friends" what they though about a product or service, driving new traffic to the website. Watch the video demo on SocialPass and see for yourself. What a great user experience this could have been.

If I had the chance to go back in time and do things differently as they did in the Star Trek episode this entry is named after, I don't think I would. This was a magical experience, as small start-up companies always are, and I look forward to seeing all the cast members again in the sequel.

Yammer Me This

2008-09-30T10:03:00.005-04:00

It is not often that a web service or a piece of software makes my work life better but I felt compelled to speak out about Yammer. My team at Ringside Networks would always hang in an IRC channel because we were spread out across the US. This worked great and made us feel like a co-located team but it had its drawbacks. You had to be logged in all the time or have a bot collect what was being said when you were not around.

Then came Yammer. I was already a Twitter micro blogging fan. I already use Twitter to stay involved in my friends lives and share mine with them but Yammer allowed my software development team to coordinate like never before. While Twitter asks you to answer the questions, "What are you doing?", Yammer wants you to ask the question, "What are you working on?". As my work day progresses, I would just Yammer on what I was working on and read what the rest of the team was up to. You would get more frequent, meaningful updates than I would ever see on IRC.

The big difference was, there was no pressure to respond right way or even be online all the time to do it. It just feels less stressful. Yammer also does not limit you to 140 characters or less which is handy when describing the details of what you are doing.

Another useful difference between Yammer and Twitter is that Yammer has an implicit group of people in its community. You must have a email address at a mail domain like ringsidenetworks.com to join Yammer. Joining and using the service is free and anyone from your company who has an email address can join. Yammer provides cross platform clients and clients for mobile devices as well so you can stay in touch with your team wherever you go.

You might wonder how they plan to make money. They charge for the ability to administrate your domain. If you want to administrate the community then a company representative must pay Yammer for this feature.

If you are looking for a team building tool for your remote development team you should give this a try. Follow this link to see the TechCrunch50 Video from the yammer team.

Don't Open That Box!

2008-07-05T02:45:00.002-04:00

Sometimes you get lucky and capture interesting things while playing WOW . I was playing with my wife in the Terokkar Forrest the other night and she opened a box (which is something she loves to do) and we suddenly became surrounded by a ring of zombies which started closing in on us. We got lucky because they were not that hard to kill, there were just a lot off them.

Time Machine Saves Another Mac... Thanks to WOW

2008-06-17T16:26:00.004-04:00

Well, a member of my family has had their MacBook die again (twice this month) but I am not complaining. It had a hard life and it was covered under AppleCare. This time it's the hard disk but we were very lucky because I have a complete backup (for once). The family member in question was not really a fan of hooking the external drive up often... until ... I moved World of Warcraft onto the external drive to make room.

What a co-incidence this was because now, every time they played WOW, Time Machine would silently do a update of the backup image of the Macbook. When Apple replaces the hard disk I will be able to restore it 100% thanks to Time Machine and the best Time Machine enabling software on the market, World of Warcraft.

How Easy is it to Run an OpenSocial App on Ringside?

2008-06-11T11:45:00.002-04:00

Well now I have gone and made a video and its on OpenSocial Application Deployment. This is actually my first screen capture video made with Screenflow and there will be more to come. The process is relatively easy as long as you can handle looking at yourself on camera.

People around here felt I should get the word out about just how easy it is to develop OpenSocial applications using the Ringside Social App Server. In this first video you can watch me deploy the LastFM gadget inside the local Ringside server on my Macbook. Its as simple as creating a new app using the developer tool and then specifying the Gadget Specification XML as your callback URL.

This is by no means a guarantee that all your off the shelf gadgets will run unmodified in our Shindig based container. I am finding such a wide variation in OS versions (0.5,0.6!) and server customizations (if server=='orcut') as I have been testing off the shelf components that I am beginning to think that many of them will need to be modified before they will run cleanly. If you are interested in OpenSocial development try it out and let me know what you think.

The Sith Lords Back Ringside!

2008-05-29T13:18:00.003-04:00

This charming picture of Emperor Palpatine and many other beloved Star Wars characters showed up on the Ringside cam and thought it was worth sharing. I guess they know a good thing when they see it. Go Ringside!

Surprise! Facebook's login.php has Changed

2008-05-28T23:12:00.002-04:00

I just noticed that one of my deployed Facebook applications was no longer working properly when it was being accessed from outside Facebook. This application allows users to make comments on abstract artwork (Its is at www.FulcrumGalleries.com). It is also running on Facebook as an application called What is Art. It is built with the Ringside Newtwork's Social Application Server which allows this type of dual deployment though the use of a Javascript widget.

This application can use Facebook to log users in when they are using the What is Art application directly from the Fulcrum website. It does this by deferring to Facebook for authentication. This is achived by following Facebook's posted authentication rules for web and desktop apps located here.

What I started seeing is quite different than the posted procedure. Originally, an application could redirect to login.php with an api_key as a parameter with the intention of logging in to a specific application. Login.php would then redirect to the calling application's callback_url with an auth_token which could then be converted into a Facebook session by calling auth.getSession. You would then use that session for all future API calls.

Well now I am seeing a different behavior in login.php. It now returns a parameter called session when it calls the callback_url. Session looks like this:

{"session_key":"263101aaf6065b08763196df-558462736","uid":"558462736","expires":0,"secret":""}

As you can see, the session parameter has the actual session_key inside it already, completely allowing you to skip the call to auth.getSession! I guess this is a time saver but supporting this change took some re-coding to get my app working again. It might be a good idea to start running a functional test against login.php daily just in case it changes again.

Why I Love Javascript

2008-05-21T22:37:00.003-04:00

You can't get errors like this anywhere else.

I Mock PHPUnit

2008-05-21T21:18:00.003-04:00

I need to write PHPUnit tests for an OpenSocial class I am implementing in PHP and I am new to PHPUnit. The class required another class, a security token as input and I did not want to create a real token for my test. To my surprise, I discovered that PHPUnit has the ability to create Mock Objects built in. It was so easy to do I felt compelled to post this example which I dug up here.

If I want to create a Mock Object for the class RingsideGadgetToken for example and it has a default (No argument constructor) all I had to do was this:

public function createMockToken(){

$uid_='100000';
$api_key_='4333592132647f39255bb066151a2099';
$api_secret_='b37428ff3f4320a7af98b4eb84a4aa99';
$token=$this->getMock('RingsideGadgetToken');
$token->expects($this->any())->method('getAppId')->will($this->returnValue($api_key_));
$token->expects($this->any())->method('getOwnerId')->will($this->returnValue($uid_));
$token->expects($this->any())->method('getViewerId')->will($this->returnValue($uid_));
return $token;

}

And I had a fully functional mock RingsideGadgetToken. If I had wanted to I could have failed if a method was called more than once (expects($this->once())) or a specific number of times (expects($this->exactly(4))). Below is the complete example I found in Sebastian Bergmann's presentation referenced above which got me started:

require_once 'PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase';

class SubTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
public function testStub()
{

$stub = $this->getMock('SomeClass'); $stub->expects($this->any())->method('doSomething')->will($this->returnValue('foo'));

// Calling $stub->doSomething() will now return
// 'foo'

}

}
?>

Anyway, I was so pleasantly surprised, I thought it worth talking about. There is a great guide to PHPUnit I came across as well at http://www.phpunit.de/pocket_guide/index.en.php

Facebook and OpenSocial Interoperability Ideas - Component Reuse

2008-05-20T13:27:00.006-04:00

I have been looking at how OpenSocial can be integrated into the Ringside Social Application Server over the past few weeks and have come up with two different models for integration. Which model we should adopt first really turned out to be decided based on the maturity of the OpenSocial Platform but I will talk more about this in a future posting. Right now lets talk about the model I am working on now, The Component Reuse Model.

In this model, The Ringside server becomes an OpenSocial gadget server. Shindig (Apache's implementation of an OS gadget server) is embedded in our product and it servers up the Ringside Server's social graph using an OpenSocial Javascript container and data model. This opens up some interesting possibilities.

Offline OS Development: Your Ringside server can now be used to develop OS apps offline, on your own box the same way that you can already do this for Facebook applications.
Hosting OS Apps: OpenSocial applications could be run as peers to Facebook apps on the same system, sharing the same social graph, in essence providing a portable application format which would allow your app to run on Orcut or Ringside for example. Ringside servers now also could benefit from the reverse of this and gain the use of existing OS apps available today (though some minor changes might be required to run in our container).
Running OS Apps in Facebook: If you can deploy a OS Gadget as a Ringside application it gains the ability to authenticate against Facebook (since the platform can already do this). Once this is set up you would be displaying Facebook's social graph inside your OS application. Since it was deployed to a Ringside server as an iframe app, it could be easily registered with Facebook as an application and the Ringside server would automatically handle conversion of Facebook's social context to an OS security token.

All of this can be accomplished just by integrating Shindig into our existing Social Application Server as it stands now. A first draft of this should ship this week in the Ringside Server beta3 release.

Standup Haiku

2008-05-19T15:57:00.001-04:00

When I mentioned that our daily development stand-up meetings were to long, one of the developers where I work (Ringside Networks) told me that my status was usually the longest so why should I object to the overall length of the meeting?

I thought, good point, but how to sharpen my status comments to a fine point and yet keep them informative and though provoking? The answer came to my mind immediately: Haiku. A simple form of poetry consisting of three lines of text where the first and last lines have only five syllables and the middle one seven. I must say this worked. Not only does everyone seem to listen more keenly but they ask the questions when I am done. Below is a sample, my status for today.

Am working on trails.
Seven and eight are done now,
Gadget server, Ready.

I am no poet, but the Haiku form sure did the trick.

Followup: This became far more popular than I thought and I have been asked to do this daily for a while (I don't know how long I can keep it up). They can be read at http://wire.tumblr.com/.

A Paper Computer

2008-02-12T12:16:00.001-05:00

My eight year old son has made it clear that he wants a computer of his own. He is no longer satisfied by borrowing mommies Macbook. He put it on his Christmas list. He put it on his birthday wish list as well. Unfortunately, we both felt he was to young to have his own by he obviously felt otherwise. My youngest has a talent for building things out of paper that actually work. He has built a functioning crossbow among many other projects. I often call him the "Paper McGiver." This time he has used his paper crafting skills to send us a clear message. Since we did not listen, he was going to build his own laptop. The keys really work. The knobs turn and it has a little working lever as well. The beauty of this laptop is that it will be really easy to re-cycle as well.

Well, lets get started...

2008-01-14T09:36:00.000-05:00

I have been meaning to start blogging for a long time now but the most trivial things can hold you back. For example, what to call your blog? I know what I want to talk about but a name eluded me. Then this morning it came to me, Games Without Frontiers. It s song by Peter Gabriel of course but something resonated with me. It was apparently about the 1980 Olympics and how the US was going to boycott it for political reasons or more specifically about how adults can act like children.

I am looking at it from a different point of view. I am not very political. My interests revolve around technology, software and science fiction. The name appealed to me because of the idea that technologies future is unlimited and the childlike optimism I have for its future. Well, lets get started.